by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel
DEGRADED EDEN: THE LEVANT
A similar environmental story was told for the Levant, at the opposite end of the Mediterranean basin. Although official European imperial rule did not begin until the twentieth century, the French and British were involved in the Levant in various capacities during the nineteenth century, as were missionaries from these and other countries including Americans.24 The environmental narrative of deforestation and desertification is as strong in several ways in the Levant as it is in the Maghreb. Similarly, it is often the nomads, here called Bedouin, who were blamed for presumed environmental destruction by commentators during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This story is somewhat more complicated, however, due to the number of countries with vested interests active in the region since the nineteenth century.
From early in the nineteenth century, a common Western perception of the Levant was that it was largely a fertile region, although it had some areas of desert where agriculture was difficult.25 A Western traveler wrote in 1859, for example, that “the whole country [Palestine] is thickly studded with villages, the plains clothed with grass or grain, and the rounded hills with orchards of olive, fig, pomegranate, and other trees.”26 Such early writings did not contain many descriptions of the destruction of forests or the degradation of land by overgrazing.
By the end of the century, though, this narrative of fertility changed to one of lapsed fertility and environmental overuse (timber harvesting), and for some, to one of environmental ruin. There were those concerned with perceived deforestation, such as the French diplomat who wrote that “the magnificent woods in the Aleppo district... are being destroyed by charcoal burners and oak-bark strippers.... In Syria and Palestine forests no longer exist.”27Others lamented the loss of vineyards saying that “the disappearance of vineyards and not of forests is the difference with which we have to reckon in the landscape of Palestine.”28
Some with an interest in settling the region perceived the environment as full of potential but sadly mismanaged. If only the “curse of the country,... bad government and oppression” could be lifted, “Palestine would become once more a land of corn, vines, and olives, rivaling in fertility and in wealth its ancient condition, as deduced from careful study of such notices as remain to us in the Bible and in the later Jewish writings,” wrote a member of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) in the 1870s.29 Another member of the PEF, however, Professor Edward Palmer, blamed the Arab nomad “invaders” and their descendants, the contemporary Bedouin, for ruining the environment and creating the desert.30 His is one of the earliest iterations of what would become one of the dominant declensionist environmental narratives in the twentieth century. Palmer was murdered in 1882 by Bedouins in the Sinai.31
During this period, Western interest in Palestine grew steadily and included an increasing number of people who wanted to settle in Palestine. Not surprisingly, the Ottoman administration received a lot of blame for environmentally destructive policies from the late nineteenth century to well into the British Mandate period (1920–48). One of many policies blamed for the destruction was the so-called Ottoman tree tax. Many tales recount how villagers cut down fruit trees, and even entire orchards, in order to avoid this tax. Estelle Blyth, the daughter of the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem and secretary for the Palestine Exploration Fund, wrote that “to escape the tree tax, the men from a village in the Hebron district one winter cut down some five hundred trees, in all stages of growth and promise, and left them lying where they fell.”32 It appears that this tax was limited to agricultural (fruit and nut) trees and not forest trees, because the tax seems to have been levied on the potential products harvested from the trees. It likely had little effect, therefore, on the natural vegetation of the region. Such stories, moreover, may have been exaggerated due to many writers’ bias against the Ottoman administration. In fact, the Ottomans had invited the French to help them develop a forest law in the 1860s, which resulted in the 1870 Réglements des Forêts.33 This law later informed the British forest law in Palestine during the Mandate period.
By the early twentieth century, Jewish settlers in Palestine took advantage of the narrative of deforestation to justify tree planting that had as its primary aim the appropriation of rural land. The Jewish National Fund, for example, planted forest trees on land bought from local peoples “in order to hold the land purchased,” although the publicized purpose was “the provision of jobs and the improvement of Palestine’s landscape and environment.”34 Tree planting was a particularly good way to claim land and thus to prevent Arab pastoralists from having access to traditional grazing land under the machinations of Ottoman law.35 Competition for land between Zionist settlers and Palestinians became more frequent and more intense after the 1880s and motivated questionable actions by both groups. Afforestation by the settlers continued into the Mandate period, although not over significantly large areas. Hence, the declensionist narrative was used to help appropriate land for the new immigrants.
A forest service was established under the British in 1920, and its mission was, in part, to try to repair the “centuries of neglect” under the Ottomans that had resulted in the “denudation of Palestine’s forests.”36 The narrative of deforestation and desertification in Palestine and the Transjordan was made official during the British Mandate period in several ways. The forest department reported in 1936, for example, that half the habitable area had become “an artificial desert due to overgrazing.”37 The Peel Report of 1937 stated that although Palestine now had no “real” forests, it should be (and was in the past) at least 15 percent forested. The forest law in Mandate Palestine, known as the Woods and Forest Ordinance (1920), was based on the forest law of Cyprus developed under the British and the 1870 forestry law developed for the Ottomans by the French.38 The primary goal of the Woods and Forest ordinance was to “protect the remaining areas of woodland and scrub from unauthorized cultivation, cutting or burning and the depredations of grazing animals.”39 The Forestry Ordinance of 1926 went further and defined forest resources as state forests and state reserves, thereby officially protecting about 72,000 hectares of forest, scrubland, and potential forest.40
Livestock grazing, particularly that conducted by Arab villagers and Bedouin, came under special attack for causing (and having caused for centuries) deforestation and desertification during the Mandate period. The forest service strongly recommended that grazing be curtailed and restricted and that an ambitious program of reforestation be implemented. Overgrazing was blamed, incorrectly for the most part, for preventing forest and other plant growth and causing erosion and thus for water loss and dune mobilization. The Arab pastoralists were deemed such a threat by the forest department that in 1936 it strongly recommended that fully half of the pasture lands in Palestine should be permanently protected from grazing and be reforested.41Up to that point, only about 700,000 dunums of Palestinian land (2.5 percent) actually had been designated as forest reserves. After the Arab Rebellion of 1936–39, however, the activities of the forest department were curtailed and those in the high levels of administration referred to the department as a “dummy department.”42 The administration feared that restricting the Arabs’ rights to grazing with aggressive forestry policies might provoke more unrest.
The demonization of grazing, and thus of the humans who owned the livestock, mostly Arab pastoralists, also played a part in the justification of two significant laws in the 1940s: the Bedouin Control Ordinance of 1942 and the Shepherds Ordinance of 1946.43 Both of these laws aimed to control and curtail the movement of livestock and people, in part in the name of environmental protection. The actual effect that these two laws had in the 1940s, though, was likely small, coming as they did late in the Mandate period. The importance of these laws lies, rather, in the institutionalization of the declensionist environmental narrative that blamed the Arab pastoralists for the majority of the presumed deforestation and desertification down through the centuries. They also illustrate the utilization of the
declensionist narrative for the social control of “undesirable” populations. By 1947, the narrative was found even in influential botanical treatises of the region, such as Paul Mouterde’s The Arborescent Vegetation of the Levant. This botanist stated that the mountains were “covered nearly entirely [in trees] two thousand years before our era, in the Bronze age. But, since antiquity, to establish agriculture and make livestock pastures, humans have attacked the dense cover and reduced it to these meager relicts.”44
With the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the declensionist narrative was enshrined, and it has been used for decades to justify forestry, agricultural, and social policies (Figure 8.6). Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion proclaimed in an opening session of the Knesset in 1951 that “we are a state at the beginning of repairing the corruption of generations, corruption which was done to the nation and corruption which was done to the land.... [W]e must plant hundreds of thousands of trees ... [comprising] a quarter of the area of the state. We must wrap all the mountains ... and their slopes in trees ... [and] the dry lands of the Negev.”45 As Shaul Cohen has pointed out, the new politics of planting in Israel had several purposes including security for the military, memorials for special persons, and, perhaps most important, “as a method for the prevention of grazing or cultivation on the land that the government did not want to fall into or return to the hands of the Arab[s].”46
Likely as a result of this rhetoric, the old narrative of the ruin of the Levantine environment by the Arab (nomad) conquests was revived and found its way into the writings of many in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. It was assumed that environmental destruction during the Islamic conquests had been exacerbated by the overgrazing of Arab nomads’ livestock over the intervening centuries, especially in the southern parts of Israel. American Walter Lowder-milk helped to highlight and spread this narrative in his many writings on soil erosion in the Middle East. His 1944 Palestine, Land of Promise is replete with accusations of destruction wrought by the Arab invaders in the seventh and thirteenth centuries and by pastoral nomads in the region since. He blamed them for deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, and desertification. He visited Palestine to make his three-month study at the end of the “Arab Revolt” in 1939, and he displays a very negative and biased opinion of Arabs, and especially nomads, throughout this book.47
Figure 8.6. The Balfour Forest above the Jezreel Valley, 1947. The Balfour Forest was planted on rocky land near Kibbutz Ginegar purchased by the Jewish National Fund in the 1920s to commemorate Lord Balfour, author of the Balfour Declaration. Photograph by Zoltan Kluger. Reproduced with the kind permission of the National Photo Collection, the Government Press Office, Israel.
This declensionist narrative was incorporated, in large part, into Israeli histories of the Levant and may still be found today. Professor Adolf Reifen-berg of the Hebrew University recounted this narrative, blaming the Arab invasions and subsequent Arab nomads for the deforestation and desertification of large parts of Israel and Transjordan in his 1955 The Struggle Between the Desert and the Sown, as have more contemporary Israeli scholars.48 Recent research in the Negev, however, demonstrates that this claim is not true. The ruined and abandoned settlements that for so long have been blamed on the destructiveness of the Arab conquests, overgrazing, and subsequent desertification were in fact abandoned because of profound changes in regional politics and economics. The erosion present in the region “cannot be linked to the over-grazing that is often tied to ... pastoral incursions.... In short, the Islamic conquests ... did not bring any desertification.”49 The author of this work, Steve Rosen, professor at Ben-Gurion University, warns in the conclusion of his article that claims of overgrazing have been used to legitimize the “expropriation of Bedouin grazing lands.... The notion of Islamic invasions ... in fact, masks political agendas.”50
CONCLUSION
Similar long-standing arguments claiming desertification due to centuries of overgrazing by Arab nomads in Libya and southern Jordan likewise recently have been shown to be false.51 Other narratives of ruined environments exist in other parts of the Middle East, the analysis of which is not possible in the space of this chapter. The story of the over-irrigation and ruin of Iraqi agricultural land, for example, needs closer scrutiny due to recent research on sea level and coastline changes associated with the end of the last ice age. Egypt has at least two primary declensionist environmental narratives worthy of investigation: one of deforestation, desiccation, and desertification, and the other of squandered irrigation expertise and thus lost agricultural lands. Such narratives have been used to implement large water and other development projects as well as to relocate sizable marginalized populations.
What is clear, even from this brief survey of parts of the Middle East, is that the dominant environmental narrative of the region is one of a ruined, desertified environment. The examination presented here of the basis for such a conclusion, however, suggests that much of this declensionist narrative is unfounded, and moreover, it is largely a social construction closely associated with imperialism. By interrogating such stories, one of my aims is to redeem the “desert wastes” of the Middle East. Only when the Middle East environment is seen without the mutually reinforcing lenses of imperialism and Orientalism can appropriate, sustainable, and socially just development in these “naturally” arid regions be possible. The continued use of the declensionist narrative has resulted in too many environment and development projects such as the “green dam” in Algeria and the accidental creation of “green deserts” in some nature reserves in Israel that have done more social and environmental harm than good.52
For the most part, scholars have yet to explore these complex topics and their contemporary implications for the Middle East and North Africa, despite a thriving and growing literature in critical environmental history for other regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.53 Much of this work demonstrates the relevance, even urgency, of understanding environmental narratives that often reach back to the colonial period for contemporary efforts toward economic development and environmental conservation that is socially just. This lacuna has been noted by recent scholarship in environmental history, although few have begun to analyze the environmental history of the Middle East from a critical perspective.54 Even fewer researchers have examined the important relationship between environmental narratives and European imperialism (and proto-imperialism) that is so important to understanding the Middle East and North Africa, which this chapter has begun to explore.
Because so much “scientific” research on the Middle East has been conducted by Europeans (and Americans) steeped in the declensionist narrative, this inaccurate narrative has been incorporated into the educational and research systems of the postcolonial Middle East just as it has in much of the global north. Many people in the region, from researchers to government administrators to average citizens, subscribe to it. If the majority of people in the Middle East hold a common identity as inhabitants of a degraded environment, what, then, are the political, economic, and social ramifications of this? One answer is the type of environmental development exemplified by the United Arab Emirates in recent years, which overexploits groundwater reserves in a highly unsustainable manner to “roll back the desert” with a variety of afforestation and other “greening” projects.55 A second result is the sort of agricultural/social development currently being implemented in Egypt’s Western Desert with the building of the Toshka canal. This “New Valley Project” aims to restore the “ancient fertility” of the region and to produce modern organic produce in the pristine desert environment for the “new, clean” model Egyptian citizen.56 A third outcome is the kind of economic development typified by the hugely expensive indoor ski resort in Dubai that has prompted local people to comment that “now it is Europe here too.”57 Exploration of such questions for the Middle East holds promise for meaningful research that may well help to bring about more appropriate, sustainable, and less socially exploitative development in th
ese splendid desert spaces in the future.
CHALLENGING EXCEPTIONALISM: THE CONTEMPORARY MIDDLE EAST IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
Part III
9
AMERICAN GLOBAL ECONOMIC POLICY AND THE CIVIC ORDER IN THE MIDDLE EAST
James L. Gelvin
FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of twentieth-century political economy, the notion of a Middle East provides an analytical vantage point that is useful but incomplete. It is useful because it highlights the characteristics shared by a number of contiguous states in Southwest Asia and North Africa, although, admittedly, those characteristics are not necessarily exclusive to the region, and the borders demarcating the region are not necessarily consistent (e.g., see Chapter 3). It is incomplete because the trajectory of the political economy of any set of contiguous states is constrained by the broader global and extra-regional political economic systems in which it is situated. Political economic histories must, therefore, take account of those systems, as well as their effects on constituent subsystems. The purpose of this chapter is to reconstruct the political economic history of the Middle East in the twentieth century, keeping these caveats in mind.
A NEW CIVIC ORDER FOR THE MIDDLE EAST
In the aftermath of the economic crisis spawned by the Great Depression and industrial growth spawned by World War II, increasing numbers of Middle Easterners moved to cities, sold their labor, and became integrated into the political process. Although postwar governments in the region were hardly democratic, they did have to respond to the aspirations and needs of newly urbanized and politicized populations to survive. Some—not all—Middle Eastern states responded by adopting an increasingly popular-nationalist rhetoric that appealed to those populations. More important, all states throughout the region responded to popular demands and expectations by taking on many of the trappings of post-World War II welfare states in Europe and North America. Over time, they introduced new economic planning boards, labor laws, and educational and welfare benefits for their citizens. In return, they expected compliance and support. Overall, then, there was a transformation of what a number of historians have called the “civic order”—the “norms and institutions that govern relations among citizens and between citizens and the state.”1 The concept of civic order enables us to unite the so-called populist/authoritarian states and others within a common framework.
