Mon. 18 Oct. 2010

HAARETZ  Abbas rebuffs Syria call to continue Palestinian 'resistance'..1  How Israel can use to Syria to thwart Ahmadinejad……...…2  Peres cancels Morocco trip after king denies request to meet……………………………………………………….…5

YEDIOTH AHRONOTH  Mike Leigh cancels Israel visit over loyalty oath bill……….5

VOICE OF RUSSIA  Israel says Russian missiles for Syria "ok"……………….…7

GUARDIAN  How Iran brokered a secret deal to put its ally in power in Iraq…………………………………………………………..8

DAILY TELEGRAPH  Abbas: Palestine 'ready to end all claims against Israel'…...13

THE CAVALIAR DAILY  The fight for peace…………………………………………14

NYTIMES  Adonis: A Revolutionary of Arabic Verse…………………16 HOME PAGE Abbas rebuffs Syria call to continue Palestinian 'resistance' The recent Arab League meeting in Libya was marked by friction between PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Syrian President Bashar Assad over peace talks. By Zvi Bar'el Haaretz, 18 Oct. 2010,

The Palestinians must continue their "resistance" against Israel, Syrian President Bashar Assad said during the recent meeting of the Arab League monitoring committee in Libya.

Assad clashed with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at the meeting when the Syrian leader argued that it is not the Arab League's role to grant the Palestinians permission to negotiate with Israel. It is an issue for the Palestinians to decide, he said. 2

Abbas responded by saying that "the Palestinian problem is an Arab problem, and if the Arab League does not make a decision, it means it is washing its hands of the Palestinian problem."

Assad called on the Palestinians to continue the resistance against Israel instead of discussing the settlement freeze, but was rebuffed by Abbas who said that if he did not insist on a settlement freeze there will be no land left on which to build a Palestinian state.

Friction between leaders The friction between the two leaders began a day before the summit, over the agreements reached by Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal with Egyptian Intelligence Minister Omar Suleiman and with representatives of Syria and Saudi Arabia.

Meshal, who met with Suleiman last month in Saudi Arabia, announced that he agreed to sign the reconciliation agreement with Fatah that had been proposed by Egypt, and with no reservations.

2 He also suggested that the signing of the agreement be done in Damascus, as that would rally support for the reconciliation between the two Palestinian factions.

While Abbas was quick to express his support for the initiative, Palestinian Authority security forces continued arresting Hamas activists in the West Bank, thus stirring opposition to the deal from Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas sources contend that the arrests were carried out to foil the reconciliation agreement and to enable Abbas to continue the direct talks with Israel without having to take Hamas' view into consideration.

Meshal then proposed that Syria urge the Arab League to invite him to the summit in Libya, to help foster Palestinian reconciliation. 3 Syria pressed the Arab states to agree but Abbas refused, saying that unless Meshal signed the Egyptian reconciliation proposal, he should not be allowed to participate in the summit.

The Syrian attempt to elevate Meshal's standing to that of Abbas clearly upset the PA president.

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How Israel can use to Syria to thwart Ahmadinejad Lebanon, that little country that has no intrinsic strategic significance, is serving well as the region's boxing ring. By Zvi Bar'el Haaretz, 17 Oct. 2010,

"How do you feel with Ahmadinejad so nearby?" a farmer from Moshav Avivim, on the Lebanese border, was asked, as if an actual Iranian nuclear bomb had been laid right next to the border.

3 But it is not Ahmadinejad's proximity that should worry the farmer, or the dramaturges that accompanied the spectacle. Because this visit evinced no new threat, no declaration that had not been heard before, no new revolution threatening to destroy Lebanon.

Bint Jbail, like most of southern Lebanon, has been under Hezbollah control for years. Images of the ayatollahs Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei have long been a ubiquitous part of the Lebanese landscape. Iranian aid to Hezbollah needs no new "proper disclosure" from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Lebanese government - which is of no particular interest to the Iranian president - cannot refuse a visit from him, not after Lebanese President Michel Suleiman was given such a solicitous welcome in Tehran.

In the absence of genuine new threats they had to be invented, in the form of discerning "hidden messages" in the great show put on 4 by Hezbollah for the Iranian president: one to Washington, so it knows who's in charge in Lebanon; a double message to Israel, so it understands that Iran is backing Hezbollah and Hezbollah will "protect" Iran if Israel attacks it; one warning the Lebanese against accusing Hezbollah of murderering Rafik Hariri; one message to the Sunnis and another to the Shi'ites. In short, Lebanon, that little country that has no intrinsic strategic significance, served well as the region's boxing ring. Fierce contests for control and hegemony are being fought in that arena - in particular, a cold war between certain Arab states on one side, and Iran and its allies on the other; between the so-called "pro-Western" and "anti-American" axes.

Lebanon is not the only fight venue in the neighborhood. Iraq, Palestine, Yemen and Sudan offer similar services to powerful rivals wrestling for regional control. Ahmadinejad has also taken aim at Arab states attempting to curb Iran's influence. In Egypt, for example, the official organ Ruz al-Yusuf called Ahmadinejad's visit: "The day on which Beirut became a Shi'ite emirate," while Saudi Arabia's foreign minister said cautionly, "we must first study all the results of this visit."

4 Even Syria, which Ahmadinejad visited in September, did not go overboard in responding to the Iranian president's reception in Lebanon. His statements were quoted selectively in the Syrian press, and on Thursday the main headlines were grabbed by the important news of the visit to Damascus by outgoing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, after nearly a year of being shunned. Lebanon is still in Syria's sphere of influence, and Damascus has no intention of handing it over to Tehran. That is the "secret of success" of the Iran-Syria alliance - an understanding that they will respect the boundaries of each other's sphere of influence.

Israel could have had a major role in this mighty power play. The renewal of negotiations with Syria, precisely at the time of Ahmadinejad's visit, and after President Bashar Assad's statement that Iran was supportive of such talks, would have presented Iran with a serious dilemma regarding its relations with Syria while putting Hezbollah in the awkward situation of its protector-state negotiating with its worst enemy. 5 Such negotiations would not necessarily lead to the dissolution of the ties between Iran and Syria, since their shared common interests are not identical with each state's own interests vis-a-vis other countries. Nor would it necessarily lead to Hezbollah's disarmament. But a peace agreement between Israel and Syria would significantly lower the threat from the northern border and create a new strategic equation, one that could be more important than peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

But for such negotiations to begin Israel would have to declare that it understands the price of peace, or issue any other declaration that would convince Assad that he will not become a second Mahmoud Abbas. And this will not happen. Israel prefers to count the rockets in Hezbollah's armories and to quote Ahmadinejad's promises of the imminent end of the Zionist entity. Israel has always known how to seal the windows of opportunity with duct tape, lest they form a crack, God forbid.

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5 Peres cancels Morocco trip after king denies request to meet Moroccan King Mohammed VI wrote Peres last Friday that such a rendezvous was impossible at the moment; President's Bureau believes decision was made to protest Israeli policy. By Nir Hasson Haaretz, 18 Oct. 2010,

President Shimon Peres has canceled his upcoming visit to Morocco after the king of the North African state rejected his request to meet during the trip.

Peres had been invited to take part in the World Economic Forum in Morocco next week and had been scheduled to deliver a keynote address to the event. But according to the policy of the President's Bureau, Peres is entitled to refuse a visit to any country in which he is not able to meet the head of state. 6 Moroccan King Mohammed VI wrote Peres last Friday that he would ordinarily be pleased to meet with him, but that such a rendezvous was impossible at the moment.

The President's Bureau believes that the king's refusal is based on protest of Israeli policy and thus decided to cancel Peres' trip.

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Mike Leigh cancels Israel visit over loyalty oath bill Renowned British director decides to call off October visit to Jewish state as guest of Sam Spiegel Film and Television School, citing government's decision to pass Citizenship Act amendment as the 'straw that broke the camel's back' Amir Bogen Yedioth Ahronoth, 18 Oct. 2010,

The government's decision to pass the loyalty oath bill is sparking outrage both in and out of Israel. Acclaimed British director Mike

6 Leigh has canceled a visit to Israel due to this new political development.

Leigh was scheduled to arrive in Israel on October 20 and visit Jerusalem as the guest of the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School.

In a personal letter to Sam Spiegel director Ranan Shor, Leigh admitted he had always been hesitant about visiting Israel. He stated he cannot and does not wish to come to Israel and noted he wished he had canceled his visit after the IDF raid on the Gaza- bound flotilla last May, which he said was justly condemned by the international community.

The director noted that matters had worsened since and explained a visit by him would be construed as support of Israel. He described the loyalty oath bill as "the straw that broke the camel's back" after mentioning that the resumption of settlement 7 construction had first led him to reconsider his visit. Leigh also pointed to the Gaza blockade and the shooting innocent children as reasons for his decision.

Leigh, who had previously visited Israel in 1990, went on to explain say he would be the first to visit the Sam Spiegel School when peace is achieved, a just solution for the Palestinians facilitated and Gaza rehabilitated and stated his current position is nevertheless unnegotiable.

During his planned visit to Israel Leigh was meant to give a master class for Sam Spiegel students and graduates, hold audience meetings in Jerusalem and Haifa and give a lecture for Palestinian filmmakers in Jenin. All events have been canceled.

'We're not responsible for gov't policy' In a letter of response to the British director, Shor regretted Leigh's decision and noted that the school's students and teachers who awaited his visit were not accountable for the Israeli government's policy. Shor further added that the public

7 significance of Leigh's decision will be construed as a bill of divorce.

In a public statement the Israeli director said, "This saddens me deeply. We were greatly looking forward to Mike Leigh's visit. We have become more and more isolated in the international arena due to the political situation but I shall keep trying to bring the cinema greats from around the world to Israel. "

In 1993 Leigh, won the best director award at Cannes Film festival for his film "Naked" and has since had great success in Israel and the rest of the world with such films as "Secrets and Lies" "Topsy- Turvy" and "Vera Drake."

One cinema persona who has already landed in Israel is Italian film editor Roberto Perpignani ("Last Tango in Paris" "Padre Padrone") who will be giving a master class for Sam Spiegel students. Perpignani will also be the guest of honor in the "My 8 Favorite Scene" conference to be held in the Jerusalem Cinematheque on Thursday.

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Israel says Russian missiles for Syria "ok" The Voice of Russia, Oct 17, 2010,

Israel will nor roll up its defense cooperation with Russia over Moscow's decision to sell advanced anti-ship missiles to Syria.

In an interview with Interfax on Saturday the new Israeli ambassador Dorit Golender said that Isarel was not in a state of war with Syria but feared that the missiles might end up in the hands of terrorists.

The decision to supply the Yakhont missiles to Damascus was recent announced here by Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov.

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8 How Iran brokered a secret deal to put its ally in power in Iraq Tehran's influence in Baghdad politics described by western official as 'nothing less than a strategic defeat' for US Martin Chulov in Baghdad, Guardian, 17 Oct. 2010,

In the sprawling slums of Baghdad's Shia heartland, signs of triumph are everywhere. Loyalists of Muqtada al-Sadr are posting giant images of the cleric in hospitals, schools and on neighbourhood squares. Cakes and nuts, usually reserved for festivals, are being served to guests of key officials.

Sadr's followers say theirs is a movement whose time has come. It has been like this for 16 days, since the exiled cleric confirmed his support for a second term for the incumbent prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. That move looks set to revolutionise political life in 9 Iraq and, potentially, recast the brittle nation's dealings with the west.

Hours after Sadr's endorsement, on 1 October, the bulk of Iraq's Shia political blocs announced that Maliki was their candidate for prime minister, after seven months of political torpor.

This crystallised two things; that Maliki would likely out- manoeuvre his rivals, and that those who supported him would want, in return, more than their share of treasure. On the regional chessboard that is Iraqi politics, Maliki's move was akin to putting his key rival, Iyad Allawi, in check.

The price sought has now begun to emerge, along with a picture of how Sadr's support was won and what it means for Britain and the US, who have invested 4,500 lives, billions of pounds and their international standing in the hope of shaping Iraq as a western- oriented democracy that realigns the regional balance.

9 According to Guardian sources, Maliki's renewed grasp on power and the Sadrists' elevation as influence brokers have been brought about by a consortium of the Middle East's most-powerful Shia Islamic players, whose power bases are rooted in the region's other main player, arch US foe Iran.

It has been spearheaded by the Islamic Dawa party, which opposed Saddam Hussein from a base in Tehran during the Ba'athist years, as well as by Maliki's adviser, Tareq Najim Abdullah. Sadr and Ayatollah Kazem al-Haeri, a key exiled figure, who has acted as Sadr's godfather, also led the way.

Qassem Suleimani, head of the al-Quds brigades, a division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and the head of Lebanese Hezbollah's politburo, Mohammed Kawtharani, also heavily influenced the process. Above them all, two Shia Islamic overlords, Grand Ayatollah Khameini, and Hezbollah's Hassan 10 Nasrallah are understood to have been involved in getting Sadr onside. In interviews over the past week, important players in Iraq's power base have divulged the essence of what they believe the Sadrists demanded from Maliki's envoys. It includes a grant of three ministries from his own quota, bringing to seven the number of ministries that the Sadrists could hold in a new government.

It also includes the position of secretary-general of the cabinet and, crucially, deputy positions in all the security agencies. A total of 100,000 roles allocated to Sadrists in government agencies appears to be on the table, as is a mass release of Sadrist prisoners.

A leading Sadrist, Nassar al-Rubaie, said that they were entitled to 25% from each ministry. The Sadrists won 40 seats in the 325-seat parliament. "The electoral process has delivered people who make decisions in this country and we are an important part of that group."

Rubaie said the proposals offered by Maliki's envoys had been enough to win Sadr's support, even though the cleric had publicly stated that he could not abide a second term for the prime minister

10 whose government he abandoned in 2007. Maliki's response then was to send the army to rout Sadr's militia in Sadr City and Basra, igniting a bitter feud.

A high-ranking third party was needed to break the stalemate, as trust was non-existent on both sides. In early September, the Iranians made the first move. Haeri told his understudy that Maliki was the way forward; he was not perfect, but both he and the Iranians thought they could work with him.

Maliki then made his move. He sent Najim Abdullah and the head of the Dawa party, Abdul-Halim al-Zuhairi, to the Iranian shrine city of Qom, to meet with Sadr. There they met Suleimani, Iran's most powerful military general and nemesis of the US.

Suleimani has led the Quds force for the past 20 years. "He runs Iran's policy in Iraq," said a senior Iraqi official. "There is no dispute about this." 11 Suleimani is also a key link to Hezbollah in Lebanon and to Hamas in Gaza, supplying weapons, money and training to help oppose Israel. A senior US official in Baghdad claimed this summer that the Iranian military was responsible for about 25% of all US casualties in Iraq. US intelligence officials believe Suleimani's unit accounted for nearly all of them.

According to an authoritative source, Kawtharani was also at the meeting in Qom. The two courtiers, Abdullah and Zuhairi, discussed options with Sadr. He liked what he heard, but would not sign on without a guarantor. Suleimani put his name forward, but Sadr was aiming higher. He sought two of Shia Islam's highest authorities to ratify what was being put to him – Khameini and Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

Sadr was won over, but Nasrallah's name came with a condition. According to the source, when Nasrallah, who remained in Beirut, was consulted, he asked for a return guarantee from Maliki that the US military would disappear completely from Iraq by the end of 2011.

11 "Maliki told them he will never extend, or renew [any bases] or give any facilities to the Americans or British after the end of next year," the source said. "They then went to try to smooth things over with the Syrians."

Syria was an obstacle in the process, partially because ill-feeling between Maliki and the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, had been exacerbated by Maliki alleging in August 2009 that Damascus was harbouring senior Ba'athist leaders who had blown up two ministries in the centre of Baghdad, undermining his security credentials.

"Zuhairi met Assad at Damascus airport. In public and private he was very much opposed to Maliki before the meeting," said the source.

Around the same time the Iranians made their second move. 12 Ahmadinejad touched down in Damascus on 18 September on his way to the UN in New York. The pair spoke for two hours. According to a senior Iraqi government official in the days afterwards, Assad told his advisers: "Our Iranian friends want Maliki, and Maliki it is."

It was a crucial circuit-breaker, which allowed Maliki to make concrete plans for a new administration that would be dramatically different from the last, both in make-up and orientation.

Ahmadinejad returned from New York six days later and at a final meeting in Tehran the deal was ratified. The first domino was then tipped – the Sadrists' announcement. Then came the Shia list's pledge of support for Maliki.

The last seven years have been a tug of war for the heartland of Arabia, underpinned by the nagging strategic challenge of whether Iraq will emerge as a strategic ally of the west.

The US was a primary player, but as its military withdraws, its influence plummets. The US embassy in Baghdad had thrown its

12 weight behind a second term for Maliki, believing his secular rival, Allawi, is untenable as leader because his support base is largely Sunni. "That position only served to embolden Maliki and the Iranians," said a senior western diplomat. "It was poorly conceived, poorly executed and utterly disastrous in its consequences."

Last week, a US official offered an explanation: "We have switched from frontline players with muscle that we could wield, to straight diplomacy."

In July, that same official said: "[The Sadrists'] world view and view of relations with the US is totally incompatible with any relationship that we could have."

The US transition from military overlord to would-be democratic partner has escaped no one's attention, nor has the vacuum left behind gone unremarked. 13 Publicly, however, the Dawa party is maintaining a different line. "There is no contradiction between the Iranian point of view and the US view in forming a new government," said Zuhairi. "For example, the Americans have said this will be a Shia-led government. So, I say the Iraqi project is a reconciliation between Iran and the US."

A western official claimed it was "nothing of the sort", then, offering his view on recent US diplomatic efforts, said: "This is nothing less than a strategic defeat.

"They could not have got this more wrong if they tried."

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HOME PAGE Abbas: Palestine 'ready to end all claims against Israel' The Palestinians are ready to end all historic claims against Israel once they establish their state in the lands Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East War,

13 Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Sunday, addressing a long- standing Israeli demand. By Our Foreign Staff Daily Telegraph, 18 Oct. 2010,

In an interview with Israel TV, Mr Abbas also said negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remain his preferred choice, but that he will consider other options if talks break down over Israel's continued settlement expansion.

In an apparent attempt to reach out to Israeli public opinion, he said that once the Palestinians have established their state in the 1967 borders, "there is another important thing to end, the conflict, and we are ready for that, to end the historic demands."

Negotiations were relaunched by the Obama administration last month, but quickly faltered over Israel's refusal to extend a curb on Jewish settlement construction. Mr Abbas says there's no point 14 negotiating as long as settlements take over more land claimed by the Palestinians.

The Palestinians want to establish a state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967. Israel has withdrawn from Gaza, but about half a million Israelis have settled in the other war-won areas. HOME PAGE

HOME PAGE The fight for peace Israel must recalibrate its political strategies to respond to emerging threats By Roraig Finney,

14 The Cavalier Daily (serving the University of Virginia community since 1980) 15 Oct. 2010,

Since it gained independence in 1948, Israel has been a beacon of liberalism, a state constantly threatened by the predations of surrounding nations and the aspirations of a Palestinian population too often manipulated by its neighboring countries. Now, however, Israel is struggling — like the United States — to understand and fight a changing face of terrorism. Israel must develop a new type of war on terror — one that supports its own basic premises of justice. After all, Israel’s struggles have defined the understanding and accomplishments of liberty in the Middle East.

However one views the sufferings and the tactics of Palestinians or the response of Israelis over the past few decades, it is undeniable that the mind and actions of both peoples have been shaped by ideas of territory and self-determination integral to the 15 nation-state. In this context, it has been Israel’s aim to defend its territory and its national people against threats. Palestinian terrorists have resorted to violent measures to secure their own state, supported for strategic reasons by the military force of nations such as Syria and Egypt. The determination of Palestinian ideologues to secure Israel, the land in which they infuse their very identity and culture, has impeded peace efforts between the two nations for decades. But Israeli success in the defense of the nation was accomplished by a strategy described in two words: threat neutralization.

That essential conflict structure, however, is evolving. Israel’s brilliant success in neutralizing the existential threats of military assault and massive terrorism had previously enabled it to redefine and expand the purposes of its existence. Now, Israel protects not just a Jewish nation, but also a culture of opportunity and freedom for its citizens. The new terrorism, exemplified by al Qaeda and executed by Hamas and Hezbollah, assaults this very culture and seeks to establish what scholar Phillip Bobbitt calls “a state of terror” on the ruins of this “state of consent.”

15 The new Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists who have supplanted the Palestinian Liberation Organization in waging violence against Israel are becoming less concerned with the nationalist project. And their sponsors are even less so: Iran and Syria have offered only nominal support to actual attempts at Palestinian statehood. Instead, they are more concerned with the destruction of Israel as a regional power. In fact, al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has actually expressed positive disinterest in the establishment of Palestine, fixating instead on the annihilation of Israel and Western presence in the Muslim world entirely.

This desire for annihilation is born of the changed nature of the Israeli threat. Previously, Israel was merely an obstacle to the accomplishment of a Palestinian state. Now, Israel, like the nascent democracy of Iraq, is a threat to the very premises of the states that Syria, Iran and, most of all, al Qaeda seek to operate as. These premises are those of terror. If Muslims live under laws of 16 consent, they substitute the will of man for that of God, so says al Qaeda. In Iran and Syria, this understanding is hybridized and incomplete, but it is becoming increasingly dominant among terrorists they support. No state of consent can be allowed to survive where Islam should rule.

To these people, who can accept nothing less than the extinction of Israel if their world is to survive, terrorism intended to persuade a change of border policy will not suffice. Terror must now undermine the very basis of the Israeli nation by destroying the security on which consent and opportunity depend. This terrorism is strategic, intending first to isolate Israel from international support, then to place upon the citizens of Israel a burden of fear they cannot bear. Unlike states such as Iran or Palestinians who truly seek a state, the new terrorists will not shrink from nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

Hamas and Hezbollah are not yet wholly creatures of this new form of terrorism; they are still being commanded by the aims of the poor and wretched Palestinian people. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, presently concerns itself with the global fight against the U.S. But

16 al Qaeda’s gaze will not remain so singly fixed for long, and a new generation is rising in Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel and its allies must realize that anti-terrorism must now mean ensuring the survival of political consent, or else terror will rule. This will mean changing the nature of outreach to the Palestinians, helping establish a rule of law in Gaza and the West Bank that will allow business and society to thrive. Anti-terrorism now must be a matter not merely of destruction, but construction.

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Adonis: A Revolutionary of Arabic Verse By CHARLES McGRATH New York Times, October 17, 2010

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Every year around this time the name of the Syrian poet Adonis pops up in newspapers and in betting 17 shops. Adonis (pronounced ah-doh-NEES), a pseudonym adopted by Ali Ahmad Said Esber in his teens as an attention getter, is a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. This year Ladbrokes, the British bookmaking firm, had his chances at 8-1, which made him seem a surer bet than the eventual winner, Mario Vargas Llosa, a 25-1 long shot. Why Adonis appeals to the oddsmakers, presumably, is that he’s a poet, and poets have been under-represented among Nobelists lately; that he writes in Arabic, the language of only one Nobel winner, Naguib Mahfouz; and that as is the case with so many recent winners, most Americans have never heard of him.

In the Arab world it’s a very different matter. There he is a renowned figure, if not everywhere a beloved one. He is an outspoken secularist, equally critical of the East and West, and a poetic revolutionary of sorts who has tried to liberate Arabic verse from its traditional forms and subject matter. Some of his poems are immensely long and immensely difficult and resemble Pound’s Cantos at their most impenetrable. Others reveal a Paul Muldoonish playfulness, a Jorie Graham-like expansiveness and

17 fascination with blank space. His poems are as apt to cite Jim Morrison as the Sufi mystics, and his 2003 volume “Prophesy, O Blind One” includes some long, leggy lines about traveling that could have been written by Whitman, if only Whitman had spent more time in airports.

“The textbooks in Syria all say that I have ruined poetry,” Adonis said with a pleased smile last week while visiting the University of Michigan here.

Adonis, now 80, moved to Lebanon from Syria for political reasons in the 1960s, and since the ’80s has lived in Paris. (He is a French citizen.) Yale University Press is bringing out a volume of his selected poems, translated by Khaled Mattawa, this month, and next Monday he will read from it at the 92nd Street Y. He was at Michigan, where Mr. Mattawa is on the faculty, to do some readings and give lectures. Small and animated, with a nimbus of poet-length gray hair, Adonis also posed graciously for photos 18 with female fans who were presumably collecting souvenirs in case the Swedish Academy gives him the nod next year.

But in conversation he refused to discuss the Nobel. “I don’t think about it,” he said sternly. “I don’t wish to talk about it.” Adonis speaks fluent French, and his English is better than he lets on, but while in Ann Arbor he preferred to use Arabic, with Mr. Mattawa interpreting. Occasionally, when Mr. Mattawa, racing to keep up, paused for a breath, Adonis gave him a nod and a smile of encouragement.

Adonis’s indifference to prizes appears to stem partly from modesty and partly, to judge from a noontime talk he gave on Tuesday, from a conception of poetry that transcends not just literary politics but politics altogether. Poetry for him is not merely a genre or an art form but a way of thinking, something almost like mystical revelation. “Poetry cannot be made to fit either religion or ideology,” he said in the talk. “It offers that knowledge which is explosive and surprising.”

18 He went on to complain about what he called the “retardation” of contemporary Arabic poetry, which in his view has become a rhetorical tool for celebrating and explaining the political and religious status quo. In the Islamist scheme, he said, there is not much place for poetry, because Islam assumes that with the Koran knowledge is complete and there is nothing left to add.

Over lunch, Adonis remarked with a shake of his head that the situation of poetry in the West was not a whole lot better, marginalized not so much by religion or ideology but by the media and pop culture. And yet his enthusiasm for poetry remains youthful and undiminished. Traditional Arabic poetry, he explained, was usually written in one of 16 meters, in balanced lines split by a caesura, and frequently employing a single end rhyme for an entire poem. His innovation, starting in the ’60s, was to introduce unrhymed free verse and even prose poetry and to write in mixed meters.

19 “I wanted to draw on Arab tradition and mythology without being tied to it,” he said, adding, “I wanted to break the linearity of poetic text — to mess with it, if you will. The poem is meant to be a network rather than a single rope of thought.”

Some critics have suggested that his poetry is, in a way, a poetry of exile, and that doesn’t trouble him at all. “Every artist is an exile within his own language,” he said. “The Other is part of my inner being.”

Lately an erotic element has been creeping into his work; in one recent poem the beloved is poetry itself, imagined as a mistress who comes at night in a black dress. “Happiness and sadness are two drops of dew on your forehead,” he writes, “and life is an orchard where the seasons stroll.”

He has also become interested in the plight of women in Islamic countries. Visiting a class taught by Mr. Mattawa, he said: “Right now we feel Arab culture is paralyzed. We suffer from women’s sense of their lack of freedom, of being deprived of their

19 individualism. It’s impossible for a culture to progress with men alone, without women being involved.”

But he surprised some of the students, and raised a few eyebrows, by adding: “The person who is oppressed is the woman, but the real slave is the man, caught up in defending his enslavement. Women should help him become free.”

Just where does poetry fit into all this, one young woman asked a little skeptically, adding: “Isn’t poetry a pretentious, elitist form, not really a force for change?”

“ Poetry cannot change society,” Adonis said. “Poetry can only change the notion of relationships between things. Culture cannot change without a change in institutions.” But to the criticism that poetry was an insufficiently popular form he replied: “Poetry that reaches all the people is essentially superficial. Real poetry requires effort because it requires the reader to become, like the 20 poet, a creator. Reading is not reception.” He smiled and added, “I suggest you change your relationship to poetry and art in general.”

Afterward Adonis said he had enjoyed the exchange. “My approach in teaching is always to encourage the students to combat me,” he said.

He has two grown daughters, one a visual artist and the other the director of a French cultural organization, and raised them not to be poets, necessarily, but to question everything. “They were free, and I told them to do whatever they liked,” he said. “Even if it went against me.”

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 Los Angeles Times: 'Syrian, Saudi leaders try to head off unrest in Lebanon over investigation into Hariri killing'..

20  Irish Times: 'Bedouin's way of life dying among the ruins of Palmyra'..

 Independent: 'Weak Merkel stokes xenophobia as she fights for political survival'..

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