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Last update - 14:10 21/05/2008 Mamoir The ignorant ingenue By Shoshana Kordova Tags: Arafat, Palestinians  Unveiled: How an American Woman Found Her Way Through Politics, Love, and Obedience in the Middle East, by Deborah Kanafani Free Press; 272 pages; $25 Deborah Kanafani's ambivalence about the kind of book she was writing is evident throughout "Unveiled," which comes across as not quite a memoir and not quite a collection of profiles of prominent Arab women. The reason for this unevenness became clear to me after reading an interview with Kanafani, an American of Lebanese Christian descent. She told the media industry Web site mediabistro.com that she wanted to write about other people, not herself. The publisher, however, had other ideas. The Free Press division of Simon & Schuster pushed for Kanafani's life as wife, and then ex-wife, of Arafat adviser Marwan Kanafani to serve as "the narrative thread, as an American whom the reader could relate to," Kanafani said in the interview. Kanafani seems to invest more in relaying her encounters with other women, such as Jordan's Queen Dina, Yasser Arafat's wife Suha and her mother Raymonda Tawil, and Toujan al-Faisal, whom Kanafani describes as "the first (and only) elected female member of the Jordanian parliament," than in sharing her own story of her post-divorce struggle to raise her children in late-1990s Ramallah, despite their father's edict forbidding them to live with her. Deborah Jacobs, who grew up on Long Island in the late 1950s, neither knew nor cared about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until she met Marwan Kanafani, when she was working for the National Association of Arab Americans in Washington, D.C., as a liaison to the U.S. TV networks, straight out of graduate school. He was the Arab League's New York director, a Palestinian refugee who grew up in Mandatory Palestine, Lebanon and Syria before becoming a goalkeeper for the Egyptian national soccer team and moving to the United States. After marrying Deborah, in 1982, Marwan became an adviser to and spokesman for Arafat, playing what the book describes as a key role in the Oslo peace process and winning a seat on the Palestinian Legislative Council. Subjugation embraced As a memoir, the story reads like an attempt to convince the reader that Deborah Kanafani underwent much hardship as a result of Arab male patriarchal attitudes, yet emerged strengthened and victorious. But it is hard to dredge up much empathy for her plight when, for this reader at least, she is not much of a sympathetic character. Employing a strange mix of psychological insight and utter obtuseness, she comes off as somewhat pathetically eager to play second fiddle to a man who, like her father, knows how to dominate the party -- and everyone in his life. She describes how she embraced her own subjugation with eyes wide open, explaining that before their marriage, Marwan regularly checked up on her and kept her away from friends, expecting her at times to sit for hours and wait on him whenever he needed anything. "I wasn't sure what my life as Marwan's wife would be like, but I knew it would be my new job," Kanafani writes of her thoughts shortly before their wedding. "I would not pursue my own life or career; my focus would be making Marwan happy." Later on, she seems to want to make the reader believe that she is tough, but manages only to prove otherwise. Speaking of Raymonda Tawil, Kanafani writes: "She was the ideal blend of femininity and strength. I wanted to tell her that I was strong and independent too; I wanted to whisper this great secret to her, but I couldn't let Marwan hear me." In addition, the incidents that appear intended to depict Kanafani's strength could just as easily be read as demonstrating her weakness. When the Kanafanis' two school-age children are visiting their father in Ramallah and Marwan decides that Deborah can see them only with his permission and under the supervision of his employees, Deborah does make the effort to seek a custody solution from American officials, but then rejects it out of hand. She chooses to stick it out in the West Bank to be near her children, reluctantly adhering to the constraints imposed by Marwan. But she does not give a satisfying explanation as to why she refuses American help in bringing the children back to the United States when she purportedly wants full custody of them. And when she does go back to the States, her ultimate victory -- getting her children to join her there, shortly after the onset of the second intifada in 2000 -- is due less to her own efforts than to those of Marwan's new wife, an American woman who temporarily cared for the children in Jordan and sent them to the U.S. because she wanted the freedom to get out of Jordan herself. But although Kanafani seems eager to go beyond her personal narrative -- setting aside separate, slightly disconnected chapters to profile al-Faisal and Baha Kikhia, the wife of Libyan ambassador to the United Nations Mansour Kikhia, who was kidnapped in 1993 -- her descriptions of all that she encounters are marred by her facile acceptance of everything she sees and is told. Kanafani may have intended to write about high-profile Arab women without addressing the politics swirling around them, but once she takes the reader into Arafat's world, more context is necessary. Perhaps the most blatant example of this void is her depiction of Yasser Arafat, whom she met for the first time when he came to the United States to sign the Oslo Accords in 1993. She describes Arafat chasing her 6-year-old son Tarik around the room, "teasing and tickling him along the way," and writes: "I thought Arafat had a soft touch; at any given moment I would look at him and see the vulnerability of a child." At least her ex-husband is a little more tuned in to the real world; when she mentions this notion to Marwan, he warns her not to be deceived. Kanafani portrays Arafat and his followers as tirelessly working in the interests of peace, with nary a reference to anything resembling the T-word (though Israeli assassinations of Palestinian figures do make a few appearances). But there are no polemics here; Kanafani just seems to have bought wholly into the Palestinian peace rhetoric intended for Western consumption. It is no surprise that she barely speaks Arabic. The author makes a point of painting herself as apolitical, saying that the "strains of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict never affected my own family's political beliefs" and that she wants peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. The list of Palestinian and Israeli human rights and peace organizations that appears at the back of the book is an indication of her sincerity. But the book makes her seem less like a dove than like an egregiously ignorant ingenue, which is rather surprising for a media professional who has served as director of international productions for the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation and executive director of Women in Film and Video in Washington, D.C., a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the professional development of women in film, television and video. When Kanafani passes through Israel on her first trip to Ramallah, she gives the impression of a vacuous visitor who has never glimpsed a map of the region or bothered to find out the slightest bit of background information, writing: "Alone in the back seat of the Land Rover, I gazed at the vast expanses of Israel's uninhabited land ... I couldn't help but feel perplexed by the war, why people were fighting over land when there was so much available." So said Suha Kanafani also appears to fully accept Suha Arafat's claim that Palestinian Authority funds were not being siphoned off into private bank accounts. She doesn't adequately address suspicions that Suha was receiving a monthly allowance of $100,000 to help her maintain her Parisian lifestyle while Arafat was alive. Nor is there any reference to the French investigation of the $11.4 million that the Bank of France said had been transferred to Suha's bank accounts between July 2002 and September 2003 -- of which $2.5 million, according to French press reports, was diverted to the account of an interior decorating firm. And nothing is said about Forbes magazine's 2003 estimate that Yasser Arafat was personally worth at least $300 million, not to mention the Israeli intelligence report putting that number at $1.3 billion. According to Forbes, "Arafat has feasted on all sorts of funds flowing into the PA, including aid money, Israeli tax transfers and revenue from a casino and Coca-Cola bottler. Much of the money appears to have gone to pay off others." But all the reader gets is Suha's boilerplate denial. "I asked her about the controversy that surrounds her regarding her knowledge about the millions in missing funds that Yasser Arafat was rumored to have diverted away from the Palestinian Authority into secret bank accounts," Kanafani writes in the epilogue. "'This,' she tells me, 'is part of the propaganda' to destroy her, to destroy her husband's legacy. 'You saw how I live, Debbie, a simple apartment ... My husband was a man for peace; he recognized Israel; he won the Nobel Peace Prize.'" Earlier in the book, Kanafani tells of Raymonda Tawil buying Suha Arafat new dresses to wear on official visits, and authoritatively asserts: "The men around Arafat gave her very little financial support, and Arafat did not fight them on this. He was committed to his image as a man who lived only with necessities." This kind of wholehearted acceptance of Arafatian hype does little to boost Kanafani's credibility as an author or even as a well-informed, thinking observer. Deborah Kanafani seems intent on conveying the human side of the public figures she depicts. But while this is certainly laudable, it is not enough, ultimately leaving the reader wishing for greater depth and a more accurate overall picture. If Kanafani had won her argument with the publisher as well as written more extensive -- and critical -- profiles of her subjects, perhaps this book would have been a more compelling read. Shoshana Kordova is on the editorial staff of Haaretz English edition. Her blog, "The 90th Minute," can be found at www.shoshanakordova.com. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Fear of extinction The state of over 20 species of birds in Israel has worsened considerably. Taking advantage Jerusalem police probe possible gang rape of disabled woman.

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