A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  The competition between Islamic fundamentalism and Pan-Arab nationalism, as well as the influence of each movement on the other, has had tragic consequences not only for Arabs and Moslems. The refusal to accept anything less than a unitary Arab state and a unified Islamic domain has meant the rejection of all claims for political and religious independence by non-Arabs and non-Moslems. The various splinters in the Arab world may not be able to decide who will rule the unified realm, but they are nonetheless absolutely united in their uncompromising conviction that it will be an Arab and Moslem realm. This belief derives in no small measure from the Islamic division of the world into Islamic and infidel domains (the “Realm of Islam” versus the “realm of War”) locked in eternal struggle. 27 Within the lands of the Islamic domain, the Koran enjoins the nonnegotiable inferiority of all non-Moslems. The Arabs have seen themselves as the stewards and rulers of all Islam ever since the earliest Islamic conquests, and there is little indication that they are ready to give this up now. But as we have seen, the vast region from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf that the Arabs designate as exclusively theirs contains people of many other ethnic groups and faiths who do not necessarily or readily accept the supremacy of Moslem Arabs. These groups, numbering in the tens of millions, form an important part of what is commonly referred to as “the Arab world.” No matter—they will all be made to accept Moslem Arab hegemony in a unified Arab state.

  It is in these terms that we may grasp the special opposition of the Arab world to Israel. For centuries, the Jews suffered degradation, persecution, and periodic massacre at the hands of the Arabs, 28 as did other minority peoples. But of all of the minority peoples strewn across the vast reaches of the Arab realm, the Jewish people is the only one to have successfully defied subjugation and secured its independence. Worse, the Jews were able to establish an “alien” sovereignty smack in the center of the realm, splitting the Arab world in two and dividing its eastern from its western part. Still worse, the people who succeeded in this ultimate act of defiance are both non-Moslem and non-Arab. Thus, the specific Arab enmity currently directed toward Israel is rooted in older, more generic antagonisms that would have existed even if Israel had never come into being.

  The durability of the twin fanaticisms of Pan-Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism—their militarism, xenophobia, irredentism, and irreducible hatred of the existing order—is the true core of conflict in the Middle East, and of much of the violence that emanates from that region to the rest of the world. While many Arabs and Moslems in the Middle East have no desire to follow the hellish courses that these ideologies offer, fear of their disciples effectively prevents the emergence of a leadership willing to speak out against them. The absence of any democratic tradition in the Arab world stifles any such voices, just as it prevents the peaceful adjudication of the ongoing rivalries and claims in accordance with rights legally respected under the rule of law. Yet the absence of such Western political ideas in the Arab world is no accident. The rejection of democracy is but a part of the Arab world’s abiding resentment of the West and is so deeply ingrained that it must be considered the third core component of Middle Eastern strife. The least understood of the forces at work beneath Arab political turbulence, this burning resentment of the West may perhaps be the most important for understanding the international aspects of the conflicts in the Middle East. Again, to make any sense of the Arab obsession with the West, one must look at history.

  Just as surely as individuals, nations undergo traumatic experiences in parts of their history that continue to shape their behavior and attitudes. All Americans, for example, bear the formative imprint of their Civil War, the Depression, and Vietnam, even if they themselves were not around to witness these events personally. For the Jewish people, an older nation, the two most indelible traumas in the last two millennia were the razing of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E., which marked the collapse of Jewish sovereignty until our own time, and the Holocaust in this century, which destroyed European Jewry. Both experiences overshadow countless other disasters, however awful, that took place during the intervening centuries. The result of these two historical traumas is the present tenacity with which Jews strive to recreate and sustain sovereign Jewish power, especially the power to defend themselves. The destruction of the Temple at the hands of the Romans while Jewish factions in besieged Jerusalem were literally knifing each other to death also gave rise to the emphasis now placed on Jewish unity and the taboo on political killings among Jews, which has resulted in the virtual absence of civil war among Jews for two thousand years. With remarkably few exceptions, Jews do not kill Jews over politics. 29 This is why the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin was so shocking to Israel and the entire Jewish people.

  I relate these examples because many people in the West, and especially in the relatively young United States, tend to underestimate the influence of pivotal historical experiences on the Arabs (or on anyone else). Yet it is precisely such national traumas that have molded the Arab attitude toward the West. The Arabs burst onto the world scene in the seventh century, after Mohammed had forged a new religion, Islam. In a remarkably short time they conquered the entire Middle East and North Africa and plunged deep into Europe. To Arab eyes, these lightning victories were clear evidence of provident design and signified the supremacy of Arabdom and Islam over Christianity and the West. They were regarded as the prelude to the world dominion promised by Mohammed. The glory that was to belong to Arab Islam is described by Amir Shakib-Arslan in 1944 in Our Decline and Its Causes.

  [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.