Lessons unlearned in the Middle East

Nationalism, the vehicle on which Europe’s history rode during the 19th century, spread to the Middle East in the 20th, becoming the region’s driving force. The Arab world, which had submitted meekly to centuries of Ottoman oppression, was suddenly transformed when Western armies arrived to feast on the dying empire’s remains. The Arabs distinguished the tyranny imposed by the Ottoman Muslims from domination by the Christian West, a distinction that made East-West conflict inevitable. Though the military odds heavily favored the West, the Arabs fought back on their own terms. Unfortunately, the promoters of the present war in Iraq appear never to have read the history books. The violence in Baghdad today confirms that Arab nationalism came into the 21st century as fierce as ever, with the Arabs ready to shed both their own blood and ours.

Books dealing with nationalist confrontation in the Middle East have not been in short supply. A few are grand in scope and notable in achievement, like British historian John Keay’s “Sowing the Wind.” Fascinated by the presumptuousness of their imperial past, the British are given to writing monumental works not so much extolling their triumphs as ruing their folly. With erudition and wit, Keay examines the British presence in the region from the end of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century, reminding us of how even experienced imperialists blundered badly. His work stands in contrast to the abundance of Middle East books that focus more narrowly, most often on the Israeli-Arab conflict. These works characteristically brim with polemical ardor and old arguments, casting little light.

Large in ambition, Keay’s book provides us as impartial an introduction to the complex Arab-Israeli relationship as possible, but it also fills us in on the effects on the region of the British-French rivalry, the Cold War, the contest over the Suez Canal, the implacable centrality of oil and a variety of eccentric personalities, most of them British: T.E. Lawrence, Kim Philby, Gertrude Bell. But since good history is chiefly useful for the light it sheds on contemporary problems, Keay’s finest service lies in his account of the four decades of struggle between the British and the Arabs over Iraq. It leaves the reader looking at the evening news with a sense of deja vu. Britain’s failed effort to master Iraq contained a warning to American policymakers of what to expect in their invasion -- if only they had bothered to take note.

In 1915, the second year of World War I, British columns drove confidently into what was then Mesopotamia, a remote Ottoman province. Stopped short of Baghdad, they retreated down the Tigris to the well-protected town of Kut, where their troops, scandalously ill-clothed and ill-provisioned, dug in. Britain was astonished when more than 500 soldiers were killed in skirmishes and another 500 died of poorly treated wounds, while about 700 died of disease and malnutrition. No one had foreseen the necessity of providing a decent field hospital. Does the absence of preparation sound familiar? The Turks were the principal foe, but they were supported by Arab scavengers and scouts, who “hung about on the horizon, swooped on the wounded, picked off stragglers, and committed unspeakable atrocities.” The Arabs, improvising against an enemy who was better trained and equipped, fought as what Keay calls “desert guerrillas.” Today some would less generously call them terrorists.

After the war, the victorious British pasted together three incompatible Ottoman provinces -- Shiite, Sunni and Kurd -- into a new state, to which they imparted the ancient name of Iraq. But they had no idea how to govern it. Britain had earlier given the Arabs solemn pledges of independence, without mentioning that they intended to confine that independence within imperial limits. But as occupiers, few of the British saw reason for any independence at all. “The country was so obviously unready for self-government that no one on the spot could possibly have advocated anything ... but the substitution of British for Turkish control,” wrote one high official from Baghdad, while another claimed condescendingly, “The stronger the hold we are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased.” With London loath to spend much money on Iraq, those in command in Baghdad likened their work to King Canute’s. Though a laudable effort was made at what would today be called nation building, Iraqis rode a wave of resistance to the European colonialism that was rising throughout the Arab world. By the summer of 1920, Iraq was in open revolt.

The first postwar killing of British troops took place in Mosul, in the Sunni north, but disorder spread quickly to Najaf and Karbala in the Shiite south. Normally antagonistic, these two regions, despite British efforts to divide them, bonded on the common ground of Iraqi nationalism. The rebels specialized in hit-and-run warfare. Conceding the cities to Britain’s military power, they initiated no pitched battles but attacked installations throughout the countryside, undermining colonial rule by disrupting communications and services. Rebel casualties were about 8,500, as against British casualties of about 1,000 -- but that was far more than London was prepared to suffer. No less important, the rebels tied up an army of 100,000 men, at a cost that the British treasury could ill afford.

The uprising ended in a compromise, in which the British, with what Keay calls their “natural preference for royalty,” created a throne on which they placed an Arabian chieftain. They hovered so tightly over him, however, that few Iraqis came to think of him as one of their own. The British built a government on their own model, with a parliament, political parties and a press -- a government no worse than colonial regimes elsewhere -- and for nearly 40 years it reigned over a more or less stable society. Pleased with their achievement, the British assumed that the Iraqis were too. (One report to London noted that under British guidance the Iraqis had even learned to eat with knives and forks.) Yet the Iraqis’ resistance to accepting the monarchy as legitimate doomed it to eventual destruction.

In 1942, this resistance exploded in a pro-Axis coup d’etat. Though spread thin by the war, the British had to divert a contingent from the Pacific, reinforcing it with units originally deployed against the Nazi army then advancing across North Africa. It took a month of fierce fighting for the British to regain control of Iraq. Baghdad’s response to defeat was an orgy of looting and killing, whose main victims were local Christians and Jews. Restored to office, the powers behind the king proceeded to execute officers who had participated in the coup, confirming in Iraqi eyes the monarchy’s image as the agent of colonial oppression. An officer named Khairallah, cashiered by the throne, angrily took a job as a schoolmaster. He later adopted a nephew, a child named Saddam Hussein, whom he raised in his home.

By 1948, Britain, its empire echoing the Ottoman death rattle of 30 years earlier, had concluded that it was time to offer Iraq a new arrangement. But throughout the Arab world, nationalists knew that neither colonialism nor the regimes it supported could hold on much longer. The fight against Zionism in Palestine only inflamed them further. Britain proposed to cede some political power and cut back on the troops and bases it maintained, but few Iraqis were willing to accept such a deal. When a treaty foisted on Iraq’s prime minister was announced, Baghdad erupted into a general strike. The prime minister fled into exile, and only after hundreds of Iraqis fell to police gunfire and hundreds more vanished into prisons was calm restored to the streets. Nothing more was heard of the treaty, but the massacre left the public without doubt that the dynasty had become indistinguishable from the foreign oppressors.

The revolution took place in July 1958. Keay expertly probes its context -- a period of turbulence throughout the Middle East that included Nasser’s seizure of power in Egypt, the Suez crisis and heightened Soviet-American tensions. Headed by an army junta, it was a bloody affair. But, unlike Nasser’s, it was far more than a military coup. After the army gunned down the young king and his entourage, all of Baghdad rose up. Crowds seized the most powerful officials, killed them and dragged their bodies through the streets. Most symbolic was the burning of the British Embassy. Though the conquerors were not welcomed with the flower petals that Vice President Dick Cheney predicted for America’s forces last spring, there was -- in contrast to Baghdad today -- a sense of exultation, with banners flying and dancing in the streets.

But it is important to note that what Baghdad cheered was not impending democracy or liberty. Under the British they had those things -- or at least a semblance of them. Instead they cheered the freedom to pursue their own destiny without foreign intrusion, particularly the intrusion of a Western Christian power. Notwithstanding the unspeakable cruelty of the regimes it produced, the 1958 revolution is still regarded by most Iraqis as a huge leap forward. Though Iraqis may have loathed Saddam Hussein, he embodied their nationalist yearnings. Did Washington believe that Iraq was willing to trade him in for a return to foreign hegemony? Keay’s lesson is that such a belief was self-deception.

The Arab-Israeli conflict, too, is a nationalist confrontation, the ongoing product of the collision in two world wars of Eastern and Western cultures. Zionism took its ideology from 19th century Europe and had the misfortune to arrive in Palestine just as Arabs were taking theirs from anti-colonialism. Understandably, the Arabs perceived Zionism as a colonial instrument, and it is true that Zionism would never have succeeded without early British help. But whatever Britain’s motives -- and, as Keay makes clear, they were not innocent -- Zionism had a different agenda, built on providing refuge for the Jewish victims of the Christian West’s chronic anti-Semitism. The Zionists had no intention of playing London’s imperial game, and the Jewish state was created over the angry opposition not just of anti-Western Arabs but also of the British colonial establishment.

Three of the books here under review focus heavily, more than a half-century after Israel’s founding, on the question of Zionist legitimacy. It is an exercise in which scholars and ideologues can spin webs until the end of time. Israel is there because it is there. Do we still examine the legitimacy of the Arab conquest of the Mediterranean littoral, the Turkish conquest of Asia Minor, the Australians swallowing a continent, the Americans planting their flag from the Atlantic to the Pacific? History contains its own legitimacy, and a people that succeeded in establishing a refuge in a land to which they had a deep sentimental attachment have no need to apologize. Nor do the Arabs, in refusing to yield, in the face of superior firepower, the land in which their culture is rooted. The options available to Jews and Arabs are a fight to the death and a sensible compromise. Indeed, if nationalist ideology continues to supersede common sense, as it has for so many decades, both peoples may be doomed.

Arthur Hertzberg is a moderate rabbi to whom Jews and non-Jews alike have long turned for common sense on Middle East issues. Aware that nationalism is obstacle enough, he warns in “The Fate of Zionism” of the peril of infusing it with religious extremism. “It is of the most profound importance,” he writes, “that modern Zionism not be identified as the lineal heir to the religion of the Bible. If the Jewish claim to a homeland in Palestine rests on the assertion that it is the Holy Land that God promised to Abraham for his children, it follows that Muslims have the right to claim that the Prophet made the site of the ancient temple holy to the new Islamic faith through the miracle of arriving there one night from Medina and immediately ascending from there to heaven.”

Ideologues in both camps use precisely those arguments to elevate nationalist disputes to divine mandates, making the barriers to reconciliation nearly impossible to scale. Hertzberg does not exculpate either side. Indeed, what defines his work has been the clarity of his vision, enabling him to see the burdens both camps have imposed on peacemaking. He argues, for instance, that by tightening its grip on the land, Israel has forced the Palestinians into a course of violence; at the same time, he condemns Yasser Arafat’s overreaching, which has plunged his people into futile armed conflict. What is sad about this book is that, after three years of bloody intifada, Hertzberg seems drained of hope. It is less a guide to peace than an ode to despair. Both sides are spurred by their own hurts, he writes; each has lost the ability to take account of the other’s pain.

In contrast to Hertzberg’s lament, Alan Dershowitz’s “The Case for Israel” is nationalist bombast. In contending that Israel’s case is morally unblemished, he denies the Arabs any case at all. As may befit a professor at Harvard Law School, Dershowitz has written a lawyer’s brief rather than a scholarly exegesis, but his work gives lawyers a bad name. Even a brief, if only for the sake of credibility, requires some element of balance. Among the ferocious books on the conflict -- and there are many, arguing both sides -- this may be the meanest. Dershowitz has bludgeoned facts into a work grotesque in its partisanship. A few of his misstatements:

* “The Palestinian leadership with the acquiescence of most of the Palestinian Arabs actively supported and assisted the Holocaust and Nazi Germany and bears considerable moral, political, and even legal culpability for the murder of many Jews.” In fact, as in the case of Iraq during World War II, some Palestinians saw the Nazis as liberators from British colonial rule, but only one leader, the infamous mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, actively collaborated with them, and, having failed to ignite an uprising, he fled the country. Dershowitz might as plausibly argue that the Jews favored Hitler on the grounds that Lehi, a small band of Jewish terrorists, also fought against Britain during the war.

* “Some Islamic governments [throughout much of history] had an apartheidlike system under which Dhimmis -- a religious category that includes Christians and Jews -- were, by law and theology, deemed inferior and subjected to separate but unequal rules.... [I]t is not that the Dhimmis are second-class citizens -- essentially Dhimmis are not citizens at all.” In fact, Jews and Christians, as “people of the book,” were a protected class in Islamic society. They were not denied citizenship, since until modern times the Islamic world had no concept of citizenship. Though they endured some legal disqualifications, they lived in communities where their culture thrived and that were less rigidly segregated than Europe’s ghettos. Moreover, they experienced nothing like the calculated pogroms and massacres suffered by the Jews of Christian Europe.

* “[T]he Palestinians refused to make peace when Ehud Barak offered to end the settlements.” In fact, Prime Minister Barak never offered to end the settlements. On the contrary, while he negotiated for peace in the 1990s, Israel built a record number of settlements. In any review of the failure of negotiations, both sides have much to answer for, but a major difficulty was the Palestinians’ recognition -- well founded, most would say -- that they could not build a viable state with hundreds of hostile settlements and a quarter of a million settlers in their midst.

Yaacov Lozowick, a director of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, tells us in “Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars,” that he is a former peace activist who has abandoned hope because of the Palestinians’ implacable rejection of Israel’s legitimacy. Unlike Dershowitz, he concedes basic justice in the Palestinian cause, and he deals respectfully with the arguments made by both sides. Unlike Dershowitz, he is also honest about such matters as the historic cohabitation of Muslims and Jews. “[W]hile Europe had been grappling with its relationship to the Jews for centuries,” he says, “Islam faced its first serious conflict with Judaism only [when Zionism became a force] in the twentieth century. Any expectation that this conflict would be quickly and rationally resolved flies in the face of history.” Lozowick’s criticism of the Arabs, though strongly stated, leaves open some prospect of reconciliation with Israel. It is more than Dershowitz grants.

The most upbeat of recent books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is Donna Rosenthal’s “The Israelis,” mostly because it is not political at all. Rosenthal, a journalist, has given us a panorama of Israeli diversity -- Ashkenazim and Sephardim, Orthodox and secular, Russians and Ethiopians, Arabs and Christians, even adulterers and gays. It is considerably more fun to read than any of the other books discussed in this review. In a sense, her theme too is nationalism, but only in assuring readers that the marketplace of opinion in Israel is intact. Although other books tell us that Israel’s blinders limit its perception of its neighbors, this one heartens us with the prospect that ultimately an idea might prevail that permits Israeli society and the Arabs to live in peace. Given the horrific news we read every day in the newspapers, that’s easy to forget. Thanks, Ms. Rosenthal!