In your otherwise illuminating book The Crisis of Islam, you present some rather less illuminating argumentation in the two middle chapters (“Discovering America” and “Satan and the Soviets”) to support the following proposition: “The Palestine problem has certainly caused great and growing anger, from time to time renewed and aggravated by policies and actions of Israeli governments or parties. But can it really be, as some contend, the prime cause of [Islamic] anti-Western sentiment?” (81)
Your answer of course is “no.” Your argument begins to fall apart on pp. 61-62. After reviewing the undisputed fact that Arab leaders supported the Nazis during WWII and the Soviets during the Cold War, you say:
But though these foreign sponsors and imported philosophies provided material help and intellectual expression for anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism, they did not cause it, and certainly they do not explain the widespread anti-Westernism that made so many, in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Islamic world, receptive to such ideas. It must surely be that what won support for such totally diverse doctrines was not Nazi race theory, which can have had little appeal for Arabs, or Soviet atheist Communism, which has no appeal for Muslims, but rather their basic anti-Westernism. Nazism and Communism were the main forces opposed to the West, both as a way of life and as a power in the world, and as such they could count on the sympathy or even collaboration of those who saw in the West their principal enemy.
I cannot disagree with a single word. The Islamic world embraced the Nazi and Soviet regimes because these regimes were their enemy’s enemy. But then, oddly, you continue:
But why? If we turn from the general to the specific, there is no lack of individual policies and actions, pursued and taken by individual Western governments, that have aroused the passionate anger of Middle Eastern and other Islamic peoples, expressed in their various struggles—to win independence from foreign rule or domination; to free resources, notably oil, from foreign exploitation; to oust rulers and regimes seen as agents or imitators of the West. Yet all too often, when these policies are abandoned and the problems resolved, there is at best only a local and temporary alleviation. The British left Egypt, the French left Algeria, both left their other Arab possessions, the monarchies were overthrown in Iraq and Egypt, the westernising shah left Iran, the Western oil companies relinquished control of the oil wells that they had discovered and developed, and contented themselves with the best arrangements they could make with the governments of these countries—yet the generalized resentment of the fundamentalists and other extremists against the West remains and grows and is not appeased.
I wish that, following this paragraph, you had considered the possibility that Israel is the reason why the resentment of the fundamentalists remains and grows, but you don’t. Apparently baffled, you drop the “but why” question and move on to a discussion of the role of the west in the overthrow of the Shah.
It is odd that you fail to consider this possibility because it is such an obvious one. Yes, the western powers removed or were forced to remove all of the grievances you mention. Inexplicably, you don’t mention the one grievance that has not been removed: the partition of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel.
In the “Satan and Soviets” chapter, you say (79):
Israel is one among many points—Nigeria, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, etcetera—where the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds meet. Each of these is the central issue for those involved in it, and an annoying digression for the others. Westerners by contrast tend to give the greatest importance to those grievances which they hope can be satisfied at someone else’s expense. The Israel-Palestine conflict has certainly attracted far more attention than the others, for several reasons.
Wait a minute. Are you arguing that only we westerners make such a big deal out of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is in fact merely an annoying digression to everyone except us and “those involved in it”? But who is “involved in it”? At a minimum we would have to say that the list of states involved in this conflict includes Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq since they have gone to war against Israel. Given that these states include most of the Arab population of the Middle East (only the sparsely populated Gulf sheikdoms are excluded), it seems a bit odd that you then decide you need to look for other reasons why the Israeli-Palestine conflict has attracted more attention than other conflicts between Islamic and non-Islamic peoples. But off you go:
First, since Israel is a democracy and an open society, it is much easier to report—and misreport—what is going on there. Second, Jews are involved, and this can usually ensure a significant audience among those who for one reason or another are for or against them. A good example of this difference is the Iraq-Iran war, which was waged for eight years from 1980 to 1988. It caused vastly more death and destruction than all the Arab-Israel wars put together, but received far less attention. For one thing, neither Iraq nor Iran is a democracy, and reporting was therefore more difficult and more hazardous. For another Jews were not involved, neither as victims nor as perpetrators, and reporting was therefore less interesting.
A third and ultimately the most important reason for the primacy of the Palestine issue is that it is, so to speak, the licensed grievance—the only one that can be freely and safely expressed in those Muslim countries where the media are either wholly owned or strictly overseen by the government. Indeed, Israel serves as a useful stand-in for complaints about the economic privation and political repression under which most Muslim peoples live, and as a way of deflecting the resulting anger.
In deciphering what is going on here, we need to remind ourselves that you began the paragraph by pointing to a variety of “points where the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds touch each other” and then proceed to explain to us “why the Israeli-Palestine conflict has attracted far more attention than others.” Ignoring the fact that this conflict touches almost every Arab in the Middle East, you give three other reasons why the Arabs pay so much attention to Israel-Palestine: a) there is a free press in Israel; b) Jews are involved; c) Arabs are transferring illicit anger at their own rulers onto a more legitimate target: Israel.
I would not argue that your three reasons are irrelevant in explaining why Arabs are so angry with Israel. However, it is a bit odd for you to argue that these three reasons are more important than the far more obvious one which you studiously avoid: the Arabs have re-established Muslim sovereignty over every square inch of land that was lost to the western powers the day the Ottoman Empire collapsed except those square inches that the western powers deeded over to Israel in 1947. Freudians may tell the Arabs they’re not really angry about this, that they’re really angry at their father-rulers but can’t express it. It sounds rubbish to me, but then maybe I’m suppressing something, too.
Dan Badger
London
July 23, 2005
