WHY ARE THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE MIDDLE EAST SO UNSTABLE?
Today’s most volatile Arab nations occupy land that was once part of the Ottoman Empire. The Sultan allied himself with Germany in World War I and as a consequence lost Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Mesopotamia in the Treaty of Versailles (1919). France and Britain took possession of these territories and tried to make them into European-style nation-states. Note that the idea of a nation-state was relatively new at the time. Bismarck unified Germany in 1871 but most older Germans still identified more strongly with their principality, e.g., Bavaria, than with the German nation. The national anthem Deutschlandüber Alles (“Germany over all”) was intended to encourage people to submerge their local affiliations. Italy was unified in 1870. Germany and Italy spent centuries on the path to unification, aided by literacy among their citizens, mass communications, railroads, and telegraphs.
The vast nation-states carved out in the Arab world by the British and French had very primitive communication infrastructures and a largely illiterate population. If you were friends with a European diplomat you might find that you and your family were given absolute power over an area one fifth the size of the United States (Saudi Arabia) or twice the size of Idaho (Iraq) and you could even ask that your new country be named after your family (“Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan” and “Saudi Arabia”). These regions might contain lots of mutually antagonistic tribes with linguistic, religious, and ethnic divisions. The first source of instability is that the nation-states of the Middle East in general did not encapsulate groups of people that had any real affinity for each other or common identity. Sudan, for example, contains a northern group of Muslim Arabs and a southern group of animist and Christian blacks. The primary interaction between these groups over the centuries has been the Arabs sweeping down to capture and enslave blacks. The British in 1956 decided that these two groups should be yoked together forever in one country and the result, according to BBC News, has been [that] “Unstable governments, civil war and widespread human rights abuses have afflicted the country ever since.” The CIA Factbook notes that “Sudan has been embroiled in a civil war for all but 10 years of this period (1972– 82). Since 1983, the war and war- and famine-related effects have led to more than 2 million deaths and over 4 million people displaced.” The country is one quarter the size of the United States, the people lack a common language, religion, or race, the literacy rate is 46 percent, yet nobody is willing to say “Hey, maybe it was a mistake to carve this big a chunk out of the African continent as one country.”
(Nigeria was a similar arbitrarily carved-out country with an Arab north and a Christian-indigenous south that has achieved a measure of stability. Muslim mobs killed thousands of Christians in the mid-1960s, leading the Christian Ibo [or “Igbo”] tribe to secede in the late 1960s, forming a new country called Biafra. The Muslim tribes controlled the Nigerian army and were therefore successful in overpowering the Ibo, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated one to three million Christians and the permanent exclusion of the Ibo from political power in the reunified nation. Muslim-Christian violence continues to claim hundreds of lives each year in Nigeria but the government and military have a firm grip on power and hence Nigeria is considered a successful example of decolonialization.)
A second factor contributing to instability is the fact that any tribal leader or military commander could claim just as much legitimacy to rule as the European-appointed dictator. No ruler sought or had the consent of his subjects. Iraq, originally granted by the British to the Hashemite family that also got Jordan, provides a typical example of coups and counter-coups.
A third factor contributing to instability is that agreements among peoples are impossible where there is no representative government. If the democratically elected government of the United States signs an agreement with the democratically elected government of Canada, one presumes that this agreement represents the will of both people. The agreement ought to survive even if the leaders who signed it have been replaced. This presumption does not make sense in the Arab world where every country is ruled by a dictator. The Ayatollah Khomeini did not feel bound to honor the deposed Shah’s various treaties. If you seized power in Iraq tomorrow would you feel bound to honor Saddam Hussein’s agreements with neighbors? An agreement in the Arab world is only good for as long as the two guys who signed it are still in power. (Note that this has painful implications for those Israelis who yearn for a negotiated peace; they could sign deals with every living Arab dictator but face a new war the instant that one of those signatories dies or is overthrown. For example, if they signed a peace treaty with Yasser Arafat today and Hamas took over the Palestinian leadership tomorrow, the war would be back on.)
WHY ARE THE PALESTINIANS SO VIOLENT?
If you want to know why Palestinians are violent, look in the mirror. Ask yourself if you’d be spending ten minutes thinking about the State of Israel or the disposition of Palestinians if not for their violence.
Most of the nations within the Middle East contain conquered people and conquerors. For an example right next door to the Palestinians, consider that the rulers and bulk of the population in Egypt are Arab conquerors who swept in from the southeast. The conquered indigenous people are the Copts, the descendants of the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids and temples so familiar to tourists. The Copts converted to Christianity during the Roman Empire and have suffered from religious, political, and economic oppression for 1,300 years, ever since the Arab conquest. Copts are periodically murdered by Arab-Muslim mobs and generally the Arabs are not prosecuted for the killings. You could read about this in www.copts. net but you probably won’t because the Copts are not violent.
At the Potsdam Conference the Allies granted Eastern European nations the right to expel their ethnic German citizens, i.e., people who had been living in these areas for generations but whose forebears were German and who spoke the German language. Roughly 12 million of these volksdeutsche were in fact expelled, their property confiscated, and as many as two million may have been killed in the process. The surviving volksdeutsche settled in crummy houses in Germany and Austria and integrated themselves with those societies. If there were a Volksdeutsche Liberation Army murdering Czech, Polish, and Hungarian civilians the world might pay some attention to the injustices suffered by this group.
The 870,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries in the 1940s and 1950s similarly settled quietly in the United States, Europe, and Israel. They aren’t out there blowing up Iraqi, Moroccan, and Algerian embassies or airplanes, which is why you probably never think about them.
The list of people who were displaced by the events of World War II and decolonialization is endless. The only group that anyone pays attention to is the Palestinians. If the Palestinians were to stop blowing up airplanes and pizza shops people would stop paying attention.
Arab leaders don’t care about non-violent Palestinians. As noted earlier, if you were an Arab leader there is no reason to care about your own subjects, much less members of very distant tribes. The only Arab nation that has ever offered Palestinians citizenship is Jordan; a Palestinian family that has lived in Egypt or Saudi Arabia for several generations will still be aliens with no right to permanent residence. Thus there are more than 4 million people officially classified as Palestinian refugees despite the fact that the final British census before the 1948 war found only about one million people of all religions living in Palestine. The primary agency for these stateless souls is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). If you visit their Web site, http://www.un.org/unrwa/, you’ll see that the United States and European nations provide almost all of the funding. Historically in fact the Western nations provided 100 percent of the funding for UNRWA, but in recent years Saudi Arabia has been shamed into chipping in. For 2002 the Saudis contributed $5.8 million, compared to a U.S. contribution of $120 million and Britain’s $30 million. Most Arab countries contribute
less than the cost of a new Mercedes automobile.
Violent Palestinians, by contrast, have no trouble getting support from fellow Arabs. In April 2002 the Saudi state television network ran a telethon that raised more than $100 million to aid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers (Associated Press, April 13, 2002). Iraq, which contributes nothing to UNRWA, has been donating roughly $10 million per year to the families of suicide bombers. Iran, another state that contributes nothing to UNRWA, sends weapons and money to anti-Israel groups such as Hezbollah and Yasser Arafat’s army, most notably a 50-ton shipment of rockets and plastic explosives in January 2002 (notable because it was in violation of the agreements that Arafat had signed and because it was discovered and intercepted by the Israeli Navy).
The only way that a Palestinian can get his or her hands on a share of Arab oil wealth is by becoming a suicide bomber. “[Izzidene al Masri] lived with his 12 brothers and sisters and his parents in a neat, tile-floored house” (Knight-Ridder, April 1, 2002, on the Sbarro pizza shop bomber). If you lived in poverty it might make sense to trade your life for the knowledge that Saudi Arabians would support your parents, grandparents, and eleven siblings in comfort for the rest of their lives.
This kind of poverty is likely to endure because Palestinians combine a low level of education and a high level of illiteracy (30 percent) with perhaps the highest birthrate of any world population, estimated for 2001 at 5 percent per annum by passia.org. This means that Palestinians need to generate economic growth of 5 percent per year, and preserve that growth from kleptocratic politicians, merely to maintain their standard of living. For comparison, the most rapidly growing population with which most Americans are familiar is Mexico; its population is growing at an annual rate of 1.47 percent (CIA Factbook 2002). In the 1990s, according to the World Bank, the average country enjoyed a 2.5 percent annual growth rate. Even if they succeeded in liberating all of Palestine, the Palestinians would have a difficult time growing at any rate close to 5 percent per year. They’d have one of the most densely populated countries in the world, one of the poorest in natural resources, especially water, and a complete lack of industry.
It may be a mistake to look too deep into Palestinian poverty for the roots of Palestinian violence. For most violent Palestinians we need not conjecture as to the motivation for their violence because they’ve explained it in their own words. Here is an excerpt from the Palestinian National Charter, July 1–17, 1968:
Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.
Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit. [Note that this would include the present-day country of Jordan, 70 percent of the land of the original British Palestine, split off and handed to Emir Abdullah in 1923.]
Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine.
Commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian popular liberation war.
The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time, because they were contrary to the will of the Palestinian people and to their natural right in their homeland, and inconsistent with the principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations; particularly the right to self-determination.
Source: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/mideast.htm
Hamas has a Web site where they explain their goals:
Hamas is a Jihadi (fighting for a holy purpose) movement in the broad sense of the word Jihad. It is part of the Islamic awakening movement and upholds that this awakening is the road which will lead to the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.
[Settlement with the State of Israel] should not be allowed to happen because the land of Palestine is a blessed Islamic land that has been usurped by the Zionists; and Jihad has become a duty for Muslims to restore it and expel their occupiers out of their land.
Hezbollah also has a Web site (www.hizbollah.org) where they explain their objectives:
. . . Because Hezbollah’s ideological ideals sees [sic] no legitimacy for the existence of “Israel” a matter that elevates the contradictions to the level of existence. And the conflict becomes one of legitimacy that is based on religious ideals. . . . And that is why we also find the slogan of the liberation of Jerusalem rooted deeply in the ideals of Hezbollah. Another of its ideals is the establishment of the an [sic] Islamic Government. . . .
Hezbollah also used one of its own special types of resistance against the Zionist enemy that is the suicide attacks. These attacks dealt great losses to the enemy on all thinkable levels such as militarily and mentally. The attacks also raised the moral [sic] across the whole Islamic nation. . . .
Hezbollah also sees itself committed in introducing the true picture of Islam, the Islam that is logical. Committed to introduce the civilized Islam to humanity.
Note that if we take seriously the words of the Palestinian fighters we can ignore 99 percent of the journalism and punditry to which we are exposed. The guys with the guns have explained very clearly why they are fighting and under what conditions they will lay down their arms. Their reasons for fighting and their conditions for peace have nothing to do with day-to-day events.
HOW HAVE THE ISRAELIS SURVIVED FOR SO LONG?
The Arab war on Israel is now in its fifty-third year and the fact that the Israelis have hung on for so long is primarily a testament to spectacular Arab incompetence. Relying on an opponent’s military incompetence is not a viable long-term strategy. The U.S. military exhibited spectacular incompetence at the beginning of World War II, losing battles where we outnumbered the Germans ten to one. Our enemies were not able to enter North America and prevent us from regrouping. Consequently we ultimately learned how to fight and prevailed. The Arabs are gradually moving into the modern age and learning how to use Western technology. Every year the Arabs sell a bit more oil and grow a bit wealthier. Additionally there are one billion non-Arab Muslims worldwide happy to devote a portion of their wealth and energy to the challenge of killing or otherwise removing the Jews in Israel. Every time an Arab army is defeated it can simply retreat back across the border and regroup to fight another year or another decade. At first glance, it is difficult to see how the Arabs have failed thus far and how they can continue to fail in the long run.
The last real fight between Arabs and Jews was the 1973 Ramadan War. In this war, called the “Yom Kippur War” by Westerners, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, backed up with money, troops, tanks, and airplanes from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, Morocco, Lebanon, and Jordan, and came very close to winning. All of these countries have much larger economies and militaries than they did in 1973. All, except for Egypt and Jordan, remain in a state of declared war with Israel. In light of the example of the Ramadan War, the willingness of Anwar Sadat to sign a peace treaty with Israel back in 1978 seems either insane or an enormous triumph for the diplomacy of American President Jimmy Carter.
Perhaps there is a military and rational explanation for the 1978 peace treaty, however. The Israeli nuclear weapons program was in its infancy in 1973 when the Arabs launched their big war. The best estimates are that Israel had enough material to make three bombs. By 1978, however, Israel was estimated to have built between 100 and 200 atomic bombs, enough nuclear power to wipe out every town in Egypt, whose population is densely concentrated along the banks of the Nile River. Anwar Sadat, in command of a military without nuclear weapons, could no longer realistically hope to prevail in a conflict with Israel.
The nuclear balance of power has been shifting since 1978. Pakistan has the Bomb and long-range ballistic missiles. Wealthy Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia have been buying missiles from the Chinese and anyone else who will sell them. Ironically the Palestinians may save the physical lives of the Jews. If an Arab dictator were to succeed in acquirin
g nuclear weapons, dropping the Bomb on Israel would seem to be a quick and easy path to everlasting glory. The fact that the Palestinians are living in and among the Jews and would be killed alongside them might be the only thing that gives a nuclear-capable Arab pause. In 2002 there were 1.26 million Arabs who held Israeli citizenship and who lived within the 1948 boundaries of Israel, nearly 20 percent of the population. Most of the remainder of those officially classified as Palestinian refugees live in the West Bank, in Gaza, or in nearby Jordan.
Are the Palestinians adequate protection for the State of Israel? Islamic terrorists have demonstrated a willingness to kill co-religionists in the service of larger goals, e.g., when they brought down the World Trade Center and the Muslims working inside. Secular Arab leaders going as far back as Anwar Sadat have pronounced themselves willing to lose millions of their own soldiers in exchange for a victory over Israel. Given the lack of interest in Palestinian welfare by fellow Arabs over the decades it seems reasonable to conclude that the deaths of even several million Palestinians might come to be considered acceptable as the price of liberating the land.
Israel’s nuclear arsenal is small and weak. The Israelis might be capable of wiping out neighboring capitals such as Cairo and Amman but not of surviving a first strike, deterring an Osama-bin-Laden–style foe, or of reaching a faraway enemy such as Saudi Arabia. On balance it would seem that the presence of the Palestinians amidst the Jews is currently the main deterrent against an Arab nuclear or biological attack.
Those Who Forget the Past Page 50
