The Middle East waiting game.

• Author: Salhani, Claude
• Position: Reporter-at-Large

"SEE YOU in paradise", a Palestinian journalist and Hamas member told me, half-threateningly, on the second day of a training program in Gaza City--delivering the words with a sardonic smile that haunted me half the night, as I tried to figure out if he had been serious or simply had a bizarre sense of humor.

Over the three-day period I spent in Gaza, training a group of Palestinian journalists on behalf of a non-governmental organization, the young man from the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, bent my ears about the "great evils of America." But then the same man surprised me even more over lunch on the last day of courses by asking if I knew how he could obtain a student visa to study in the United States, preferably in Illinois or Michigan. Somewhat startled, given his professed strong dislike, even hate, of the United States, I asked why he would want to live and study there. "I like the American people. I have nothing against them", he said. "It's the Bush policy that I hate. Particularly his policy regarding Iraq and Palestine."

Ah, politics and religion, two thorny subjects preferably not brought up at the dinner table, but topics of conversation that are as unavoidable as they are confusing, particularly to the uninitiated in Levantine travels. After that stay in Gaza, I heard that general antipathy for Bush but fondness for Americans expressed by others: an elegant Turkish professor in Istanbul and an American-educated Saudi business executive in Riyadh, for example. Raise the topic of the United States and its politics these days with almost anyone in the periphery of the Middle East, and you will likely hear the same anti-Bush, pro-Americans mantra.

Similar sentiments are echoed at the official level. Usama Hamdan, a spokesman for Hamas, told me matter-of-factly during a previous trip to the region: "We are not against America. Our struggle is with Israel, not the U.S." He added, "We have differences with the United States, but no enmity towards America. I have no hate for America."

A "clash of civilizations" at the personal level is not rare in the Middle East. Many individuals experience their own internal culture clash that puts their affinity for Western culture in competition with their Islamic identity. Sometimes the two don't blend well. On a flight from London to Riyadh, a Saudi Arabian teenager sported a skin-tight t-shirt with the bold message "I did Justin." There was little doubt that she understood the full meaning of the message as she paraded up and down the aisles of the plane. As we were going through immigration, the provocative clothing had discreetly disappeared under the traditional black abaya. The traditional, chador-like cover placates cultural and religious demands and conceals the Western attire--and desires. Do the woman's inner or outer layer of clothing reflect her true identity? That personal ambivalence is also representative of the region's politics.

Are innocent Americans ensnared in the interior conflicts that lie beneath the abayas, concealing and repressing mixed feelings? People say they don't hate Americans, but somewhere within the layers of potentially conflicting views and emotions, hate--be it directed at Bush and his policies or at individuals--begins to appear.

"They hate us by proxy", said an American diplomat, one of many who hunker down in the fortress-like U.S. embassy in Riyadh. He and other diplomats are protected by rows of concertina wire, concrete barriers, closed-circuit cameras, shatterproof glass and phalanxes of heavily armed U.S. Marines. But that's once you've passed through Saudi security forces, equipped with armored personnel carriers, heavy-caliber...