The Complete Idiot's Guide to Middle East Conflict Read online

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  Mysteries of the Desert

  Napoleon organized a military expedition to Egypt in 1798 to cripple British communications with India. His troops advanced into Palestine and Syria, but were stopped in southern Lebanon. Napoleon secretly returned home to France in 1799, but his army remained until 1801, when the British forced them out and returned control of Egypt to the Ottoman sultan.

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  Arab nationalism was also in large part stirred by a longing for a return to the golden age of Islam. As you read in Chapter 4, Muslims dominated the Middle East for more than 1,000 years. Islam had been an incredible success, and the Arabs had enjoyed a great deal of power and influence. Starting with Napoleon’s capture of Egypt in 1798, however, the empire had begun a steady decline that left Muslims closer to the bottom than the top in terms of accomplishment and prosperity. Almost everywhere they looked, Christians were deciding the future—often their future. And colonialists, mainly in Britain and France, were introducing Western ideas and customs, which were having a great influence on their culture.

  The Islamic Reformation

  The frustration and humiliation accompanying these changes preoccupied many Arabs, who hoped to find a solution that would restore their past glory. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, people such as the Egyptian Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Syrian Rashid Rida, and others began a movement referred to as the Islamic Reformation. Their aim was to reinterpret Islamic teachings in light of new conditions and to stress the religion’s capability to adapt to modern times in hopes of delivering Muslim countries from their perceived backwardness.

  The Muslim Brotherhood, which emerged in Egypt, took almost the opposite approach, emphasizing a return to the original form and spirit of Islam. Its adherents were more militant than intellectual and sought to mobilize public support to win independence from Britain.

  Other groups formed around related ideas for bringing about an Arab renaissance based on socialism or communism or some hybrid of ideologies. None of these nationalist movements, except the Young Turks (see the section “Young Turks” later in this chapter), attracted the popular support needed to make them successful.

  The Dream of Unity

  After World War I, President Woodrow Wilson introduced the notion of self-determination, the principle that a people should be free to determine their own political status. This concept immediately struck a responsive chord in the Middle East. However, the common nationalist idea that territories should be divided into separate units based on ethnicity or some other characteristic of the majority of the population clashed with the Muslim view that the Arabs constituted a single nation with a common culture and language. From a fundamentalist perspective, it was unacceptable to have multiple Muslim states. In fact, opposition to Zionism was largely attributable to the opposition to a Jewish entity in the midst of the Islamic nation.

  Gradually, the desire for a single Islamic state gave way to the reality that the region was divided into separate entities, albeit artificially created by the imperial powers. Arab nationalism became more focused on opposition to the colonial powers as their influence over the affairs of the region intensified. Demands for independence grew louder in places such as Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, where nationalism became more localized and less regional. Most of the Arab lands won their independence after World War II, but not as a single nation. Instead, the boundaries were primarily determined by the way the imperial powers carved up the region in the aftermath of the First World War (see Chapter 6).

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  Hieroglyphics

  Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser sought to unify the Arab world into one Arab state. This goal was referred to as Pan-Arabism.

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  Ironically, Arab nationalism grew stronger in many ways after most Arab states had achieved independence. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Pan-Arabist movement, in particular, was a major political force in the 1950s and 1960s. Nasser stressed the idea that Arab identity transcended the boundaries of individual states and that all the Arab nations should either unite or at least cooperate closely.

  Young Turks

  Before the Arabs could unify themselves, however, they had to throw off the yoke of the Ottoman Turks, who continued to control most of what had been the Islamic Empire.

  In the heart of the empire, the so-called Young Turks, revolutionaries opposed to the autocratic Ottoman regime, were beginning to sow the seeds of a new nationalist movement—one that would culminate after World War I in the founding of modern Turkey under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. A key aspect of Ataturk’s reforms was the separation of “church” and “state.” This reform distinguished Turks from the Arabs, who believed that Islam precluded the separation of politics and religion.

  The Young Turks’ revolutionary goals were aided by the intervention of the Allies during World War I, particularly the British, who persuaded the Arabs to revolt.

  Ferment in Arabia

  During the period of nationalist ferment in the eighteenth century, another of these Islamic reform movements arose. Muhammad ibn Abdul al-Wahhab, a native of Ayaina in the Najd region of Arabia, was forced to leave his birthplace. He began a journey that led him to believe that the practice of Islam was becoming corrupt and that a return to the fundamentals of the faith was needed. He set down his argument in The Book of the Unity (of God) (Kitab al-Tawhid) and called for a puritanical devotion to the doctrine of the absolute unity of God as enunciated in the Islamic affirmation, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is Allah’s prophet.”

  Abdul al-Wahhab’s effort to persuade people of the virtue of his teachings met with little success until he came to Dariya, a town north of Riyadh, in present-day Saudi Arabia. Al-Wahhab met the local ruler, Muhammad ibn Saud, and convinced him to support his teachings. In 1744, the two men swore an oath of allegiance to the brand of Islam that became known as Wahhabism.

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  Ask the Sphinx

  Today only about eight million Wahhabis remain, almost all of them residing in Saudi Arabia.

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  With the support of Saud’s tribal army, al-Wahhab spread his version of Islam throughout Arabia. When Saud died in 1765, his son Abdul Aziz, who had married one of al-Wahhab’s daughters, carried on his father’s legacy. The Saud family continues to rule Saudi Arabia, but no longer adheres to Wahhabism, prompting criticism from Wahhabists that the regime is not sufficiently devout.

  The Arab Revolt

  The central figure in the Arab nationalist movement at the time of World War I was Hussein ibn ‘Ali, who was appointed by the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress to the position of sherif of Mecca in 1908. As sherif, Hussein was responsible for the custody of Islam’s shrines in the Hejaz and, consequently, was recognized as one of the Muslims’ spiritual leaders.

  In July 1915, Hussein sent a letter to Sir Henry MacMahon, the British High Commissioner (essentially governor) for Egypt, informing him of the terms for Arab participation in the war against the Turks. The letters between Hussein and MacMahon that followed outlined the areas that Great Britain was prepared to cede to the Arabs.

  The Hussein-MacMahon correspondence conspicuously does not mention Palestine. The British argued that the omission had been intentional, thereby justifying their refusal to grant the Arabs independence in Palestine after the war. Nevertheless, the Arabs held then, as now, that the letters constituted a promise that Palestine would be an Arab state.

  Searching for a Palestinian Identity

  When Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in large numbers in 1882, fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there, and the majority of them were not long-time residents but relatively recent arrivals. Palestine was never an exclusively Arab country, although Arabic gradually became the language of the majority of the population after the Muslim invasions of the seventh century.

  No independent Arab or Palestinian state ever existed in Palestine. In fac
t, Palestine is never explicitly mentioned in the Koran—rather it is called “the holy land” (al-Arad al-Muqaddash).

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  Sage Sayings

  There is no such country [as Palestine]! “Palestine” is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.

  —Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul Hadi to the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine

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  Palestinian Arabs never viewed themselves as having a separate identity. When the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose Palestinian representatives for the Paris Peace Conference, the following resolution was adopted: “We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic, and geographical bonds.”

  The representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations submitted a statement to the General Assembly in May 1947 that said, “Palestine was part of the Province of Syria” and that, “politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity.” A few years later, Ahmed Shuqeiri, later the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), told the United Nations Security Council, “It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.”

  The Arab and Zionist national movements shared the desire for independence in their homelands. But there was an important difference: the Zionists were united in their attachment to Palestine, whereas the Arabs were divided by the competing interests of individual leaders from different lands throughout the region.

  The first expressions of Zionism preceded the political movement by several decades. Similarly, the first expressions of Palestinian nationalism can be traced back to the early twentieth century, but Palestinian Arab nationalism did not become a significant political movement until after the 1967 Six-Day War and Israel’s capture of the West Bank. Prior to that time, particularly during the 19 years they spent under Jordanian rule, Palestinians did not demand self-determination or statehood. Since 1967, the identity of Palestinians has become more distinct, and their pursuit of a state specifically in Palestine their central objective.

  The conflict between Jews and Arabs over who would become independent in Palestine was inevitable because the Arabs were convinced the land was not able to sustain both peoples. This precluded a compromise by which both nations could realize their independence in Palestine.

  The Least You Need to Know

  Zionism became the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.

  The British promised to create a Jewish homeland in the Balfour Declaration.

  As Jewish immigrants began to settle in Palestine, the native Arabs became convinced that they would be displaced, a feeling that would provoke decades of conflict.

  Arab nationalism begins to stir as Zionism took hold and was directed at opposing Western imperialism and overthrowing the Ottoman Turks.

  The Arabs revolted against the Turks with the understanding that the British would grant them independence, but they were deceived by the British.

  Part 3

  The Great War’s Spoils

  World War I results in a rearrangement of the global checkerboard; great empires are defeated and split into new nations. The Ottoman Empire is one of those that fall, and the victors, principally Britain and France, divide its remains between them, creating a series of new countries that shape the modern Middle East.

  The British also make a number of promises during the war—in particular, the Balfour Declaration—expressing their support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and a seemingly conflicting promise of independence for the Arabs. Part 3 traces the efforts of the Zionists to build that state—despite opposition from the Arabs and British. The competing claims of Arabs and Jews for Palestine ultimately can’t be resolved by the British, so the matter is turned over to the United Nations, which arrives at the Solomonic solution of dividing the land into two states. The Jews reluctantly accept the partition of Palestine, but the Arabs reject it and launch a war that ends with the newborn state of Israel triumphant, the Arab world bitter, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.

  Chapter 6

  Trouble Brews in Palestine

  In This Chapter

  Imperialism by another name

  Palestine gets the ax

  Room for everyone?

  The Mufti’s riot act

  During World War I, the Arabs fought beside the British to crush the Ottoman Empire and, they believed, win their independence. Not until after the war did they learn that the British, along with the French, were interested only in advancing their own imperial interests and had no intention of fulfilling their promises to the Arabs—or, for that matter, to the Jews. Besides the duplicity of the great powers, the Zionist cause was undermined by the actions of the Turks. Initially, the Ottoman government recognized the potential benefits to Palestine’s development that could be derived from access to Jewish financial resources, so the Ottoman government relaxed immigration restrictions in 1913, thereby facilitating the second aliyah, the Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Turks reversed their decision the following year, however, in large part because of grumbling from local Arabs. They also deported all the non-Ottoman Jews in Jaffa, which precipitated a mass exodus of Jews throughout Palestine. At the beginning of World War I, 85,000 Jews lived in the Holy Land, but, by the war’s end, the number had dwindled to 56,000.

  Empire First, Freedom Later

  The breakup of the Ottoman Empire presented the opportunity, at least in theory, for the peoples of the Middle East to gain independence. At the time, however, the notion that any of the people had a right to determine their own future was unheard of. It has become common to hear supporters of Palestinian statehood today argue that the Palestinians have the right to self-determination, but this concept was never acknowledged in the days of the great empires of Greece, Rome, or Islam.

  The right of all nationalities to self-determination was first articulated by President Woodrow Wilson in a speech to Congress on January 8, 1918, in which he presented 14 points he believed should be the basis of a peace settlement after World War I. These included assuring freedom of the seas, removing economic barriers to international trade, reducing arms, and recognizing the self-determination of peoples.

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  Mysteries of the Desert

  In 1915, the British agreed to a request from the Jews to form their own military unit to fight the Turks. However, initially the British refused to allow the Jewish volunteers to fight on the Palestinian front and suggested that they serve as a detachment for mule transport on some other sector of the Turkish front. And so the Zion Mule Corps came into being. Later, in 1917, the British agreed to the establishment of a Jewish Legion for the Palestinian front. In June 1918, the Jewish volunteers fought for the liberation of Palestine from Turkish rule. The British subsequently disbanded the force.

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  Wilson’s Concept of Self-Determination

  After World War I, the other great powers accepted the Wilsonian concept of self-determination, with the qualification that a nation be able to maintain itself before it becomes autonomous. The United States and its allies, naturally, took the responsibility for determining whether a given nation was ready for self-government. They also devised a provision for nurturing a nation until it was prepared for independence. This was the origination of the mandate system.

  Not surprisingly, the motivation for devising the mandate system was not a philanthropic desire to help developing nations, but an imperialistic design to maintain control over their spheres of influence. Great Britain wanted to ensure control of the sea route to India and the Far East through the Suez Canal so that Britain would have access to supplies of cotton, oil, and other manufactured goods. Ports, bases, and, later, airfields in
the region were keys to preserving Great Britain’s position as a Mediterranean and world power. Similarly, France obtained vital materials from the region, and its bases in Syria and Lebanon strengthened its military status.

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  Hieroglyphics

  A sphere of influence is a region dominated or controlled by a foreign government.

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  The interested powers were able to acquire international recognition for their plan through the League of Nations, which adopted a covenant in 1924 containing the provision that when communities reached a certain stage of development, “their existence as separate nations can be provisionally recognized, subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the mandatory” (Article 22). This diplomatic doublespeak means that Great Britain and France could decide whether or when to grant their wards independence.

  Messieurs King and Crane

  In accordance with the League of Nations’ covenant, President Wilson sent Dr. Henry C. King and Charles R. Crane to investigate the wishes of the inhabitants of the former Turkish (Ottoman) Empire in June 1919. The King-Crane Commission, as it came to be known, received a letter from the Syrian Congress opposing Zionist settlement in Palestine. King Faisal told the commission that he considered Palestine an integral part of Syria and was opposed to it being separated. This was a tacit rejection of the Balfour Declaration and a direct contradiction of his earlier support of Zionist aims.