A Jewish dream realized
In his classic work England and the Middle East, the historian Elie Kedourie refers to the often violent metaphysical disputes that have arisen about interpreting the origins of the present Middle East. This is an understatement: few areas of history are perhaps as controversial and fiercely polemical as the story of our region since the creation of Israel in 1948. Furthermore, as already seen, much of this involves reading history backwards, of using the past to fuel current debates about the rights and wrongs of Israel’s presence in Palestinian areas, or indeed of the very legitimacy of the Jewish State itself. To take a particular stance – for example, attributing agency to Arabs between 1914 and 1923 rather than seeing them as wholly passive – is to be regarded as actively supporting Israeli military action against Palestinians in 2005, because pro-Israeli historians, such as Efraim Karsh, author of Islamic Imperialism, make such an attribution, and to agree with him on 1918–23 is interpreted therefore as agreeing with him on events in 2005, even though these issues are quite separate and are decades apart. Taking a historical position on events of eighty or more years ago is doing no such thing, but because of the controversial nature of the debate that is how it is often seen today.
While this particular chapter was being written, the Jewish settlers in Gaza had been expelled by the Israeli army, and Hamas, the hard-line Islamic party, had confounded much international opinion by winning the often-postponed Palestinian elections. This is an area in constant flux in which presumptions are frequently shown to be false. In addition, there are numerous areas of grey in a dispute in which the protagonists see things entirely in black or white.
Having therefore given the context for what follows, let us begin the story of Israeli independence and its aftermath.
Britain, having created the area of Jewish settlement in the first place by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, spent much of the 1930s backtracking on its promises to the Jewish peoples of Europe about allowing them to settle in the land of the Palestinian mandate. Further Jewish immigration to Palestine was restricted, which had devastating effects because of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. A Commission under Lord Peel, a descendant of the famous nineteenth-century statesman Sir Robert Peel, decided that Palestine should be split. However, it was also decided, in 1939, to restrict Jewish immigration because of its unpopularity with the Arab population. While this may have been understandable from a logistical and policing viewpoint, the timing was disastrous. Hitler was already persecuting the Jews in Germany and the tentacles of the Third Reich were expanding, to the detriment of Jews all over Europe. Just when they needed to escape, a number of countries, the USA and Switzerland included, were placing barriers in the way of Jewish immigration, as were the British in Palestine.
We know that over six million Jews were slaughtered in the Holocaust along with millions in other categories, such as Gipsy, homosexual, and Slav, all deemed lesser beings, or untermenschen by the Nazis. (Perhaps as many as twenty million Soviet citizens died as a direct result of the war, for example, with a very large proportion being civilians, not Red Army soldiers.) As Elie Kedourie writes in Arabic Political Memoirs and Other Studies, the ‘advent of Hitler in 1933 introduced an entirely new and unforeseen element in the Palestinian problem’.
Suddenly, as a consequence of the Holocaust, a Jewish homeland made much sense to a guilty Europe. Nearly all countries had collaborators who took part, in some way or another, with helping the Germans round up and murder Jews. The controversial writer Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, would not agree with such a view, since he insisted on taking the traditional route of ascribing special blame to the German people. Such a view could be considered both old-fashioned and historically inaccurate. The historian David Caesarini is surely right to point out that anti-Semitism was by no means only a German phenomenon. Europe was rife with it, and so a minority of peoples, including for example some of the British inhabitants of the Channel Islands, willingly collaborated with the Nazis in their pursuit of Jewish genocide. To single out the Germans is to ignore the crimes of countless others.
Jewish immigration to Palestine increased exponentially, as Jews felt that only with their own state would they be safe from future Hitlers. From the Jewish viewpoint, this was more than understandable. The problem, as we know, was that the long-standing Arab inhabitants of the region had different feelings about an enormous number of foreigners coming to their part of the world, and as exculpation for European sins of genocide of which the Arabs were innocent.
In other words, both sides, Jewish and Palestinian alike, had strong moral grounds for the cases that they now put to the wider world, which were entirely incompatible. After the annihilation of six million Jews, the Jewish national wish for safety was entirely comprehensible as was the Palestinian desire not to lose their ancestral land as a result of mass immigration from outside. It is important to remember that after the Second World War both sides therefore had equally strong moral claims for their particular viewpoints, and the fact that neither could coexist with the other one was now the real dilemma.
In 1947 the newly created United Nations agreed with the British decision, which had been made a decade earlier, that partition was the only solution to the Palestinian problem. By 1948 the Jewish population had risen to over 650,000 from well under 200,000 some twenty years earlier. By now this was the result of an enormous emigration of surviving Jews from Europe; the homecoming of Muslim-world Diaspora Jews had not yet happened, and would result from the expulsions from Arab countries after the creation of the new Israeli state. Most of the inhabitants of Palestine as a whole remained Arab – not just Muslim, but with a large Christian Palestinian group as well.
Had a Palestinian state been created in 1947 as the UN envisaged, decades of war could have been avoided. But the Arab states, especially Jordan, were determined to avoid recognizing Israel’s very existence, and acceptance of the UN twostate solution entailed accepting Israel as a separate and predominantly Jewish state, distinct from the rest of Palestine. The Palestinians were, as they have been since, a pawn in a much bigger Arab game, and their one chance for an internationally recognized state of their own went by the board. Furthermore, no Arab state wanted any other Arab state to grab too much of the territory that would be available were Israel to be strangled at birth. The different rulers therefore mistrusted each other, adding to the divisions.
By this time the British were in a no-win position, with Jewish terrorist groups, including two future Israeli prime ministers among them, Menachem Begin and Yitzaq Shamir, alongside Arab groups that did not want a Jewish state to exist. So Britain, still wanting a powerful military presence in the Middle East, withdrew from Palestine in 1948 and recognized Israel’s independence, while maintaining an army in Egypt to protect the Suez Canal, and ensuring close military ties with the two Hashemite kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan.
On 14 May 1948 David Ben-Gurion became the prime minister of the newly independent Israeli state; on 19 May the country found itself at war, attacked by five of its Arab neighbours.
Here it is important to recall the fall of the Ottoman Empire. As Sir Richard Allen wrote in Imperialism and Nationalism in the Fertile Crescent, without it there would have been no Jewish homeland and no Israeli State. The problems of today’s Middle East are often attributed to the events of 1948. But on this, Osama bin Laden is right to agree with Sir Richard – they actually go back, as already argued, to 1917 and the origins of the post-First World War settlement in 1918–23.
The initial fighting itself lasted one month, with the Jewish State able to gain more territory than had been allocated to it by the UN. Despite all the nearby Arab states joining in the attack, the war was, from the Arab viewpoint, a complete disaster. Not only did Israel continue to exist, but the Arab states lost territory, and then gained 750,000 Palestinian refugees as well. The UN tried to mediate, but then the UN Swedish negotiator, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated in September 1948 by a Jewish group. He was replaced by an American diplomat, Ralph Bunche. By July 1949 fighting had finally ceased.
As with all claims and counter-claims right up until the present, each side has accused the other of committing massacres against innocent civilians. Those sympathetic to the Palestinians do not hesitate to remind us of the slaughter of Palestinians at Dayr Yasin, a village in which over 200 civilians were killed by Israeli terrorists. Similarly, Israelis do not let us forget a similar mass murder at Mount Scopus, where nearly 100 Jewish medical workers were butchered.
Arthur Goldschmidt in his A Concise History of the Middle East is surely right to say that both sides committed atrocities and that statistics from this period are notoriously difficult to prove, since each side exaggerates the numbers involved of both the dead and of those who fled. Jordan gained most of the 22 per cent of the Palestinian state that was left in Arab hands – today called the West Bank, as it lies west of the river Jordan – and the Egyptians took the Gaza Strip, which is contiguous to their territory. Jerusalem was split between the Israelis and Jordanians. The United Nations set up a UN Relief and Works Agency to house the Palestinians who had fled in 1948. These settlements were supposed to be temporary. But only Jordan gave Palestinians citizenship – other Arab countries kept them as permanent stateless refugees, since the hope was that, with the elimination of Israel, they would be able to go back and reclaim their lost homes.
As we know, this did not happen, with a million Palestinians condemned to effective refugee status. This proved disruptive to all recipient countries, but perhaps above all to Lebanon, independent from France since 1945, and, as Albert Hourani points out in A History of the Arab Peoples, without the restrictions that Britain had placed over Iraq at the latter country’s nominal independence in the 1930s, and with a constitution that presumed a now non-existent Christian majority. The seeds of the later Lebanese civil war were planted with the coming of the Palestinian Diaspora.
The Palestinian flight transformed the demographics of the region. While well over 100,000 Palestinians remained within Israeli territory, large areas now became available for Jewish settlement. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over the Middle East were now expelled from countries such as Iraq, but also from Arab parts of northern Africa where they had lived since Biblical times. Baghdad, for example, a city with a substantial Jewish minority, now became overwhelmingly Arab in population.
Since the original 2006 edition of this book, the debate on the origins of Israel have further been inflamed by a debate within that country itself about whether ordinary Palestinians were primarily evicted by Israelis, or at the behest of neighbouring Arab powers.
In one sense this argument is literally academic, the topic of many polemical discussions at university seminars both in Israel and in numerous other similar institutions around the world. But in another sense it is a profoundly partisan issue, since the identity of the Palestinian cause – namely the desire for an independent country or, in the case of many Palestinians, their wish either to return to their pre-1948 ‘home’ or their desire to expel the Israelis altogether in some instances – is strongly linked to a sense of Arab victimhood and Zionist aggression. If there is a historical basis that proves that the representation of victimhood at the hands of Zionists is factually inaccurate, then much of the Palestinian argument becomes seriously undermined, which in turn brings with it strong political repercussions in the current dispute.
The debate arose with a group of Israeli ‘New Historians’, notably Benny Morris of Ben Gurion University in Beersheba. In books such as Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist–Arab Conflict 1881–2001 (2001), and in his more recent work 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War (2008), Morris shocked the wider as well as academic world by arguing that the Palestinian case is essentially correct. His argument is that Palestinian inhabitants of pre-1948 British mandate Palestine had been driven out of their homes by Zionist groups, many of whom were bent on creating a Jewish majority state with borders wider than those sanctioned by the United Nations. This was therefore an eminent Israeli scholar supporting the Palestinians’ point of view in the debate over who was entitled to live where. Morris is also careful to say, though, that what he calls the ‘expulsionists’ – those wanting the opposing group to leave the region altogether – were mainly on the Arab side, not the Jewish.
Morris also makes a vital point that other historians of the region often omit, namely that the Arab desire to expel all but a tiny percentage of Jews from Arab soil was not born out of secular nationalism – Palestine for the Palestinians. Rather this desire represents a religious, specifically Islamic, way of seeing the world: that non-Muslims had invaded sacred Muslim soil. In other words, this is not a clash between Israelis and Arabs, which is the secular understanding of the conflict, but a wish by devout Muslims to see what had been Islamic territory since the seventh century return to Muslim rule again, repeating the victories of the Islamic armies of Saladin in expelling Christians centuries before during the time of the Crusades. In a twenty-first-century context, these two different ways of approaching the conflict bring to light one of the complications that the Middle East faces today. It is, as we shall see, why the exclusively Muslim group Hamas (unlike the PLO, which contains Palestinian Christians at all levels) refuses to recognize the existence of Israel and thus rejects a ‘two-state’ solution that would allow a Palestinian state to coexist with Israel.
However controversial Morris’ other views might be considered to be – such as the existence of massacres committed by Israelis against Palestinians, albeit on a much smaller scale than the hideous carnage of the Armenian genocide of the First World War – his distinction here provides a perspective not only helpful in understanding the history of the region, but also in elucidating present-day attempts to find solutions to the Israel–Palestine dilemma.
Subsequent research by the equally controversial historian Ephraim Karsh – whose earlier work we have seen in previous chapters – has shown that such a view is statistically incorrect. In his polemical (and therefore much disputed) work Palestine Betrayed (2010), Karsh shows clearly that it was Arab neighbouring governments and the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) (which included leading Palestinians) that urged the Palestinian people to leave their homes. This, Karsh argues, was so that Arab armies bent on destroying the new state could attack more easily and be in a better military position to invade and eliminate the newly created Israel. In leaving in droves as they did, Karsh continues, the fleeing Palestinians acted in obedience because, like the Arab neighbouring countries and AHC leadership, they all presumed that Israel would be defeated, the Zionists driven into the sea and that everyone leaving their towns and villages would soon return to homes free of Jewish neighbours. As we now know, the Arab attempt failed in the Nakba, the great catastrophe, of 1948. Palestinians who thought they had left their homes for just a few weeks found themselves to be refugees.
Karsh’s work shows conclusively that there could have been a Palestinian state in 1948, and that it could have adhered to much wider borders than those set out by the United Nations. What destroyed the creation of what we now refer to as the ‘two-state solution’ was firstly the unanimous Arab view that the Israeli state had no right to exist. This meant that, together with the Arab nations and Zionists advocating a ‘one-state’ solution, the Palestinians believed that the UN offer to sanction a fully independent Palestinian country alongside the UN-created Jewish/Zionist Israel was unacceptable since such an undertaking would have to involve Arab recognition of Israel. As Morris also argues, for religious Muslims, this would have entailed recognition of a Jewish state on historically Islamic land – something quite possible for more secular or for Christian Palestinians, but unlikely for those who saw the issue in spiritual as well as nationalistic terms.
In addition, some of the Arab countries did not want an independent Palestine because they wanted that new state’s lands for themselves. As we know, when the invasion of the new Israeli state in 1948–9 failed, rather than allowing a Palestinian state in the remaining territory, King Abdullah of Jordan annexed the West Bank to Jordan instead. (Egypt correspondingly annexed the Gaza Strip.) Had King Abdullah decided differently, some speculate that there could still have been an independent Palestinian state in 1948, albeit on a smaller territory given Arab losses to the new Israeli state. In other words – and this is the most controversial of Karsh’s contentions – the reason there is no Palestinian state today is because of the decisions of Arab leaders back in the 1940s.
It is easy to see how academic history can become polemical and partisan. If Morris is right, the Palestinian moral case is somewhat reinforced since it allows that, while not expulsionist, many Israelis also committed wrongful acts. But if the opposing Karsh thesis is correct, then it is fellow Arabs that the Palestinians have to blame rather than their Israeli enemies. Either way, ordinary Palestinians have still been victimized. If blame is to be allocated in the dispute between Palestinians and Israelis, then an honest assessment might be that both sides have committed atrocities, as Benny Morris and the ‘New Historians’ argue, although details are still contested decades after the original events. For whatever reason – Israeli aggression or Arab rejectionism – hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have found themselves as refugees, with no hope of return. Jordan alone gave Palestinians citizenship rights – no other Arab country did this.
How one interprets the past makes a profound difference to how one sees the present. As we shall see when looking at events in twenty-first-century Israel/Palestine, some Palestinians seek to escape their past while others remain firmly embedded in it. In public, on the West Bank (and probably in private in Gaza), many Palestinians hope for liberation from the tyranny – whether Zionist or Arab – of the past and the legacy of victimhood that the past engenders. To the more secular or religiously moderate Palestinian demographic, the possibility of a twenty-first-century two-state solution (despite the possibility that this may have once been squandered in 1948) remains a viable option.
As we shall see, the Islamic-based group Hamas are loyal to the 1948 stance and refuse to acknowledge the existence of Israel, a view that renders a two-state solution impossible. This stance is derived from religious belief, and is thus distinct from the policy-making processes of secular societies who separate matters of religion from matters of the state. The tenet that religious belief has policy implications is by no means limited to Islam in the twenty-first century – consider for example the role of Christianity in Latin America and Africa, or Hinduism in India today. Those Palestinians who support Hamas create a continuum between the present day and the ideology of 1940s rejectionism, making the past very much alive in the present, even if the alleged Palestinian motivation (faith) differs from that of the (secular) nationalists of 1948.
Jewish settlers had called Israel a ‘land without a people’. This had not been true, because of the number of Palestinian inhabitants, Muslim and Christian. But they had fled, creating a new empty space. Now, with the two enormous influxes of new Jewish inhabitants – from Europe, and from the Middle East and North Africa – the land was filled again, with a whole new category of inhabitant.
Now that Israel and the USA are so closely linked, we tend to think that this has always been the case. But as Goldschmidt and other writers remind us, initially it was the Communist USSR that was supportive of Israel, since they saw their backing to the new state as a means of reducing British influence in the Middle East, where the British still cherished illusions of influence and Great Power status in the Arab world. In the USA, the State Department, the US military and many missionaries all tended to sympathize with the Arabs or fear losing good relations with the Arab countries. But 1948 being an election year, Truman did not want to lose the Jewish vote, and neither did politicians wishing to be re-elected to Congress. Since popular support for Israel was overwhelming, not least among American Christians who saw 1948 as linked to a new understanding of Biblical prophecy, the politicians therefore supported Israel as well.
(Many commentators, in writing about the USA, have spoken of the power of the so-called Jewish Lobby. While the lobbying power of Israel is indeed great and much more concerted than that of the Arab world, the issues can be misunderstood. For when a Republican administration is in office, the Christian Right is far more powerful than any Jewish organization could ever hope to be, since it is a major base within the Republican Party itself. The Christian Right believes in a nineteenth-century interpretation of the Bible, called ‘dispensationalism’; this gives enormous credence to the re-establishment of the Jewish people in their land of origin, and the independence of Israel in 1948 confirmed such American Christians in their views. It is therefore this group far more than any Israeli lobby that drives the policy of the USA, especially if, as was the case with George W. Bush, America has a president who believes such a modern theological interpretation himself.)
Communist support for Israel was to change, especially after 1958 when the Americans invaded Lebanon to prevent extremists from taking power and when Egypt turned to the Soviet Bloc for support. But we should not forget that strategic relationships were not always as they are today.
The sense of loss and humiliation was total, and not just confined to the five defeated Arab countries; 1948 is known as the disaster, and, as Elie Kedourie reminds us, fate has been unkind to the Arab world ever since. Increasingly, a feeling arose that Israel was the creation of Western imperialism. Two groups shared this view – Arab nationalists, and Islamic radicals, for whom the presence in the former Dar al-Islam (Realm of Islam) of a Jewish, non-Muslim state was a permanent insult.
But while Kedourie counsels against over-estimating the influence of Christian Syrians in the formation of Arab nationalism, it is probably fair to say that this sense of being Arabs together against a common foe was inclusive and open to Christian Arabs as well as the Muslim majority. From 1948 until the disaster of the Six Day War in 1967, Arab nationalism remained the predominant sentiment in the Arabic-speaking Middle East, often mixed, as time went by, with socialism.
Both Elie Kedourie and Bernard Lewis have shown that the states that exist in today’s Middle East are new and artificial. Furthermore, both nationalism and socialism are imports from the West. Arab nationalism was thus a clarion call across state boundaries to wider loyalties and a sense of Arabic solidarity, however precarious such an identity might be historically. (Under the Ottoman millet system, it was your religion that demarked you, not your ethnicity.) Socialism was new to the Arab world as well. One could argue, perhaps, that the way in which it was interpreted in the Arab world might have been different in the region’s predominantly agrarian societies, since what Marx had in mind in the nineteenth century applied more to urban societies in Europe than to their rural equivalents in the Middle East.
So while the Arab world felt bitterly against the West, and against what they regarded as imperialistic interference by Western powers in their internal affairs, it is ironic but true that the main ideology of the ruling classes was in this period entirely Western in origin, as both nationalism and socialism are European ideologies.
Arab revolutions and Arab–Israeli wars
Egypt has been, especially since Mehmet Ali (Governor of Egypt for two periods between 1805–49), the powerhouse of the Arab world. In 1952 it would be again. One of the tragedies of post-war Egyptian history is that the chance for real democracy, which began in 1950, was in effect sabotaged by the discredit heaped upon the ruling elite by the military debacle against Israel and by the understandable lack of trust in King Farouk, a compulsive intriguer. A group of officers, including two future presidents, Gamal Nasser (Gamal Abd al-Nasir) and Anwar Sadat, began to plot to get rid of the corrupt royal regime, which, despite its nationalist protestations, was seen as being unable to get rid of the hated British occupiers. In a coup in 1950 King Farouk was overthrown – the broadcast being made by a young Sadat – and a new revolutionary regime took power. Initially Egypt was under the nominal leader, General Neguib, but he was soon in turn overthrown in 1954 by the real leader, Colonel Nasser, who was to rule Egypt for the rest of his life, until 1970.
Nasser was the first authentically Egyptian ruler since the Pharaohs, as the Ptolemies were ethnically Greek. He began cautiously, not wanting to alienate the major Western powers, but sooner or later his radical ambitions for the Egyptian people led to an inevitable collision with the West.
Two major issues had to be tackled. The first was the British military occupation, which had been there since 1882 and, linked with it, Anglo-French ownership of the Suez Canal. The second was the urgent need for energy and for irrigable agricultural land, both of which could best be met by building a huge dam at Aswan. But this was well beyond the economic capacity of the still poor Egyptian state. The Americans decided not to finance the new dam, and Nasser soon realized that the other key grievance – the Suez Canal – provided the answer. Ironically Nasser had succeeded by negotiation in persuading the British in 1954 to remove their forces, so the British army had finally withdrawn after a seventy-four-year occupation in early 1956.
But in mid-1956 Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal, and the appropriation to Egypt of all its revenues. The British, still obsessed with Empire, regarded this as cutting the umbilical cord through the Mediterranean to the rest of the Empire in Asia – the defence of the Suez Canal had been pivotal to British defence policy for decades. Despite the strongest protests from the USA – both President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles were appalled at the idea of imperialist adventures in the Middle East – the British and French secretly colluded with the Israelis to attack Egypt. Israel would invade and then an Anglo-French army would intervene, pretending to separate the combatants but in reality using this as a cover to regain the canal.
War duly broke out, but that autumn Britain and France were completely humiliated by American outrage and global insistence that they withdraw their forces. (All this was happening while the Hungarians were making a desperate but futile attempt to break free of Soviet domination.) France and Britain therefore had to retreat; their dominance in the Middle East was coming to an end, and from now on the Middle East would be part of the wider, superpower, Cold War rivalry between the USA and USSR, and no longer a pawn in power struggles of European countries.
Nasser was perceived throughout the Arab world as the man who had humiliated the hated imperialist powers. He became an instant hero to millions of Arabs who, after all the disappointments of recent decades, needed one. But he was a nationalist and, while notionally a Muslim, essentially a secularist and socialist. Although most adored him a minority, mainly of zealous Islamists, did not – as we shall see in the last chapter. He was also a dictator who would not hesitate to have his enemies executed. So while Egypt was now finally ruled by Egyptians, after two and half millennia of rule by Iranians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Caliphs, Ottomans, and British, its very brief democratic interlude had been extinguished.
If the so-called Arab Street – a name given to the average Arab point-of-view and the equivalent of Joe Bloggs in Britain – adored Nasser, the more conservative monarchies in the Arab world did not. A proxy war was fought for many years in the Yemen between the supporters of the former monarch, backed by Saudi Arabia, and the nationalists, who were helped by Egypt.
The Suez crisis did not help the monarchical cause. For decades the two wings of the Hashemites, in Iraq and Jordan respectively, still longed for the Syrian territories over which Feisal had ruled briefly between 1918 and 1920. But each Hashemite ruler wanted it for his own country, so even here the Hashemite cause was divided. Abdullah was able to gain much of the West Bank and a foothold in Jerusalem, but he was assassinated. His son was mentally unstable and the throne went to the teenage Hussein. King Hussein, fortunately for his small country, proved to be one of the ablest Middle Eastern monarchs of recent times, and survived against all the odds on his throne, dying peacefully in 1999 after a reign of over forty years. He ended up with less territory than he had at the start, but at least he kept in power, unlike so many of the dictators around him.
For the ostensibly more powerful Iraqi Hashemites, 1956 was a disaster. King Feisal II ruled in all but name, with a permanent power struggle in the background between his ambitious uncle Abd al-Ilah, and Nuri al-Said, the arch-manipulator and shadow ruler for much of the monarchical period. Nuri wanted Syria as well and Jordan too, but he was never able to fulfil this dream, not least because of zealous Egyptian opposition (and traditional Saudi distrust of the Hashemites). The Sunni minority, as Kedourie reminds us in his devastating critique in The Chatham House Version and other writings, continued to rule over both the Kurds and the Shiite majority.
King Hussein of Jordan was shrewd enough to realize that British support no longer counted for survival in the Middle East. In early 1956, before the Suez debacle, he dismissed Sir John Glubb – known widely as Glubb Pasha – from his long-standing command of the key Jordanian force, the Arab Legion. Glubb represented the old, post-Lawrence of Arabia romantic link between European and Arab, but by contrast to the young Jordanian nationalists, he also represented Western domination and control. His dismissal was therefore highly symbolic from both points of view. Yet Nuri and the ruling elite in Iraq did not understand this new world, and in 1955 they signed a treaty with countries like Britain, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan called the Baghdad Pact, a kind of Middle Eastern NATO (Jordan refused to join).
Three years later in 1958 there was a bloodthirsty revolution, in which an Iraqi soldier, Qasim, seized power, with all the royal family, and Nuri was brutally murdered. (A certain young political activist called Saddam Hussein played a minor role.) Nuri had tried a brief union with Jordan, but this dissolved in July, when the successful plotters proclaimed Iraq a Republic. Britain’s domination over part of the Middle East, all but destroyed by the Suez crisis of 1956, was finally and permanently finished. Not only that, but in 1958 Syria did unite with another Arab country, but it was not Iraq. The new state, albeit short-lived, was the United Arab Republic (UAR), and the country with which Syria came together was Nasser’s Egypt.
Also in 1958 came the first American-armed intervention in the region. Following the coup in Iraq, there were fears that Lebanon and Jordan would be in danger. American troops landed in Lebanon, already near civil war, to protect that country from invasion, and this time British troops were also welcome in Jordan, since they went there with American approval.
Iraq could also have joined the UAR. However, Qasim realized that neither Egypt nor Syria had oil but that Iraq did in abundance, and therefore he concentrated on his own country. In and out of power during this time were members of both the Iraqi Communist Party, something that alarmed the West, and another, more nationalist, and equally secular grouping, the Ba’ath (literally ‘Renaissance’) Party, who helped a new regime to overthrow Qasim and seize power in another coup in 1963. But this regime too did not last long, being overthrown within a year.
The Ba’athists, founded in the 1920s by the Syrian-Christian-Arab nationalist Michel Aflaq, were in the context of the Middle East secular and nationalistic. A Chaldean Catholic Christian such as Tariq Aziz, later Saddam Hussein’s deputy, could be as active a member as a practising Muslim. While they paid notional allegiance to ideologies such as socialism, what they really wanted was the Arab world for the Arabs and the entire removal of Western hegemony over the region. They were, in that sense, a classic nationalist party, since any Arab was able to join. This sets them apart from Islamic parties, which automatically exclude Christians, Druze, Fire Worshippers and members of other non-Muslim religions.
To leap ahead slightly, in 1968 the Ba’ath Party, of which Saddam Hussein was now a prominent member, took power. This time they were to remain in charge until Saddam’s regime was removed by the American invasion of 2003. While Saddam did not become president immediately, he began plotting behind the scenes and was able to establish the terror network that kept him in supreme power for so long. As with all Iraqi regimes it was to be a Sunni-led government, in Saddam’s case even more restrictive than usual since he relied increasingly on his own clan from Tikrit to maintain his rule. Soon the Kurds were being massacred in the north, as were all opponents to the psychopathic regime that Saddam operated.
(There is an irony here. Tikrit was also the birthplace of Saladin, who, as we saw, was a Kurd, not an Arab. Since Saddam was active throughout the 1980s in genocidal attacks on the Kurdish people, while at the same time proclaiming himself to be a modern Saladin, there is a considerable incongruity in his actions.)
In 1964 the Arab countries decided that something should be done for the benefit of the Palestinians, on whose side they nominally all were. A meeting in Cairo led to another in Jordan, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was born. However, the really effective opposition to Israel was not so much the PLO but an armed group led by a Palestinian called Yasser Arafat. This was al-Fatah, which literally means ‘conquest’ in Arabic. It is, though, the reversed first letters of ‘The Movement for the Liberation of Palestine’ in Arabic: Harakat al-Tahrir al-Filistani. (Filistani comes from the same root as the biblical ‘Philistine’, but Arabs are not descended from that ancient race – the similarity is geographical, not ethnic or linguistic.) So effective was Fatah that the PLO leaders invited them to merge, and Arafat was soon leader of both, which he would be for the rest of his life.
By 1967 it was clear that the Israelis were able to hold their own against regular guerrilla attacks from Arab countries. The USSR, which now had numerous advisers in Egypt, became worried about what they felt was a large Israeli presence on the Syrian border. The Egyptians persuaded the UN to withdraw their forces that had been there since 1956, and then began a blockade of Sharm al-Sheikh, which completely cut off Israel’s ability to export through the Gulf of Aqaba to the Red Sea. Talks began on a unified command of Arab countries against Israel. Then on 2 June the Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol, appointed the great Israeli military hero, Moshe Dyan, who as far back as the War of Independence in 1948 had shown himself to be unusually brave, to be minister of defence.
What happened next, in June 1967 is, as with so much of Middle Eastern history, a source of dispute. One side claims that the Egyptians launched an attack on Israel and that the Israelis therefore defended themselves. By contrast, the Arabs claim that Israel, realizing that there was a considerable Arab military build-up, launched a massively successful air strike on 5 June, completely destroying the Egyptian air force in the process. Whichever version is correct does not alter the indisputable outcome of the very rapid conflict. The Israelis routed the Arab armies so swiftly that the conflict became known as the Six Day War, in no small way thanks to the effortless air superiority they now enjoyed.
Israel seized the entire Sinai Peninsula in just four days, despite having an estimated 800 tanks to the 2,700 possessed by the Arab armies, and a probable population ratio of around twenty-five to one. Jordan too was swiftly routed – on 30 May King Hussein having foolishly put his forces under effective Egyptian command – with the Israelis able to take both East Jerusalem and the entire West Bank. The Syrians did no better, losing their strategic positions on the Golan Heights. It has been reckoned that if it wasn’t for the ceasefire agreed to by Israel and Syria through the UN on 10 June, even Damascus would have fallen to Israeli attack.
The world lives decades later with the consequences of that lightning Israeli victory in 1967, since the pre-1967 borders of Israel are those upon which the entire Arab world continues to insist. By contrast, no Israeli government is ever going to want to jeopardize the military security of their country as they see it by reverting to them. Some Israeli conquests, such as Gaza, were abandoned as recently as 2005, whereas others remain fully in place and are regarded as non-negotiable, for example those settlements on the West Bank it is deemed necessary to preserve for Israeli national security.
From the Arab point of view, the war in which they had been humiliated again was a disaster – physically, psychologically and in terms of morale. As Arthur Goldschmidt reminds us, the Soviet Bloc had aided the Arabs for years, and their armies were supposedly much better prepared than nineteen years earlier. Nasser had been in power in Egypt for fifteen years, and the Arab world had thought itself rejuvenated. But in 1967 the Arab nations lost far more land than in 1948, and over 200,000 Arabs fled, creating an even bigger refugee problem than before. In addition, nearly one million Palestinians on the West Bank, denied a state of their own back in 1948, were now ruled not by fellow Arabs but by Israel. Decades of Palestinian–Israeli strife was about to get far worse.
In Resolution 242 the UN asked Israel to return to the pre-1967 boundaries. Israel refused, annexing the formerly Jordanian part of Jerusalem. On the Arab side, none of the countries agreed even to negotiate with the Jewish state whose existence they continued to deny. A stalemate then ensued. As Bernard Lewis reminds us, the PLO now became the real spokesman for the Palestinian peoples, a role it has enjoyed ever since. Initially the PLO settled in Jordan. But in September 1970 it was ruthlessly suppressed after activities by a militant wing, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, caused a major rift with the Royal Jordanian Army. The Jordanians expelled the PLO to Lebanon, where it remained until seven years into the Lebanese civil war in 1982, when Israel invaded that country and expelled the PLO forces.
Finally, in 1993 the PLO decided to negotiate with the Israelis, something that it has been doing off and on ever since. (Now that in 2006 Hamas controls the Palestinian Authority Area, this might all change, since the PLO no longer speaks for the majority of the Palestinian inhabitants.)
In 1970 Nasser died, still a hero to many but seriously tarnished by the 1967 defeat. Anwar Sadat, his vice-president and fellow 1952 conspirator, succeeded him. Sadat immediately made links with the West, allowing foreign investment and in 1972 expelling his Soviet advisers. But as regards Israel, he was determined to gain revenge for the defeat of 1967. Peace proved elusive, despite the best efforts of the USA. Jordan was willing to have a new, united Jordan/Palestine and then recognize Israel, but as this would have involved Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, the idea did not prosper. Terrorism continued, with the murder of Israeli hostages at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich provoking outrage, as did the Israeli revenge attacks on Arab soil.
In October 1973 Egypt and Syria felt ready for war. They chose to attack on 6 October, the date of the major Jewish festival of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), which gave its name to the conflict. This time the Israelis nearly lost before going on to win, in no small way thanks to emergency weapons supplies sent by the United States. The myth of invincibility, and the idea that Israel could always win unaided, which was the case in 1967 and to a lesser extent in 1948 as well, was now punctured permanently. Israel’s counter-attack saw Israeli divisions getting near to Cairo and Damascus, but since the Soviets were supplying the Arab powers the UN decided to ask for a ceasefire lest the situation escalate – this was becoming a rather hot Cold War conflict. After eighteen days the war ended. The UN passed Resolution 388, which, like its famous predecessor, 242, was ignored.
In a sense though, Egypt had won. Sadat had been shrewd enough to gain support from Saudi Arabia, thereby ending decades of mutual antagonism. Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing Arab countries now used the urgent and permanent Western need for petrol against the West. In so doing, they managed to split the USA – which had plentiful oil supplies of its own – from Western Europe, which in this still pre-North Sea oil era, did not. An oil embargo was introduced against any country deemed to be excessively pro-Israeli – the Netherlands was singled out as the worst culprit – and a decision was made to increase the price drastically.
(Oil went from around US
3 a barrel to as high as US20, before going back down to around US11 – still, therefore, nearly four times what it had been early in 1973.)
Sheikh Yamani, the Saudi oil minister, suddenly became a major figure on the world stage. The oil price hike demonstrated Arab power over the West for the first time – finally they had a weapon that they could use to great effect. The change in petroleum values hit European economies very hard, and in Britain the situation was worsened by a decision of the mineworkers to go on strike.
It was this sense of crisis that mobilized Henry Kissinger, the United States Secretary of State, to engage in his famous ‘shuttle diplomacy’ in an attempt to de-escalate the crisis. He was able to prevent Israel from wreaking even more damage on the Egyptians, correctly realizing, as Arthur Goldschmidt has written, that this would render Egypt more rather than less likely to want eventually to agree on a more lasting peace.
Until July 2006 Lebanon had largely avoided becoming embroiled in the more recent upheavals of the Israeli–Arab conflict around it. But in 1975 this area, in which Christians and Muslims had lived together in peace and whose capital, Beirut, was described as the Paris of the Levant, slid into civil war. According to the constitution, Christians were in the majority, and so held the Presidency. But Muslims had in reality constituted the majority for a long while, and the presence of mainly Muslim Palestinians in the country tipped the scales even more in their favour. Every group had its own private army, or militia. An attack on a Palestinian bus, by Christian Maronites, sparked a fifteen-year conflict, worsened when Israel intervened against the PLO in 1982.
One of the very few oases of calm was the American University in Beirut, where the students came from all the warring factions. I spent time there in the 1980s with friends and relatives who taught and lived there, and it was an eerie feeling. The campus was peaceful, while beyond it all kinds of death and mayhem could be seen from my balcony window. Even a short journey could be treacherous. Especially noticeable was not just that much of Beirut had been reduced to rubble, but that so much of the damage had been done by small arms fire, by militias of teenage gangs, some of whom, by the end, had known no other way of life. In 1975–6, Goldschmidt writes, some 70,000 people were killed, half a million left homeless and whole parts of the city destroyed.
In 1977 two new leaders came to power: Menachem Begin, the former anti-British activist, became prime minister of Israel, thereby ending decades of left-wing rule, while in the USA Jimmy Carter, the idealist, became president, determined to bring peace worldwide.
As the saying goes, it takes a Nixon to go to China. The same now applied in Israel – Begin was notorious as the instigator of the Dayr Yasin massacre, in which large numbers of Palestinian civilians had been killed. He was therefore uniquely qualified to create peace with Egypt, and since President Sadat was thinking along similar lines, this process now began. On 19 November 1977, President Sadat flew to Israel. Unfortunately he was alone among the Arabs in wanting peace; denounced as a traitor by other Arab nations, this embrace of reconciliation would eventually cost him his life in 1981 at the hands of Egyptian Islamic extremists.
Not all Sadat’s requests were met – he asked for a Palestinian state, for example, an entity we still await. But thanks to Carter, the US government became fully involved in the process, and at Camp David, the presidential retreat in northern Maryland, Carter was able to bring Begin and Sadat together for talks on what they might be able to agree. After much hard bargaining, in September 1978 two framework documents were produced. One was for peace between Israel and Egypt, and one for peace in the Middle East in general.
It was hoped that the latter would lead to other countries becoming involved, but this proved illusory. The PLO rejected it outright, as did Jordan, Syria (now under the hard-line leadership of Hafez Assad) and the now economically powerful Saudi Arabia, paymaster of so much of the Middle East.
Nevertheless, progress was made on the Israeli–Egyptian front. Israel agreed to pull out of Sinai, giving the peninsula back to Egypt, though, crucially, not Gaza, from which Israel did not retreat until 2005. Egypt spurned the enticements of other Arab states, made in a gathering in Baghdad in 1978, to pull out of the discussions altogether. So in March 1979 Carter flew to Cairo to rescue the now seriously delayed talks. He proved entirely successful. Sadat and Begin came to Washington and on 26 March they signed a peace treaty at the White House ending twelve years of on-off warfare. This treaty has lasted; for over quarter of a century Israel and Egypt have maintained the peace. Some years later, Jordan also recognized Israel’s right to exist.
The Palestinian problem was not solved, however, and is with us still. The PLO remained firmly rejectionist, as did Israel’s other neighbours. Not only that, but by 1979 a dramatic change of events in Iran, Muslim but hitherto the West’s key regional linchpin, changed the face of the Middle East for ever.