A Durable Peace (19 page)

The second session is entitled “The Situation in the Middle East.” To my chagrin, I discovered that this consisted of the
same
harangues against Israel, almost word for word, that were delivered during the first session. When I rose to speak during
such a session in 1985, I asked about the purpose of having two separate debates; after all, if the same claims and arguments
are to be made twice, the UN could save everyone the time, the trouble, and the money and have just one discussion. The only
possible justification for this second debate, I suggested, could be to discuss the subject of the session’s name, the situation
in the Middle East. I proceeded to distribute to the delegates a compendium of Middle Eastern violence for 1985, compiled
by the impartial American Foreign Broadcasting Information Service, which regularly monitors news reports from the Middle
East. I had excluded reports of incidents relating to Israel. “Those,” I said, “were discussed in the ‘Question of Palestine’
debate, in the UN’s Second Committee, in a host of Special Committees, reports, letters and other documents.” (After four
years at the UN, I had to wonder if there was a forum in which this subject was not discussed.)

Given that 1985 was widely considered an “uneventful” year in the Middle East, this was a remarkable compilation. It was a
catalogue of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, executions, coups, hijackings, and border incursions, alongside the outright
war raging at the time between Iran and Iraq. The targets were
diplomats, journalists, embassies, and airline offices. The victims were Iraqis, Moroccans, Sudanese, and Libyans, bearing
almost every passport in the Arab world, as well as Americans, British, French, Italians, Swiss, Dutch, Soviets, Japanese,
and many others.

Calendar of Middle East Violence, April 1985

SOURCE:
U.S. Foreign Broadcasting Information Service

Such a list—a single
month
of which is reproduced in the table above—could hardly have been obtained from any other region in the world, because the
Middle East has for decades consistently been the most violent area on the globe. Yet virtually none of the conflicts enumerated
has anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Needless to say, none of the violence listed was found suitable for discussion
in the General Assembly. The Arab delegates were quite peeved to be handed this compendium. By what right, they wanted to
know, does the Israeli representative meddle in the “internal affairs” of the Arab world? These are all disputes within “the
Arab family” and do not belong under the UN’s purview of international matters. (I was hearing this last rejoinder at a time
when both Iran and Iraq were declaring that the road to liberate Jerusalem went through each other’s capital. On this, the
Iranians at least had geography on their side.)

In the UN, as in the media and diplomacy generally, the Arabs were adept at sweeping all inter-Arab and inter-Moslem violence
under the rug. Yet there is something uncanny about the world’s capacity to focus on the Arab-Israeli dispute (with total
casualties estimated at 70,000 dead over five decades) in the face of the carnage of the
other
Middle Eastern conflicts, such as the Egyptian invasion of Yemen (250,000 dead), the Algerian civil war (1,000,000 dead),
the Lebanese civil war (150,000 dead), the Libyan incursion into Chad (100,000 dead), the Sudanese civil war (at least 500,000
dead), and the Iran-Iraq War (over 1,000,000 dead). Even the least of these conflicts far outstrips the entire half-century
of Arab-Israeli tension on any devisable scale of casualties or misery. But especially after the Gulf War (at least 100,000
dead, and possibly many more), no fair-minded person can accept the pretense that the turbulent conflicts raging everywhere
in the Middle East can be forced into the Palestinian straitjacket.

If the Palestinian Problem is not the core of the Middle East conflict, then what is? Where can we look for the political,
social, or psychological roots of phenomena so powerful that they have reduced
to habitual strife the entire Arab nation 150 million strong, a people that once hosted impressive centers of scholarship
and culture that influenced all of civilization? To answer this question, we must consider three forces that have largely
been obscured in the view of the Arab world that is commonly held in the West: the crisis of legitimacy, the yearning for
a unified Arab domain, and resentment against the West. Each of these forces feeds upon the others in a circle of unending
instability and violence.

Ever since the end of Ottoman rule after World War I, the absence of any popular consensus as to what constitutes a legitimate
Arab government has ensured that even the most towering political structures in the Arab world have rested on foundations
of quicksand. The demise of the empire that had subjugated the Arabs for centuries left the Arab world in the hands of a patchwork
of British and French colonial administrations. Their interests were primarily material, and when it proved unfeasible for
them to maintain direct control over the vast reaches of the Arab lands, they sought to grant independence to the newly fashioned
Arab “states” in a manner that would least interfere with the functioning of their economic empires, particularly with the
supply of oil to their industries. They carved the region into numerous states (today there are twenty-one members of the
Arab League), each of them far too small to become a world power in its own right, and they granted sole proprietorship of
these new entities to friendly Arab clans who were considered likely to be favorable to maintaining relations with their European
benefactors. Thus was born a collection of monarchies from Morocco to Iraq.
²⁰

The Middle East, of course, had no tradition resembling that of the Western nation-state, which is predicated on the existence
of separate nations. The French are sharply aware and even genuinely proud of those elements of character and culture that
distinguish them from the Spanish, the English, and the Germans, and the feeling is at least mutual. The special institution
of the European nation-state, like that of the Greek and Italian city-states before it, could catch on among the people in
Europe precisely
because the French, for example, naturally consider themselves to be loyal to and bound to obey the government of France,
whatever government that might be, and no other. But as many Arabs are quick to point out, this is not the case among Arabs,
who consider themselves loyal principally to their family or clan,
²¹
and beyond that to the Arab people as a whole. The intermediate state-unit was generally taken to be an arbitrary, unnatural,
and undesirable division imposed on the Arab people—much as Americans would probably feel if outsiders were to make each of
the fifty states into an independent country. Thus a tension between subjects and rulers was introduced into the Arab states
from the very start, with the European-appointed “king” demanding a loyalty that his subjects were at best ambivalent about
granting. Often the monarch was therefore not so much a national leader expressing the general will of his people as the scion
of a particular fief-holding family, interested in the state apparatus mostly as a means of assuring himself and his relations
a lush life, usually with ample help from interested foreigners. As Amir Shakib-Arslan, a Lebanese who was one of the most
popular writers in the Arab world between the wars, put it:

Moslems offer help to these foreigners betraying their own brethren, and enthusiastically assist them with advice against
their own nation and faithfully cooperate with these foreigners from greed and perfidy. But for the assistance obtained by
the foreigners through the treachery of one section of the Moslems and the zeal with which the latter rendered them help…
these foreigners would have neither usurped their sovereignty… [nor] contravene[d] and supersede[d] their religious laws…,
nor would they have dragged down the Moslems into the valley of the shadow of death and led them to a disgraceful death.
²²

The readiness of the Arabs to reject their own monarchs, their own states, and the borders that divide them is thus a consequence
of a general crisis of political legitimacy. Since they accepted
the governments and boundaries that the Europeans devised only superficially, if at all, there was nothing other than force
that could silence the cacophony of claims to legitimate rulership (because of superior pedigree or ideology) over any particular
parcel of land. And since every one of these claims has been backed by the threat of insurrection or coup, the result has
been terminal instability. Most of the Arab regimes have by now mastered the suppressive techniques of “crowd control” and
have thus gained a measure of apparent solidity, but the underlying problem remains the absence of any notion of legitimacy
for either the various governments or the borders that separate their countries.

This explains the preoccupation of Arab leaders not only with their fears of coup and assassination but with “mergers” of
one sort or another—each merger (like many corporate mergers) thinly masking one government’s effort to delegitimize and dissolve
the other government. Thus Nasser attempted to fuse Egypt, Syria, and Iraq; Iraq tried to merge with Jordan and absorb Kuwait;
Qaddafi has attempted marriages with Tunisia, Sudan, and even Morocco; and Syria has absorbed Lebanon as an interim step in
its effort to build a Greater Syria. All these unions failed for lack of any real willingness by any Arab leader to cede any
power (except for Lebanon’s absorption into Syria in 1991, which was pulled off at gunpoint), fulfilling Lawrence’s prophecy
that “it will be generations before any two Arab states join voluntarily.” It is the Arabs’ frustration over their inability
to unite and stabilize their domain that explains why Saddam’s conquest of Kuwait inspired jubilation throughout the metaphorical
“Arab street” that runs from Morocco to Mesopotamia—notwithstanding the fears of some Arab rulers that they might be Saddam’s
next victims. For the majority of ordinary Arab people, the arbitrary divisions that Europeans scrawled all over the Arab
map were an injustice far worse than any cruelty that Saddam might inflict on the Kuwaitis. They cheered for an Arab Bismarck
who would erase the borders and unify the Arab realm, earning their respect through the ruthless
application of force and thereby creating for himself, out of the ruins of Kuwait, legitimacy

This feeling was particularly evident among Palestinian Arabs, both in Israel and in Jordan, who backed the destruction of
Kuwait with a unanimous enthusiasm that was incomprehensible to most Westerners. For Palestinian Arabs, Kuwait symbolized
the kind of colonial intrusion into Arabdom that they associate with Israel and Lebanon. The dismantling of the Western-leaning
principality of Kuwait seemed to be a step toward the dismantling of Israel. Thus an opinion poll in August 1990, following
Iraq’s invasion, suggested that 80 percent of Palestinian Arabs supported Saddam.
²³
When
The New York Times
interviewed Palestinian Arabs, it came away with opinions such as: “Saddam is our leader, and I’d go fight for him to remove
the Americans.” And: “This is an Arab problem. America has no right to be here…. Saddam is… the second Saladin.” And: “If
Saddam succeeds in getting the oil weapon, he will show the world there is another power, an Arab power, and he will use the
weapon for us.” Meanwhile, the Mufti of Jerusalem, during the Gulf War, called upon Saddam to “abolish the filth of the American
Army and their collaborators from the holy lands.” In the following days, the
Times
reported that the Arabs of the West Bank were holding mass demonstrations at which they chanted, “Saddam, we are with you
until victory.”
²⁴

These dreams of recapturing lost Arab glory and the popular resentment against the artificial colonial borders serve as the
backdrop for Pan-Arab nationalism, which by the end of World War II had become the most powerful movement in the Arab world.
Pan-Arab nationalism demands the rectification of all wrongs committed against the Arab people through the immediate dismantling
of these borders and the unification of the Arab people into a single Arab superpower “from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian
Gulf.” In practice, this first means the eradication of the monarchies, which are considered to be a continuation of the humiliation
and exploitation of the Arab people at the hands of the West. One by one, military coups inspired by Pan-Arabism have replaced
the kings with leaders like Nasser, Qaddafi, and Saddam—each of whom has contributed his own efforts to pulling more monarchical
governments down. By now, only a handful of the monarchies remain (in Jordan, the Gulf states, and Morocco), and their grip
on power is continuously challenged by radicals, precisely because they are viewed as the last vestiges of an era that will
soon pass.