The damage done to the Arabs by Israel’s creation is an untold story in the West. To understand it, you have to set aside the Israeli narrative and the idea of Arabs as fanatical, backward warmongers irrationally bent on destroying a modern, democratic and peaceable state.
For the Arabs, Israel’s presence in their midst has been disastrous. It has led to six major wars, forced them to militarise when they could not afford it, distorted their development, split their ranks and encouraged their fragmentation into ethnic and religious minorities, provoked the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and reared generations of young Arabs on conflict, hatred and hostility. It has forced them to host a state which dominated them and ensured continued western hegemony in their region. A disproportionate amount of damage was borne by the frontline states of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. But now Iraq and the rest of the Arab world are affected, as is Arab society in general.
On each visit to the Arab world I am struck by its immense resources and its varied geography, history and customs, from Yemen to the Levant, sweeping through Egypt and Sudan to its westernmost point in Morocco. Such diversity could have made this the wonder of the world, physically beautiful, self-sufficient and wealthy. Instead, it is backward, poor and divided. This is not all Israel’s fault, but its existence has contributed significantly to the Arabs’ decline, and ignoring Israel’s role in the story would be misleading.
This essay is going to be quite controversial, I’m sure, but there are some good points in there. The article is actually an argument in favor of recognizing the Beirut Declaration of 2002 / King Abdullah peace plan as the landmark proposal it is but is rarely recognized as such (all my hostility to the Saudis put aside.) It concludes:
This does not mean that without Israel, the Arab world would have had an untroubled history; Israel often only aggravated or exploited what was already there. The ground for the divisions in the Arab world had been prepared by the major European powers at the end of the world war one. By creating borders and nation-states where none existed, they sowed the seeds of future discord. The imposition of Israel in this setting was just the most flagrant example of the same imperialist policy.
Israel’s powerful western sponsors are committed to its security, irrespective of the cost to the Arabs, who are hamstrung by political weakness and dependence on western favour. How can that be dealt with? Neither war nor peace has solved this predicament, and the Arabs have ended with unsatisfactory and uneven arrangements, characterised by resignation and impotence. The Saudi peace plan represents an acknowledgment of this reality, but also of Israel’s stunning success in imposing its own terms without having compromised. However the plan fares, it is a landmark in the historical evolution of the Arab world from outrage and hostility to accommodation and acceptance, even if grudging. Whether it will be the end of the story remains to be seen.
Some of these themes, on a Palestinian scale, are explored in Rashid Khalidi’s excellent and moving “The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood”, which I just read. But more on that later.
Are you kidding? This essay is ridiculous, and any good points it makes are lost in unprovable statements like:
“[Israel] forced them to militarise when they could not afford it.”
Yeah, because no nation-state in history has ever spent too much money on arms when they should have been spending it on social welfare systems, right? I mean that *never* happens outside the Middle East and never before 1948.
And last I checked, the great fault line developing in the Middle East today is along Sunni/Shia lines. That divide *might* pre-date Israel’s founding by a few centuries (Ali was either born in 598 or 1947, I’m not sure), but I bet the author can demonstrate how it never would have gotten so bad without the establishment of the state of Israel.
I can’t believe this ran in LeMonde Diplo.
The damage done to the Arabs by Israel’s creation is an untold story in the West. To understand it, you have to set aside the Israeli narrative and the idea of Arabs as fanatical, backward warmongers irrationally bent on destroying a modern, democratic and peaceable state…in 1948 the Arab world was confronted with the new and alien creation of Israel. Its governing ethos was European and so were most of its people. As such, Arabs could neither understand nor deal with it. They were powerless to prevent Israel’s creation and too weak to defeat it in the war that ensued.
How are the author’s words NOT a contradiction? There are many other problems with this essay, especially factual cause-and-effect ones, but most importantly the dominant, unsubstantiated background theme of Arab victimization by the West and/or Israel.
This essay’s chief value, then, is to demonstrate, because it was published in Le Monde Diplomatique, that the current meme dominating international relations between Arabs and between Arabs and the West is highly distorted, confused, and dysfunctional. Only a substantial revision in Arab thinking can resolve this.
I was discussing this recently with a european friend and he asked why Arabs were collaborators in their own decline ? I think the question is legitimate but at the same time, one has to consider that Arab countries were never decolonised. Algeria is probably an exception. The ottoman empire was defeated by the west and Israel is nothing less than a continuation fo the western colonisation process by other means. Not accessing the decolonisation state meant that Arabs citizens were never able to build a civil society and a political project from their own will but had to accept what their rulers/vassals imposed on them.
The proof that the colonisation process is continuing by other means is the reshaping of the ME into ethnic states by the same powers who shaped it into national states. Sometimes I think that we re witnessing the never ending decomposition of the ottoman empire at the hands of those who defeated it. And that might be true given that the ottoman empire was the most powerful, lasting, and deeply rooted in the regions it conquered.
By the way, Solomon2 is a computer program that pops up now and then on many many blogs, every time Israel is accused of soemthing bad. The rpogram was quite good a while ago but I see it is showing some signs of fatigue and incoherence…
By the
If you are a subscriber to Le Monde Diplomatique you might have read Régis’s Debray excellent piece on palestine in the August edition. It is not to miss.
one has to consider that Arab countries were never decolonised.
That statement only makes factual sense if it is taken to mean that most of the Arab states today consist of territory that was conquered, then colonized, by Arabs through religious wars. The French did colonize Algeria, but they departed over two generations ago. What became Israel was already being re-settled by Jews before World War II, though not without unnecessary hardships by many of the pioneers: many complained they had to pay two or three times for the same plot of land.
The current problems of the Arab World are intimately linked to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Jew fought beside Arab and European in that struggle to liberate Baghdad, Damascus, and other cities, both because the Jews had been promised their homeland as a reward and because they thought their Arab neighbors deserved their own chance at self-rule.
Independent Arab states with an independent Jewish homeland were thus meant from the very beginning to be a package deal. Once the war was over, however, Arabs (1) wanted more for themselves and (2) feared the comparitive newness of a territory ruled by Jews in the midst of their own lands.
This fear was reasonable only in the sense that the examples of the Turks (where did all those Armenians and Greeks go?) and Arabs themselves was that once their ethno-religious groups dominated a region, it tended to kill or drive out the others. That the Jews arrived with the intention of not doing so could not be believed; nor the prospect (circulated by the local imam) of the “last mosque” being converted by infidels be tolerated.
First mob violence, then armed violence, took place against the Jews. Not all Arabs participated. When independence finally came Arabs heeded the call by their own leaders to flee so conventional armies could fight unhindered, but, I guess, secretly out of fear and hatred of Jewish rule. Israel won its wars partly because the Arab states were fighting for “honor” – that is, thievery – whereas the Jews were fighting for their very lives. The leaders of the new Arab “republics” used their leverage over the law and people’s fears to eject most if not all of the remaining Jews from Arab lands, seizing thier property and thus creating a permanent justification in the ruling class for anti-Semitism, for if Jews were accorded equal or even limited rights with Arabs how could they justify keeping their loot?
And what of the Arabs’ original fears? The Temple Mount is undamaged, save by Muslim hands. http://solomon2.blogspot.com/2005/11/response-to-hareega.html“ rel=”nofollow”>Hundreds of thousands of Arabs returned to Israel after its war of independence. Israel-dominated territory has not experienced ethnic cleansing, save of the Jews in Sinai and Gaza. Their have been no massacres of Arabs by Jews; indeed, their population has been exploding under the twin pressures of lawlessness and unlimited food aid.
Indeed, Bruce Thornton claims, “http://victorhanson.com/articles/thornton061407.html“ rel=”nofollow”>Since World War II, some 25 million people have died in various conflicts, only 8,000 as a result of Israel’s attempts to ward off a chronic existential threat. That number includes soldiers.
That’s about one-third the casualties Assad inflicted upon Hama in a week, and less than Saddam averaged during each year of his misrule. And who counts the casualties in the civil wars of Yemen, or the Arab expansionist wars in Sudan and Western Sahara?
So how can Western colonialism be counted as one of the major ills of the Arabs? Why even associate it with Arab decline? Is it, perhaps, because Western Colonialism is a “safe” whipping boy that serves as a distraction for Arab leaders who prefer to distract their populace by waving a red herring while robbing their pockets and stealing their children to die for the sake of glory? After all, Westerners, http://solomon2.blogspot.com/2006/03/i-was-ten-years-old-but-they-changed.html“ rel=”nofollow”>especially Jews, don’t terrorize populations by killing children for the misdeeds of their parents the way some Arabs do.
Sophia, help me here please, because I know there was something I was supposed to look up about some French intellectual and I forgot what it was. I apologize for not getting back to you in our previous discussion.
WHEN WILL YOU ARABS/MUSLIMS START BLAMING YOURSELVES AND NOT ISRAEL FOR HOW SCREWED UP YOUR LIVES ARE.I COULD LIST MANY REASONS WHY THE RECREATION OF THE NATION OF ISRAEL WAS A GOOD AND JUST DECESION.BUT YOU WOULD JUST CLAIM THAT I’M A JEW LOVER AND A ISLAMAPHOBE.THE RECREATION OF THE NATION OF ISRAEL DID NOT VICTIMIZE YOU,IT JUST EXPOSED YOUR CULTURE AS HATE FILLED, AND DYSFUNCTIONAL. YOU’RE STILL LIVING IN THE MIDDLE AGES IN A TRIBAL SOCIETY.YOU’RE ALL OUTRAGED ABOUT THE POOOOOR PALESTINIANS,AND HOW THEY HAVE BEEN VICTIMIZED BY ISRAEL.WELL LETS TAKE A LOOK AT PAKISTAN. IT WAS CREATED THE SAME YEAR AS ISRAEL.PAKISTAN HAD NEVER EXISTED BEFORE THE BRITISH CREATED IT OUT OF A PIECE OF INDIA.THERE WERE MANY,MANY MORE PEOPLE DISPLACED AND MANY,MANY MORE REFUGEES THEN IN “PALESTINE”. YOUR PROBLEM IS ISLAM, IT IS A RELIGION OF HATE. MOHOMMED HATED JEWS AND CHRISTIANS AND COMMANDED THAT THEY EITHER SUBMIT TO ISLAM OR BE KILLED.LOOK WHAT’S GOING ON IN THE WORLD,ISLAM IS THE CAUSE OF ALL THE DEPRAVED AND IRRATIONAL VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD.THAT’S BECAUSE THATS WHAT ISLAM TEACHES, KILL,KILL,KILL.EVEN IF EVERY JEW LEFT ISRAELYOU WOULD STILL BE KILLING EVERYONE WHO DOESN’T SUBMIT.IF THERE WAS NO OIL IN THE MIDDLE EAST YOU WOULD ALL BE BEGGARS.YOU CREATE NOTHING,NOTHING BUT VIOLENCE.YOU ALSO PLAY THE VICTIM ROLE SOOO WELL.PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY ARE ALWAYS THE VICTIM ARE JUST COWARDS AND LIARS.THEY BLAME ALL THEIR PROBLEMS ON OTHERS,COWARDS.YOUR CULTURE IS SO BACKWARDS YOU CAN’T COMPETE IN THE REAL WORLD.THE ONLY THING YOU LEAD THE WORLD IN IS DEATH AND DESTRUCTION.GOD LOVES,SATAN HATES A RELIGION BASED ON HATE IS SATANIC.ISLAM IS THE ONLY RELIGION THAT HAS A WHORE HOUSE IN HEAVEN. 72 VIRGINS FOR ANY MUSLIM THAT BLOWS UP ANY INNOCENT PEOPLE.CUT PEOPLES HEAD OFF IN THE NAME OF ALLAH.THIS IS THE RELIGION OF PEACE? GIVE ME A BREAK.YOUR GOD WANTS YOU KILL PEOPLE. I’M NOT RELIGIOUS BUT THAT SOUNDS PRETTY SATANIC.I WOULD REALLY LIKE A MUSLIM TO RESPOND TO THIS WITHOUT ORDERING MY DEATH.
This is satire isn’t it? Surely no literate person can be this ignorant.
The capital-letter screed above sounded, to me, as ridiculously as the essay sections Issandr quoted in his post.
“This does not mean that without Israel, the Arab world would have had an untroubled history…” — how nice of the author to say so. Really, this makes it all very reasonable.
“But now Iraq and the rest of the Arab world are affected, as is Arab society in general.” — the author is really trying to say that the US is in Iraq because of Israel?
Come on. The Arab world is *huge*, with hundreds of millions of people. To suggest that Israel, a few million Jews on a tiny sliver of land, is the reason why the entire Arab world, from Morocco to Yemen to Iraq, has problems… it’s just too much. You want to pin all of the Palestinians’ problems on Israel–that I can understand. I don’t accept it, but I can understand it. But blaming Israel for the generally unhappy predicament of “the Arabs” today–again, it’s just too much.
Of course it does all fit together nicely if you’re a person who thinks “Jewish Power” is a non-racist, non-paranoid, meaningful phrase, and who thinks Zionism = Racism and/or Colonialism and/or Apartheid. And it sure is easy to, say, blame Saudi Arabia’s crappiness on Israel, rather than on oil and religion and a despotic system of government.
[…] Middle East and Development and Society and Politics Cairene 1:43 pm Another one thanks to the Arabist; this article, written in light of the recent reemergence of the Saudi peace plan, enumerates the […]
Since Abu Jehuda thinks that I’m so ignorant, can you or any other Arab/Muslim please tell me what your culture contributes to the world? Other than jihadist.
Oh yeah,Pakistan was actually created one year before Israel(1947). Sixty years have pasted now and Pakistan’s fastest growing industry is terrorist training camps. The London train bombers, trained in Pakistan. Those doctors busted in England for trying to blow up the airports, trained in Pakistan. I’m sure there will be many more to come.
Is it Israel’s fault that Pakistan is a mess? Or is it Islam’s?
Is it Israel’s fault that the whole Muslim world is a mess? Or is it Islam’s?
Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Is it Israel’s fault that the other countries in the region need to be controlled by dictators? Or is it Islam’s?
I can understand why Muslim’s hate Israel. Israel has been embarrassing the Muslim world for sixty years. Five Muslim countries invaded Israel the day after it was formed, and were beaten badly. Five on one and you couldn’t win. Pathetic.
Enough about Israel, could someone explain to me how Islam got the name “the religion of peace”? I see no evidence of that. I only see hate coming from Muslim world.
Someone please answer my questions.
Not to be left out, there was a plan in place to establish a state in the Middle East that sought to incorporate the Arabs and the Jews. According to the sources I have researched, many in the region saw this as a positive development, with a notable leader in the region clamining that one group could not flourish without the other. However, as if foreshadowing the next 90 years, a fanatic was able to mobilize a small group of devotees, and the resulting violence derailed the effort.
Forgive me for leaving out…..that plan was post WW I, 1921 I believe?
yes, even the most ardent pro-palestinian would see this as a hideously biased, poorly researched article that carefuly avoids placing blame on the arabs nations in the way that basically everyone concedes they richly deserve.
The annoying thing about the existence of the state of Israel is how Arab regimes have used its presence as an excuse to do all sorts of things to its populations over the years. Absolving Arab leaders of their nasty tendencies is just not on.
Oh, and I loved the ALL CAPS screed, that was good fun, you could almost see the flecks of foam on the computer screen and Solomon2, always good to hear that old chestnut about how the Palestinians fled their lands to ease the way for the Arab armies. I mean really, not even the israelis put that one out any more.
hehehehehehe are you kiding or what
Just see in Telvisions israelz they not respect araB and they kill them from the preapre Mohamed
الله ياخذكمو ياخذ الØÙ‚ يا اسرائيل
Don’t worry just wait and see what you will see a hill a big big hill i also dont not respect israelz One beacuse they are Dirty in every where
ive Gon to italy >>Milano
always good to hear that old chestnut about how the Palestinians fled their lands to ease the way for the Arab armies. I mean really, not even the israelis put that one out any more.
That’s the claim of Abu Mazen, the current Palestinian President. Details at the bottom of http://solomon2.blogspot.com/2005/11/response-to-hareega.html“ rel=”nofollow”>this post.