Why the Arabs are fixated on Israel

Why is it all so complicated in the Middle East? Isn't the war between the coalition forces and Saddam Hussein's regime? Why should the road to lasting peace lie not just in Baghdad or Washington but through Riyadh and Cairo and Damascus? And why through Tel Aviv? How has a struggle in Israel between Palestinians and Jews got tangled up with the war in Iraq?

History provides help with the answers. From the Garden of Eden on, the Middle East has been producing empires and battles and religions. History leaps there from the pages of books to become a living weapon. Phrases such as Sykes-Picot or the Balfour Declaration may not mean much outside the Middle East, but they mean a tremendous amount there. Saddam doesn't talk idly about the crusades or about Napoleon's conquest of Egypt; he is summoning up Arab fears of invaders from the West. In North America we rarely use history in the same way, to obsessively go over ancient hurts, to excuse ourselves for failures in the present, or justify what we are doing.

Geography, trade, religion (one of its great exports), and more recently oil have meant that the Middle East has always attracted outsiders from pilgrims (to the holiest places of Judaism, Christianity), crusaders, looters, traders, oil men. For much of its recent history the area has been under the control of outside powers; until the 19th century the great Ottoman Empire with its capital in Istanbul dominated it, more recently the Western empires and then during the Cold War the Soviet Union and the United States. The recent past has bred feelings of helplessness and resentment among the locals, a resentment that continues to blame not just the West (whatever that may mean) but Israel. Because Israel is seen as a piece of the West, the Jews as surrogates of Western powers who have yet again humiliated the Arabs and taken their land.

It was not always like this. Jewish communities had very deep roots throughout the Middle East and Arabs and Jews and the other peoples of the region lived in relative harmony for centuries. The roots of the great rift were laid a century ago -- a tiny but tragic part of a long history and yet another terrible example, like Bosnia or Rwanda, of how easy it is to turn neighbour against neighbour and peoples against peoples. At the end of the 19th century three very significant changes took place which have helped to shape the modern Middle East.

First, the Ottoman Empire slid rapidly towards its end. And everyone knew it; European powers, Britain and France among them, gathered around the patient, eager to snap up pieces of its territory as they shook loose. There was little question in those colonial days of leaving the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire which stretched from Turkey to Saudi Arabia and from Iraq to North Africa to look after their own affairs.

Secondly, nationalist ideas took root. They were brought to the Middle East by missionaries who opened colleges; by newspapers printed on new presses; or by young men who had travelled abroad to study. And nationalism found a willing audience. Arabs dreamed of the great glory of the past when an Arab empire had stretched even to Spain. Kurds began to dream of their own homeland. And Turks within the Ottoman Empire began to think of a greater Turkish world (but one which would keep control of its subject peoples). When young army officers seized power in 1908 they tried to reverse the Ottoman decline; that only stimulated resistance and the spread of nationalism among their non-Turkish subjects such as the Arabs.

And third -- and this was also partly the result of nationalism -- the old dream revived among Europe's Jews of a state of their own, where Jews would no longer be a beleaguered minority at the mercy of the Christians, who all too often had turned on them. The Russian pogroms and anti-Semitic outbreaks even in modern cities such as Vienna and Paris were terrifying evidence that anti-Semitism had not vanished with the Middle Ages. The World Zionist Movement dedicated to building a Jewish state decided -- not without much debate over alternatives such as Uganda -- that both religion and history made the Middle East the only choice. Palestine, then a sleepy corner of the Ottoman Empire, was where the holiest places were, where the last Jewish Kingdom had existed before the Romans destroyed it in the first century AD.

Who could have seen then that these three developments would combine to produce a tangle which still causes trouble today?

The real mischief came during the First World War when promises were often made in haste which in the longer term were simply not compatible with each other. Britain and France were the main culprits. True they were desperate; it looked as though they could easily lose the war to Germany and its allies which included the Ottoman Empire. What if the Ottoman sultan -- who was also caliph, the closest thing that Muslims had to a spiritual leader -- called for a jihad against them? That could bring uprisings among millions of Muslims, in the French empire in North Africa, in Egypt which the British had just taken, in British India. A jihad could cut off exports of the important new fuel of oil from Iran; it might sever the Suez Canal; in other words it might bring a German Europe.

And so to distract the Ottomans and weaken them, the British tried to encourage an Arab revolt. They promised a leading family -- the Hashemites, guardians of the Muslims' holiest places in Mecca -- support (in the form of weapons and gold and British officers such as T.E. Lawrence) and a reward -- an independent Arab kingdom. The Arabs thought then and later that the kingdom would include most of the Arab world. The British argued they had not meant that at all.

The British did not intend that the choice bits of the Middle East should fall outside their control. So while they were negotiating with the Arabs, they also had very quiet talks with the French to make sure that the two imperial powers sorted out the residue of the bankrupt Ottoman Empire to suit themselves. The British would get Palestine and the three provinces of the Ottoman Empire over by Iran and the French would get what became Syria and Lebanon. The Arabs got wind of Sykes-Picot, named after the two men who negotiated it, but they were fobbed off with vague reassurances. They were also reassured when, just at the end of the war, Britain and France issued a declaration which echoed the noble promise of self-determination being made by the American president Woodrow Wilson, to promise the Arabs "the complete and definite emancipation of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks and the establishment of national governments and administrations." This was greeted enthusiastically across the Middle East.

The British and French deals with each other and their promises to the Arabs were tricky enough, but there was a third strand to the tangle. In 1916, also at the low point in the war, the British government decided with support from France that something had to be done to get what it called world Jewry on its side. (In a curious reflection of a common anti-Semitic fable, the Allies also assumed that Jews exercised great power behind the scenes.) Jews could help the Allies by easing loans from U.S. banks; by turning on Germany (which had a significant Jewish population) and by keeping Russia in the war (Jews loathed the Tsarist government -- with good reason).

So it was decided to do what the Zionists had been lobbying for and that is to promise support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The promise came in the form of a letter from the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, to Lord Rothschild a leading British Jew. It carefully avoided the words "state" or "nation," but everyone knew that the Balfour declaration gave approval from what was still the most powerful nation in the world to the Zionist dream and that sooner or later that meant a Jewish state.

The Ottoman Empire was polished off by the war. Since the Allies in the end won, their ambitions for the Middle East could be realized. But their various promises now came home to roost like so many unwanted bills. At the Paris peace conference of 1919, the Arabs presented their case, the Zionists theirs and behind the scenes the British and French prime ministers haggled over the boundaries of their respective pieces of the spoils. Because the Americans wouldn't go for outright colonies (and perhaps because even in Europe the idea was starting to seem old-fashioned) the convenience of mandates was adopted. The new League of Nations dominated, after the United States failed to join, by Britain and France, would take territories where the inhabitants weren't yet ready to rule themselves and hand them out to various powers with a mandate to rule them well. The Arabs, or so it seemed from Paris, were not nearly ready for self- government. So Britain took over Palestine (which it then made into Palestine and Transjordan), and the three Ottoman provinces further east (which it made into Iraq) and the French got Syria and Lebanon. In the case of Palestine, the British did remain true to the promise they had given in the Balfour declaration; when the terms of the mandate came to be drawn up they reiterated that it was to be the Jewish homeland. Not much was left for independent Arab kingdoms except the Saudi Arabian peninsula which no one wanted because it didn't seem to have much except sand and some insignificant cities.

The Arabs -- and by now an increasing number were politically aware -- were outraged. The wartime promises were not being kept and now they were to be denied self-determination. There was trouble in Egypt, in Syria, in Iraq -- and in Palestine there were violent riots as much against the presence of the Jews as against the British. A new Palestinian Arab Congress demanded a national government which would represent only Arabs. And elsewhere in the Arab world, Arabs started to see the Palestinian Arabs as their cause too. A rift opened between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East which has never been repaired.

Could it have been different? Many people at the time certainly hoped so. Chaim Weizmann, the great Zionist leader and Faisal, the Hashemite prince who had led the revolt in the desert and was later Britain's choice for king of Iraq, met in the desert near Aqaba just after the war ended and talked of how their two peoples could work together. They were photographed smiling, both wearing Arab headdress. They talked optimistically about how Palestine might be a happy home for both their peoples. It has, as we know, turned out very differently. Right from the start the Arab sense of betrayal at the hands of the British and French has found the Jewish presence in Palestine, and later Israel, both a handy symbol and target. There is much more to the story of course and much has happened since. But we should not forget the bad start.

Can the Middle East ever settle down without solving the trouble in Israel? It seems highly unlikely. Great powers helped to make the present dreadful conflict in Israel. I suspect that only another great power, this time the United States, can do anything to sort it out. And until it is sorted out that conflict will continue to poison relations not just between Arab and Jew, but between the Middle East and the West.

Margaret MacMillan is the author of the award-winning Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, and is the provost of the University of Toronto's Trinity College.

Let's cut to the chase:

1- Israel is full of Jews.
2- The Arab's surrounding the Jewish state of Israel are Muslim, a large percentage are Islamic Fundamentalists.
3- Islamic Fundamentalists today are taught from the earliest of ages to kill the infidels, Jew and Christian alike. Their schools use the koran to justify their teachings.
4- Islamic Fundamentalists wish to see non-muslims either converted or slaughtered.
5- Islamic Fundamentalists will kill Jews, hoping one day wipe them off the face of the earth.
6- After Israel, we are next on their hit parade.

That's the jist of it, plain and simple.

The true story of why the British promised Palestine to the Jewish people:

Of course, all of these discussions and arrangements were restrained by the fact of the Ottoman Empire's continued control of Palestine. This changed in World War I. The Ottoman Turks sided with Germany. Germany and the Allied powers bogged down along the German/French borders. Millions perished. The British were in desperate need to enhance the power of their explosives in order to win the war. The person who discovered the chemical processes to do just that was the chemist, Chaim Weitzman. Near the end of the war the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, called for Weitzman to offer him an award for his assistance in the war effort. In a classic statement, Weitzman declared, "I want nothing for myself but rather a homeland for my people." As a result Lloyd George directed his Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, to issue what became known as the Balfour Declaration, proposing Palestine become a homeland for the Jewish people. A month later a British military force led by General Allenby overthrew Ottoman rule in Palestine, and Britain now became the ruling sovereign in the area.

http://www.leaderu.com/common/british.html

It's said that a picture is worth a thousand words.

This one sums up mine.

Arab Hypocrisy regarding Israeli 'occupation'

Nufsed.

-Jay

The historical grievances nutured by Arab historical understanding has some basis in fact but is largely irrelevant to the problems these nations face today. If the state of Israel was gone tomorrow the Arab nations would still be poor and backward and vulnerable to exploitation. Even with their considerable oil revenues the countries of the Arab world are among the poorest of the world.

The Arab is not exploited today because of the Balfour declaration or anything else that happenned almots 100 years ago; they exploited because they live in a culture that does foster science and technology and one that explicitly discourages the creation of a modern banking system. The Islamo-Facist ideologies imported from Europe have made matters immeasurably worse by providing a childish rationale for the reality of historical decline.

The Arab culture is one that is mired in lies: lies about the West, lies about historical achievements of the Arab world, and lies about the role a dysfucntional culture plays in the pauperization of a civilization. Until a cultural reformation of historic proportions occurs in the Arab world these nations will continue to obsess about 100-year old historic grievances while the rest of the world moves on.

The Arabs had gotten the better part of the bargain and they still want more. They have independence in 21 states spanning two continents and a world the size of the United States. The Jews ended up with a tiny country (if you include the West Bank and Gaza in it) the size of the state of New Jersey. Now who has cheated whom? Yes, the Arabs would have ended up living as a minority in someone's else country but for reasons no one understands is why Arabs don't complain about the lot of Arab minorities in Turkey and Iran. Of course if the Jews were non-Arab Muslims they probably wouldn't be on the receiving end of Arab wrath. Whatever the Arabs' troubles are, Israel has nothing to do with 99% of them as only as only four Arab states directly border the Jewish state. The Arabs would still have major problems with modernity even if Israel had never been born in the first place.

Why the Arabs are fixated on Israel

Because way back in the 7th century, centuries after Jews and Christians had settled the Arabian peninsula, bringing education, farming, and high technology to the region, including founding such cities as the one later named Medina, a certain immigrant to the region named Muhammed patched together a syncretic religion borrowing heavily on Jewish and Christian traditions, tried to pitch it to the Jews and was rebuffed. It ticked him off. The result was the destruction of a couple of Jewish states in the region and then the elimination of Jews from the entire Arabian peninsula. His religious descendents have taken his calls for the persecution and despoliation of the Jews (and Christians) to heart as an article of faith.

Another reason they have it in for Israel is that when they kicked out the Jews in the 40's-60's, their economies were badly damaged (especially that of Iraq), even though they held onto most of the expelled Jews' property and businesses. They resent Israel for turning some of the worst real estate in the Middle East into a staggeringly productive and wealthy state, a state in which common Muslim Arabs actually have the vote and greater economic well-being than in any of the surrounding Arab states. They hate Israel because in almost every fundamental way Israel has shown itself to be their superior.

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