A Durable Peace (21 page)

[Islam] gathered together and consolidated the scattered races and tribes of Arabia…. Renovated and inspired by this dynamic
force they made themselves masters of half the world in the short span of half a century. But for the internecine strife…
no power on earth could have prevented them from conquering the whole world.
³⁰

But it was not to be. Almost as rapidly as the expansion took place, the Arab world empire began to contract. In 732, Charles
Martel turned the Arabs back at Poitiers, 180 miles from Paris, signaling the beginning of the centuries-long Christian reclamation
of lost ground. In some parts of Europe, this
reconquista
took longer than in others; it took 250 years to regain Sicily, but a full eight hundred years in the case of Spain. The
durability and success of Western Christendom’s opposition to the dreams of grandeur marked Western civilization as
the
enemy for subsequent generations of Arabs. Furthermore, the humiliation of the West’s early victories over Islam was repeated
in 1099, when the numerically inferior but highly organized Christian Crusaders captured Jerusalem. Although the Moslem leader
Saladin finally expelled the Western interlopers from Jerusalem in 1268, his victory was short-lived because the Arabs were
soon themselves conquered by the Mamluks, then subjugated by the Turks for four hundred years. (The Islamic Turks proved no
less intent on conquering Christendom than the Islamic Arabs had been, and they succeeded in extending Turkish rule deep into
Europe. But the Moslem bid for dominance of Europe was finally lost in 1683, when the Ottoman armies were defeated outside
Vienna.)

The Arab world’s next pivotal encounter with the West came with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. By now, it was a different
West. It had undergone the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and had produced a modern, technologically superior civilization.
Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt with only a few thousand men could not have been more shocking to the Arabs. The historical enemy,
whom they had always looked down upon with
scorn, had left them far behind. Even Napoleon’s withdrawal from Egypt was the result of pressure not from the Arabs but from
Europe.

Nor did the Europeans stay away for long. By the 1830s, the French and British had set up permanent bases in Algeria and on
the coast of the Arabian Peninsula respectively, setting the stage for their assault on the heart of the Arab world. The British
conquered Egypt in 1882, and those parts of the Arab world that British, French, and Italian expansion had not already taken
before World War I fell into European hands after it, with the overthrow of Ottoman control. The entire Arab world remained
under European rule up to the middle of the twentieth century. To Arab sensibilities, this was the ultimate humiliation, the
complete turning of the tables. The Europe that they had once nearly made their own was now everywhere supreme in the Arab
world, the descendants of Charles Martel lodged in Damascus and Algiers, and the descendants of Richard the Lion Heart flying
the cross over Cairo and Baghdad.

This ultimate defeat at the hands of the arch-nemesis produced a crisis of confidence and identity that permeates the outlook
of the Arab world to this day, even after the achievement of Arab independence. Particularly prominent among Arabs is the
sense of frustration and alienation, the constant fear of discovering and rediscovering Arab inferiority, which was described
by the Moroccan nationalist Abdallah Laroui:

In February 1952 [the influential Egyptian author] Salama Musa entitled one of his articles, “Why Are They Powerful?” The
“they” has no need to be defined; “they,” “them” are the others who are always present beside us, in us. To think is, first
of all, to think of the other. This proposition… is true at every instant of our life as a collectivity…. For a long time
the “other” was called Christianity and Europe; today it bears [the] name… of the West.
³¹

Yet despite this pervasive fear, the power of the West is precisely what the Arab finds all around him. According to Amir
Shakib-Arslan:

It may be said without exaggeration about the Moslems that their condition, spiritual as well as material, is deplorably unsatisfactory.
With very few exceptions, in all countries where Moslems and non-Moslems live side by side, the Moslems lag far behind in
almost everything…. [Moslems cannot] come any-where near the nations of Europe, America, or Japan.
³²

Even more significant, the West has penetrated Arab and Islamic society, infesting it with the philosophy, science, law, and
ideology of the victors, thereby making defeat total and final. This pervasive shame and alienation was expressed by the Egyptian
intellectual Muhammad Nuwayhi:

In truth, anyone who reflects on the present state of the Islamic nation finds it in great calamity. Practically, changing
circumstances have forced it to adopt new laws taken directly from foreign codes,… to arrest its ancient [religious] legislation….
The nation is tormented and resentful, plagued by inner contradictions and fragmentation, its reality is contrary to its ideals
and its comportment goes against its creed. What a horrible state for a nation to live in.
³³

The despair over the dominance of Western ideas was given grim voice by Salah al-Din al-Bitar, the disfavored founding father
of the Ba’th party, a few months before he was assassinated in 1980: “The Arabs,” he said, “have not created an original idea
for the last two hundred years, instead devoting themselves entirely to copying others.”
³⁴

Nor has political independence allayed Arab resentment and frustration; rather, it has provided a more effective means for
expressing both—in the form of Pan-Arab nationalist and Islamic
fundamentalist governments claiming to be reviving the Arab people and returning it to the justly deserved glory of which
the West has deprived it. Anti-Westernism and Arab power were therefore at the heart of the nationalist socialism of Nasser,
whose regime hung banners in the streets telling Egyptians: “Lift your head, brother, the days of humiliation are over.”
³⁵
Indeed, the theme of settling the score with the West was the cornerstone and raison d’être of Nasser’s politics. In 1954,
he declared, “I assure you that we have been getting ready, ever since the beginning of the revolution, to fight the great
battle against colonialism and imperialism until we achieve the dignity the people feel is due to Egypt.”
³⁶

Much the same is true of the Ba’th Pan-Arab nationalism of Hafez Assad and Saddam Hussein, as expressed by Ba’th founding
father Michel Aflaq: “Europe today, as in the past, fears Islam, but it knows that the force of Islam… has revived and appears
in a new form which is Arab nationalism. For this reason Europe turns all its weapons against this new force.”
³⁷
Likewise, the strength of Muammar Qaddafi’s fundamentalist Islamic version of Nasserism is built on a foundation of anti-Western
sentiment. Qaddafi’s manifesto
The Third Way
declares:

We were prey, but now… the prey is standing on its own two feet and desires to resist its predators…. The Arabs, deformed
by colonialism, were beginning to doubt themselves. It was becoming impossible for them to believe that the foundations of
contemporary civilization were laid by Arabs and Moslems… that the Arabs or the Moslems created the science[s] of astronomy…
chemistry, accounting, algebra, medicine…. The time has come to manifest the truth of Islam as a force to move mankind, to
make progress, and to change the course of history as we changed it formerly…. [T]he truths about which we speak were present
before the formation of American society.
³⁸

Arab anti-Westernism does not stop at words. It has manifested itself in the pro-Soviet orientation of the leading Arab states
up to the collapse of the Soviet Union as a superpower, in the anti-Western agitation of the Arabs among the “nonaligned states”
and at the UN, in the terrorism launched from the Arab world at Western targets, and in the particular glee that the Arab
rulers showed at the height of the oil embargo, imposed in 1973, when they throttled the Western economies. In many Arab eyes,
this last was a vindication that history was finally coming full circle, and that a renascent Arab nation was delivering the
West its due, as American congressmen rode bicycles to work and chief executives in New York, London, and Paris waited in
line for gasoline.

The friendliness of a few Arab rulers toward the United States deludes some Westerners into believing that this reflects the
real sentiments of the Arab masses. But such rulers frequently represent only a thin crust lying over a volatile Arab and
Islamic society. It is instructive to recall that “moderate” and “pro-Western” states like Iraq and Libya were transformed
overnight into centers of anti-Western fanaticism after the toppling of King Feisal and King Idris. (The same phenomenon was
in evidence in non-Arab but Moslem Iran, with the toppling of the Shah.) Any Western reliance on a friendly Arab regime is
basically a reliance on individuals, not on peoples. These individuals may disappear in a flash, often swiftly replaced by
elements pandering to the deep-rooted attitudes of the population.

Only against the background of this intense animus toward the West can the Arab rejection of Israel be truly grasped. In the
theology of Arab resentment, Israel, a state founded by European Jews and built on the model of the liberal states of the
West, is understood as a tool or weapon by which the Western governments can inflict further defeats and humiliations upon
the Arab nation. As early as the 1930s, Emil Ghouri, architect of the slaughter of Arab “collaborators” in Palestine, declared
that the 1929 massacre of the Jewish residents of Hebron was an assault on “Western conquest, the [British] Mandate, and the
Zionists”—in that order.
³⁹
This worldview was directly incorporated into Nasserist Pan-Arab nationalism, as expressed in Nasser’s Egyptian National
Charter:

Imperialist intrigue went to the extent of seizing a part of the Arab territory of Palestine, in the heart of the Arab Motherland,
and usurping it without any justification of right or law, the aim being to establish a military fascist regime, which cannot
live except by military threats. The real anger is the tool of imperialism.
⁴⁰

It was this imagery of Western usurpation that Nasser invoked on May 29, 1967, to whip the Arabs into a fury one week before
the Six Day War:

We are confronting Israel and the West as well—the West, which created Israel and despised us Arabs and which ignored us before
and since 1948. They had no regard whatsoever for our feelings, our hopes in life, or our rights.… If the Western powers disavow
our rights and ridicule and despise us, we Arabs must teach them to respect us and take us seriously.
⁴¹

This spirit was the animating force of the Ba’th nationalist rejection of Israel on the eve of the Six Day War, when the Syrian
chief of staff announced his reason for warring against Israel:

I believe that Israel is not a state, but serves as a military base for the Imperialist camp.… He who liberates Palestine
will be the one to lead the Arab nation forward to comprehensive unity… [and] can throw all the reactionary regimes into the
sea.
⁴²

Similar beliefs were expressed by Saddam Hussein when he said: “Imperialism uses Zionism as a strategic arm against Arab unity,
progress and development. This is a well-known fact.”
⁴³

Nasser, the archetypal Pan-Arabist dictator, was instrumental in establishing the PLO in Cairo in 1964, and he suffused it
from the start with his fervent Pan-Arab approach. His legacy can be seen in the anti-Western venom of the various PLO factions,
each of which adhered to its own Pan-Arab ideological basis for the rejection
of Israel as an outgrowth of the imperialist West. Thus, PLO executive member Mubari Jamal Tsurani said in 1986: “Nothing
that is called peace is likely to come about. What is possible is a state of cease-fire. As long as imperialism exists, and
as long as Israel is there, peace will not be possible.”
⁴⁴

In our age, when history is often either unknown or disregarded, it is easy for Arabs to plant the view in the West that if
only Israel had not come into being, the Arab relationship with the West would be harmonious. But in fact, the Arab world’s
antagonism for the West raged for a thousand years before Israel was added to its list of enemies.
The Arabs do not hate the West because of Israel; they hate Israel because of the West
.

From day one, the Arab world saw Zionism as an expression and representation of Western civilization, an alien implantation
that split the Arab world down the middle. Indeed, a common Arab refrain has it that the Zionists are nothing more than neo-Crusaders;
it is only a question of time before the Arabs succeed in uniting themselves under a latter-day Saladin who will expel this
modern “Crusader state” into the sea. That, in this larger anti-Western context, the Arab world perceives Israel as a mere
tool of the West to be used against the Arabs can be seen in the constant references made by Saddam, Assad, and Arafat to
Saladin. As Arafat is fond of saying, “The PLO offers not the peace of the weak, but the peace of Saladin.”
⁴⁵
What is not stated but what Arab audiences understand well in its historical context is that Saladin’s peace treaty with
the Crusaders was merely a tactical ruse that was followed by Moslem attacks, which wiped out the Christian presence in the
Holy Land.

Perhaps this is why Syria’s Hafez Assad displays in his office a large painting of the triumphant Saladin expelling the last
Crusader.
⁴⁶
The powerful appeal of the idea of reenacting Saladin’s victories in modern times has stimulated Arab leaders to make not
only repeated attacks on Israel but repeated subversions aimed at toppling pro-Western Arab rulers and continual attempts
to drive the Western presence out of the Middle East—as Iraq tried to do
in Kuwait in 1991, and as Syria has by now more or less succeeded in doing in Lebanon. The fact that, in the wake of the Soviet
collapse, regimes such as Syria’s are forced to make a tactical peace with the West should not be allowed to obscure the contempt
and antagonism for the West that lurks just beneath the surface, and that could resurface instantly at any sign of Western
weakness or with the emergence of powerful new forces on the world scene.