Peace Be Upon You (44 page)

The hope that a combined Arab-Jewish polity could be created under the benign and watchful tutelage of the British took time to die completely, but the Arab revolt in 1936, this time against both the Jewish community and the British authorities, shattered whatever illusions anyone may have had that such a state was feasible. Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the mufti of Jerusalem and one of the most prominent Palestinian leaders, disdained compromise with the Jewish immigrants and turned against the British for refusing to support Palestinian dominance. After the outbreak of war between England and Germany, Hajj Amin tilted toward Germany and the Nazis in order to gain leverage against Britain. He spent the war years in Berlin, where he was warmly received by Hitler and the Nazi leadership.

At the same time, the Jewish Agency, which was the Zionist organization responsible for governing Palestine’s Jews, also increased its pressure on the British. Several splinter groups (most notably the Irgun Zvai Leumi, led in part by future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin) used terrorist tactics—roadside bombs, assassinations, and targeting civilians—against the Palestinian Arabs and later against the British in order to force a change in British immigration policy, an end to the mandate, and the creation of a Jewish state.

In 1939, the British government issued a white paper that appeared to abandon the promises of the Balfour Delcaration. They were in no mood to placate the Zionists. Instead, needing stability in Palestine, they did their best to satisfy the Palestinians. The white paper promised an end to Jewish immigration within five years and an eventual Palestinian Arab state rather than a Jewish one. It also struck down the idea of a partition that would result in a two-state solution. The Jewish leadership was horrified, but war in Europe changed the landscape once again. Violence in Palestine escalated, and the British cracked down on Jewish resistance groups. The Jewish Agency, recognizing that the war and the Holocaust had raised the stakes, started to mend fences with the British, and the Palestinian leadership became even more disillusioned. The end of the war, with Britain victorious but exhausted and financially spent, signaled the end of the mandate, and the British government looked for a way out.

The end of the war also saw the fateful beginning of American
involvement in the politics of the Middle East. U.S. oil companies had been active since the 1920s, and had assiduously courted the rulers of Saudi Arabia. But the scope ofthat involvement was minor compared to the years after World War II. As the British receded, the Americans stepped in to fill the void. In the case of Palestine, American interests were nebulous. Though Zionist leaders lobbied the Truman administration to support the establishment of a Jewish state, at the United Nations, they had to compete with Arab leaders who lobbied just as strongly against one. The postwar path from the mandate to the creation of Israel was chaotic and uncertain. The British asked the United Nations to take charge of the situation, and Palestine became one of the first issues that the UN. attempted to solve.

In November 1947, after substantial back-and-forth, the UN General Assembly accepted a partition plan that would have transformed Palestine into an unwieldy checkerboard of Jewish and Palestinian areas. The problem, and a glaring one, was that the eleven Muslim members of the United Nations (including non-Arab states such as Turkey, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) voted against the plan. Denouncing it as “absurd, impracticable, and unjust,” they vowed to prevent its implementation by any means necessary. True to their word, when Israel declared its independence on May 15, 1948, the armies of five Arab states (Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Syria) mobilized for war. The Israel Defense Forces raised thousands more men than the combined Arab armies and Palestinian militias, and proved to be far superior to their disorganized adversaries. By the fall, not only was the partition plan null and void, but 750,000 Palestinians had been turned into refugees, and Israel controlled large portions of territory that had at least nominally been promised to the Palestinians.
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Defeat was not followed by reconciliation. After long and painful months of UN-mediated negotiations, Israel signed armistice pacts with each of the Arab states individually. Not only was there no universal peace agreement, there was no peace agreement, period. Armed hostilities ceased, but Israel remained in a state of war with its neighbors. Internationally, the United Nations and its constituents were divided. The United States had, at the last minute, recognized Israel, but only after heated debate within the Truman administration. Most of official Washington was opposed to recognition, largely out of concern that the gesture would weaken the United States in its global campaign against
the Soviet Union and undermine its ability to function diplomatically and economically in the Arab world. The Europeans were somewhat more favorable, largely because of guilt over the horrors of the Holocaust. On the whole, however, the new Israeli state found itself intact but isolated and ostracized. Its ability to buy weapons or seal economic agreements was hampered, and it was surrounded by hostile states whose lack of coordination made them ineffectual but whose daily animosity made them unpleasant and dangerous neighbors.

In the Arab world, the establishment of Israel became known as the
naqbah
, the catastrophe. All of the members of the Arab League, including those of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, vowed never to recognize Israel and refused to negotiate until there was a return of the refugees and a Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital. The creation of a Jewish state was widely perceived in the Arab world as the ultimate indignity, a glaring example of the strength of the West and the feebleness of the Arabs. After more than a century of reform efforts, the Arab states—or their leadership at their very least—were becoming frustrated. The liberal, constitutional reforms of the nineteenth century and the nationalism of the twentieth century had led to a degree of independence from Europe, but by all measures, the Arab world still could not compete with the West. Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco remained colonies of France, although the latter two were on the road to independence. Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt could not make foreign policy decisions without the approval of the British Foreign Office. Saudi Arabia was independent, but ringed by British protectorates in Kuwait and the emirates on the Persian Gulf coast and dependent on European and American oil companies for income.

The sense of humiliation grew, as Israel proved impossible to dislodge. In the late 1940s and 1950s, however, the Arab-Israeli conflict was confined to the Middle East. Many, but not all, Muslim countries outside the Middle East voted in sympathy with the Arab states if and when the subject of Israel came up at the United Nations, but Israel was not yet a central concern for their people or their governments. A century of pan-Islamic movements had succeeded only in creating a general sense of shared interests. The result was empathy with the political aims of the Arabs but not virulent opposition to Israel or to Jews. Outside the Middle East, the creation of Israel was taken as one more instance of selfish Western imperialism, but hardly the worst episode. On the other hand,
for the central Arab states, and of course for the displaced Palestinians, it was seen as a tragedy that ended, once and for all, the dreams of reform and progress. For them, and soon for many parts of the Muslim world, 1948 was not a beginning but an end. From the ashes of the failed promise, a new set of ideas emerged—virulent, dark, and despairing—that ran counter to centuries of history.

The most immediate and destructive consequence was that hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced to leave their homes and emigrate to Israel. Iraq had one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, with families that could trace their lineage to the time of the Babylonians, centuries before the birth of Christ. By the 1940s, there were nearly 150,000 Iraqi Jews, many of whom were prominent as financiers, businessmen, and doctors. Iraqi Jews had also played a behind-the-scenes role in bolstering the Hashemite monarchy, especially with loans. Yet after 1948, they came under extraordinary pressure from the Iraqi government, which passed laws limiting their property rights and restricting their freedom of movement, and which ultimately coerced them to leave with only a fraction of their property. By the early 1950s, barely four thousand Jews remained in Iraq; the bulk had left for Israel, with the rest scattered to England, the United States, and other parts of the world.

It was not just Iraq. Of the approximately 1.7 million Jews in Arab lands, hundreds of thousands emigrated to Israel, and hundreds of thousands more left for Europe, Latin America, or the United States. The emigration to Israel included a massive airlift of nearly fifty thousand Yemeni Jews, and the involuntary departure of tens of thousands of Jews from Egypt, Syria, Morocco, and Iran. For nearly two thousand years, Jewish communities had been rooted in these countries, and for most of that time, they had lived peacefully under the rule of Muslim governments. They enjoyed a level of autonomy greater than what they had known under the Babylonians, the Romans, or the Christian states of Europe. Muslim tolerance of Jews was often laced with contempt, but that did not prevent coexistence and occasional cooperation. Here too, it is important to remember that at very few moments in human history have ruling majorities treated minorities with respect, and they have rarely allowed them access to power, privilege, and prosperity. Within those parameters, Jews under Muslim rule lived about as well as any minority under any majority at any point in history.

That made the forced emigration in the late 1940s all the more startling. After 1492, Jews expelled from Spain were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire. Four hundred and fifty years later, that welcome came to an end. In light of nearly a millennium and a half of coexistence, what happened after 1948, and indeed what has happened between Muslims, Christians, and Jews since then, is an exception to the historical pattern of coexistence. It is tempting to ascribe these events to a deep dislike of Jews that began in Medina, when Muhammad turned on the Jewish tribes. But in order to draw that unbroken line, centuries of other history, of Hasdai ibn Shaprut, of Maimonides, and of their countless descendants, must be forgotten and ignored.

The events of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the inability of the Arab and Muslim world to compete with the West, led to an increasing level of bitterness and insecurity. Before the nineteenth century, Muslim states were rarely threatened by the People of the Book. Christians and Jews lived as protected minorities, and Christian states were more often than not on the defensive in the face of Muslim dynasties beginning with the Umayyads and continuing with the Ottoman Empire. The Crusades were an exception, but the Crusader states were quickly contained and, in the greater scheme, quickly defeated. Only in the nineteenth century were Muslim societies put on the defensive, and it took the establishment of Israel—and Jewish military victories over the Arabs—to unleash the waves of intolerance that led to the exodus of the ancient Jewish communities of the Near East.

The Arab-Israeli conflict has focused attention on conflict between Muslims and Jews, and between Muslims and the West. But here too, the narrative that has become so familiar is incomplete. The relentless focus on conflict and its continuance in the present has left little room for other stories. The result is a numbing, never-ending litany of war, hatred, animosity, and death. The history of coexistence has been lost in that fog.

O
VER THE PAST DECADE
, and particularly after September 11, 2001, more people have become familiar with the story of how Arab and Muslim disillusionment provided the impetus for the evolution of a virulent strain of fundamentalism. Since September 11, there is a common understanding of why some fundamentalists embraced terrorism. “Common understanding” doesn’t mean wide and deep awareness, of course, but many in Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world now have a basic sense that the creation of Israel and the inability of Arabs and Palestinians to prevent that produced widespread disenchantment with modernization and Westernization. The subsequent rise of extreme forms of fundamentalism epitomized by al-Qaeda has been dissected, studied, and debated. And after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and bombings in Bali, Madrid, and London, the citizens of many nations have been forced to grapple with the rise of radical groups in Iraq, Europe, and Asia.

The picture is still unclear, but its outlines are straightforward. At some point in the middle of the twentieth century, a critical mass of despair was reached in the Muslim world. Both the reforms of the nineteenth century and the nationalism of the twentieth were judged as failures. At first, the reaction against Arab nationalism was muted. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was an early proponent of a return to a purer Islam, and though its vision of the golden age of the caliphs was more fiction than fact, the Brotherhood did tend to the poor and to the newly urbanized and gave them a sense of place and belonging in a cold impersonal world. The Brotherhood was vigorously suppressed and its
leader was killed in 1949. Egyptian fundamentalism then went underground, and the torch was passed to Sayyid Qutb, who turned his attention to the corruption of Arab regimes and the pernicious influence of the Western world. In his eyes, the bankruptcy of reform was the inevitable result of the turning away from Islam and toward the false gods of progress and modernization. In 1966 Qutb was executed, and became a sanctified martyr to generations of fundamentalists.