Maybe I didn’t get the memo, but I hadn’t heard the word “Daesh” used to describe ISIS until our recent trip to Israel and Jordan. Now, since the attacks in Paris, even President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry have been saying it.
As The Guardian explained earlier this year, “The term is based on an Arabic acronym al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil Iraq wa’al Sham, which translates as Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (Syria), but is close to ‘Dahes’ or “one who sows discord.’”
That wordplay has ISIS members threatening severe bodily harm to anyone who uses it, yet as Matt Iglesias and Zack Beauchamp pointed out at Vox, “Daesh” is useful in the West because, unlike ISIS or Islamic State, it neither directly suggests some sovereign territorial caliphate nor impugns the Islamic religion.
My girlfriend, Pat, and I had left Tel Aviv at the end of our first week in Israel, flown to the resort city of Eilat and then, early the next morning, walked through the Yitzhak Rabin Terminal, across no man’s land under the gaze of soldiers in watchtowers and into Jordan. We spent a day at the incredible ancient city of Petra and a day in Wadi Rum, the desert valley through which Lawrence of Arabia trekked on his way to take Aqaba from the Turks during World War I. We drove north to within half an hour of the Syrian border and toured the Roman ruins in the city of Jerash as around us Jordanian schoolgirls sang and danced their way through a class field trip.
Mostly because of fears of Daesh/ISIS and al Qaeda, tourism is down dramatically in Jordan, as it is throughout the region. But we felt safe the whole time we were there, and everyone was tremendously kind and hospitable, although as we rolled out of Jerash we did spot a small restaurant somewhat disconcertingly called The Sniper Café.
We returned from Jordan to Israel as stabbings and other incidents of violence, many of them fatal, continued between Palestinians and Israelis. The final few days of our visit were spent in Jerusalem, with a quick, unexpected detour to Bethlehem. We had been told at the beginning of our trip that it was too dangerous, and television news reports highlighted clashes there between young Palestinians and authorities, but a taxi driver said he would get us there and did.
In truth, Nativity Square was more crowded with tourists than it had been the early morning I was there 11 years ago, during the waning days of the second intifada. But the demonstrations continue and merchants say it’s bad for business. “The tear gas has become our perfume,” a hotel waiter joked with one reporter. “…We hope this will end soon.” Still, a local shop owner said to us, “Thank you for coming and not believing CNN and Fox News.” Roadblock and checkpoints slowed the way back to our Jerusalem hotel. “This is not about security,” our cab driver sighed. “It’s just to give people a hard time.”
In Israel, not only the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also concerns about Daesh would arise in several of our conversations about the situation there. Ali Wakad, the Palestinian journalist who co-wrote the motion picture Bethlehem, was worried that after the perceived failures in the Middle East of socialism and communism, the nationalist Pan-Arab movement, liberalization and “negotiations with the enemy,” many of the Arab people, including the Palestinians, had decided, “why not give the Islamists the chance to rule” — a move he felt would endanger “secular and liberal people in the Arab world.”
Wakad believed that Israel had squandered the opportunity it had to make peace with the Palestinian Authority and now that the PA’s leadership is so weak and corrupt, the country faces other opponents who no longer care about a return to the 1948 borders when Israel was created or the 1967 borders before the Six Day War. Some are telling him, he said, “Nobody is hearing us. We don’t want the 1948 borders, we do not want the 1967 borders. We do not recognize Palestine. We want an Islamic nation, an Islamic state.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu manipulates fear of such an Islamic nation for political gain. Meanwhile, the Palestinians continue to protest occupation, the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the constant encroachments of far-right religious extremists on their lives and land. Netanyahu pledges to maintain “the status quo” at the al Aqsa mosque/Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City that limits prayers at the site to Muslims but the real status quo he clings to is the crony capitalism that keeps Bibi and his friends in power and at the high end of the nation’s vast income inequality.