Reflections on the Middle East crisis 9783111716787, 9783111164410

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REFLECTIONS ON THE MIDDLE EAST CRISIS

New Babylon

Studies in the behavioral sciences 7

MOUTON • PARIS

THE H A G U E

Reflections on the Middle East Crisis edited by

H E R B E R T MASON

MOUTON • PARIS

THE HAGUE

NOTE A portion of this book, including essays by Merlin L. Swartz, John H. Marks, Samir Anabtawi, Uri Avnery and Irene Gendzier, together with the editor's introduction, appeared in The Muslim World, Hartford Seminary Foundation, Hartford, Connecticut, January 1970. A portion of the essay by Jacques Berque appeared also in his longer essay entitled "Quelques Problèmes de la Décolonisation", L'Homme et la Société, no. 5, Paris, 1967. By permission of the editor, the essay bij Noam Chomsky, written for this book, appeared first in the November 1969 issue of Liberation Magazine, New York. No one contributing an essay to this book wishes any criticism he may make to be construed or used as a position against his home, country or people or used to support anyone else's partisan position.

© Mouton & Co 1970 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Herbert Mason

7

P A R T I : The Middle East Crisis in Perspective

Historical

Preface to Part I 1. Merlin Swartz: The Position of Jews in Arab Lands Following the Rise of Islam 2. John H. Marks: The Problem of Palestine 3. Noam Chomsky: Nationalism and Conflict in Palestine P A R T I I : Personal

Perspectives

on the

15 17 39 65

Crisis

Preface to Part II 4. Samir N. Anabtawi: The Palestinians as a Political Entity 5. Abdullah Laroui: Reflections on Three Concepts of Justice Regarding Palestine 6. Edward W. Said: The Palestinian Experience 7. Uri Avnery: The Third Year of the Six-Days' War 8. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel: A Plea for Rationality in Israel-Arab Relations 9. Irene Gendzier: Letter to a Friend: An Essay on a Hope for Peace

101 103 117 127 148 166 173

6 P A R T I I I : General Reflections

Table of Contents

on the

Crisis

Preface to Part III 10. Arnold Toynbee: Reflections on the Crisis 11. Jacques Berque: Crisis and Role of Decolonization 12. Charlotte M. Teuber-Weckersdorff: Relevance of the "Third World" to the Palestinians 13. Michael Gilsenan: Through a Glass Darkly: Images of the Middle Eastern Confliot 14. Herbert Mason: Alternatives to Fear

191 193 205 214 219 233

Introduction

Part of the challenge to anyone seriously concerned about any given area of the world is first to get at the root of his own people's fear regarding it. The Middle East affords us one advantage in this challenge which apparently Vietnam does not. A considerable number of people in the United States, for example, become passionate when they think of the Middle East and even more passionate when they prepare to confront someone about its crisis. Perhaps the tragedy of Vietnam has come about because the concerned have lacked real passion in their concern, so that Vietnam has been allowed to become a touchstone on many levels for experimental knowledge or "insight" into one's own problems, rarely a place where actual people who have taken care of themselves in an enduring and, in some ways, beautiful way, live and should be felt by others to deserve to continue to live. Over the Middle East, on the contrary, long time friendships break once and for all; we snarl like dogs at one another; even our experts' "objectivity" cannot disguise a position of aesthetic, religious, racial, political or economic bias; and every cool effort to deny the justice, logicality or practicality of "the other's" position tends to expose the limitation of one's own. Hundreds of teach-ins and marches been held on Vietnam, almost none on the Middle East. Non-violent radicals on Vietnam have been known to turn violent reactionaries on the Middle East. Deep native undercurrents, as well as nervous foreign embassies, prevent open discourse. Refusal to meet or talk perhaps reveals the deeper passion of our commitment. It is better to have deep passions than academic consciences; but passion, when the issue is not truly clear or is not a response to an immediate or real threat, can be very

8

Introduction

misleading. Our passion, heightened at home by our political assasinations, "the atmosphere created by Vietnam", "the violence in our streets" and "campus unrest", tends to make us react easily to crises abroad. Our fear is about a survival that is enhanced vicariously and therefore assumed to be collective. It is not sufficient to answer this fear by saying that survival is at stake only to Israelis, not to Americans, for this vicariousness argues possibly from an analogous struggle for the inner power that comes from confidence in roots and indicates an inner life of kindred feelings that have their own dimension in reality. In fact, the passion referred to is an extraordinary witness to the energy of personal identification. Perhaps this aspect of the crisis has gone almost unnoticed amidst our heated arguments over justice and injustice. Cold rationalists take on the fervor and sacrifice usually associated with religious fanatics; atheists and etatists argue from scripture along lines of theocracy. What was thought to be an age of modernity and a faith in progress takes on a "mediaeval" tinge of faith in divinely ordained causes. The Middle East crisis, apart from its harrowing effect on the peoples directly involved, provides a crack in our terrible facade of professional abstractionism. And as such, we note the phenomenon of others' crises bringing us to a deeper feeling in ourselves of life, one which we may have been afraid or ashamed to admit we can manifest in our own setting. If the same passion could be aroused in identification with the Vietnamese people, that land might be free of our machines of war. But paradoxically, if our passion could be calmed on the Middle East, the people particularly involved in the on-going crisis, the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Arabs, might be helped to recognize each other as people again, instead of as the caricatured enemies enhanced by our enthusiasms. Part of the thesis of this book is that our passion on this question has been misdirected, and part of the book's aim is to contribute to a quieting of that passion by presenting, not a position veiled in "objectivity", but our knowledge of the history of Arab and Jewish relations and our belief in the translation of passion into cooperation as the only way to break the recurring cycle of wars. Our passion has been misdirected because it has been put to the service of a negation, in itself wrong, but in this instance especially dangerous to the people with whom we psychologically identify - the Israelis. The majority of Western peoples, because of guilt over the

Introduction

9

atrocities their nations have committed against the Jews, because of Jewish power and influence in their societies, and because of admiration for the identifiably advanced condition of neo-Western Israel itself, have transferred much of their own fear for survival into the mirror of Israel's twenty-one year history. Israel has been seen as a symbol of renewal from Western ruins, if not resurrection; a renewal that is analogous to that of many Western countries after their Great Wars and much beyond that of most Third World countries. It is a symbol of needed hope. It has not been a renewal free of inner and outer contradictions, however. Advance has a way of creating its own regression. When we are almost "free" or fulfilled, something binds or diminishes us. In the Israeli case, that something is the Palestinian Arab. In America it is the black man or, as some remind us, the red man. Where race is not a question, it is economics or politics — the presence of genuine social idealists amidst nearly autonomous bureaucracies; or it is religion - the presence of a true believer amidst those ordained experts who have nearly succeeded in gilding revelation. In someone's human face under our victimization, if we can see, there is to be found our only liberation from our fatal and recurring dreams. All that is asked is that we see; though, of course, that recognition will change us. The other's presence in our consciousness will end his exclusion and deny us our frightened exclusiveness. This is a thought which is extremely difficult to express in the language of our contemporary governmental expertese or academic specialization. In fact, one of the intentions of this book is to present essays that are reflective in nature and widely understandable in language. Thus a condition which the editor, in undertaking this collection, sought to remedy somewhat was the "specialism" diagnosed perceptively by Professor Henry D. Aiken (in the New York Review of Books, October 20 and November 3, 1966). The fact that the book happens to have as its subject a critical area of the world known as the Middle or Near East does not make it important in itself. Only the quality of the essays and the soundness and wisdom of its authors' words can justify attention. Reflection should be a personal science for achieving respect. Respect should be, as it is in the main Near Eastern religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), the complement of family, tribe, race, nation, species as the basis for community. Reflection is thus a version of the Sufi "science of hearts" (the 'ilm al-quliib) which served periodically, by

10

Introduction

aiming its practitioners toward experimental wisdom (mrfrifa), to regenerate in microcosmic form the larger community that had experienced from inward and outward causes a loss unity and coherence. What this book hopes to put forward, beyond its particular perspectives on the subject at hand, is the notion that thought itself is something sacred to be patiently, personally cared for and not given over, as Dante depicted in the lower regions of his Inferno, to distortions of truth and such consequent exhalations, found especially surrounding Middle Eastern problems today, as propaganda, suppression of fact, and stubborn refusal to communicate at all; and, finally, this book hopes to put forward the belief that respect must replace the long history of the desire to convert or to displace as the social end of thought. As to the book's "position", though not speaking for all the contributors, whose positions in several instances may differ from his own, the editor has no hesitation in admitting to the belief that the injustice which the Palestine Arabs (now called "Arab refugees") feel they suffered is not a feeling but an experience, one that cannot be looked at abstractly. Furthermore, it is a continuing experience, one that cannot be remedied by time alone. The editor believes that settlement and compensation are the responsibility of Israel and that the cost will be paid not only in lands restored and in money given, but in a change in Israel's identity itself; namely, in an end to exclusiveness and racial preference in the state. That is the only way to put an end to the tragic insecurity of a state that began by the expulsion of those who had known and still consider Palestine as home. The Jewish experience of injustice and atrocity, committed against its people by the Nazis and by Western civilization during the course of centuries, also cannot be remedied by time alone. This civilization owes the Jews an immeasurable repatriation and compensation, only a small portion of which has been represented by its support of the Israeli state. From a certain viewpoint, that state's continuance is Western civilization's direct responsibility, and even that commitment will not be satisfactory repayment for the obvious reason that the dead and the injured of the past cannot enjoy the kind of favors bestowed on their heirs by suddenly responsive states. But the editor feels unable to say that one injustice experienced can be measured against another or can claim historical priority. No one really knows how to weigh suffering, but only to recognize it.

Introduction

11

In the first two sections of this book we are attempting to focus on the history of Arab-Jewish relations as a possible basis for reconciliation and to dispel the notion that Arabs and Jews have a long history of mutual hate and open conflict. Section three is an extension of the editor's reflections, that is to say, by persons viewing aspects of the crisis in detachment but not indifference. All persons writing in this book have done so in response to personal letters outlining the kind of book it was to be. The only requirement was that each author pursue reflectively his own thought without conforming to current fashions of "objectivity", and each was assured that his views would not be construed as representing his country's or anyone's but his own. The editor's work of correspondence and assembling of essays for this book all along has been dedicated respectfully to the two teachers who have had the profoundest effect on his thought and approach to the Middle East - the late Professor Louis Massignon of the Collège de France and Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb, retired Director of Harvard's Middle East Center. He would like to think this is the kind of book they would wish one of their students would edit in this crisis period involving an area of the world to which they dedicated their lives and tireless reflections. He also wishes to acknowledge his debt to his friends Noam Chomsky, Irene Gendzier, Elaine Hagopian, Merlin Swartz and Jacques Waardenburg without whose suggestions, assistance and encouragement the book might have compromised its intent or never come to light. Also, he wishes to thank Miss Elisabeth A. Campbell (Radcliffe '71) who typed the essays after they were edited and in several cases contributed invaluable suggestions of an editorial nature. HERBERT MASON

PART I

The Middle East Crisis in Historical Perspective

Preface to Part I

The editor feels it is necessary to reemphasize the fact, stated briefly in the introduction, that his "position" on the Arab-Israeli conflict and its possible solution is not one necessarily shared by any of the contributors, nor does he necessarily share the "position" of any contributor. Each of the essays represents personal reflections of the individual author only. And yet the depth of reflection and the honesty of concern mark these essays as something more than mere subjectivity. Furthermore, within their particular range of concern and ideological interest, especially in the case of the following three essays, an objectivity with respect to historical facts was sought and, the editor believes, attained. For this reason these essays - by Professors Swartz, Marks and Chomsky - have been placed together under the title "The Middle East Crisis in Historical Perspective", not because they purport to be "the" history of the crisis, but rather because they present a perspective that is historical in content and form. Merlin L. Swartz received his doctorate in Middle East and Islamic Studies from Harvard University, studying under Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb and George Makdisi. Dr. Swartz has spent many years in the Middle East and has been teaching and doing research in Lebanon since 1967. His translation and study of the twelfth century preacher Ibn al-Jawzi's The Book of Storytellers and Preachers (Kitab al-Qussas) will be published this year in Beirut. John H. Marks is a member of the Department of Near Eastern Studies of Princeton University, teaching Ancient Near Eastern History and

16

Preface to Part I

Pre-Islamic History. He was Director of the American School of Oriental Research, Jerusulem (Jordan), during 1966-67. He is presently preparing a History of the Near East from Alexander to Muhammad for publication. Noam Chomsky is a member of the Department of Linguistics at M.I.T. He has published several works on linguistics and, most recently, a volume of contemporary essays entitled American Power and the New Mandarins (Pantheon, 1969). He is a member of the Steering Committee of RESIST and of the Council of International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace.

MERLIN SWARTZ

1

The Position of Jews in Arab Lands Following the Rise of Islam

As with every historical event, the significance of the Arab conquest for the history of Jews in the Near East, North Africa, and Spain (lands that were to comprise the new Arab-Islamic empire) can only be accurately assessed when that event is seen in its proper historical context. It will be necessary to begin, therefore, by describing briefly the general condition of Jews in those lands during the period preceding the rise of Islam, when they were under the domination of Christian rulers and a Christian majority. Apart from the Jewish community in Palestine, Roman Jewry as a whole lived in relative peace and prosperity during the first three centuries of the Christians era. They did, it is true, pay a special tax (Fiscus Judaicus) that at times proved burdensome. On the other hand, they were never the object of persecutions as Chistians frequently had been. The Roman authorities, it appears, had made an honest attempt to accomodate themselves to their Jewish subjects by exempting them from the obligation to sacrifice to the pagan deities of Rome and by not requiring them to recognize the divinity of the emperor. With the Edict of Caracalla (A.D. 212), which gave all free inhabitants of Rome full citizenship without distinction, the legal condition of Roman Jewry was further improved, for now all free Jews living within the empire were full citizens. This meant, in effect, that Jews as a whole now enjoyed equality before the law with non-Jews. If Jews were distinguished from other citizens of the state, it was by certain privileges granted them in order to make possible the practice of their faith — not by a single disability apart from the payment of the Fiscus Judaicus.

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Merlin Swartz

Such a state of affairs, however, was not to prevail for long. The turning point came with the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity in A.D. 312 and the proclamation of the Edict of Toleration which, despite its title, initiated a process leading to the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the empire and the consequent displacement of all other faiths. For non-Christians in general, and for Jews in particular, this meant the eventual loss of their citizenship and most of what they had gained through the Edict of 212. Only Christians could be citizens of the empire, for the state was now, in effect, a Christian theocracy. The Edict of Toleration was followed by a series of enactments designed to clarify the inferior legal status of Jews and to curtail their power and influence. The anti-Jewish sentiment that had been nurtured in the Church for the better part of three centuries was now taken over by the state and informed the official attitude toward Judaism. From "a distinguished faith", as it had previously been referred to, it now became a "nefarious sect." Under the brief reign of Julian the Apostate (361-363), the antiJewish measures enacted by Constantine were temporarily suspended. With the accession of Theodosius II to the throne in 408 and the promulgation of the famous Theodosian Code shortly thereafter, the old discriminatory laws were not merely reinstated, they were substantially strengthened and expanded. Conversion to Judaism was declared to be a criminal offence punishable by death. Marriage between Christians and Jews was strictly forbidden and, what involved an even more serious departure from the past, the religious affairs of Roman Jewry were, in effect, placed under the jurisdiction of the state. Though anti-Jewish sentiments in eastern Christendom can be traced back to the first century and are reflected in certain parts of the New Testament, the discriminatory measures enacted by Constantine and Theodosius II gave a new impetus to these sentiments which, more and more, were openly endorsed and promoted by Church leaders themselves. St. Chrysostom, for example, the most powerful and influential Christian preacher of the fourth century, is known to have used his sermons to launch bitter verbal attacks against Jews. A little later Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, played a key role in the massacre and expulsion of the Jews from that city. Under the Byzantine emperor Justinian (483-565), and with strong ecclesiastical backing, a systematic attempt was made to stamp out organized Jewsh life in North Africa. Synagogues were confiscated, public worship was proscribed, and at

The Position of Jews in Arab Lands

19

least one Jewish community - the one at Bonn - was completely destroyed. In the Near East, life for Jews reached its lowest point during the reign of Heraclius (610-641). In the year 629, following the recapture of Palestine from the Persians, the Jewish residents of Jerusalem were massacred in cold blood. Three years later, and just one year before the Arab armies were to appear en masse on the northern frontiers of Arabia, Heraclius issued a decree forbidding the public exercise of Judaism and ordered all Jews within his realm to submit to baptism. The history of Spanish Jewry in those early centuries followed a pattern strikingly similar to the one we have just observed. For them, too, an important turning point came with the conversion of the royal house to Christianity. Under Recared (586-612), the first Catholic king of Spain, a series of discriminatory measures were enacted which prohibed Jews from proselytizing, entering into marriage with Christians, and holding public office. In 613 King Sisebut (612-620) issued a decree requiring all those of Jewish faith to submit to baptism. For the greater part of a century following Sisebut, the public practice of Judaism was virtually impossible. The legislation of Sisebut was further refined and reinforced by successive Church Councils meeting at Toledo. These reprehensible laws received their final formulation in 694 at the Seventeenth Council of Toledo. There all Jews were declared to be slaves of Christians. Jewish children seven years and older were to be removed from their parents and placed in the custody of Christian homes or monasteries where they could be brought up as "Christians". What property remained in the hands of Jews was to be confiscated. Those Jews who did submit to baptism were asked to demonstrate the authenticity of their conversion by eating the flesh of swine. Thus by the opening decades of the seventh century, Jewish communities in the Near East, North Africa, and Spain had witnessed the progressive deterioration of their position both legally and materially. Through a process of legislation, much of which had been inspired by leaders of the Church, Jews found themselves stripped of most of the rights they had once enjoyed, and isolated socially, economically, and politically. In certain areas such as Spain, they had been reduced to a state of enslavement. It must not be supposed, however, that all of these discriminatory laws were systematically enforced. They were not - not even in Spain. The mere fact, however, that such laws

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Merlin Swartz

existed, apart from their enforcement, was more than sufficient to divest Jews in those lands of any sense of dignity and rendered their situation always precarious at best. For Jews in the Near East, North Africa, and Spain, the Arab conquest marked the dawn of a new era. Those forces that had led to the progressive isolation and disruption of Jewish life were not only checked, they were dramatically reversed. Few Jews, however, had any idea of the far-reaching forces of change that were about to be set in motion when the Arab-Muslim armies first broke out of Arabia in 633. Indeed, many Jewish communities were initially seized with fear, for they had heard of Muhammad's expulsion of the Jews from Medina and the surrounding oases some years before. The course of events, however, very quickly demonstrated this initial apprehension to be without ground. And with their fears allayed, Jews in one region after the other began throwing their support behind the advancing Arab armies. The sources are replete with moving accounts of the assistance rendered by these Jewish communities.1 In many areas the Arab armies were openly and enthusiastically welcomed as "liberators" from the oppressive rule of Christian over-lords. And the Arabs, for their part, soon came to regard these Jewish communities as allies in a common cause. Though some of this support may have been dictated by considerations of expediency, there is, on the whole, no reason to doubt its well-intentioned, even spontaneous, character. R. Simon bar Yohai, writing during the period of the Arab conquest, described Umar (the one primarily responsible for launching the conquest) as "a lover of Israel who repaired their breaches." "The Holy One", he went on to insist, "is only bringing the kingdom of Ishmael in order to help you from the wicked one (Christians)."2 A Jewish document widely circulated during the first century of Arab rule described Islam as "an act of God's mercy."3 Indeed, taken as a whole, the sources make it quite clear that the Arab conquest was widely hailed among contemporary Jews as a divine intervention by God on behalf of "His People" and was regarded, therefore, as an event full of promise for the future.4 Contrary to what is populary believed in the West, the indigenous Jewish communities in the conquered areas were not coerced into accepting Islam. The old image of Muslim armies forcing conversion at the point of the sword is a blatant distortion that has its roots in

The Position of Jews in Arab Lands

21

Crusader propaganda. Taking seriously the Quranic injunction, "There is to be no compulsion in matters of religion,"5 the conquering armies permitted Jews and Christians to remain such. Indeed, during the greater part of the first century of Arab rule, conversion to Islam was officially discouraged - primarily, it would seem, for economic reasons. During the early centuries of Arab rule, there were few Jewish converts to Islam. Only at the end of the medieval period did they go over to Islam in significant numbers and then it was in response to the magnetic pull of Islamic mysticism (tasawwuf), and not to external pressures of any sort. But if Jews were shown tolerance in the new Arab-Islamic empire, this tolerance was not a matter of temporary sufferance, not the result of a willingness to co-exist for the present with no real guarantees for the future.6 On the contrary, Jews both individually and collectively were granted a positive legal status in the new state. Based in part on precedents established by Muhammad in the constitution of Medina and in part also on pre-Islamic tradition, the right of Jews to life, property, protection, and the free exercise of their faith (so long as it did not prove offensive to Muslims) was guaranteed by Islamic law. In the spheres of religious practice and personal life, Jews were to be governed by their own law. Only in their relations with the larger non-Jewish community were they to come under the jurisdiction of the law of the state. On the other hand, individual Jews could always have recourse to Islamic law if they preferred. And from the sources we know that occasionally, at least, they did avail themselves of this privilege. Furthermore, Islamic law made no distinction between Jews and other minority faiths. Together with Christians and Zoroastrians, Jews formed part of a much larger class of "protected persons" (dhimmis).7 All members of this class, irrespective of creedal, ethnic, or other differences, were recognized by, and enjoyed the same standing before, Islamic law. In return for protection and the other rights guaranteed by that law, dhimmis were to pay a poll tax (jizya). The payment of this tax generally does not seem to have been regarded as a sign of subjugation. It was a tax paid in return for certain benefits, and when those benefits could not be guaranteed, Islamic law stipulated that the tax was to be returned.8 In order to prevent it from becoming a burden to dhimmis, the law further stipulated that it could only be collected from those who were capable of paying it. Women, children, the elderly,

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Merlin Swartz

the blind and crippled, the poor and unemployed were exempted. One early Jewish writer referred to it as a "slender poll tax" in return for what he described as "an almost boundless toleration." While dhimmis did enjoy equality among themselves, they were not, however, on a footing of equality before Islamic law with Muslims. Dhimmis had fewer rights and were subject to special restrictions which did not affect Muslims. Jewish and Christian physicians, for example, were not to practice their profession among Muslims. Dhimmi merchants were to pay double the amount of duty for goods they imported. (Very interestingly, however, the harbi - i.e., a Muslim citizen of a non-Muslim country - was to pay twice the rate required of dhimmis). Moreover, Christians and Jews were not to erect new houses of worship, though they were allowed to keep the old ones in a state of good repair. Perhaps most seriously of all, dhimmis were required to indicate their identity by wearing special badges or styles of clothing. The fact, however, that these restrictions were rarely observed in practice is significant, for it meant that in real life the position of dhimmis was much more nearly one of equality with Muslims than legal theory allowed. And in this one respect, at least, Muslim practice down through the centuries has shown itself to be decidedly superior to the letter of Muslim law and, undoubtedly also, a more faithful reflection of the inner intention of Islam. (The existence of such laws, however, must have had a certain adverse psychological affect on dhimmis). It should also be noted in this connection that in certain specific areas, dhimmis did, in fact, enjoy equality with Muslims. Thus according to Hanafite and Hanbalite law, the blood of dhimmis and Muslims was held to be equal in value and, therefore, in the case of homicide, for example, the amount of blood-money required as payment to the wronged party was to be the same for both. In cases where property was owned jointly by a Muslim and a dhimmi, Islamic law went out of its way to insure that the rights of the latter were protected. It is also highly significant that dhimmis were granted the right to travel and reside where they chose. There were no laws of any sort restricting the residence of dhimmis to special quarters in the cities or towns. The tendency among western writers to characterize dhimmis as "second class citizens" is partially understandable inasmuch as dhimmis did not enjoy complete equality before the law with the Muslim majority. Such a characterization, however, overlooks several im-

The Position of Jews in Arab Lands

23

portant points and is thus not entirely accurate. First of all, it fails to take into account the fact that while dhimmis did have fewer rights before the law, they also had fewer obligations. The equality of right and obligation in Islam is an important legal principle; and a serious attempt was made in Islamic law to maintain a careful balance between the two. It is worth noting in this connection that in Islam dhimmis are regarded essentially as guests. In view of the fact that Islam incorporated within itself the ancient Near Eastern tradition of hospitality in which the honorable treatment of guests was regarded as a sacred duty, the status of dhimmis as guests took on special meaning.9 In the second place, the use of the term "second class" in describing the status of dhimmis tends to ignore the whole course of Islamic history. In short, it fails to reckon with the fact that in actual life dhimmis enjoyed virtual equality with Muslims and, in some respects, enjoyed advantages. There can be little doubt, then, that for Jews the Arab conquest meant a marked improvement in their legal condition. From a previously degraded class of aliens, almost always resented by the Christian majority and frequently the object of open persecution, they were now elevated to a new position and granted a positive legal status with clearly defined rights guaranteed by law. And what is equally important, they were no longer regarded as a separate entity, legally or otherwise, but were thought of as part of a larger class of protected persons in relation to whom they enjoyed full equality. No longer were Jew as Jews the object of special laws or a special minority status. If the Arab conquest brought immediate release from conditions of a most degrading sort, it also had long-term implications that were not less important. The new conditions resulting from the conquest (including the legal changes just noted) made it possible for Jews to gradually break out of the isolation in which they had previously lived and paved the way for their eventual integration into the main stream of life in Arab-Islamic society. This process of integration, representing as it did a dramatic reversal of past trends, constitutes, in many ways, the most prominent, most characteristic feature of Jewish history during the early centuries of Arab rule. And in its wake, this process brought changes unprecedented in the history of the Jewish people. With the mass penetration of Jews into the main sectors of Arab-Islamic society and their intimate involvement in this non-Jewish milieu, both the

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outward form and inner essence of traditional Jewish life were deeply affected and, in some cases, fundamentally transformed. In what follows I shall attempt to trace this process of integration in outline form and take note of some of its more important consequences for the economic, political, and social life of Arab Jewry. In the economic sphere, integration began early and resulted in a gradual, but marked improvement in the material well-being of Jewish communities. These communities, many of which had lived for long periods under conditions of privation and stagnation, quickly came to life and entered a new period of economic growth and prosperity. This was not, furthermore, an isolated phenomenon, confined to this or that region. From the borders of Persia in the east to Spain in the west, it formed a clearly observable, new pattern and provides a striking contrast to the conditions of poverty that had generally prevailed among Jews in those areas prior to the rise of Islam. In actual practice economic discrimination against Jews appears to have been virtually unknown. Islamic law, as we have seen, did call for the imposition of certain restrictions on the economic activity of dhimmis. In real life, however, these were all but ignored. The degree of economic freedom enjoyed by Jews can in part be seen from the wide variety of professions and crafts which they practiced. There was scarcely an occupation (from the humblest to the most lucrative and prestigious) in which they were not be found. They did, at times, tend to predominate in certain crafts such as dyeing, for example; there is, however, no evidence to suggest that this was the result of pressure or exclusion from other occupations. Contrary to what is commonly believed, they were not prohibited from owning and cultivating land. What they were deprived of was the right to purchase and develop virgin lands, for these were regarded as the common property of the Muslim community. The degree to which Jews succeeded in penetrating the main stream of economic life is shown most strikingly in the extent to which the outward form and material base of their economic life was transformed during this period of their history. From a nation of peasants, traditionally tied to the soil, they were gradually transformed into a nation of international traders, manufacturers, and financiers. This was a change hitherto unparalleled in the experience of Jewry. Never before in their history had such a large segment of the Jewish people turned to mercantile occupations.10 More significant, however, is the

The Position of Jews in Arab Lands

25

fact that this transformation was part of a much larger transformation which involved the economy of the empire as a whole. Through the development of trade made possible by the political and administrative unification of large areas and the growth of industry in the urban centers, the old agricultural economy gradually gave way to one based primarily on commerce, manufacturing, and banking. That Jews as a whole not only profited materially from this "bourgeois revolution", but participated in it and were themselves transformed by it, indicates to what extent the old economic barriers had indeed been broken down. From the evidence available, it seems clear that already by the end of the fourth century of Arab rule, the process of economic integration had gone far. In the economic sphere, the record of medieval Islam's treatment of Jews stands in sharp contrast to that of medieval Europe where they were progressively and systematically excluded from one sector of the economy after the other, so that by late medieval times only the most degrading and menial occupations were open to them. In the political sphere, the affects of integration were equally impressive and far-reaching. The relative absence of Jews in public office during the first century of Arab rule is explained largely by the fact that Jews had traditionally been excluded from this sphere of community life and, therefore, had not been given the opportunity to acquire the necessary skills, or experience. This state of affairs, however, was not to continue for long. With the growing involvement of Jews in the larger economy and their pursuit of bourgeois occupations, the requisite fiscal and administrative skills were gradually acquired. By early Abbasid times the services of Jews were being increasingly sought by Muslim rulers. Particularly in Iraq, Egypt, and Spain (the three major political centers of the Arab world), Jews rose to positions of power and influence. Not a few were called to serve as advisors and counsellors to caliphs and their chief ministers. Despite their elevation to positions of prominence within the government, Jews in general appear to have remained aloof from partisan politics and most of the perpetual intriguing that went on in political circles. They chose rather to concentrate on the mastery of technical skills and on the development of a bureaucratic tradition within their own ranks. This two-fold policy proved to be a wise one. First, it made them less vulnerable to reprisal during periods of political upheaval and, secondly, it rendered them increasingly indispensible as public servants. It was not without reason,

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then, that Jews frequently found it easier to survive changes of government than did their fellow Arabs. Despite the brilliant achievements of Jewish public officials in Spain and Iraq, it was in Fatimid Egypt that Jews were to rise to the peak of their power and influence in governmental circles. Under the early Fatimid caliphs (many of whom were known for their liberal attitudes) Jews found their way into government service in unprecedented numbers. By the reign of al-Mu'izz (953-975), they had come to play such an important role in the affairs of state that people were frequently heard to remark (whether out of jealousy or admiration, we are not told) that nothing could be done anymore without the assistance of Jews. Under this same caliph, Egypt's most important province of Syria was administered by a Jewish governor. Few, indeed, were the levels of Egyptian administration that did not feel the impact of Jewish influence. In addition to all this, a number of important non-administrative posts in the caliph's court were held by Jews. Awed by the extent and effectiveness of Jewish influence throughout the government, an Arab poet of that time composed the following lines (as reported by Suyuti): "Today the Jews have reached the summit of their hopes and have become aristocrats. Power and riches have they, and from them councillors and princes are chosen. Egyptians, I advise you, become Jews for the very sky has become Jewish!" u

The holding of public office by large numbers of Jews did occasionally arouse resentment among the Muslim majority and at times made it necessary for Muslim rulers to dismiss their Jewish employees in varying numbers. We hear of such reactions during the reigns of alMansur, Harun ar-Rashid, al-Mutawakkil, and several other lesser calips. It must be pointed out, however, that these reactions were always strictly limited and, with one exception, never affected the wider Jewish community. Only those who held public office were threatened by such moves and, even then, Jewish officials were never threatened as Jews, but as dhimmis. Insofar as Jews suffered from such measures, they did so together with other dhimml officials. There is no record of a single attempt in the whole of Islamic history to exclude Jews as such from public office. The only znA-dhimml reaction that ever affected Jews on a wider scale including both those in and out of office and which, therefore,

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forms something of an exception to what I have just said, occurred ironically enough in Egypt during the Fatimid period. Under the caliphate of al-Hakim, and through the latter's initiative, a persecution broke out in Egypt which caused widespread suffering among Jews. What role, if any, resentment of Jewish power and influence played in triggering this outburst is not clear. It is clear, however, that the persecution was not directed just against Jews but against the larger dhimmi community in Egypt. Thus, even though Jews suffered severely during this time, they did so along with other dhimmis. Fortunately, al-Hakim soon saw the folly of what he had done. Under the influence of apparent feelings of remorse, he ordered an end to the persecution. In what seems to have been a sincere attempt to restore the liberal tradition of his predecessors, he invited Jews back into public office and made every effort to repair the damage that had been done to Jewish property, particulary to synagogues. To those Jews who had converted to Islam in order to escape persecution he gave the privilege of re-embracing their ancestral faith, despite the fact that do so he had to fly in the face of Islamic law which required the death penalty for those who turned their backs on Islam after having embraced it. That there were limits to the political integration of Jews is clear from the foregoing. Nonetheless, it should not be forgotten that despite these limits, significant progress had been made in giving Jews a place in the political life of medieval Islam. Moreover, as we have seen, those reactions from which Jews had to suffer occasionally did not in any way form part of a consistent pattern or reflect an anti-Jewish bias. Here again, the record of medieval Islam contrasts sharply with that of Europe where, already at this early date, anti-Jewish feeling was widespread and persecution of Jews part of an emerging pattern. Even in those areas of the Arab world that were temporarily occupied by European powers, the consequence for the local Jewish population was one of unmitigated disaster. During the Crusader occupation of Palestine the Jewish population of that region was cruelly reduced. The massacre of the Jewish residents of Jerusalem in 1097 was but one episode in a tragic series which virtually put an end to organized Jewish life in that land. The same story was repeated in North Africa when re-christianized Spain captured Oran in 1509, Tunis in 1535, and Bougie in 1541, and ruthlessly reduced the local Jewish communities in each of these cities.12

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The integration of Jews into the economic and political life of the Arab world could hardly have advanced as far or as rapidly as it did had it not been for a larger, more encompassing form of integration best designated, perhaps, by the term "social". In treating the matter of social integration, I shall relate it more specifically to the process of arabization, i.e., that process whereby Jews as a whole assimilated Arabic-Islamic culture. It was this process, in the final analysis, that made possible the entrance of Jews on a large scale into the central stream of Arab social life and enabled them, in turn, to participate in both the material and non-material spheres of that life in a most amazing way. Through this process of assimilation and integration, Arabic-Islamic culture, and all that was bound up with that culture, made an indelible impression on the deepest levels of Jewish being. One of the earliest and most crucial aspects of this process of arabization was the adoption by Jews of the Arabic language as their primary vehicle of communication. The assimilation of Arabic, which began during the period of the conquest, proceeded rapidly and affected a wide area so that by the end of the third century of Arab rule, Arabic had almost entirely replaced Hebrew and Aramaic as the language of daily life for Jews. Even among themselves Jews gradually came to employ Arabic almost exclusively. Hebrew did, of course, continue to be used but it was mainly for liturgical purposes and, to a limited extent, also as the language of religious scholarship. Arabization, however, was not limited just to linguistic matters. It touched almost every facet of Jewish social life and, in many cases, involved a radical transformation. It meant the assimilation of Arab social customs generally, Arab patterns of behavior (both public and private), and Arab social tastes. The adoption of Arab habits of dress and the appropriation of Arabic personal names in place of the old Hebrew ones are but two among a vast number of instances that could be cited to illustrate this process. It is remarkable that these two in particular could become universal practices among Arab Jewry since they were offically prohibited by Islamic law. While the capitulation of Islamic law may be seen as further evidence of Islam's liberal attitude toward dhimmls, it also indicates, I think, something of the great force behind this process of arabization, something of its almost-tidal-wave proportions in the face of which the law was helpless. On the most elemental level, the assimilation of Arabic-Islamic culture led to an extensive re-shaping in the outward forms of Jewish

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social life. Those external features of Jewish social life that had traditionally symbolized their ethnic distinctiveness vis-à-vis the nonJewish world were gradually lost. Arab Jewry, for all practical purposes, ceased to be a separate ethnic entity. (This meant that Arab Jewry's identity became more exclusively a function of religion). Whatever else the loss of their external, ethnic separation may have meant, from the point of view of social integration, it marked an importand advance. No longer was the identity of Jews as Jews revealed directly and immediately through the outward forms of their life in the way that it traditionally had been. By decrasing their visibility, both individually and collectively, arabization made possible a much larger measure of anonymity in the public sphere. This meant, in turn, greater freedom of movement, both socially and physically. The trend toward increased physical mobility, in part, explains why the Jewish ghetto never made its appearance in the medieval Arab world. It is true that in the larger cities such as Baghdad, Jews tended to congregate in certain quarters. There is no evidence, however, to suggest that they did so under pressure. Large numbers of Jews were always to be found scattered throughout the city as were their synagogues. The trend toward greater social mobility is seen in the growing ease with which Jews were able to find their way into the various social classes, occupations, and public offices. If arabization led to important changes in the outward, material shape of Jewish life, it had an even greater impact upon the internal, non-materials aspects of that life. Arabization meant a great deal more than the appropriation of the outward forms of Arab culture. Along with the assimilation of the Arabic language and Arabic-Islamic cultural patterns, there went the assimilation of Arab values and tastes, Arab modes of thought and patterns of communication, Arab attitudes and sentiments. Arabization meant, in short, the absorption of fundamentally important features of the Arab mind and the Arab spirit. Changes of the sort described above were bound, in time, to precipitate a crisis in identity for Arab Jewry. And this, perhaps, was the most important consequence of arabization, for through it Jewry acquired a new understanding of itself - a new self-image. With the mass assimilation of Arabic-Islamic culture in both its exterior and interior forms, it became increasingly problematic for Jews to regard themselves as fundamentally and irrevocably different from their fellow Arabs with whom they shared so much and so deeply. It became

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progressively more difficult for arabicized Jews to think of themselves as Jews in the traditional sense, as Jews pure and simple. Though the arabization of Jews did not mean the loss of their Jewish identity as such, it did mean a significant diluting of that identity. If Jews continued to think of themselves as Jews - as they certainly did - they thought of themselves as Jews of a special kind, viz., Arab Jews. It is in the context of this change in self-understanding that one must see the practice of adopting Arabic personal names. For the Semitic mind, it must be remembered, names were much more than arbitrary, external forms of identification. A man's name was viewed as participating in the very essence of his person and, as such, revealed something of the essential character of his being. This meant, in effect, that a man's name was bound up in the most intimate way with the question of his identity. A change in one could not occur apart from a change in the other. For Jews who shared the Semitic outlook, the adopting of Arab names was of the greatest significance. It symbolized, in short, a new understanding of their identity. It did not signify, as I have already said, a surrender of their Jewish identity, for they continued to adhere to the faith of their fathers. What it did signify, however, was an important modification or diffusion of that sense of separateness that had figured so prominently in their traditional selfimage. Arabicized Jews were Jews who felt a genuine sense of kinship to, and solidarity with, their fellow Arabs — something non-arabicized Jews could never have shared. Through the integration of Jewry into the main stream of Arab society and their almost wholesale assimilation of Arabic-Islamic culture, a great many of the old material, psychological, social and intellectual barriers that had separated Jew from Arab were gradually torn down. With these old walls removed, the way was paved for a direct encounter between Judaism and Islamic civilization on the deepest religious and intellectual levels. For Judaism, however, any such direct confrontation involved considerable risk in view of its minority position. In any genuine, face-to-face encounter with the youthful, vigorous, vastly more powerful Islamic civilization, Judaism stood in danger of either being absorbed or else overwhelmed, forced into retreat and, perhaps eventually, into oblivion. In actual fact, however, the results of this historic encounter were precisely the reverse of what might have been expected. Instead of being either absorbed or forced into retreat, Judaism was

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stimulated by its encounter with Islam and the result for Judaism was a new period of unprecedented intellectual and religious florescence. It is not without reason, therefore, that later Jewish historians looked back on this period in their history as a golden age. The extent to which this flowering owed its inspiration to medieval Islamic culture is shown by the extent to which the new Judaism bore the imprint of this culture. The influences of Islamic culture on Judaism were many and varied, but in three areas (literature and language, philosophy, and religious piety) it was particulary significant.13 I shall consider these areas briefly, beginning with that of literature and language. At the time of the Arab conquest, the majority of Jews in the East appear to have been bilingual. In general, apart from some local variation, they employed Aramaic as the language of daily life, with Hebrew being used primarily for religious and literary purposes. The process of arabization referred to above, involved much more than the adoption of Arabic as the language of daily speech in place of Aramaic. Indeed, it also meant that Arabic took over the place of Hebrew as the primary medium of literary expression and of scholarship. Almost all of the important and influential works produced by Jewsh writers during this period were composed in Arabic. Bahya's The Duties of the Heart, and The Guide for the Perplexed by Maimonides are but two instances of this phenomenon. T o an astonishing degree, Arabic also replaced Hebrew as the language of scripture. The Old Testament, along with the Mishna and other sacred texts, was translated into Arabic and was widely used in that form. So highly was Sacadya's translation of the Old Testament regarded that it eventually acquired a sacred status in its own right. The study of the Old Testament in the form Sacadya's Arabic translation was regarded by many as an act of special piety. Commentaries on the Jewish scriptures (many of which bore striking resemblances to the Quranic commentaries) appeared in Arabic with greater and greater frequency. What is perhaps even more surprising, works dealing with the Hebrew language and Hebrew literature were composed widely in Arabic as well. Thus, the most important and influential work on Hebrew poetry to come out of the Middle Ages - that composed by the famous Moses ben Ezra - was written in Arabic. Only within the confines of the synagogue did the use of Hebrew continue more or less unchallenged. This almost overpowering influence of Arabic, far from bringing about the demise of Hebrew, led eventually to its modification and

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revitalization. On the literary level, vigorous new forms of Hebrew prose and poetry, owning much of their inspiration to Arabic models, gradually came into being. New themes, styles, and techniques, hitherto known only in Arabic, found their way into Hebrew and came to be extensively employed by Jewish writers. Through this encounter with Arabic, the Hebrew language was broadened and enriched, made more flexible and powerful as a vehicle of literary expression. In the sphere of linguistics, as well, the stimulus provided by Arabic proved to be equally significant. Under the influence of Arabic, entirely new sciences of Hebrew grammar, philology, and lexicography came into being and patterned extensively after Arabic, which earlier had developed its own linguistic sciences. With the development and elaboration of these new Hebrew sciences, the Hebrew language, for the first time in its history, became the object of systematic analysis and this, in turn, led to the eventual flowering of a vast Hebrew literature in this field. For the development of both the Hebrew language and Hebrew literature, therefore, the influence of Arabic proved to be of fundamental importance. The contributions of Islamic civilization to the intellectual development of Judaism were many and varied. None was perhaps more dramatic or more important for the future of Jewish intellectual life than the role played by Islamic civilization in mediating Greek culture and learning to the larger Jewish community. It must be remembered, of course, that Judaism had been exposed to the influences of Greek culture long before the rise of Islam. It is this very fact, however, that points up the special character of the Islamic contribution. Even though Judaism had lived for centuries in a milieu thoroughly permeated by Greek culture, it had stubbornly refused to embrace that culture as Christianity had done. For the vast majority of Jews, Greek culture and learning were regarded as a threat to Jewish values and beliefs. There were, of course, individual Jews and isolated Jewish communities that had drunk deeply at the fountain of Greek learning long before the rise of Islam. But this had had little affect upon Jewish thought or the larger body of Jewry. As H. A. Wolfson has shown, Philo, that towering Jewish philosopher of the first century, remained virtually unknown to Jews as a whole until medieval times. Once, however, the great works of Greek literature, science and philosophy began to appear in Arabic translations and in a kind of Arabic-Islamic veneer, Greek culture suddenly appeared to Jews in a new light, with

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the result that much of Judaism's traditional hostility to things Greek disappeared. From the tenth century on, Jews took up the study of Greek thought on a scale hitherto unknown, and with a genuine sense of excitement and enthusiasm. Out of this encounter with Greek culture, there grew up within Judaism a brilliant tradition of Jewish philosophy and a distinguished line of Jewish thinkers. Eventually Jewish philosophers, in their turn, were to play a most important role in mediating Greek thought, as they had learned it from the Arabs, to the Christian West via Spain. How was it that the larger body of Jews, who for centuries had remained uncompromisingly opposed to Greek wisdom, suddenly, when they encountered that wisdom in an Arabic-Islamic form, embraced it with undisguised enthusiasm? Though it will not be possible to give an adequate answer to this question here, several points may be offered as a partial answer. It must be remembered, in the first place, that by the time the great masterpieces of Greek learning began to appear in Arabic translations, the process of arabization had already gone far. For Jews, therefore, to encounter Greek thought in an Arabic-Islamic form meant to encounter that thought in a form with which they were thoroughly familiar. Through a process of "arabization" Greek thought had been robbed of something of its foreign quality. Secondly, the integration of Jews into medieval Islamic society and their direct exposure to a non-Jewish environment that was, for the most part, open and tolerant, did much to dissipate the traditional and deep-seated Jewish suspicion of things non-Jewish. Islam's contribution, therefore, is not to be seen so much in the content of what it mediated to Judaism - that was in the present case essentially Greek and thus nonIslamic - as in the transformation which it effected in Judaism's attitude toward the non-Jewish world. Islam's contribution was essentially social and psychological in character; and this, in some ways, was an even more crucial contribution than the actual content of what it mediated to Judaism. On the religious plane, the encounter between Islam and Judaism led to deep mutual sharing, with important consequences for both. But on this plane, too, it was Judaism that was most profoundly affected by the meeting. Under the influence of Islam, Jewish theology and law underwent important modification and took on their final forms. It was in the sphere of religious piety, however, that Islam was to make its most important contribution to Judaism. Under the impact of

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Islamic asceticism (zuhd) and mysticism (tasawwuf), there developed within Judaism new Jewish forms of asceticism and mysticism bearing clear marks of their Islamic origins. The ascetic ideas of Islam appear to have found their way into Judaism for the first time through the writings of Bahya, a Jewish scholar-saint of the eleventh century. It was in his The Duties of the Heart, written originally in Arabic, that Bahya made his greatest contribution to this development. Throughout the work Bahya based himself almost exclusively on Muslim sources, and even at those points where he could very well have drawn on Talmudic materials he chose to rely consistently on Islamic texts. Within a relatively short time, Bahya's work became one of the most widely used books of devotion in medieval Jewish circles, and eventually was translated into Hebrew. Out of the inspiration provided by Bahya and his disciples, there rapidly came into being a vibrant Jewish literature devoted to ascetic themes and concerns, and giving evidence of its Islamic affinities. Sufi ideas and practices made their appearance in Jewish circles in the twelfth century, the same century that witnessed the rise of the great Muslim Sufi brotherhoods. The first significant Sufi influences are to be found in the writings of Maimonides, perhaps the most impressive religious thinker to appear in the world of medieval Arab Jewry. It was not until the following century, however, and particularly in the writings of his son Maimuni, that the mystical teaching of Islam were to become an all-consuming passion in Jewish circles. In his most important work, The Complete Guide for Servants of God, Maimuni repeatedly insisted that the great Sufi masters of Islam had followed the Hebrew prophets of old more faithfully than had the Jewish people themselves. Sufism in its Judaized form attracted large numbers of Jews and very quickly became a vigorous movement. The size and power of this new movement clearly indicates that it corresponded to a deeply-felt need among Arab Jewry at the time. Moreover, Jewish Sufism did not fade out of the picture with the passing of the medieval age, but continued to play an important role in the religious life of Arab Jewry down to the modern period. Before moving on the final section of this essay, some attempt must be made summarize what has been said thus far and, in so doing, to indicate something of Islam's significance for the history of Arab Jewry. There can be no doubt that the Arab-Muslim conquest struck a

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massive blow at the vicious spiral of anti-Jewish sentiment in the Near East, North Africa, and Spain. It put an end to the intolerable conditions of oppression under which Jews had previously lived in those areas, and ushered in a new age of tolerance enshrined in, and guaranteed by, law - a tolerance that was not, therefore, at the mercy of the unpredictable, fluctuating moods of the non-Jewish majority. These, moreover, were not isolated changes, but formed part of a general condition that prevailed throughout the empire. The new conditions created by the Arab conquest paved the way for the progressive integration of Jews into the main stream of Arab-Islamic society and, in so doing, subjected them to sweeping changes affecting the outward form as well as the inner core of Jewish existence. From a poor peasant class, excluded from public life, they were transformed into an urban, bourgeois people possessing considerable economic power and playing an important role in the political life of the Arab world. Under the impact of the powerful forces of cultural assimilation, they lost most of their separate ethnic identity and, in the process, absorbed much of the Arab-Islamic ethos itself. These changes left their mark on the deepest levels of Jewish being; they permeated the very depths of the Jewish psyche creating, in turn, a new self-image which, though not totally discontinuous with the old self-image, was sufficiently different to warrant being called new. The arabicized Jew was a new kind of Jew — and Arab Jew — and he viewed himself as such. This complex, multifaceted process of integration with the sweeping changes that flowed from it, made possible an historic encounter between Judaism and Islam of the greatest importance for both. That Judaism was more deeply affected than Islam by the meeting was perhaps inevitable given the latter's superior position, its youthful vigor, and its size. Through the inspiration and stimulation of this encounter Judaism entered a new period of cultural, intellectual, and religious creativity and flowering - one might even call it a renaissance. The direction of influence, however, was not one-way. The encounter involved serious exchange, a genuide dialogue, a give-and-take from which Islam, as well as Judaism, benefited enormously. Islam for its part learned much and deeply from Judaism. The history of Arab Jewry demonstrates in a rather remarkable way the extent of Islam's commitment to the ideal of openness and tolerance. 14 It was this, it seems to me, that ultimately made possible Islam's enormous impact upon the Jewish people and their faith.

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Because Islam, on the whole, never posed a threat to Judaism, the latter never found it necessary to assume a defensive, apologetic stance vis-à-vis Islam. Arab Jewry, thus, never had to develop a rationale for their existence in the way that European Jewry had to do. Under Islam Judaism was able to recover much of its long-lost sense of selfrespect and dignity. With this new sense of worth and self-confidence, it was possible for Judaism to enter into a dialogue with Islam with a sense of openness and receptivity that would not otherwise have been possible. In the preceding we have looked at the experience of Jews in Arab lands during the early and medieval periods of Islamic history. In order to complete our survey, something also must be said regarding the history of Arab Jewry in more recent times. With the passing of the medieval age, classical Islamic civilization entered upon a period of gradual decline that was to last well into the modern era. That both Arab and Jew shared alike in this decline and eclipse indicates further to what extent the history of the two peoples had come to be intertwined. Just as the flowering of Judaism had coincided with the golden age of Islam, so now its recession went hand-inhand with the recession of Islam. If they shared in a common glory, they also shared equally in a common decline. Apart from the temporary improvement that followed the Ottoman conquest of the Near East, the history of Arab Jewry up to the beginning of the present century was one of general decline and stagnation. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the fate of Jews in Arab lands during this period was the result of general cultural, economic and political decline, and not of deliberate policies, consciously formulated and directed against Jews. Where (and when) Jews suffered from conditions of poverty and backwardness, as they did, it was not as Jews, but along with the indigenous population.15 The only real exceptions to this last generalization have occurred in the present century and are to be seen almost entirely, I think, as Arab reaction to the Zionist movement and the establishment of the State of Israel. They are an expression of Arab outrage at the displacement of the indigenous Arab population of Palestine through the organized efforts of Zionism and the establishment of an alien state in a land that had been theirs for thirteen centuries. While this reaction, with its resultant anti-Jewish feelings, is not to be excused, it must

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be seen in its proper historical context. It must be remembered that anti-Jewish sentiment, insofar as it is to be found in the contemporary Arab world, is strictly a modern phenomenon, and one that runs counter to the time-honored Islamic tradition of fraternity and tolerance. The very widespread popular notion that present day Arab-Jewish hostility is but another chapter in a long history of mutual animosity is totally false. If there is one thing that the past makes clear it is precisely that Arabs and Jews can live together peacefully and in a mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship. History also makes it clear that as heir to the Islamic tradition of opennes and tolerance the Arab people have at hand the moral resources adequate for the forging of any such fraternal relationship. Will they choose to fall back on that heritage appropriating its resources, or must they go down the devious paths of narrow, self-centered nationalism charted for them by the modern West? Israel for its part, however, will be called upon to renounce its present form as an outpost of Western political influence, its quasiracist character, and its blind and arrogant faith in military supremacy as the answer to its problems. As long as Israel retains its present form it will inevitably remain isolated not only from the larger human community in the Near East, but also from the moral resources of its own heritage - a heritage as rich and humane as that to which the Arab world stands heir. We in the West must remember, however, that we have little right to stand over either the Arabs or the Jews in superior, patronizing judgment, for the root of the current dilemma is precisely that both Arabs and Jews have learned too much and too well from the West. If they can unlearn, or modify, what they have learned in the light of their own traditions and historical experiences, there may be a way out of the present impasse.

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NOTES 1. See, e.g., Balâdhurî, Futüh al-Buldän. Cairo, 1956, pp. 162, and 167-169; Tabari, Tärlkh ar-Rusül wa'l-Mulük. De Goeje ed., Leiden, 1879-1881, vol. I, p. 2403; and Ibn Athîr, al-Kämil fi't-Tärikh. Beirut, 1965, vol. II, p. 501. Cf., T. W. Arnold, The Preaching of Islam. London, 1913, p. 132; and S. D. Goitein, Jews and Arabs; Their Contacts Through the Ages. Schocken Books. New York, 1964, pp. 62 ff. 2. S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews. New York, 1957, vol. Ill, p. 93. 3. Goitein, Op. cit. p. 63. 4. While it is true that many Christian communities also welcomed the Arab armies, it must not be forgotten that the conquest did not have the same long-term meaning for Christians as for Jews. In contrast to Christianity which gradually declined in the Arab-Muslim world (and, in some areas, virtually disappeared), Jewish communities in many regions not only continued to survived but flourished (cf., Baron, Op. cit. vol. II, pp. 110 ff.). 5. Surah II. p. 256. 6. Cf., Goldziher, Vorlesungen über den Islam. Darmstadt, 1963. pp. 32 ff. 7. For a fuller explanation of this term and its legal content, see C. Cahen, "Dhimma", in Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. II, pp. 227-231. 8. Arnold, Op. cit. p. 61. 9. L. Gardet, La cité musulmane vie sociale et politique. Paris, 1961, p. 58. 10. Goitein, Op. cit. p. 111. 11. A. Mez, The Renaissance of Islam. London, 1937, p. 58.; Cf., A. von Kremer, Culturgeschichte des Orients unter den Chalifen. Wien, 1875-1877, vol. I, p. 188. 12. C. Roth, A Short History of the Jewish People. London, 1936, p. 271. 13. See Goitein, Op. cit. pp. 125 ff. 14. C.f., Goldziher, Op. cit. pp. 32 ff. 15. Baron, Op. cit. vol. Ill, p. 172.

JOHN H. MARKS

2 The Problem of Palestine

The Palestine problem, which today involves achieving peace between Israelis and Arabs, was created and is basically sustained by the western world. The roots of the problem lie in the Middle Ages when large numbers of persecuted Jews left Christian states for the milder regimes of the East, and in the 17th century when European powers began seeking first to penetrate and later to control Near Eastern territories, in order share in the luxury trade further east. These two roots with their more recent tentacles underlie and support the present world dilemma in Palestine. The United Nation's partition of Palestine in 1947 and the subsequent recognition by member nations of the new state of Israel simply placed the old problem of what was to happen to Palestine in a new setting, and the twentieth century confrontation between Israel and her Arab neighbors has exposed to view hidden ramifications of the problem. A brief account of events leading up to the present political impasse is the story of this paper. The spread of Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries brought to the Jews in Palestine a welcome relief from Christian and Byzantine persecution.1 Under the Muslims Medieval Jewish communities flourished in parts of the Arab Muslim Empire, while Christianity was gradually disappearing from the Arab world.2 Jewish growth under Muslim domination did not result from special privilege so much as from Jewish alliance with the Arabs in their wars of conquest. Jews considered Muslim domination preferable to Christian oppression, while the formerly dominant Christians sought to escape their new inferior position. The Arabs guaranteed to non-Muslims free exercise of their religion so long as their conduct remained unoffensive to Muslims. Notwith-

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standing this general religious tolerance, however, Muslims did restrict Jews and Christians from holding government posts, from the use of riding-animals, and from building new synagogues or churches. The law enjoined Muslims from securing the services of Christian or Jewish doctors, discriminated economically against non-Muslims by doubling customs' duties on their merchandise, rejected in the courts nonMuslim witness against a Muslim, and in general made of the nonMuslim population second-class communities. The discriminatory laws were not always enforced, but it has been reasonably asserted that even where they were, the position of the non-Muslims under Arab Islam was on the whole "far better than that of the Jews in Medieval Christian Europe." 3 Conditions varied, of course, according to the general state of Muslim society and the strength and influence of the nonMuslim communities. The Crusades brought much of Palestine under Christian rather than Arab control, but when the last crusaders were finally driven back to Europe in 1303 Palestine was left a Muslim country of peasants and bedouin. The remaining Christian minority increased slowly, but the Jewish communities continued to shrink in size, while for two centuries Palestine remained a provincial area under Egyptian control. Then, in 1516, the vigorous Ottoman, Selim I (1512-1520), drove the aged Egyptian ruler and his armies from Palestine, and authority in Palestine passed from the Mamluks of Egypt to the Ottomans of Turkey. For the next three hundred years Palestine ceased to engage more than stereotyped European interest while the European powers discovered and developed the New World. Indeed an archaeologist and historian of Palestine declared in 1912 that Palestine during Ottoman rule had no history, and that verdict has generally remained unchallenged by western historians whose interests tend to follow the fortunes of their own states.4 In Europe, however, the Inquisition had expelled the Sephardic Jews from Spain in 1492. Since France was closed to them also, these refugees settled in Italy, North Africa and the Levant, only to be driven from Italy in the middle of the 16th century. Both Selim and his successor, Suleiman "the magnificent" (1520-1566), were sympathetic to the plight of the homeless and offered them asylum in Ottoman territories.5 With Palestine thus again opened to them, the Jews immigrated in such large numbers they soon outnumbered the indigenous, Arabic-speaking Jewish population. Jerusalem, which in 1488 num-

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bered 70 Jewish families, harbored 1500 Jewish refugees at the turn of the century. The relatively new village of Safad in the province of Galilee received an even larger number of immigrants than Jerusalem and became a center for Jewish mysticism.6 There the first Hebrew press in Palestine was established in 1577.7 Tiberias, lying in ruins on the shore of the lake, was rebuilt between 1560 and 1565 and became a rival to Safad as a center for Jewish learning.8 Yet in spite of the welcome given to Jews early in the century, by its close the numbers of Jews in Palestine were considerably reduced. Plague took its toll. In addition, the indifference of Turkish governors to the welfare of their subjects9 freed local bedouin tribes, petty officials, Druzes and others to reduce the country to a level of desolation it had not known for centuries. "Traveller after traveller reported desert and marsh where there had been fertile fields, and ruins where there had been towns and villages."10 A visitor to Jerusalem in 1590 complained that of the city only part of the wall remained, and "all the rest is grasse, mosse and Weedes."11 Relief from Instanbul could not be expected, for the Turks were engaged first with the rising Austrian monarchy and later with the expanding Russian state. The invading Turks were defeated by Austrian forces at Vienna in 1683, and in the counter-offensive that developed against them were forced at the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699 to withdraw from most of Hungary. The victorious Austrians had thus made significant inroads into Ottoman territory, but this victory also disturbed commerce in the Mediterranean. As a result there dawned the recognition that henceforth European policy toward the Ottoman Empire should be to preserve it. The Ottoman Empire must be preserved to check the expansion of any European power into the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean or the Levant. Clearly Palestine's history under Ottoman rule was to become an extension of the struggles among European states and the gradually declining Ottoman state for control of Ottoman territories. British interest in the Near East also had been growing throughout the 16th century. Unable to share in direct trade with India after the Portuguese under Vasco da Gama had rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 and thenceforth secured the sea route to the East, and blocked from overland trade by Venetian and Genoese control of eastern Mediterranean ports, the British sought an overland route to India through Syria and Mesopotamia. After several Turkish sultans had

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granted British merchants trade privileges in Turkish dominions, Queen Elizabeth in January 1592 granted a charter to "The Governor and Company of Merchants of the Levant" to trade by land through Ottoman dominions with the East Indies. Thenceforth, even after England defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, chartered the East India Company in December 1600, and began using the Cape route to India for the bulk of her trade, the overland route remained important for the transport of mail and personnel. The company stationed an agent in Baghdad, responsible primarily for camel transport of mail between Baghdad and Damascus, and the maintenance of this corridor to the Indian ocean became a principle goal of British foreign policy.12 By the 18th century, therefore, maintenance of a European balance of power required "the independence and integrity" of Ottoman territory, as the British were later to insist.13 The Turkish state, too weak to threaten either sovereignty or independence of the European states, was to be preserved from dismemberment. During the century Russia expanded gradually southward until in 1774 Catherine the Great (17621796) forced the defeated Turks to sign a peace treaty at Kuchuk Kainarji on the Danube, the terms of which gave Russia control of the northern shores of the Black Sea, admitted Russian ships to the Straits, and gave Russia the right to intervene in Turkish affairs to protect the interests of Christians anywhere in the Ottoman empire. (This final provision led to bitter rivaltries among the Christian communities in Palestine and set a precedent for European interference in Palestinian affairs.) But the European powers stopped her from proceeding further by the threat of general war and the offer of a portion of Poland in exchange for letting Turkey off lightly. The Turkish state, thus embroiled in the affairs of Europe, was able to give little attention to Palestine beyond collecting its "tribute."14 The campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte at the close of the century brought the first radical change in the situation of Palestine, making it, as it had once been in the first millennium B.C., a bridge between Egypt and the East. Napoleon's abortive Syrian campaign awakened his rivals to the danger of forfeiting that bridge to France, and William Pitt (1759-1806) in order to counter the French and preserve England's route to the East, proposed the preservation and maintenance of Turkey's "integrity" as an article of British foreign policy.15 The debate in Europe, whether the Ottoman state should be preserved or allowed to die, stretched over the 19th century.16 But the Ottoman Empire

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43

declined to its eventual dismemberment in the disaster of 1914. It was followed by the creation of the Near Eastern "mandates" and the world's present woes in the Near East. Whatever the reasons for Napoleon's landing at Alexandria on July 1, 1798, two consequences of his brief Near Eastern campaign have endured. One was the irreversible attraction of Palestine into the vortex of western world politics; the other was the stimulation of western interest in Palestinian history, which began with the work of the archaeological and scientific expedition that accompanied Napoleon to Egypt. Both consequences have endured as elements in the problem of Palestine. Napoleon's intentions for Palestine are not known for certain, and his attitude toward the Jews was not consistent. The evidence strongly suggests, however, that for a short period in the spring of 1799 he was a Zionist.17 Bonaparte seems to have been the first to recognize the political advantage accruing to the state that could organize and enlist for itself the support of European Jews by offering them Palestine in exchange for their assistance. A dispatch from Istanbul appeared in the official French Gazette, the Moniteur Universel, on May 22, 1799, attributing to Bonaparte a proclamation inviting the Jews of Africa and Asia to march under his banner for the restoration of ancient Jerusalem. It seems clear that news of a proclamation was released with Napoleon's permission, even though the proclamation itself does not exist in any of the Napoleonic papers. The notice, moreover, reveals as much about contemporary Jewish dreams as it suggests about Napoleon's political acumen. Had there been no contemporary Jewish aspirations for a restoration of Israel, Napoleon's suggestion would not have arisen. A letter addressed to his Jewish brethren by a French Jew in 1798, however, expresses what must have been current Jewish sentiment: "We are more than six millions of people scattered over the face of the earth; we possess immense riches: let us employ the means that are in our power to restore us to our country. The moment is propitious, and to profit by it is our duty." The writer then suggests the election by world Jewry of a legislative and administrative Council to oversee the proposed Jewish occupation of southern Palestine and Lower Egypt ("liable to such arrangements as shall be agreeable to France"). That geographic position, he continues, "which is the most advantageous in the world, will render us, by the navigation of the Red Sea, masters of the commerce of India, Arabia and the South and East of Africa." His final argument for

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mutual cooperation between Jews and France was a bold quid pro quo: "The Council shall offer to the French government, if it will give us the assistance necessary to enable us to return to our country, and to maintain ourselves in the possession of it, 1) Every pecuniary indemnification, and 2) To share the commerce of India, etc., with the merchants of France only."18 Napoleon must have known that suggestions like this were being advanced, for in 1807, some years after the failure of his Syrian campaign, he issued an order to convene a Jewish Sanhedrin (Supreme Council) in Paris. This body assembled early in February of that year "to reconstruct European Jewry on French imperial lines, with a religious center in Paris."19 From this one may surmise that Napoleon's political motivation was to unite world Jewry behind his imperial ambitions. The Jewish deputies to the Council were apparently alert to the political circumstances of their meeting, for they believed that Napoleon was planning their "political redemption, in the land of Egypt and on the banks of the Jordan." A contemporary English commentator could thus hazard the supposition that Napoleon's "gigantic mind entertains the idea of re-establishing them (the Jews) in Palestine, and that this forms a part of his plan respecting Egypt, which he is well known never to have abandoned."20 The English thus recognized any French plan to restore Palestine to the Jews to be "a political instrument in the hands of an ambitious conqueror." That political possibility did not go unrecognized by statesmen in Austria either. In his book, Memoirs upon the Jews, published in 1797, Charles Joseph, Prince de Ligne, a general, nobleman and adviser at the imperial court in Vienna, reasoned as follows: "If the Turks have a little common sense they will try and attract the Jews to them in order to make them their political, military and financial advisers, their police agents, their merchants, in short to become initiated by their advisers into all wherein lies the strength and weakness of the Christian states. Finally, the Sultan will sell to them the Kingdom of Judah, where they would act better than aforetimes . . . . The Jews who would have found again their country would be compelled to make therein flourish the arts, industry, agriculture and the commerce of Europe. Jerusalem, a horrible nest at present, giving a heartache to the pilgrims who come there now, would become a splendid capital." 21

Thus at the beginning of the 19 th century, five hundred years after the last of the crusaders had been driven from the Near East, Palestine

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45

was again part of the Mediterranean world rather than a remote eastern center for a few western pilgrims. Napoleon's expedition to Egypt and Palestine was an attempt to cut England's overland ties with India. Beyond that, however, he brought to Egypt the printing press, which was to transform Egyptian education and intellectual life, and a body of scholars to investigate and describe this ancient, new world. The publication of their work between 1809 and 1828, the justly famous Description de I'Egypte in nineteen folio volumes, together with the accidental discovery of the trilingual (Greek, Demotic and Hieroglyphic) Rosetta Stone in 1799, was the start of archaeological, linguistic and historical discovery that has continued in the Near East to the present day. In the wake of that discovery Christian scholars were drawn irresistibly to Palestine to startling opportunities for biblical research. England meanwhile steadily increased its political and economic position in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and increasing Jewish longing for Palestine culminated finally in the first Zionist Congress at Basel on August 29, 1897, almost exactly one hundred years after Napoleon had landed in Egypt. The history of Palestine during the century after Napoleon is marked by the effects on that country of European struggles for control of the Ottoman state or its terriories,22 the steady arrival of increasing numbers of western travellers and scholars, and the remarkable surge in Jewish immigration. These interrelated facts were the foundation for the ugly political impasse that appeared in Palestine at mid-twentieth century. The magnitude of Jewish immigration to Palestine during the 19th century is not everywhere appreciated. For Israelis it supports their claim to the land; for Arabs it emphasizes the extent and long history of their present, acute struggle for their own land. Muslim rulers seem seldom to have refused Jews from foreign countries permission to settle in Palestine, a privilege not always granted to western Christians,23 and the 19th century was no exception. The Jewish population of Palestine in 1845 was 12,000; by 1882 it had doubled; in 1895 the number had reached 47,000, and on the eve of the first World War it had grown to 85,000. Between 1914 and 1936 Jewish population in Palestine quadrupled, mostly as a result of immigration.24 In 1873 Jews were estimated to be increasing in Jerusalem at the rate of 12001500 per year, and Claude Conder reported in 1894 to the Society known as the Palestine Exploration Fund that when he first saw Jerus-

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alem in 1872 there were only a few scattered villas outside its walls. But at the time of his report "there is now a Jewish suburb, extending for a mile along the western r o a d . . . I suppose that the present Jewish population of the Holy City, (out of a total population of 51,000 25 ) cannot be reckoned at less than 40,000 souls, which represents a trebling of the total population in twenty years."26 The Jewish settlement was primarily in the cities. Of the 7000 Jews who settled in 1882, 4000 stayed in Jerusalem, 2000 in Jaffa, and 1000 in Hebron.2? Most of the immigrants came from Europe to escape a Christian fanaticism far more bitter than Muslim discrimination.28 In 1860, e.g., as a result of European indignation aroused at the kidnapping by the Church in Bologna two years earlier of a seven-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, presumably because he had been baptised into the Christian faith, there was organized in Paris the Alliance Israélite Universelle. This group was formed to defend Jewish rights wherever they might be attacked and to spread western education to the deprived Jewish communities of the world. The persecutions that began in 1881 in Russia, for reasons that remain obscure,29 sent great numbers of Jews to Palestine and led to the formation of a movement known as the "Lovers of Zion" (Choveve Zion). 30 The Dreyfus affair in 1894 drove Theodore Herzl (1860-1904) in 1896 to write his pamphlet, "The Jewish State," which heralded the modern Zionist organization.31 Earlier in the century affairs in Damascus and Rhodes had brought Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885) from England to Palestine to take up the cause of innocent Jewish martyrs and seek the establishment of Jewish refugee colonies in Palestine. Jewish national feeling has always been aroused and strengthened by Jewish suffering, and the strongest argument in the Jewish case for Palestine is the demand for security from oppression. One of Montefiore's last utterances summed up the rising mood of world Jewry: " I do not expect that all Israelites will quit their abodes in those territories in which they feel h a p p y . . . but Palestine must belong to the Jews, and Jerusalem is destined to become the seat of a Jewish Commonwealth"32 Not all immigrants came from the West. At mid-century a Zionist movement arose in Baghdad, "impelled by real love for Zion and Palestine," which led many Jews to leave their native city and immigrate to Palestine. Baghdad contained at the time a prospering Jewish community, boasting fifteen synagogues that were open and frequented for public worship. In the summer of 1868 this community established

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a society for promoting religious life in Baghdad, whose concerns were not limited to the local poor, but included especially the poor of the Holy Land. 33 The existence of these poor was well-known in the West. The Jews in Palestine in 1881 were described by one traveller as being "for the most part of a mendicant c l a s s . . . deprived of that protection they would enjoy under the auspices of a company and a charter securing them a certain amount of self-government.34 Another exclaimed, "The town of Tiberias is chiefly remarkable for the exceeding filthiness of most of its streets, and especially in the Jews' quarter. How any civilized European Jew can see his people degraded as they are in Tiberias and then come back to his own gilded home in the west, and leave his brethren to wallow in such a mess beside that lovely lake, is beyond conception. Jews amongst us Gentiles in England have refinement, cleanliness, luxury, and elegance - why don't they send to the Rabbis of Galilee, at any rate, besoms and soap." 35 Conder, however, wrote of the Jews in Jerusalem in 1894 that "the trade of the city has fallen chiefly into Jewish hands, and they are no longer a timorous and oppressed minority, but something more resembling the masters of the city."36 And as early as 1843 a visitor to Damascus reported that "as a class the Jewish foreign merchants of Damascus (where the Jewish population was estimated at 5000) are the most wealthy."37 This made them a prey, of course, for Ottoman extortion, and Jewish bankers in Damascus seem to have been subject to particular abuse. 38 It is worth observing that the total number of Jews in the world in 1881 was estimated to be some six or seven million, distributed as follows: in America about one and a half million, in Europa about five million, in Asia over two hundred thousand, and in Africa nearly one hundred thousand. More than half of the European Jews (2,621,000) lived in Russia; 1,375,000 were under Austrian rule, more than half of whom were living in the Polish province of Galicia; half a million were in Germany, and more than a quarter million in Rumania, Turkey numbered more than one hunderd thousand, while Holland with seventy thousand, England and France with fifty thousand each, and Italy with thirty-five thousand comprised the rest. Of the Asiatic Jews twenty thousand were thought to be in India and twenty-five thousand in Palestine.39 What happened after 1881, obviously, was a major shift in Jewish population westward from eastern Europe, the horrible extermination of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, and continued massive Jewish immi-

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gration into Palestine. This phenomenon forced world attention to Palestine, where the problem of relief for persecuted Jews and the rights of local inhabitants became more and more acute. Christian interest in Palestine grew stronger with every increase in knowledge of biblical history. British residents and officials of the East India Company in Baghdad had revealed to the world early in the century some previously hidden splendors of Mesopotamian civilization, and as a result, in 1847, the first Assyrian room was inaugurated in the Louvre, followed shortly thereafter by a collection in the British Museum. The cuneiform script of Mesopotamia was slowly but surely deciphered and by 1857 an Assyrian text had been translated thus opening to the world the hitherto closed records of a civilization known only in snatches from the Bible and Herodotus. The stimulus given to biblical studies by this feat led to the establishment of the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1865, and by the end of the century scholars had begun to penetrate the mysteries of ancient Near Eastern history and civilization and to establish for themselves resident schools and research centers in Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Beirut. The majority of these men were students of biblical history, and their interest was primarily in the fortunes of ancient Israel. Conditioned by biblical reports of the slendors of the Davidic kingdom (ca. 1000 B.C.), they viewed the current state of Palestine40 as hopeless unless improved by some "Lovers of Zion" who would work enthusiastically for its improvement. They therefore encouraged the return of Palestine to the Jews who longed for it. 41 The American consul in Jerusalem revealed the increasing Zionist mood in his report of 1892, that to the consternation of those "who think that Palestine belongs to the Jews" practically no Jews arrived in Palestine during the previous year. 42 In the wake of the scholars came increasing numbers of travellers, who returned home with tales of their experiences and superficial observations about life in the Holy Land. Some travellers stayed long enough to understand local customs and recognize problems of land development. These men often concluded for themselves and convinced their statesmen at home that the best way to modernize the land was to encourage Jewish immigration. Palestine "wants capital and population," wrote Lord Shaftesbury in 1876. "The Jews can give it both . . . . It would be a blow to England if either of her rivals should get hold of S y r i a . . . . A nation must have a country. The old land, the old people. This is not an artificial experiment: it is nature, it is

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history."43 "It remains for England to decide," wrote Oliphant in 1881,44 "whether she will undertake the task of exploring (Palestine's) ruined cities, of developing its vast agricultural resources, by means of the repatriation of that race which first entered into its possession three thousand years ago, and of securing the great political advantages which must accrue from such a policy." Mr. Oliphant reminded the Ottoman Sultan45 that he would win the support of "a large section of the British public" if he would inaugurate a policy of restoring Palestine to the Jews, and he enunciated explicitly "the advantages of an alliance with the Jewish race, to any Power likely to become involved in the impending complications in the East, which may possibly involve a general war..." He wrote, "The nation that espoused the cause of the Jews and their restoration to Palestine would be able to rely upon their support in financial operations on the largest scale, upon the powerful influence which they wield in the press of many countries, and on their political cooperation in those countries - which would of necessity tend to paralyze the diplomatic and even hostile action of Powers antagonistic to the one with which they were allied. Owing to the financial, political, and commercial importance to which the Jews have now attained, there is probably no one Power in Europe that would prove so valuable an ally to a nation likely to be engaged in a European war, as this wealthy, powerful, and cosmopolitan race."46 Travellers occasionally reported examples of Jewish, Muslim and Christian relations. From these the secondary status in the Muslim country of the Jewish communities is evident. Also evident is the Arab-Jewish ability to live together in peace; the relations between Arabs and Jews were on the whole good.47 Oliphant reported in 188748 that a Jew who had accompanied him into the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem, "that most beautiful and sacred of Mohammedan temples," was not permitted "even to enter the street in which stands the Christian Church of the Holy Sepulchre." Basic Muslim attitudes were, however, prejudiced against Jews. Earlier, in 1870, the adventurer, J. MacGregor, who travelled through Palestine with his canoe, "The Rob Roy,"49 recorded that attitude on two occasions. Once his guide reprimanded an Arab, suspected of being partner to a plot on MacGregor's life, with the words, "And so to save him from drowning, or being lost, you thought it best to shoot him? Ah! dogs, brutes, pigs, Jews!" Another time MacGregor recollects, "Here, as well as some twenty years before, I heard men in Palestine call their fellows 'Jew'

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as the very lowest of all possible words of abuse." But MacGregor also knew Jews who had prosperity and status in their communities. He told of his two-days' stay with a Jewish family at Acre: "Among the busy group, when I landed, one said to me in good English, 'Come and have coffee with me.' It was just the very thing I wanted - a cup of coffee - so I went, nothing loath, and on the way he said, 'I wish to show you my young wife.' This seemed odd enough, but I was ready for any thing that might turn up. The lady was a clever Lancashire lass, who had been six years in this funny little town of Acre, and now she prattled Arabic like a Turk, and sat cross-legged on a divan, while her nargilleh gurgled its blue cloud. I staid two days, delighted with this kind Jewish family." 50

Nearly forty years later, when the news came to Jerusalem in August, 1908, that a constitution had been adopted in Turkey, there was jubilation in the city. R. A. S. Macalister reported: 51 "Next the whole mob, Muslims, Jews, and Christians, went in a body to the Haram - the most sacred enclosure of the Holy Rock, the ancient Temple Site, where without a permit and a military escort none save the followers of Muhammad dare set their foot - each singing songs of their respective Faiths. For once there was neither Jew nor Greek - all alike were Ottomans! Supercilious old Muslim sheikhs and bigoted Jewish rabbis might be seen embracing in the streets, on all sides was heard the glad cry: 'hurriyeh - liberty'!" In the west, however, the political event that was to engulf and rend Palestine, i.e., the eventual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, was developing. Three stages may be distinguished. The first began in the aftermath of the Turkish repulse from Vienna at the peace of Karlowitz in 1699 abready mentioned. It was a period during which the empire was held together for the most part because the jealous European powers were unwilling to risk a general war for the sake of their own possible gains in the Ottoman dominions. But this European "hands off" policy could not last, partly because of Ottoman internal weakness. In 1805 the Albanian Mehmet Ali (lived 1769-1849) became pasha of Egypt. Profiting from the weakness of Turkish central authority under the sultan, Mahmoud II (1808-1839), he made himself practically independent of Istanbul, and between 1831 and 1839 his son Ibrahim overran Palestine and Syria. It was during this period of Mehmet's rule that western visitors were permitted to enter Palestine and Syria and open their first schools and hospitals.

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In 1839, however, the British answered an appeal from Mahmoud to intervene in the dispute between himself and Mehmet Ali. British intervention, which compelled Mehmet to withdraw from Syria, was of course intended to prevent any Russian diplomatic or territorial gains at Ottoman (and European) expense. It was a move intended to reduce Mehmet to "obedience and subordination to the Sultan," and thus preserve the "integrity" of the Ottoman Empire. Significantly, perhaps, the first British consul was appointed that same year to Jerusalem, for the British defeat of Mehmet Ali stirred discussion in England about what should be done with Syria and Palestine. Public sentiment was divided between returning the territories intact to Turkey and annexing Acre and Cyprus to guarantee England free overland passage to India.52 British policy, however, demanded the "integrity" of Turkey, and the territories were restored. One of the British policies respecting Turkey was that it "should apprentice itself to Europe," so that it might finally "emerge in the likeness of a European state,"53 able to withstand external pressures for its dissolution. Partly in response to western pressures for reform, but primarily to invigorate the empire so that it could deal with Europe as an equal and not as a European protectorate, the new Turkish sultan, Abdul Mejid (1830-1861), issued in 1839 the document known as Hatti-Sherif of Gulhane, in which he promised security of life, honor and property to all Ottoman subjects, without discrimination as to race or creed. This was the first step on the way to the new Turkish constitution of 1876. To Russia, however, the prospect of Ottoman modernization was unwelcome, for the Tsar (Nicholas I, 1825-1855) hoped to profit from any dismemberment of the declining Turkish Empire. Turkish and western resistance to this Russian hope precipitated the Crimean War (1853-1856), which involved ostensibly Russian imperial protection of Christians in Ottoman domains. In fact it was fought to keep the Russo-Turkish frontier inviolate. At the close of the war the powers meeting in Paris agreed jointly to maintain the "integrity" of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman government also renewed the reforms of 1839 in a new document, the Hatti-Humayoun, which gave non-Muslims equality before the law with Muslims and eligibility for the army and civil service. This reform-document was made part of the peace, and the Ottoman desire for reforms was accepted as genuine, the powers agreeing to give Turkey a chance to carry them through.54 The Crimean war inaugurated a second phase in the Ottoman decline.

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This was a period of reforms attemped at Istanbul along western lines, and it was marked by the "rule" of western ambassadors at Istanbul and western consuls at Jerusalem and Beirut.55 These foreign officials looked after the interest of Jews and Christians in addition to those of their own nationals and assisted in Palestine in resolving disputed Christian claims to holy sites. Reform in Turkey, however, proved for the time being to be abortive, and by the time Russia once more declared war on Turkey in 1877 in an effort at Pan-Slavism, Palestine was virtually independent of Istanbul. "Palestine was merely the bedraggled tassel of the bespattered and much buffeted Turkish fez, the emblem of a hated bureaucracy." 56 By then, however, the Suez Canal had been completed (1869) and Britain had become the principal stockholder in the company (1875). Russian success in the eastern Mediterranean would jeopardize Britain's seaway to the East, and when therefore, the Russians in 1877 forced Turkey to yield territories south of the Caucasus and west of the Black Sea, Britain clamored for war against Russia. General European war was averted, however, largely through the efforts of Bismarck, and with the treaty of Berlin in 1878 the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire began. So far as it affected the Near East, the initial break meant that Britain took Cyprus, and the French who 48 years earlier had occupied Algeria expanded into Tunisia. The peace satisfied no one, except perhaps the British, who, to guard their economic interests in Egypt and preserve order there landed troops in 1882, thus making Egypt a British protectorate. The French responded to British policy in Egypt by increasing their own control of North Africa. Soon the major European powers were involved in fateful scramble for Ottoman territories, and the world was ultimately catapulted into the war of 1914. In that war the Turks, seeking an ally against their old enemies, Russia, France and Great Britain, joined with Germany, and the Arab East with British assistance withdrew from the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, however, the Turkish government, regarding Jewish immigration into Palestine as dangerous, since most of the immigrants came from Russia, restricted immigration and attempted to prevent by any means possible the transfer of land ownership to Jews. In 1901 Arabs were forced to agree that they would not sell land to Jews or permit the building of churches or schools on their property, and the Zionism of Theodore Herzl and his followers in 1897 stiffened Turkish restrictions on Jewish immigration and land ownership. The Turkish

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government in 1899 issued passports to Jews good for three months maximum, but forbade them from becoming permanent residents in Palestine.57 Laurence Oliphant, who believed that Jewish settlement in Palestine would help to stabilize the Ottoman Empire, summed up the situation in 1887: "There are three prejudices which have operated against the colonization of Palestine by Jews, and which are all absolutely unsound, and these are first, that the Jew cannot become an agriculturalist; secondly, that the country is barren, and, thirdly, that it is unsafe. The real obstacle in the way to Palestine colonization does not lie in any of these directions, but in the fact that the government is most determinedly opposed to it."58 In 1908 a group of Turkish army officers, known as the "Young Turks" won control of the Ottoman government and restored the constitution of 1876, according to which elections were held and a parliament representing all regions of the Ottoman Empire was assembled. The immediate effect in Palestine was that thrill of rejoicing already reported above at the dawning of a new age of freedom. But the new constitution did not come properly to grips with the problems of adequate Arab representation in the government, the status of Arabic as an accepted, official language, or the thorny issue of government centralized at Istanbul or decentralized throughout the provinces. Turkish nationalism, represented by the "Young Turks", emphasized the distinction in the Ottoman Empire between Turks and Arabs, thus contributing to the rise of a sense of Arab destiny. This led finally to laws in 1913 and 1914 granting the provinces a large measure of local autonomy, but though life in Palestine remained essentially unchanged thereafter, Arab "loyalty" to the empire had been shaken. Then in August 1914 Jerusalem awoke to the fact that Palestine was part of a struggle that would radically change its history, its character, and its destiny, for the war of 1914 brought about finally the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.59 The crisis that had been developing throughout the 19th century in Palestine arrived at Britain's door in 1914 and at the world's 33 years later. The western allies in the war had attempted to buttress the Arab leaders, belief that their hopes for freedom and independence from Turkey rested with an Allied victory. If Germany and Turkey were not defeated, then hope for a favorable future in the Near East would be indefinitely postponed; independence for the Near Eastern principalities lay therefore in cooperation with the British and French to defeat the

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Marks

Turks. Similar efforts at persuasion and reassurance were made with respect to the Jews, as the letter of Mr. A. D. Balfour, dated November 2, 1917, to Lord Rothschild makes clear. That document was an official declaration of British sympathy with "Jewish Zionist aspirations." It expressed approval of "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" and pledged "to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing nonJewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." Obviously the British goal with regard to the Zionists was the same as that respecting the Arabs. It was to gain their political and economic support for the war effort against Turkey, and for the achievement of these goals Britain offered vague and contradictory promises to both groups. Some years later (May 25, 1925) Mr. Lloyd George in some brief remarks to the Jewish Historical Society in London said honestly, "It is not our conception, and I am certain it is not the conception of the Zionists, that anyone should be driven out of Palestine who does not want to go . . . . Palestine was never a land exclusively of Jews."60 British policy respecting Palestine was obviously far from precise. Zionist goals at the time were also ambivalent. Nahum Sokolow in 1919 disclaimed any Zionist intention of forming an independent Jewish state: "It has been said, and is still being obstinately repeated by anti-Zionists again and again, that Zionism aims at the creation of an independent 'Jewish State'. But this is wholly fallacious. The 'Jewish State' was never a part of the Zionist programme." 61 But at a demonstration conducted in the London Opera House on December 2, 1917 to express Zionist gratitude to the British government for the Balfour declaration, Moses Gaster had spoken somewhat differently. He had declared that Zionists "wanted to establish in Palestine an autonomous Jewish Commonwealth in the fullest sense of the word. They wanted Palestine to be Palestine of the Jews and not merely a Palestine for Jews. They wished the land to be again . . . a land of Israel. The ground must be theirs."62 Sokolow himself wrote, "Give to the Jews a footing on their own soil, house and home of their own: Palestine (and gradually the thinly populated neighboring distrits) can become a great outlet for Jewish population: Palestine can again be made to 'blossom like a rose', and be capable of supporting a great population as in the glorious days of David and Solomon."63 "Zionists want a common-

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wealth of Jewish colonization and labor, a settlement of Jewish pioneers and workers who will be able to create and develop a civilization of their own, undisturbed by any restrictions. This is possible only in Palestine, and is the paramount necessity of the whole Jewish people all over the world."64 In the light of statements like these Zionist disclaimers about an independent Jewish state sound hollow indeed. The allied effort in the Near East in 1915 was aimed at preventing Muslim acceptance that the war was a jihad, a holy war, support of which would be obligatory on all Muslims. Such an acceptance would have allied all Muslims from Africa to India with Germany and Turkey against Britain and France. For a declaration of jihad to have force, however, it would require the support of Hussein, Sharif of Mecca, guardian of the holy cities and of the Prophet's flag. Western intrigue, therefore, was directed at him and his son, Faisal, who acted as his emissary to the western leaders. The British High Commissioner in Egypt, Mr. A. Henry McMahon, after securing authority from his government, in October 1915 promised Hussein, in exchange for Arab support in the war, that Britain would with one exception "recognize and support the independence of the Arabs within the territories included in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sharif of Mecca." i.e., a western boundary consisting of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea up to Mersin. The British, seeking to protect themselves from trouble with the French, who claimed the area west from Damascus to the Sea, excepted from the Arab demands "the districts of Mersin and Alexandretta and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Hama, Homs and Aleppo."65 On the basis of this agreement Arabs entered the war on the side of Britain, and the Turks were defeated. After the war the allied victors assembled in Paris in the winter of 1919 " to reconstruct the world." In the process the Ottoman Empire disappeared, Syria and Lebanon going as League of Nations mandates to France, and Palestine and Iraq as mandates to Great Britain. Britain was now required to make good her vague promises both for the sake of her own national honor and to support the general principle of the Versailles treaty, namely, the rights of all peoples to national selfdetermination. President Wilson had stated the American position when he insisted, "one of the fundamental principles to which the United States adheres is the consent of the governed. From the point of view of the United States of America the only idea is whether France

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will be agreeable to the Syrians.... The only way to deal with the question is to discover the desires of the populations of the regions."66 Subsequently, in the summer of 1919 the American King-Crane Commission travelled through Syria and Palestine assembling opinion on the merits of self-determination. The report of the Commission showed that Zionist aims in Palestine were "practically complete dispossession of the non-Jewish inhabitants," and that "nine-tenths of the population were most emphatically against the entire Zionist programme."67 The Commission's report, however, was not reflected in the final document, the Covenant of the league of Nations, article 22 of which directed: "Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized, subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory." It had become clear, however, that the Zionists would have to encourage Jewish immigration in order to counterract the existing Arab majority, and the number of immigrants to be allowed in Palestine became a significant issue, particularly after outrages against the Jews in Europe began in the 1930s when increased Jewish immigration to England and the United States was not allowed.68 The Palestine Mandate was finally adopted in September 1923,69 "framed unmistakably in the Zionist interest."70 The document showed unawareness of the legitimate Arab complaint that their position within the mandate was left almost totally undefined, and it intensified their fears of a complete Jewish takeover of Palestine. Furthermore the Jews in Palestine looked for assistance from the world Zionist organization which appointed the Executive for Palestine, over whose appointment the Mandatory had no control. The Arabs, for their part, owned the land, and the continued success of their neighbors in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq in achieving by force some of their demands from the British and French, was not lost on the Palestinian Arabs. Riots occurred in Palestine in 1929, which led to the Hope-Simpson report that recommended a reduction in Jewish immigration into Palestine. Massive Zionist objection to that recommendation led to British explanations and consequently to renewed Arab charges of invincible Jewish influence in London. After 1929 the mandate gradually proved less and less workable as

The Problem of Palestine

57

Arab and Jewish expectations became irreconcilable. By 1936 it had become clear that British vague promises of twenty years previous could not either be repudiated or fulfilled. The situation in Palestine was more complex than ever, for a Jewish national home did in fact now exist, and Palestinian Arab nationalists were convinced that the Zionists alone prevented them from self-rule. Jews and Arabs, on the basis of those earlier promises and their partial implementation, now had rights in Palestine. Since the mandate would not work, perhaps a solution to conflicting claims would be geographical partition. This was the finding of the British Peel Commission that was in Palestine from November 1936 to January 1937. Arabs, however, rejected the idea categorically; Zionist leaders had much to gain by considering it, but the Zionist Congress meeting in Zurich in August 1937, though they endorsed the idea, rejected the proposed plan finally on the grounds that Jews had an "inalienable right" to all of Palestine. In May 1939, therefore, the British government, seeing World War II on the horizon, and seeking to preserve its position in the Near East, issued a White Paper, explaining that Britain had never contemplated subordination of "the Arabic population, language or culture in Palestine;" that British policy had never been that Palestine should become a Jewish state; that a further 75,000 Jews would be admitted to Palestine over the next five years, at the expiration of which time Jewish immigration would cease unless the Arabs of Palestine would agree to its continuance; and that the High Commissioner would control or prohibit the sale of land to Jews in certain areas.71 The Zionist Congress, meeting on the eve of the war at Geneva in August 1939, rejected the White Paper, but world attention was by then focused elsewhere. The Germans invaded Poland on September 1, and two days later Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. The plight of European Jews now became brutal, and extreme pressures were placed upon the Mandatory to offer fugitives asylum in Palestine, since offers of refuge were not abundant elsewhere.72 Since Britain did not relax the immigration quota of the White Paper, the war years in Palestine were filled with Jewish terrorism, while Britain tried desperately to control Jewish immigration, accepted Jewish assistance in personnel and materiel for the European and North African war effort,73 and sought generally to strengthen the Arab position while not abandoning the commitment to Jewish rights in Palestine. Jewish terrorist activities were directed against the British, whose au-

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thority in Palestine they considered to rest on force alone, to the continuing detriment and destruction of large numbers of European Jews.74 The Arab leader was the astute, ambitious and unscrupulous Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who never seems to have understood politics to be the art of the possible; his successors have, like him, continued to lament past grievances and to appeal for abstract justice, i.e., an end to the Jewish state in Palestine. After the war ended in May 1945, President Truman suggested in a letter to Clement Atlee in August that Britain take steps to end the Jewish problem in Europe by admitting 100,000 Jews into Palestine; but Parliament did not act. In November of the same year the United States government joined with Britain in a fresh look at Palestine as a National Home for Jewish refugees in Europe, but Secretary Bevin properly declared that Palestine alone could not solve the problem of European Jews, and the Committee in its report of May 1946 endorsed the future creation of a binational state together with the immediate conversion of the mandate into a United Nation's trusteeship. Finally in January 1947 Winston Churchill demanded in Parliament that Britain abandon the mandate and withdraw from Palestine. Shortly thereafter, at the end of February, the British government submitted the matter to the United Nations, which recommended unanimously in August 1947 that the mandate should be terminated and later on November 29, 1947, that the country should be partitioned. The Jews accepted the scheme; the Arabs rejected it by a general strike which soon became open war against the Jewish community. The British set the date for their withdrawal at midnight, May 14th, 1948. On that day, before the British began their announced withdrawal, the Jewish National Council formally declared the establisment of the Jewish state of Israel in the fertile area allotted to the Jews by the United Nations. The General Assembly of the United Nations admitted the new state as a member early in May 1949.75 The epilogue to the creation of Israel has been a continued state of war in Palestine, with no forseeable propect of peace. The Israeli case rests on the legality of the Balfour declaration, the mandate and the United Nations' recognition of Israel. The Arab position is that neither the Balfour declaration nor the mandate were legally valid. They point out also that in 1947 they were willing to accept the results of those illegal documents and even to admit Truman's 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine. What they refused to

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59

consider, however, was the Jewish Agency's talk of millions. But the crucial force in the conflict remains the Big-Power rivalry, with its focus in the Near East on Israel. It seems ironic that just as the reform and preservation of the Ottoman Empire became a focus for European political rivalry in the 19th century, so the preservation of the Israeli state is becoming in the 20th. Those who believed with Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) that "the integrity and independence of the Ottoman Empire are necessary to the maintenance of the tranquility, the liberty, and the balance of power in the rest of Europe"76 have as their latterday counterparts those who believe the state of Israel to be a major force for order and freedom in the Near East today, and a stronghold in the western struggle to contain Russian, i.e., Soviet Communist expansion.77 Palestine has become inextricably entwined in western world politics and now is a pivot around which revolves western and Near Eastern strategy. What the western powers decide still determines in large measure the fate of the Near East and the world. Alphonse de Lamartine's cold-blooded political realism of 1833, which led him to recommend what he considered to be the proper European action following the certain Ottoman collapse, remains essential to proper assessment of the problem of Palestine. "As I have just observed, in certain cases capability is right. The lesser powers ought not to embarrass the greater, in whom actually resides the preponderating voice, from which there is no appeal, in the great European council. When Russia, Austria, England, and France understand each other, and have promulgated a firm unanimous decision, who can prevent their executing whatever their dignity, their interests, and the welfare of the world shall dictate to them? - Certainly no one. The inferior diplomacies may murmur, may intrigue, may write; but the work will be accomplished, and the vigor of Europe renewed."78

But it may be that the Powers have overplayed their hands and that world peace rests with "the inferior diplomacies." Surely, if the future appears bleak, the western powers have themselves in large measure to blame.

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Marks

NOTES 1. For a concise treatment see James Parkes, A History of Palestine from 135 A.D. to Modern Times. New York, 1949, pp. 65-103. 2. See S. D. Goitein, Jews and Arabs; Their Contacts Through the Ages. New York, 1964, pp. 62-88, on which this discussion depends; Geoffrey Lewis, Turkey, 3d Ed. New York, 1965, p. 28. 3. Goitein, Op. cit. p. 84. This judgment is illuminated by Bernard Lewis. "If tolerance means the absence of persecution, then classical Islamic society was indeed tolerant to both its Jewish and its Christian subjects - more tolerant perhaps in Spain than in the East, and in either incomparably more tolerant than was Medieval Christendom. But if tolerance means the absence of discrimination, then Islam never was or claimed to be tolerant, but on the contrary insisted on the privileged superiority of the true believer in this world as well as in the next." "The Pro-Islamic Jews," Judaism, 17 (1968), p. 402. If to be tolerant means not to insist on "the privileged superiority of the true believer" Jews and Christians are scarcely in position to boast! Mrs. Wadi' Z. Haddad reports, e.g., a dirge used at Jewish burials in Aleppo. It illustrates the local Jewish attitude toward unbelievers. "O death, why did you take him? He never hit his wife, He never broke the Sabbath, He never advised a Muslim, He never befriended a Christian. O death, why did you take him?" 4. "If the nation be happy that has no history, then Palestine for the next three centuries was truly favored. A better illustration of the foolishness of this stupid proverb could not be found. The people of Palestine had no history - no relations with the great world around except through the intermediation of the Turkish tax-gatherer - no distractions or interest or resources or employments - nothing in short to occupy them save the ancient and unprofitable pastime of quarrelling among themselves." R. A. S. Macalister, A History of Civilization in Palestine. Cambridge, 1912, p. 118. 5. Non-Muslim religious communities were known as millets. In Ottoman times the major millets were the Jewish, Greek Orthodox and Armenian. The activities of these groups, including the settling of their disputes and collecting of their taxes, were largely the responsibility of their leaders who answered to the government. This system gave Jews a measure of independence that was often impossible in Europe. 6. M. Franco, Essai sur I'Histoire des Israelites de I'Empire Ottoman. Paris, 1897, pp. 42ff. 7. Jacob de Haas, History of Palestine. New York, 1934, p. 335. 8. de Haas, Op. cit. p. 337. 9. H. A. R. Gibb and H. Bowen, Islamic Society and the West. London, 1950, vol. I, pp. 207ff. 10. Parkes, Op. cit. p. 170. 11. de Haas, Op. cit. p. 338. 12. John Bagot Glubb, Britain and the Arabs. London, 1959, pp. 23ff.; J. C.

The Problem of Palestine

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

61

Hurewitz, Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East, a Documentary Record: 1535-1914. Princeton, 1956, pp. 5-15. Elie Kedourie, England and the Middle East. London, 1956, p. 10. See the discussion by Gibb and Bowen, Op. cit. Vol. I, pp. 200-234: "Government and administration in the Arab Provinces." See Kedourie, Op. cit. chap. 1: "The Bases of English Policy in the Middle East, 1830-1914." Alphonse de Lamartine, early in the century after a trip to the Near East made in 1832-1833, declared that the Ottoman state was ready to fall. Therefore, he said, prophetically as it turned out, "Let destiny accomplish its purposes - observe, wait and be r e a d y . . . . Let a congress be assembled of the principal powers bordering on the Ottoman empire, or having important interests in the Mediterranean, to establish the principle that Europe withdraws from all action or direct influence upon the internal affairs of Turkey, and abandons it to its own vitality and the chances of its destiny; and to agree beforehand, that in case of the fall of this empire, whether by a revolution at Constantinople, or by successive dismemberments, the European powers shall take, under the title of protectorates, such portions of its dominions as shall have been assigned to each by the stipulations of the congress..." A Pilgrim to the Holy Land. New York, 1848, vol. 2, pp. 303f. Philip Guedalla, Napoleon and Palestine. London, 1925, p. 31. The available material has been assembled by Nahum Sokolow, History of Zionism. London, 1919, vol. I, pp. 63-66; vol. II, pp. 220ff. Cited by Sokolow, Op. cit. vol. II, pp. 221f. Ibid. vol. I, p. 83. Ibid. vol. I, p. 87. Ibid. vol. I, p. 90. See the discussion of Kedourie, hoc. cit. Parkes, Op. cit. p. 179. F. Notestein, "Population Problems of Palestine," Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 25 (October 1945), pp. 327f; Parkes, Op. cit. p. 275, gives the 1914 population as between 90,000 and 100,000 distributed as follows: 50,000 in Jerusalem, 12,500 in Safad, and 12,000 in Jaffa-Tel Aviv. de Haas, Op. cit. p. 438. C. R. Conder, "The Future of Palestine," in Palestine Exploration Fund, The City and the Land. 1894, p. 45. de Haas, Op. cit. p. 438. See Laurence Oliphant, The Land of Gilead. New York, 1881, p. 15; Sokolow, Op. cit. vol. I, p. 112. But see Parkes, Op. cit. p. 267. "In 1881 the Tsar Alexander II was murdered, and the bureaucracy, seeking for a scapegoat, laid the blame on the Jews." M. L. Margolis and A. Marx, A History of the Jewish People. Philadelphia, 1927, pp. 69Iff. Ibid., pp. 702ff. Cited by Sokolow, Op. cit. vol. I, p. 120.

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33. David Solomon Sassoon, A History of the Jews in Baghdad. Letchworth, 1949, pp. 146ff., 173. 34. Laurence Oliphant, Land of Gilead, p. 17. See Bernard Lewis, Loc. cit. "European travellers to the East in the age of liberalism and emancipation are almost unanimous in deploring the degraded and precarious position of Jews in Muslim countries, and the dangers and humiliations to which they were supject." Oliphant (p. 377) made some amusing remarks about the need for encouraging Muslim financial selfishness that cast a revealing light on life in Palestine for Muslims of the period and laid the foundation for his argument that Palestine should be given to those who can make it bloom, namely, the Jews. He wrote: "It is much more difficult to satisfy the pecuniary expectations of Christians than of Moslems: indeed, one would imagine that it was rather the Koran than the Bible which denounced the love of money as being the root of all evil - so much keener are Christian than Moslem cupidities; but as the result of a more enlightened financial selfishness is a higher state of civilization, I suppose it should be encouraged. Unless we can stimulate the Moslem to devote his whole energies to preying upon his neighbor, and can increase his greed for money and his necessities generally, the cause of reform in Turkey is hopeless. I am not now speaking of the bureaucratic class, who have been either educated in Europe or taught by contact with enlightened foreigners how 'to turn an honest penny' - but of the simple peasantry and provincial folk generally, who are not mixed up in administrative vices, and who suffer from the absence of those avaricious instincts which enable Christians to thrive and prosper when the Moslem earns but a scanty living - not because he is less industrious, but because he is less covetous and astute." 35. J. MacGregor, The Rob Roy on the Jordan. New York, 1870, p. 389. 36. Loc. cit. 37. Cited by Sokolow, Op. cit. vol. I, p. 75. 38. Gibb and Bowen, Op. cit. vol. I, p. 224. 39. Oliphant, Op. cit. p. 16. 40. Parkes, Op. cit. p. 170. "It was in the early part of the 19th century that the cumulative effect of centuries of neglect and destruction (in Palestine) reached its culmination." As late as 1925 David Lloyd George complained, "There are about 600,000 Arabs in Palestine, which once held millions." See Philip Guedalla, Op. cit. p. 53. 41. See Albert M. Hyamson, Palestine Under the Mandate, 1920-1948. London, 1950, p. 12; de Haas, Op. cit. pp. 428ff; The story of Jewish colonization of Palestine is told by Hyamson, "Palestine, the Rebirth of an Ancient People. New York, 1917, chaps. 10-14. 42. Cited by de Haas, Op. cit. p. 440. 43. Cited by Sokolow, Op. cit. vol. I, p. 209. 44. Oliphant, Op. cit. p. 29. 45. Ibid. pp. 405f. 46. In the mid-twentieth century such an argument would evoke a charge of anti-Semitism, but in 1919 Nahum Sokolow (Op. cit. vol. I, p. 207) could assign Oliphant "a place of honour in the realm of England's Zionism."

The Problem 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

of

Palestine

63

de Haas, Op. cit. p. 441. Haifa or Life in Modern Palestine. Edinburgh, 1887, p. 298. The Rob Roy on the Jordan. New York, 1870, p. 273. Ibid. p. 447. Op. cit. p. 127. The situation is summarized by Sokolow, Op. cit. vol. I, pp. 104ff. E. Kedourie, Op. cit. p. 13. The Russian defeat by England, France and Turkey left Russian influence in Palestine intact, and architectural evidences of it are still a prominent part of the Jerusalem skyline. Great Britain sent a consul to Jerusalem in 1838; France, Prussia and Sardinia followed in 1843, and the United States in 1844. In 1849 the Sardinian consul was replaced by an Austrian. Spain sent a representative in 1854. A Russian consul arrived in Beirut in 1839. de Haas, Op. cit. p. 434. Ibid. p. 442. Haifa or Life in Modern Palestine, 2d ed. London, 1887, p. 62. de Haas, Op. cit. p. 449. In Philip Guedalla, Op. cit. p. 52. Op. cit. vol. I, pp. xxiv f. Reported by Sokolow, Ibid. vol. II, p. 109. Ibid., vol I, p. xxiii. Ibid., p. xxvi. Sokolow stated the objectives of Zionism (p. xxv): "A home for Jews who are materially or morally suffering. A Home for Jewish education, learning and literature. A source of idealism for Jews all over the world. A place in which Jews can live a healthy Jewish life. A revival of the language of the Bible. The resurrection by civilization and industry of the old home of our fathers, long neglected and ruined. The creation of a sound, strong Jewish agricultural class." See E. Kedourie, Op. cit. chap. 5; J. M. N. Jeffries, Palestine: The Reality. New York, 1939, chap. 6; George Antonius, The Arab Awakening. Philadelphia, 1938. Cited in Jeffries, Op. cit. p. 272. ibid. pp. 299f. The question of immigration is discussed by Parkes, Op. cit. pp. 309f; 320; A. M. Hyamson, Palestine Under the Mandate. London, 1950, chap. 6; J. B. Glubb, Op. cit. p. 145. The text is given in Jeffries, pp. 547-553. Notestein, Op. cit. p. 18. J. C. Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine. New York, 1950, pp. lOlff. It has been suggested that Zionists exploited the situation, devoting their efforts to transporting helpless fugitives from Europe illegally to Palestine, in order to strengthen their cause in Palestine, rather than using their power to find asylum for them elsewhere. Glubb, Op. cit. p. 280. These trained men later formed the cadry of the Jewish defense army, the Haganah. See Parkes, Op. cit. pp. 347f.

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75. F o r a full account of Palestine since 1936, against the background of the second World War, see J. C. Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine. New York, 1950. 76. See J. C. Hurewitz, Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East, Document 46. 77. F o r a discussion of the problem see, e.g., Ralph Magnus, "Political-Strategic Interests," American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, United States Interests in the Middle East, Analysis 17 (October 1968), pp. 5-38. A prevailing American view was given by Martin Luther King, shortly before his death, to the Rabbinical Assembly of the international association of Conservative Rabbis in the U.S.: "Israel is one of the great outposts of democracy in the world. It is a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy." Quoted in "Land of the Bible Newsletter," published by the Israel Information Services, 48 (May 1968), p. 1. 78. Op. cit. pp. 309f.

NOAM CHOMSKY

3

Nationalism and Conflict in Palestine

These remarks are based on a talk delivered at a forum of the Arab Club of MIT. I am grateful to many Arab and Israeli students for their helpful comments and criticism. From many conversations with them, I feel that they are much closer to one another, in their fundamental aspirations, than they sometimes realize. It is this belief that encourages me to speculate about what may appear to be some rather distant prospects for reconciliation and cooperative effort. There can be few things more sad than the sight of young people who are, perhaps, fated to kill one another because they cannot escape the grip of fetishism and mistrust. Before discussing the crisis in the Middle East, I would like to mention three other matters. The first has to do with my personal background and involvement in this issue. Secondly, I would like to mention reservations I feel about discussing this topic on a public platform. And finally, I want to stress several factors that limit the significance of anything I have to say. Ordinarily, these matters might be out of place, but in this case I think they are appropriate. They may help the reader to place these comments in a proper context and to take them as they are intended. To begin with some personal background: I grew up with a deep interest in the revival of Hebrew culture associated with the settlement of Palestine. I found myself on the fringes of the left wing of the Zionist youth movement, never joining because of certain political disagreements, but enormously attracted, emotionally and intellectually, by what I saw as a dramatic effort to create, out of the wreckage of European civilization, some form of libertarian socialism in the Middle East. My sympathies were with those opposed to a Jewish state and

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concerned with Arab-Jewish cooperation, those who saw the primary issue not as a conflict of Arab and Jewish rights, but in very different terms: as a conflict between a potentially free, collective form of social organization as embodied in the Kibbutz and other socialist institutions on the one hand, and, on the other, the autocratic forms of modern social organization, either capitalist or state capitalist, or state socialist on the Soviet model. In 1947, with the UN partition agreement, this point of view became unrealistic, or at least unrelated to the actual drift of events. Prior to that time it was perhaps not entirely unrealistic. And again, I think, today this may be a realistic prospect, perhaps the only hope for the Jewish and Arab inhabitants of the old Palestine. I should say, at the outset, that my views have not changed very much since that time. I think that a socialist bi-nationalist position was correct then, and remains so today. Implicit in this judgment are certain factual assumptions regarding the prospects for Arab-Jewish cooperation based on an interpretation of interests along other than national lines. These assumptions are not solidly grounded, and are surely open to challenge, as is the implicit value judgment concerning the desirability of a socialist bi-national community as compared to a subdivision of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states or the establishment of a single Jewish or Arab state in the whole region that would preserve no form of communal autonomy. These are the questions that I would like to explore, quite tentatively, and subject to reservations that I will mention. Returning to my personal experience, the partition plan seemed to me at best a dubious move, and perhaps a catastrophic error. Of course, I shared the general dismay over the subsequent violence and the forceable transfer of populations. A few years later I spent several very happy months working in a Kibbutz and for several years thought very seriously about returning permanently. Some of my closest friends, including several who have had a significant influence on my own thinking over the years, now live in Kibbutzim or elsewhere in Israel, and I retain close connections that are quite separate from any political judgments and attitudes. I mention all of this to make clear that I inevitably view the continuing conflict from a very specific point of view, colored by these personal relationships. Perhaps this personal history distorts my perspective. In any event, it should be understood by the reader.

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67

Let me turn next to certain reservations that I have about discussing the topic at all. These reservations would be less strong in an Israeli context, where my point of view might at least be a reasonable topic for discussion, though it would not be widely shared, I presume. The American context is quite different. In general, the spectrum of political thinking in the United States is skewed sharply to the right as compared with the other Western democracies, of which Israel is essentially one. Interacting with the narrow conservatism that dominates American opinion is an ideological commitment to a perverse kind of "pragmatism" (as its adherents like to call it). This translates into practice as a system of techniques for enforcing the stability of an American-dominated world system within which national societies are to be managed by the rich in cooperation with a "meritocratic elite" that serves the dominant social institutions, the corporations and the national state that is closely linked to them in its top personnel and conception of the "national interest." In this highly ideological country, where political commitments often border on the fanatic, the question of cooperation in the common interest can barely be raised, without serious miscomprehension. Specifically, there is little likelihood of a useful discussion of the possibilities for Arab-Jewish cooperation to build a socialist Palestinian society when the terms are set by the conservative coercive "pragmatism" of American opinion. It is, furthermore, characteristic of American ethnic minorities that they tend to support the right-wing forces in the national societies to which they often retain a cultural and economic connection. The American Jewish community is no exception. The American Zionist movement has always been a conservative force within world Zionism, and tended towards maximalist and strong nationalist programs at a time when this was by no means typical of the Palestinian settlement itself. To cite just one case, the Zionist Organization of America was, I believe, the first organized segment of world Zionism to formulate as an official doctrine "that Palestine be established as a Jewish commonwealth" and to condemn any program that denies this "fundamental principle," even the program of the politically rather conservative Ihud group in Palestine, which was specifically repudiated (October, 1942).1 At the Basle Congress of the World Zionist Organization in 1946, the first after the war, Chaim Weizmann was impelled to condemn the nationalist extremism of the American delegation.2 Today, it seems to me that this general conservatism and nationalist extremism is harmful

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to the long-range interests of the people of Israel as well as to the search for a just peace; in any event, it has helped create an atmosphere in the United States in which discussion and exploration of the basic issues is at best quite difficult. An Israeli writer like Amos Oz, for whom the abandonment of the Jewish State "is a concession we could not make and shall never be able to make," can nevertheless appreciate the absolute validity of the right of the Palestinian Arabs to national selfdetermination in Palestine: "This is our country; it is their country. Right clashes with right. 'To be a free people in our own land' is a right that is universally valid, or not valid at all." He sees the conflict as a tragedy, "a clash between total justice and total justice... We are here - because we can exist nowhere but here as a nation, as a Jewish State. The Arabs are here because Palestine is the homeland of the Palestinians, just as Iraq is the homeland of the Iraqis and Holland the homeland of the Dutch." The Jews have no objective justification other than "the right of one who is drowning and grasps the only plank he can." The Palestinian Arabs understand the meaning of Zionism only too well, he says; they regard themselves, with justice, "as the despoiled owners of the whole country, with some reluctantly accepting the situation and some not accepting it at all."3 Similarly, General Moshe Dayan speaks quite clearly of the justice of the Arab position: "It is not true that the Arabs hate the Jews for personal, religious or racial reasons. They consider us - and justly, from their point of view - as Westerners, foreigners, invaders who have seized an Arab country to turn it into a Jewish state."4 Speaking at the funeral of a murdered friend, just before the Sinai campaign of 1967, Dayan said: "We must beware of blaming the murderers. Who are we to reproach them for hating us? Colonists who transform into a Jewish homeland the territory they have lived in for generations."5 In a pro-Zionist Israeli journal, a senior official of the government of Israel can propose that formal sovereignty should be ceded to a bi-national Palestinian Union ("a constitutional monarchy headed by the present ruler of the Kingdom of Jordan," "a union of Jewish and Arab settlement areas, each of which will be guaranteed autonomy in matters of culture, education, religion and welfare").6 I mention these examples, which can be multiplied, to illustrate a significant difference between the Israeli and the American Jewish communities. In the latter, there is little willingness to face the fact

Nationalism

and Conflict in Palestine

69

that the Palestinian Arabs have suffered a monstrous historical injustice, whatever one may think of the competing claims. Until this is recognized, discussion of the Middle East crisis cannot even begin. Amos Oz introduces his essay by deploring the fact that "anyone who stands up and speaks out in these days risks being stoned in the market place and being accused of Jewish self-hate or of betraying the nation or desecrating the memory of the fallen." To the American Jewish community, these words apply quite accurately, more so than to Israel, so far as I can determine. This is most unfortunate. Political hysteria benefits no one. The barriers that have been raised to any serious discussion of the issues will only diminish what meager possibilities may exist for peaceful reconciliation. Finally, I want to emphasize that I approach these questions with no particular expert knowledge or even intimate contact, nothing more than what I have just described. Nor do I have any specific policy recommendations in which I, at least, would place much confidence. Specifically, I doubt very much that any American initiatives are likely to be helpful. As to initiatives by the American government or other great powers - these might well prove disastrous. With all of these reservations, I feel that the problem must still be faced, and with a sense of considerable urgency. The reasons for this sense of urgency are put very well by Uri Avnery, in one of the most important of the recent books on the Middle East crisis: "An uneasy cease-fire prevails along the frozen fronts of the recent war, a cease-fire fraught with dangers, broken by intermittent shots. The armies confronting each other across the cease-fire lines are arming quickly. A new war is assumed by all of them as a virtual certainty, with only the exact timing still in doubt. But the next war, or the one after it, will be quite different from the recent one, so different, in fact, that the Blitzkrieg of June, 1967, will look in comparison like a humanitarian exercise. Nuclear weapons, missiles of all types, are nearing the Semitic scene. Their advent is inevitable. If the vicious circle is not broken, and broken soon, it will lead, with the preordained certainty of a Greek tragedy, toward a holocaust that will bury Tel Aviv and Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem. Semitic suicide is the only alternative to Semitic peace. A different kind of tragedy is brewing in Palestine itself. If no just solution is found soon, the guerilla war of organizations like al-Fatah will start a vicious circle of its own, a steep spiral of terror and counterterror, killing and retaliation, sabotage and mass deportation, which will bring undreamt of miseries to the Palestinian people. It will poison the

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atmosphere and generate a nightmare that will make peace impossible in our lifetime, turning Israel into an armed and beleaguered camp forever, bringing the Arab march toward progress to a complete standstill, and perhaps spelling the end of the Palestinian-Arab people as a nation - the very people for whose freedom al-Fatah fights in vain. Cease-fire - this is not a passive imperative. In order to cease fire, acts of peace must be done. Peace must be waged - actively, imaginatively, incessantly. In the words of the psalmist: 'Seek peace and pursue it.' The search can be passive - the pursuit cannot."7 General Dayan speaks with equal realism, in the remarks from which I have already quoted: "As long as we have to fulfill our aims against the will of the Arabs, we shall be forced to live in a permanent state of war." I do not see any way in which Americans can contribute to the active pursuit of peace. That is a matter for the people of the former Palestine themselves. But it is conceivable that Americans might make some contribution to the passive search for peace, by providing channels of communication, by broadening the scope of discussion and exploring basic issues in ways that are not easily open to those who see their lives as immediately threatened. It cannot be said that anything serious has been done to realize these possibilities. I suspect that the major contribution that can be made in the United States, or outside the Palestine area, is more indirect. The situation in the Middle East, as elsewhere, might be very different if there were an international left with a strong base in the United States that could provide an alternative framework for thinking and action,8 - an alternative, that is, to the system of national states which, under the circumstances of the world today, leads to massacre and repression for the weak and probable suicide for the strong. I am thinking of an international movement that could challenge the destructive concept of "national interest" which in practice means the interest of the ruling groups of the various societies of the world and which creates insoluble conflicts over issues that in no way reflect the needs and aspirations of the people of these societies, an international left that could represent humane ideals in the face of the powerful institutions, state and private, that dominate national policy and determine the course of international affairs. In the specific case of the Palestine problem, such a new framework, I think, is desperately needed, and I can imagine no source from which

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it might derive other than a revitalized international movement that would stand for the ideals of brotherhood, cooperation, democracy, social and economic development guided by intrinsic, historically evolving needs - ideals that do belong to the left, or would if it existed in any serious form. Perhaps the most significant contribution that can be made to reconciliation in Palestine by those not directly involved is to work for the creation of an international movement guided by these ideals and committed to a struggle for them, often in opposition to the national states, the national and international private empires, and the elites that govern them. It is perfectly possible to construct an "Arab case" and a "Jewish case", each having a high degree of plausibility and persuasiveness, each quite simple in its essentials. The Arab case is based on the fact that the great powers imposed a European migration, a national home for the Jews, and finally a Jewish state, in cynical disregard of the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the population,9 innocent of any charge. The result: hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees in exile, while the "law of return" of the Jewish state confers citizenship, automatically, on any Jew who chooses to settle in their former homes. The Zionist case relies on the aspirations of a people who suffered two millenia of exile and savage persecution culminating in the most fantastic outburst of collective insanity in human history, on the natural belief that a normal human existence will only be possible in a national home in the land to which they had never lost their ties, and on the extraordinary creativity and courage of those who made the desert bloom. The conflict between these opposing claims was recognized from the start. Arthur Balfour put the matter clearly, as he saw it, in a memorandum of 1919: " . . . in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American [King-Crane] Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."10

The Arabs of Palestine may be pardoned for not sharing this sense of the priorities.

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Not only can the Arab and Jewish case be formulated with power and persuasiveness; furthermore, each can be plausibly raised to the level of a demand for survival, hence in a sense an absolute demand. To the Israelis, the 1948 war is "the war of liberation." To the Arabs, it is "the war of conquest." Each side sees itself as a genuine national liberation movement. Each is the authentic Vietcong. Formulated within the framework of national survival, these competing claims lead inevitably to an irresoluble conflict. To such a conflict there can be no just solution. Force will prevail. Peace with justice is excluded from the start. Not surprisingly, the image of a crusader state is invoked by men of the most divergent views: Arnold Toynbee, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Itzhak Rabin, and many others. The likely evolution of the conflict should be particularly evident to the Israelis, given the Jewish historical experience. The exile of the Palestinian Arabs is taking on some of the characteristics of the Jewish diaspora. There are similarities between the emerging national movement of the Palestinian Arabs in exile and the Zionist movement itself. In " an open letter to the occupiers of my homeland," a Palestinian refugee writes these words: "Theodore Herzl once said that the Jews must go to Palestine because it was 'a land without people for a people without land.' I cry, I sorrow, for that land was mine. I am people, the Palestinians are people, and you who have suffered such persecutions, have forced us to pick up your ancient cry: 'NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM It is unlikely that the sentiments expressed in this letter will diminish in intensity. Rather, it is reasonable to expect that each Israeli victory will strengthen the forces of Palestinian Arab nationalism. Whatever agreements may be reached between Israel and the Arab states - and any agreements seem, for the moment, quite unlikely - these forces will no doubt persist. Israel is incapable of conquering the Arab hinterland, it is partially dependent on Western support (a weak reed, at best), and it can lose only once. The prospects are not attractive. Many Israeli spokesmen believe that the terrorism of the Arab movements (from the Arab point of view, the resistance to the occupyin forces) can easily be contained, that it is an unpleasantness on the order of traffic accidents. I am in no position to judge, but it is far from certain. Eric Rouleau cites an Israeli spokesman who told him "that the commandos had considerably improved their equipment,

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technique and fighting spirit." He cites a statement by Moshe Dayan that it is wrong to think of the fedayin only as criminals, that in fact they are "inspired by a patriotism and idealism that should not be underestimated."12 There are reports indicating growing sympathy for the fedayin in the occupied territories,13 where an Israeli journalist describes the attitude of the Arabs as now ranging "from passive dislike to open hatred." 14 Some knowledgeable Israeli observers sense, furthermore, that "growing numbers of Israeli Arabs, torn between conflicting loyalties, are being drawn into the unrest," noting correctly, that this development is "more alarming from Israel's point of view" than the terrorism itself."15 Yet it appears an inevitable development. Under the existing conditions, the Palestinian Arabs will inevitably be regarded as a potential fifth-column and treated as second-class citizens. 16 It would be most remarkable if they do not react, ultimately, in such a way as to fulfil these fears. Furthermore, it is unimaginable that these fears will abate, so long as the threat of extermination remains. The likely consequences Eire all too clear. Israel asks only peace, normal relations with its neighbors, and its continued existence as a state. But when the Arab-Israel conflict is posed in the terms of national conflict, it is quite unlikely that these aims can be achieved. Israel can hardly hope to make peace on its terms with the Arab states for the simple reason that these terms do not make provision for the rights of the Arabs of Palestine, now largely in exile or under military occupation, as they see their rights. The Palestinian Arabs are increasingly becoming an organized force, certain to press their demands in conflict with the Arab states and with Israel as well. This force cannot be overlooked, nor can its claims be lightly dismissed. The major consequence of the six-day war may prove to be the consolidation of the Palestinian Arabs, for the first time, as a serious political and para-military force. If so, then the framework of national conflict is indeed a prescription for Semitic suicide. Eric Rouleau speaks of "the classical chain reaction - occupation, resistance, repression, more resistance." There are other links in this chain. The Israeli journalist Victor Cygielman writes: 'One thing is sure, terrorism will not succeed in wrecking Israel, but it may succeed in ruining Israeli democracy."17 He is speaking of the demoralizing effect of "such measures of collective punishment as the blowing up of houses, administrative arrests and deportation to Jordan," and he

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comments that "the arrest of several citizens of Taibe and Haifa [i.e., within the territory of Israel itself] on the charge of having tried to establish al-Fatah cells on Israeli soil, may show a developing trend." Other Israeli intellectuals have voiced similar fears. Still other dangers are pointed out by the Israeli Middle East expert Shimon Shamir: "Perhaps the highest price that Israel might have to pay for a prolonged political domination of the Palestinian Arab society would be in the field from which Israel derives its strength - the spirit of its citizen army. It can be doubted whether a society whose institutions have been engaged for a long time in frustrating the political demands of a large Arab population could again manifest the same spirit of absolute solidarity, of fighting with one's back to the wall, of raging resistance to threats of extermination."« In part, this "high price" is a consequence of the occupation. But the occupation is unlikely to be abandoned until security is guaranteed, and there is no way for security to be guaranteed within the framework accepted by both sides. It is natural to think that security can be achieved only through strength, and through the use of force against a threatening opponent. Perhaps so. But those who adopt this course must at least be clear about the likely dynamics of the process to which they are contributing: occupation, resistance, repression, more resistance, more repression, erosion of democracy, internal quandaries and demoralization, further polarization and extremism on both sides, and ultimately - one shrinks from the obvious conclusions. It is not evident that security is to be achieved through the use of force. There is some historical experience on which we can draw. My impression - I stress again the limitations of my knowledge - is that by and large, the effect of coercion and force is to create a strong, vigorous, often irrational opponent, committed to the destruction of those who wield this force. There is an exception, of course, namely, when the opponent can be physically crushed. It seems clear that the current exercise of force is having just this effect. Terroristic attacks on civilians simply consolidate Israeli opinion and drive the population into the hands of those who advocate the reliance on force. If this process does succeed in destroying Israeli democracy and turning Israel into a police state, the Palestinian Arabs

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will have gained very little thereby. Similary, collective punishment, razing of houses and villages, detention and exile, surely have the effect of strengthening the hands of those in the Palestinian Arab movement who see the physical destruction of Israeli society as the only solution. In the past, I think that much the same was true. Prior to 1948, the Jewish community in Palestine in general tried to avoid the use of force and coercion and to refrain from a policy of reprisal in response to physical attacks and terror. The policy of Havlagah - restraint - in the late 1930's was not only a moral achievement of the highest order, but was also, it seems, reasonably effective as a tactic. There were groups in the Jewish settlement that did believe in the resort to terror against the Mandatory authorities and reprisals against the Arab revolt (itself largely directed against the Mandatory - "a furious but futile revolt against Great Britain"19). These were the groups of the extreme right - chauvinist, anti-Arab, anti-labor, with their social roots among the Zionist bourgeoisie and the associations of private farmers. Tensions between these groups and the Socialist-Zionist settlers "erupted in a miniature Jewish civil war early in the 1940's."20 As to the policy of anti-Arab reprisal, instead of my trying to assess its effects, let me simply present the words of the political arm of the terrorist organizations: "Out of the humiliated souls of Palestine Jewry, the Irgun Tsevai Leumi (National Military Organization) was born. It was created by a few dynamic spirits within the national youth and was inspired by Jabotinsky's untiring propaganda for Jewish self-defense - propaganda that for years had been stigmatized by official Jewish leaders as 'Fascist,' 'militarist,' and 'reactionary.'2! In September, 1937, the Irgun struck. During the first week of that month, the Arabs killed three Jews. The Irgun executed thirteen Arabs for the crime. In panic-stricken fury, the Arabs derailed a train, ambushed one Jewish bus and bombed another — claiming the lives of fourteen more Jews. For two months, Arab terrorism flamed again with murderous violence."22

Evidently, a great tribute to the effectiveness of the reprisal policy. The document goes on to explain how the Irgun "avenged the murder of every Jew," while "the flustered Jewish Agency publicly denounced the actions of the Irgun 'which (it said) are marring the moral record of Palestine Jewry, hampering the political struggle and undermining

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security.'" The accuracy of the charge is illustrated by the continuing account of Irgun actions, for example, of how the Irgurt fearlessly

invaded Arab settlements on the occasion of an Arab parade celebrating the 1939 White Paper, "transformfnig] the day of victory into a day of mourning," and so on. It was semi-fascist elements such as these that were largely responsible for the reprisals, which had the effects just indicated. The same, I believe, was largely true at the time of the partition agreement. Let me quote a report from the Bulletin of the Council on Jewish-Arab Cooperation, a group that emphasized "the possibilities for independent political action by workers as a class, as contrasted to reliance on decisions of any of the big powers:" "The role of the Jewish terrorist bands (Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern group) in the recent fighting can be seen from a listing of their activities. Dec. 7 — they threw a bomb into the Arab market place in Haifa. Dec. I I - they bombed Arab buses in Haifa and Jerusalem, killing and wounding many, and shot two Arabs in Jerusalem. Dec. 12 - bombings and shootings in Haifa, nearby Tireh, Gaza, Hebron and other cities, killing many Arabs. Dec. 13 - Irgun agents bombed Arab buses, killing 16 and wounding at least 67 Arabs. Jewish terrorists carried out a series of assault on Dec. 15, attacking Arab buses, Arab pedestrians and random personnel of the Transjordanian Frontier Force. These actions began precisely at the time when it appeared to newspaper correspondents and to the Bulletin correspondents in Palestine that Arab attacks were subsiding, or when, after enduring much hardship from Arab terrorist dominance, Arabs took initiative to effect formal understandings with Jewish neighbors against all armed terrorists. At no time did the Jewish terrorists even claim to be attacking the Mufti's bands or to be making any differentation among Arabs. The special attention to Haifa, a workers' city where the Arabs had committed almost no attacks, indicates the intentions to arouse Arab workers to anti-Jewish reprisals." 23

During these and following months, Arab terrorists, both Palestinian and infiltrated, were responsible for widespread murder and destruction, giving substance to the statements of men like Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, who announced "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades."24 One cannot fail to note, throughout this period, the similarities of intent on the part of the terrorists on both sides, and still more stri-

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kingly, the impact of each in strengthening the influence of the other and increasing the general polarization and drift towards irresoluble national conflict. Perhaps the conflict was unavoidable. In any event, the policy of terror and reprisal made a major contribution to intensifying it and embittering relations among people who must cooperate, ultimately, if they are to survive in some decent fashion. Reprisals have a certain logic within the framework of national conflict. One who sees a national conflict between all Arabs and all Jews might well argue that any terrorist act by any Arab or Jew can properly be the occasion for a reprisal against any Jew or Arab. In this way, the terror continues on its upward spiral, and the use of force is given new legitimacy within each of the polarizing societies. Even from a narrow point of view, one can raise the factual question of the actual effects of the reprisal policy. I have already noted two occasions when its effect on security was at best dubious. Let me turn to a third, a few years later. I quote from Nadav Safran, a well-known Harvard Middle Eastern scholar with pro-Israel sympathies. Commenting on the Israeli attack on the Gaza strip in 1955, the first major reprisal against Arab-held territory by the Israeli army, he has this to say: "The Egyptian authorities tended at first merely to wink at infiltration undertaken for all sorts of purposes from the Gaza strip under their control. But after a murderous Israeli retaliatory raid on Gaza in February, 1955, the Egyptian government responded defiantly by launching a deliberate raiding campaign from Gaza and Jordan... Israeli retaliatory attacks only increased the defiance of the Egyptian authorities and the murderousness of the raids, until finally Israel took advantage of a favorable conjuncture to launch an all-out invasion of Sinai and the Gaza strip in October 1956."25

Once again, the policy of forceful reprisal had rather dubious consequences, from the point of view of security. Safran goes on to say that since the 1956 war the border has been quiet (prior to the six-day war), so that the 1956 attack was a success from the Israeli point of view, as he sees it. But Safran's analysis - which is highly professional and informative - suffers from a fundamental defect typical of the "realist" political science of which his work is a good example. He disregards the people of Palestine, and considers only the relations among national states and the interplay between them at the level

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of coercive force. This choice of framework, which is quite explicit, is appropriate for the study of some aspects of the problem, but one who focusses on "the manipulation of various forms of coercion in the service of policy, and of policy in the service of enhancing the means of coercion" (Safran) will no doubt miss a great deal. Safran, by virtually eliminating from consideration the Arab population of Palestine, seriously underestimates the rise of Palestinian Arab nationalism. In particular, he fails to see the significance of the rise of al-Fatah, which many observers believe to be a genuine expression - the first - of the national consciousness of the masses of Palestinian Arabs.26 The moderate Lebanese journalist Ghassan Tueini described "the formation of Fatah [as] the single most significant event in the Arab World for 50 years."27 There is a fair amount of evidence that this represents the thinking of many Palestinian intellectuals, who might agree with a teacher in East Jerusalem that the "Palestinians had to take matters into their own hands," that they have captured "the imagination of the Arab masses...," "thanks to the Israeli policy of retaliation as well as a strenuous effort on their part."28 The explicit goal of al-Fatah is to involve the masses in struggle, now that they have recognized the futility of looking to the Arab states for salvation. "In our view, any liberation activity that does not try to involve the masses properly is doomed to failure, since it ignores the most important element influencing the struggle."29 It is clearly recognized that this may draw the Arab countries into war. The prospect is welcomed, even if the result is a defeat, which will lead to an extended occupation and further opportunities for growth of the liberation movement. In the article just quoted, Nasr (see note 28) continues: "No Arab-Israeli settlement (even one sponsored by Nasser) is worth the paper it is written on without fedayeen agreement." This seems plausible, given the growth of al-Fatah as an expression of Palestinian Arab national consciousness. If these assessments are accurate, as the information available to me suggests, then Safran's analysis of the interstate conflict is of only marginal relevance. Returning to the matter of force and security, Safran argues that though the 1955 reprisal and subsequent retaliatory attacks increased the Egyptian support for terrorism, nevertheless after the 1956 war the level of violence subsided. However, from another point of view

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that takes in a somewhat longer time span, the 1956 war contributed significantly to violent confrontation. The 1956 war apparently provided the immediate impulse for the formation of al-Fatah, and, as just noted, this counts as a rather questionable gain from the point of view of Israeli security. According to Chaliand (see note 26), until 1961 the organization was occupied with establishing the nucleus of a political organization among the Palestinian intelligentia, and then for several years proceeded to develop a para-military organization. Its first casualty was suffered at the hands of a Jordanian soldier in 1965, and until the six-day war it was strictly controlled by the Arab states. The catastrophic defeat of June 1967 left a political and military vacuum that was quickly filled by al-Fatah, now relatively free from the constraints formerly imposed and solidly based in the Palestinian population. Most observers agree that the Israeli retaliatory attack on Karama in March, 1968, "marked a turning-point in the evolution of the Palestine armed resistance movement."30 It enormously increased the strength and prestige of al-Fatah (which claimed a victory and was believed, whatever the facts may be) among the Arab masses and, as a result, with the Arab states, which, no doubt reluctantly, are forced to grant to the Palestinian resistance considerable latitude. The organization now claims to be unable to absorb the volunteers flocking to it.31 As I have already noted, some Israeli commentators concede that the movement exhibits considerable élan and vitality, though few regard it as a true military threat. Ehud Yaari (see note 29) is probably fairly representative of informed Israeli opinion when he writes: "Even its most vigorous critics cannot deny al-Fatah its character as an ideological movement, as well as an active military organization. The skeleton of the new theory has already been set up; only actual expedience can show whether it will put on flesh and blood. The fundamental differences between the waves of terror that preceded the Sinai Campaign in 1956 and the wave that has been growing since 1965 lies in the fact that in contrast to the murderous groups acting for revenge or profit, Israel now faces a terrorist organization with a specific political theory; terror one of a number of elements." In short, it seems accurate to say that Israel now faces a liberation movement modelling itself consciously on others that have proven succesful. Many differences can be noted. However, still taking the narrow view of Israeli security, the evolution from predatory bands

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to a conscious mass-based liberation movement hardly counts as a success for the policy of security through force. Israeli retaliation is seen by al-Fatah leadership as a major weapon in their arsenal. The Fatah leader Yasir Arafat says: "Thank God for Dayan. He provides the daily proof of the expansionist nature of Zionism... After the 1967 defeat, Arab opinion, broken and dispirited, was ready to conclude peace at any price. If Israel, after its lightning victory, had proclaimed that it has no expansionist aims, and withdrawn its troops from the conquered territories, while continuing to occupy certain strategic points necessary to its security, the affair would have been easily settled with the countries that were the victims of the aggression."32 Other Fatah spokesmen have expressed similar views. One, quoted by Hudson (see note 31), advocates violence becoase it "forces the Israelis to retaliate desperately and indiscriminately against the surrounding Arab countries, but in so doing Israel only diminishes its reputation in the international community and forces the Arab governments into even greater solidarity with the Palestinians," who will themselves, it is expected, be drawn into resistance in reaction to the harsh reprisals in the occupied areas or the neighboring countries. How accurate this analysis may be I am in no position to judge. I suspect that it is fairly realistic. It relies on factors often overlooked by the "realist" analysts who think only in terms of national states that monopolize the instruments of coercion and use them to achieve the "national interest" as conceived by their respective elites. What is overlooked is the dynamics of a popular national movement. With all the differences that have so often been stressed, there still remains an analogy to Vietnam, where American force, applied on an enormous and horrifying scale, led to a tremendous upsurge of Vietcong strength.33 In this respect, the situation in Palestine may be similar. A story has it that Dayan once advised that the Israeli military study the American policy in Vietnam carefully, and then do just the opposite. This advice is difficult to follow for an occupying power, operating within the framework of national conflict. It seems to me that something like the foregoing is what is suggested by the history of the past years. The policy of reprisal, wisely shunned by the socialist masses in Palestine in earlier years, has, not surprisingly, become national policy with the establishment of the state. As noted,

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it has a certain logic within the framework of national conflict. It is the logic of despair and ultimate disaster. One might argue that it is rather cheap, from 5 0 0 0 miles away, to urge the advantages of a policy of conciliation in preference to the harsh tactic of repression and reprisal (or a combination of the carrot and the stick). How else are we to defend ourselves from the terrorist attacks? Or, from the other side, how are we to liberate our homeland except through violent resistance? Each reproach is legitimate, in its own terms. Still, certain questions must be faced: what are the actual consequences of violence, on either side? Is there an alternative to the framework of national conflict, the relentless pursuit of "national interest" through force? With regard to the first question, I can only repeat that each side seems to me to be locked into a suicidal policy. Israel cannot hope to achieve peace on its terms by force. Rather, it will simply build the forces that will lead to its eventual destruction by force, or to a permanent garrison state, or, perhaps, to some form of colonization of the area by the great powers to enforce their form of stability - not too unlikely if nuclear weapons and missiles enter the picture. 34 Unless it achieves a settlement with the Palestinian Arabs, or crushes them by force, Israel will no doubt be unable to reach any meaningful agreement with Egypt or the other Arab states. There will be a constant temptation to undertake pre-emptive strikes, which, if successful, will simply reconstitute the original conflict at a higher level of hostility and enhance the power of those who demand a military solution. For Egypt, an acceptable long-term strategy may be " t o reduce the margin of Israel's military superiority to the point when Israel can no longer win battles except at great human cost." 3 5 The internal effects in Israel might be such as to destroy whatever was of lasting human value in the Zionist ideal. Perhaps it is appropriate to recall the warning of Ahad Ha-am, quoted by Moshe Smilansky in expressing his opposition to the Biltmore program (see p. 6): "In the days of the House of Herod, Palestine was a Jewish State. Such a Jewish State would be poison for our nation and drag it down into the dust. Our small State would never attain a political power worthy of the name, for it would be but a football between its neighbors, and but exist by diplomatic chicanery and constant submission to whoever was dominant at the time. Thus we should become a small and low people in spiritual servitude, looking with envy toward the mighty fist." 38

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Parallel comments apply with respect to the Arab states and the Arab liberation movements. There is no possibility that the Jewish population of Israel will give up its cultural autonomy, or freely leave, or abandon a high degree of selfgovernment. Any plan of liberation that aims at these goals will lead to one or another form of massacre, or perhaps to re-colonization by the great powers. In this case too, whatever is of lasting human value in the movement for Arab liberation can hardly survive such policies, and will be submerged in reaotion and authoritarianism. Within the framework of "national interest", of the conflict of "Jewish rights" and "Arab rights," the problem cannot be resolved in terms that satisfy the just aspirations of the people of what was once Palestine. In principle, there is a very different framework of thinking within which the problem of Palestine can be formulated. How realistic it is, I am not competent to judge - though I might add that I am not too impressed by the "realism" of contemporary ideologists, including many who masquerade as political scientists, historians, or revolutionaries. The alternative is ridiculously simple, and therefore no doubt terribly naive. It draws from one part of the historical experience and the expressed ideals of the Zionist and Arab nationalist movements, from currents that can barely be perceived today, after two decades of intermittent war, but that are nonetheless quite real. The alternative to the framework of national states, national conflict, and national interest, is cooperation between people who have common interests that are not expressible in national terms, that in general assume class lines. Such alternatives are open to those who believe that the common interest of the great masses of people in Palestine - and everywhere - is the construction of a world of democratic communities in which political institutions, as well as the commercial and industrial system as a whole, are under direct popular control, and the resources of modern civilization are directed to the satisfaction of human needs and libertarian values. There is little reason to suppose that these interests are served by a Jewish state, any more than they are served by the states of the Arab world. Feeling this way, I read with some slight degree of optimism such statements as this by a spokesman for one of the Palestinian Arab organizations: "It is not enough simply to wear khaki and shoot to have a revolution,

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and the Palestinian youth are not giving their lives just to restore the oppressive rule of landlords and businessmen in Palestine."37

Such comments bring to mind the position of the Left Front of Histadrut, which won 20% of the vote in the August, 1944, elections, on a platform that included this statement: "The Left Front will fight for the construction of Palestine as a joint homeland for the Jewish people returning to its land and for the masses of the Arab people who dwell in it; for setting up of a state form for Palestine in the spirit of the brotherhood of peoples, nondomination, and national fraternity - in accordance with the national, social, and political interests of the two peoples, and looking forward to the creation of a socialist Palestine."38

A social revolution that would be democratic and socialist, that would move both Arab and Jewish society in these directions, would serve the vital interest of the great majority of the people in Palestine, as elsewhere. At least, this is my personal belief, and a belief that was surely a driving force behind the Jewish settlement of Palestine in the first place. It is quite true, I believe, that "Zionism, being the outcome partly of Jewish and partly of non-Jewish enlightenment, and being also a secular reaction to Jewish assimilation,... conceived the Jewish national revival more in terms of the realisation of a harmonious 'just society' than in terms of the realisation of Jewish political independence."39 Or, to be more exact, this was a major element in the prewar settlement. This tendency is given little emphasis in the predominantly political and military histories. It is presented and analyzed in such works as the Esco Foundation study (see note 1), or in Aharon Cohen's massive study of Jewish-Arab cooperation and conflict (see note 19), with its extensive documentation of efforts - abortive, but not hopeless - to create a bi-national Palestinian community in which the vital interests and just goals of Jews and Arabs might be met. The problem, as he formulates it, has always been this: "how to weave together concrete interests and high aspirations, to create the conditions for cooperative and compatible efforts, to exploit the given objective possibilities and to strengthen the forces working to advance the common good, both material and spiritual." The greatest obstacle has been "the failure to understand the true significance of this task, narrowness of vision and

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insufficient effort." As Cohen correctly observes, "In the absence of the intellectual and moral courage to face this failure honestly, there is no hope of repairing that which demands repair, . . . no hope of breaking out of the magic circle: an increase in the Jewish constructive effort in Israel, an increase in its strength — and along with it, an increase in the dangers that threaten all of these achievements..." This is, I believe, the proper standpoint from which to approach the problems of today, as it was a generation ago. Then it represented, I think it is fair to say, a significant position in the Palestinian Jewish community - a matter to which I will return. Ben Gurion once wrote that only an insane person could attribute to Zionism the wish to force any of the Arab community from their homes: "Zionism has not come to inherit its place or to build on its r u i n s . . . We have no right to harm a single Arab child, even if with this we could achieve all that we wish."40 It can never be too late to try to recapture this vision. A movement to create a democratic, socialist Palestine - optimally, integrated into a broader federation — that preserves some degree of communal autonomy and self-government is not beyond the bounds of possibility. It might build on what, to my mind, is the outstanding contribution of the Zionist movement to modern history, the cooperatives, which have proven to be an outstanding social economic success and point the way to the future, if there is to be a future for the human race. The long-standing position of the left-wing of the Kibbutz movement was "that the kibbutz was not simply a form of settlement, but a way of life, the raison d'etre of Zionism."41 One of the consequences of the partition - to my mind, an extremely unfortunate one has been the relative decline in importance of the collectives within Israel. Perhaps this trend could be reversed if the national struggle were to be transcended by a movement for social reconstruction of a revitalized Arab-Jewish left. Admittedly, the possibilities seem slight. But there are some historical precedents that are hopeful. One thinks at once of Yugoslavia, where in the course of a successful social revolution, "the old conflict-provoking ethnic ties (Serb, Croat, and so forth) give some evidence of being less 'irrational' and less binding, with more individuals thereby willing to think of themselves quite simply as individuals operating within a broad Yugoslav context."42 If the Arab and Israeli left are to develop a common program, each will have to extricate itself from a broader national movement in which the goals of social reconstruction are subordinated to the demand for

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national self-determination. One can imagine a variety of possibilities for bi-national federation, with parity between partially autonomous communities. A common political and social struggle might take the place of national conflict - as meaningless, ultimately, as it was to those who slaughtered one another for the glory of the nation at Verdun. National ties are strong, and any steps toward cooperation must build upon them. True cooperation can only be for common goals, and between equals. In this respect, the formation of al-Fatah might prove to be a significant step towards peaceful reconciliation. A shattered, fragmented society cannot come to terms with a well-organized, technologically advanced counterpart. The Israeli left can lose nothing, and can perhaps gain a great deal, by trying to relate itself in some way to the newly consolidating Palestinian Arab community, particularly its left-wing elements. To do so, it will have to see the other side of the coin (as Aharon Cohen has put it on several occasions), and offer a positive and meaningful program for cooperation, even one with longrange and perhaps still distant goals. Given the present constellation of forces, it is reasonably clear that the initiative must come from this source. It is not for me to suggest concrete steps - in fact, the bare beginnings perhaps already exist.43 To extend them and build upon them should be the major preoccupation of those concerned to create the conditions for a just peace. Might there be any Arab response to such initiatives? From the information available to me, it seems that there might very well be a response. Consider, for example, the following remarks in a recent editorial in the official organ of the Arab Socialist Union, the only functioning political organization in Egypt.44 " . . . the new society [in Palestine] must be open to all Jews, Moslems, and Christians without exclusiveness or discrimination between first and secondclass citizens; and this non-racist nature of the new state must impose its implications and principles, by necessity, on its constitution and laws, and on the rights and duties of the citizens... [This strategy] must be crystallized into a 'dynamic organization' that will strengthen all Arabs and Jews antagonistic to imperialism, Zionism, and all forms of racism on the local and international l e v e l s . . . In my opinion, the first step in building this front, which will completely change the balance of power, is the joint responsibility of the Palestinian Resistance on the one hand, and of the Jewish local and world masses antagonistic to imperialism and

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Zionism, on the other. This front, by undertaking such a progressive program, which represents the will for liberation from imperialism and racism, will not be serving the interest of the Arab and Jewish masses . . . alone, but will serve humanity's movement in advancing towards a new world free of colonialism, imperialism and aggression, and free of the dangers of a total destructive war which is the situation in the Middle East today, one of the world's most explosive regions." The editorial is said to be "the fruits of a positive discussion which I had the opportunity to conduct at consecutive meetings with a number of the leaders of Fatah and the Popular Front in addition to some Arab friends among revolutionaries and intellectuals." In fact, Fatah statements repeatedly call for "the destruction of the Zionist and racist structures [of the state of Israel and the establishment of a] secular and democratic Palestine reaching from the Mediterranean to Jordan" 45 (I presume this means including Jordan). Y. Harkabi, who quotes a number of statements of this sort (see note 26), observes that "The Arabs' objective of destroying the state of Israel (what may be called a 'politicide') drives them to genocide," since "Zionism is not only a political regime or a superstructure of sorts, but is embodied in a society." This is a possible, but not an absolutely necessary interpretation of such proposals.46 The Israeli left might well give a different interpretation, first, to the aspirations of Zionism, and correspondingly, to the intention of these statements. By so doing, it may help to give substance and reality to a more sympathetic and constructive interpretation. The goal of a democratic socialist community with equal rights for all citizens and the goal of "a federative framework with the Kingdom of Jordan and the Palestinian people, based on cooperation in the fields of security and economics,"47 do not, on the face of it, appear to be incompatible. There may, then, be room for fruitful, and perhaps eventually cooperative effort between the Arab and Israeli left. I suspect that the fundamental stumbling-block to any agreement will prove to be the Israeli "law of return", which Ben-Gurion has described as "the peculiar sign that singles out the State of Israel and fixes its central mission, the Zionist-Jewish mission... the foundation scroll of the rights of the Jewish people in Israel:" 48 It is primarily by virtue of this law that Israel is a "Jewish State." It is hard to imagine that the Arabs of Palestine will consent to a law which, in effect, prevents them from returning to their homes on the theory that the Jews of the

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world have a more pressing need and a greater right to settle in this land. I have seen no sign that any substantial segment of Israeli opinion is willing to consider the abandonment of the principle embodied in the "law of the return." 49 It seems to me that the situation of today is more like that of 1947 than of any intervening period. Furthermore, there have been twenty years of experience from which, perhaps, something has been learned. Both international and domestic factors are more conducive to a peaceful resolution of the conflict than has been the case for some time. As to the international situation, the possibilities of great power conflict are quite real, and insofar as their leaders are rational, neither of the great powers can conceivably fail to fear such a conflict.50 It is also possible that the great powers have learned that even in their narrow self-interest, attempts to organize the Middle East within an imperial system are not likely to be successful. Dulles' Baghdad Pact led to the Nasser-USSR arms deal which significantly increased the flow of weapons and the level of tension in the Middle East. Attempts to intervene in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan in 1957-8 ranged from the ludicrous to near-disaster. Safran describes them as "the final failure in the succession of unsuccessful British, British-American, and American attempts since the end of World War II to organize the Middle East heartland in the frame of the Western alliance system."51 The Soviet attempt to intervene, for example in Iraq, was no less of a catastrophe.52 Perhaps, then, the great powers might be willing to keep hands off, even to permit some form of genuine socialist development in the Middle East outside of the framework of competing imperialisms, if it has substantial domestic roots. A sensible American policy would encourage Israel to break free of Western influence. Out of a felt need to rely on the Western powers, Israel has been unable to support anti-colonial forces in the Middle East, for example, the Algerian FLN. Such a policy must, naturally, be harmful to the development of decent relations with the Arab countries and their peoples. A different Western policy might, in principle, permit options that would, no doubt, be more congenial to much of the Israeli population itself. It might also, in principle, include the kind of economic assistance that actually contributes to development - in this case, to help close the economic and social gap between Arab and Jewish population, a prerequisite to any real cooperation. The chances that such a policy will be undertaken are no doubt slight.

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Far more important are the domestic factors, no longer what they were twenty years ago. In 1947 the Palestinian Jewish community was traumatized by the holocaust. It was aware that no world power would be willing to lift a finger to save the miserable remnants of European Jewry, no more than they were at the international conferences of Evian in 1938 or Bermuda in 1943. Furthermore, it was psychologically impossible to contemplate the resettlement of these tortured victims in a new diaspora. The Palestinian Jewish settlement acted accordingly, and did succeed in settling 300,000 Jewish refugees in a Jewish State, but at a fearful cost. An approximately equal number of Jewish refugees reached Israel after having been expelled from the Arab countries in the wake of the 1948 war, and hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees fled, or were driven from their homes in the new state of Israel. For those Arabs who remained, living standards have no doubt improved, but there is much evidence that many were dispossessed of homes, land and property, and deprived of the right of free political organization.53 Today the situation is very different. The Nazi massacre, though unforgettable in its horror, no longer determines the choice of action. Rather, it is the living death of the refugee camps and the steady drift towards further misery yet to come that set the terms for policy. From the perspective of twenty years, I think we can see the extent to which the war jarred the Zionist movement into a new and somewhat different course, which might still be modified without an abandonment of its fundamental aims. The concept of a Jewish State is not so deeply rooted in the history of the Jewish settlement of Palestine as one might be led to believe, judging by the temperament that has prevailed in recent years. I have already mentioned that the first official formulation of the demand for a Jewish State was in 1942, when the war was underway and the center of World Zionism had shifted to the United States. After an extensive analysis, the Esco Foundation report concluded: "It is not too much to say that the position of the Zionist leadership from the Twelfth Carlsbad Congress in 1921 [the first to convene after the Balfour declaration] to the Twenty-First Congress in Geneva in 1939 was strongly tinctured with bi-nationalism."54 At the Congress of 1931, Weizmann insisted that security could be achieved only by establishing friendly relations with the Arabs of Palestine on the basis "of complete parity without regard to the numerical strength of either people." 55 Ben-Gurion spoke in similar terms in

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testifying before the Peel Comission in 1937.56 Even Jabotinsky insisted only that "the Jewish point of view should always prevail" in a state that had "that measure of selfgovernment which for instance the state of Nebraska possesses,"57 and his nationalist extremism caused him to leave the Zionist organization several years later. Many others - Kalvarisky, Arlosoroff,58 Magnes, Smilansky - labored incessantly to establish a dialogue with Palestine Arabs that would lead to ArabJewish cooperation within a bi-national framework. Their efforts were not so unsuccessful as is often claimed.59 In the early 1920's several Arab peasant parties called for Arab-Jewish cooperation against exploiters, and in Haifa, largely a working-class city, the former Arab Mayor (who had been removed by the British) was a member of an upper-class Moslem society that spoke of the need for Arab-Jewish cooperation.60 A number of conferences of Jews and Arabs took place, some that appeared to offer some promise, though no serious efforts were made by official bodies to carry matters further. There were joint strikes and demonstrations of Arab and Jewish workers until 1947, and among agricultural communities there was undoubtedly much friendly contact, persisting beyond the establishment of the State. Many of the Arabs who attempted to maintain friendly relations were assassinated, as were some who combatted the politics of the Arab leadership. One example, just prior to the partition agreement, was the case of the Arab labor leader Sami Taha, who was murdered after an attempt to form an Arab "workers' party" free from the control of the Arab Higher committee.61 He had called for a democratic Palestinian state in which Jews and Arabs would have equal rights. He was a supporter of Musa al-Alami, who had been involved in earlier discussions with Weizmann and others and was regarded as a spokesman for the rights of Arab workers and peasants.62 It seems fair to say that there was an unwritten unholy alliance of sorts among the Jewish and Arab right-wing terrorist organizations and segments of the British forces, all engaged in terroristic attacks that polarized the two societies and killed a number of those who attempted reconciliation (see note 20).

Perhaps the most significant case was that of Fawzi al-Husseini, who was assassinated in November, 1946. He was the nephew of the Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini. He had taken part in the 1929 riots and had been imprisoned by the British during the 1936-9 revolt. Later, he

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became convinced of the necessity for Arab-Jewish cooperation, and just a few weeks before he was killed, he signed an agreement in the name of a new organization, Falastin al-Jadida (New Palestine), with the League for Arab-Jewish rapprochement that had been founded in 1939 and was headed by Kalvarisky. The document expressed the desire of each organization "to support the activities of [the other] and to assist it in all possible ways to make them a success."63 In the months before his death he had spoken widely in support of such a view. Some of his remarks deserve fuller quotation: "There is a way for understanding and agreement between the two nations, despite the many stumbling-blocks in this path. Agreement is a necessity for the development of the country and the liberation of the two nations. The conditions of agreement - the principle of non-domination of one nation over the other and the establishment of a bi-national state on the basis of political parity and full cooperative effort between the two nations in economic, social and cultural domains. Immigration is a political problem and within the framework of general agreement it will not be difficult to solve this problem on the basis of the absorptive capacity of the land. The agreement between the two nations must receive international authorization by the UN, which must guarantee to the Arabs that the binational independent Palestine will join a federation with the neighboring Arab states."

These principles were written into the agreement between the League and Falastin

al-Jadida.

At a meeting of Jews and Arabs at the home of Kalvarisky in Jerusalem, Fawzi al-Husseini lauded Kalvarisky's long-term efforts in the cause of Arab-Jewish cooperation, noted their partial success, and announced his intention to undertake similar efforts among the Arab population. He expressed his belief that despite the support of the Mandatory authorities for the Arab leadership of Jamal al-Husseini and the Mufti, his efforts would meet with success if they received moral, organizational and political support from the Jewish community and if cooperative efforts showed concrete results. These efforts did receive a hopeful response in the Arab community, according to Cohen, but were cut short by Fawzi al-Husseini's assassination. The mood of World Zionism is indicated by the reaction at the Zionist Congress in Basle, when a spokesman for Hashomer Hatzair, Y. Chazan, spoke of the murder. According to the report in Davar:

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"Laughter and hilarity was caused by the story (of Chazan) about one Arab, a Zionist sympathizer, who was killed in Jerusalem because he believed in Jewish-Arab agreement and favored immigration. From the Revisionist rows someone commented: 'so this one Arab was killed and now no one remains.' " Such people as Chaim Kalvarisky and Fawzi al-Husseini existed. Many of them paid with their lives for the efforts to bring about reconciliation and peace. Because the support for them was insufficient, many, many more have been killed and maimed and driven from their homes, to empty wasted lives, to hatred and torment. And the story has not yet come to an end. I would like to conclude these remarks with an excerpt from an editorial statement in the Bulletin for Jewish-Arab cooperation in January, 1948, just at the outbreak of the 20-year war. I think that these words were appropriate then, and that they are again appropriate today: "A major obstacle bringing about peace in Palestine is the prevailing view that most Jews have of what they want from the Arabs. What they would essentially prefer is that the Arabs be passive in respect to the Jews. They want the Arabs not to object to Jewish immigration and construction, not to be too closely involved in the Jewish economy, and currently not to attack Jews or to harbor the attackers. In return, the Arabs would get economic benefits from the neighboring Jewish economy, would be gradually modernized economically and politically, and would on their part not be attacked by the Jews. The weakness of this view is that people are not passive. They may appear passive in that they accept the controls and ideas of relatively static upper classes. But when economic and social changes take place about them, they react to them. When the Arab upper class tries to direct the population into anti-Jewish attitudes, the Jewish workers cannot counter this by asking the Arab population not to react at all and to leave the Jews alone. They can only offer the Arabs an alternative way of reacting, one more useful to the Arab peasants and workers. The only practicable alternative to war is therefore not peace but cooperation. In a long range political sense, we can say that the only alternative to war between nations is not a static p e a c e . . . but a war between classes, between ruled and ruler, of the Jewish and Arab worker and peasant against the two upper classes, against the fascist parties of the both nations, and the British or other outside interests that want to control the area." These remarks, I repeat, were made in early 1948. They have a certain relevance to the situation of today. In particular, I think it is im-

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portant to consider the idea that the only practicable alternative to war is not peace but cooperation - the active pursuit of peace - and that cooperation cannot exist in the abstract, but must be directed to the satisfaction of real human needs. In the Middle East, as elswhere, these needs can be perceived as they are reflected - caricatured, I believe - in terms of "national interest." This way, it seems to me, lies tragedy and bitterness. Other ways are open, and they might provide a way to a better life, not only in Palestine, but in every part of this tragic and strife-torn world.

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NOTES

1. See Palestine: A study of Jewish, Arab and British policies. Esco Foundation, Yale University Press, 1947. vol. II, pp. 1087, 1100. The 1942 program is generally referred to as the "Biltmore Program." 2. See Christopher Sykes, Crossroads to Israel. London, 1965, for a description of this occasion. 3. "Meaning of homeland," in New Outlook, Dec. 1967. 4. Le Monde, weekly selection, July 9, 1969. 5. Ibid. July 16, 1969. 6. Zalmen Chen, "A bi-national solution," in New Outlook, June, 1968. See also the discussion among the editors, March-April, 1968. This journal has, for more than ten years, provided sane and highly informative commentary on the Palestine problem. 7. Uri Avnery, Israel Without Zionists. Macmillan, 1968. 8. For a preliminary effort in this direction see Elements, journal of the Comité de la Gauche pour la Paix négociée au Moyen-Orient, no. 2-3, May, 1969, 15 rue des Minimes, Paris 3°. 9. Population estimates vary. The Esco Foundation study (Op. cit. vol. I, p. 321) gives these figures: for 1920, 67,000 Jews out of a population of 673,000 for 1930, 164,796 Jews out of a population of 992,559. 10. Quoted in Christopher Sykes, Op. cit. 11. The letter appears in The Middle East Newsletter, May-June, 1969, an anti-Zionist periodical published in Beirut. 12. Le Monde, weekly selection, July 10-16, 1969. 13. See for example the eye-witness report of Amnon Kapeliuk in New Outlook, November-December, 1968. 14. Ze'ev Schul, Jerusalem Post Weekly, reprinted in Atlas, August, 1969. 15. Shmuel B'ari in New Outlook, March-April, 1969. 16. See the statement by the Israeli journalist Nissim Rejwan in New Outlook, March-April, 1968. He writes that: "The official v i e w . . . has been repeatedly explained by the Prime Minister's present Adviser on Arab affairs. It is that one cannot expect loyalty from the Arab of Israel left single quale since they belong to another nationality.' As long as such a view prevails we will not in honesty be able to claim that we treat our nonJewish citizens as equals." 17. New Outlook, February, 1968. 18. Ibid. March-April, 1969. 19. Amos Perlmutter, Military and Politics in Israel. Cass and Co., 1969, a highly expert study by an Israeli scholar. John Marlowe describes the rebellion as "in fact a peasant revolt, drawing its enthusiasm, its heroism, its organisation, and its persistence from sources within itself which have never been properly understood and which now will never be known" (Sykes, Op. cit.). The Esco Foundation study concluded that "While the bands undoubtedly included genuine sympathizers with the Arab national cause, they also contained many recruits from the lower elements in the

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towns who were attracted by the pay and the chance of robbery"; "Acts of terror were committed not only against government officials and Jews, but also against Arabs who did not fall in with the policy of the Mufti party." This is borne out by the casualty figures for 1939: "69 British, 92 Jewish and 486 Arab civilians, besides 1,138 rebels killed." According to figures from official sources cited by Aharon Cohen (Israel and the Arab World. Sifriat Poalim, 1964, Hebrew - translations mine throughout) twice as many Arabs were killed by Arabs as by Jews in the period 1936-39, "because of friendly relations with Jews (village Mukhtars, Arab guards, Arab workers who worked with Jews, and so on), or because of their political opposition to the Mufti and his associates" (p. 204). 20. Perlmutter, Op. cit.; For example, Sykes reports that "in January, 1942 the Sternists murdered two officials of Histadrut, and when they fought the police they concentrated their vengeance on the Jewish personnel." The Esco Foundation study (vol. II, p. 1040) reports the murder of a member of Hashomer Hatsair by members of Betar who had invaded a meeting in 1944. Quite a few cases can be cited. 21. With justice. It is enough to read the "Ideology of Betar', written by Jabotinsky. Betar is a party "founded upon the principles of discipline . . . For it is the highest achievement of a mass of free men, if they are capable to act in unison, with the absolute precision of a machine. Only a free cultured people can do s o . . . Discipline is the subordination of a mass to one leader" - the Rosh Betar, Jabotinsky. Continuing: "We have decided that in building a State we must utilize the means at hand, be they old or new, good or bad, if only we will thus attain a Jewish majority." Among the means was strike-breaking; "An unjust and State-disintegrating strike must be mercilessly broke, as well as any other attempts to damage the Jewish State reconstruction... it is the right and duty of Betar itself to decide as to the justice or injustice of a conflict, help the former and break up the latter." Revisionist spokesmen in the 1930's expressed their admiration for Mussolini, Franco, and the murderers of Liebknecht and Luxembourg. According to Perlmutter, they also made "attempts to collaborate with the Fascists and Nazis in Eastern Europe, during World War II." He believes that they "constituted far more of a threat to the Yishuv [Palestine Jewish community] t h a n . . . toward the Mandatory." As already noted, they were responsible for attacks on Jews as well as Arabs (in this respect, they were comparable to the terrorists of the Arab right). Their best-known exploit was the Deir Yassin Massacre in 1948 (largely an operation of the Irgun Tsevai Leumi - the Revisionist paper HaMashkif, in August 1948, applauded this "dazzling display of warfare" because it was a main factor in causing the flight of Arab refugees). David Ben-Gurion was perceptive when in 1933 he entitled an article "Jabotinsky in the footsteps of Hitler." The strong antagonism of the Palestinian Jewish settlement to the Revisionists and their various outgrowths is very much to its credit; the relatively good press they have received in the United States is largely a result of ignorance, I suspect. 22. This is Betar, undated, early 1940's. Betar was a youth group founded by

Nationalism

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24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

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Vladimir Jabotinsky, the head of the Revisionist wing of the Zionist movement which has now become, in effect, the Herut Party in Israel. Vol. 3, No. 12, December, 1947. I should emphasize that my own point of view was heavily influenced by this group and a number of the people associated with it. Cited in Rony Gabbay, A Political Study of the Arab-Jewish Conflict. Geneva-Paris, 1959. This is an excellent and detailed study of the period from 1948-58. Nadav Safran, From War to War. Pegasus, 1969. See particularly, the important study by Gérard Chaliand, "La Résistance Palestinienne entre Israël et les Etats arabes," in Le Monde Diplomatique, March, 1969. For a recent journalistic account, see Mervyn Jones in New Statesman, June 13, 1969. He is "wholly convinced" (admittedly, on brief exposure) that al-Fatah is the "authentic expression" of a new "coherent and militant nation." Chaliand suggests an analogy to the early Kuomintang, and feels that if it fails, it may be supplanted by a more revolutionary mass movement, as in China or Vietnam. He notes that small Marxist groups exist which seem to him to share more directly in the daily life of the refugees (specifically, the FPLP). There is a detailed analysis by the former Israeli chief of military intelligence, Y. Harkabi: Fedayeen Action and Arab Strategy, Adelphi Papers, No. 53. London, Institute for Strategic Studies, December, 1968. He is rather disparaging, and regards the organization more as a nuisance than a threat. His belief that it has suffered a serious setback in "its failure to establish bases in the occupied territories" seems questionable. See note 13. Quoted by Desmond Stewart in Encounter, June, 1969. Joseph Nasri Nasr, "Palestinians want a new elite," in New Outlook, February, 1969. A spokesman for al-Fatah, quoted by the commentator on Arab affairs for Davar, Ehud Yaari, in "Al-Fatah's political thinking," in New Outlook, November-December, 1968. Abbas Kelidar, "Shifts and changes in the Arab world," in The World Today, December, 1969. According to the American political scientist Michael Hudson, in an unpublished paper ("The Palestinian Resistance Exists"), before the sixday war "al-Fatah numbered no more than 200-300 men; by the time of the Karamah battle it had increased to around 2,000; but in the three months following the Karamah battle it had burgeoned to 15,000." His account is based on three months of intensive investigation in Israel and the Arab states. Le Monde, weekly selection, February 20-26, 1969. In 1965, the first year of intensive bombardment of South Vietnam, local recruitment of the Vietcong tripled, according to American military sources. On these possibilities, see Geoffrey Kemp, Arms and Security, The EgyptIsrael Case, Adelphi Papers, No. 52. London, Institute for Strategic Studies, October, 1968. Ibid.

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36. Esco Foundation study, vol. I, p. 583. See note 1. The original essay is entitled "The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem," 1897. 37. Quoted by Hudson. The spokesman is from the FPLP. See note 26. Quoted in the Bulletin of the Council on Jewish-Arab cooperation, January38, February, 1946. Unpublished lecture by the Israeli scholar Dan Avni-Segre. Oxford, January, 39. 1969. 1925, 1927. Quoted in Cohen's study, pp. 231-2. Some regard such state40. ments as hypocritical, but I think that is an error. Perlmutter, commenting on the views of Yitzhak Tabenkin, expressed in 41. an article of 1937. George Zaninovich, Development of Socialist Yugoslavia, Baltimore Md., 42. Johns Hopkins Press, 1968. See in particular the symposium to which I have already referred in New 43. Outlook, March-April, 1968. Loutfy A1 Khowly, "An international Arab-Jewish front against imperialism 44. and racism," Al-Tali'a (The Vanguard), April, 1969. I am indebted to James Ansara and Denis Kfoury for bringing this to my attention and providing a rough translation. The translators inform me that the word translated throughout as "racism" refers as well to religious and cultural domination, in a sense which has no exact English equivalent. 45. Yasir Arafat, Le Monde, weekly selection, February 20-26, 1969. 46. It might also be argued that the many Fatah statements formulating the goal of a democratic Palestine with equal rights for all citizens are merely intended for propaganda purposes. Harkabi, who has undertaken an exhaustive analysis of Fatah material and whose view, as noted, is highly unsympathetic, concludes that "it should be acknowledged that there is little difference between what they say for external and what is intended for home consumption." 47. The formulation of Haim Darin-Drabkin in the symposium referred to in note 43. 48. Jewish Agency Digest, August 24, 1951. Quoted in John H. Davis, The Evasive Peace, Londen, 1968. 49. An exception is the Matzpen group, a socialist anti-Zionist party that numbers several hundred members. 50. For an evaluation of the situation, see Curt Casteyger, Conflict and Tension in the Mediterraean, Adelphi Papers, No. 51. London, Institute for Strategic Studies, September, 1968. 51. Op. cit. 52. For discussion of all of these events, from 1948 to the present, see Safran and also Maxime Rodinson, Israel and the Arabs. Pantheon, 1968. 53. For an Arab view, documented largely from Israel sources, see Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs of Palestine, Beirut, The Institute for Palestine Studies, 1968. It should be read by those who wish to see "the other side of the coin." An account from a pro-Israeli view is given by Ernest Stock, From Conflict to Understanding. Institute of Human Relations Press of the American Jewish Committee, 1968. See also the excellent study by Don Peretz, Israel and

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59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

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the Palestinian Arabs. Richmond, Va., 1956. The extensive study Israeli Society by S. M. Eisenstadt (Basic Books 1967) devotes 18 out of 424 pages to the Arabs of Israel. Esco Foundation study, vol. II, p. 1124. Ibid. p. 747. Ibid. p. 801-2. Ibid. p. 621. The date was 1929. He was murdered in 1933, it is generally assumed, by Revisionist assassins, not long after the conclusion of a conference that he had organized among Jewish and Arab leaders to consider problems of Jewish-Arab cooperation. The conference is discussed by Cohen (Op. cit. p. 235-7), who believes that it "might have opened a new chapter in Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine." The best sources of information are Cohen's detailed and extensive book and the Esco Foundation study, the former, considerably more sanguine as to the possibilities for success. Esco Foundation study, vol. I, pp. 485-6. Cohen, Op. cit. p. 351. A contemporary account is given in the Bulletin of the Council on JewishArab cooperation, November, 1947. The text is presented in Cohen, Op. cit. p. 328. I follow his account.

PART II

Personal Perspectives on the Crisis

Preface to Part II

The essays in this section converge on the notion of the Palestinian Arabs "as a political entity", to use Professor Anabtawi's phrase. There was no attempt on the part of the editor to enlist two sides of this or any other question involving the Middle East crisis; no attempt, in other words, to follow the format of the Temps Modernes' special issue of June 1967 entitled "Le conflict israélo-arabe". Rather persons known by the editor for their mature faculties of reflection and their courage were asked to write personal essays on the crisis, and all, from different perspectives, converged on this question feeling it to be the central issue of the crisis. This question is one that has rarely been treated as central by the Western press, largely because it is considered too controversial. The following authors demonstrate in their writing the way in which personal expression can liberate one from fear of facing all matters of reality and how that liberation can suggest approaches that give grounds for hope. Samir N. Anabtawi is Associate Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, having received his A. B. from Oberlin College and his M.A. and Ph.D from Yale. He has served on the faculties of Dartmouth College, University of California, and was a member of the Center of International Studies at Princeton. He has contributed essays to the Journal of Politics, International Organization, American Political Science Review, and other scholarly Journals. His essay "The Palestinians as a Political Entity" was delivered in its present form at the Middle East Conference held at Harvard University, May 10-11, 1969.

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Abdullah Laroui is Professor of History at the University of Rabat in Morocco. His book Idéologie Arabe Contemporaine (Maspero, Paris, 1967) has firmly established him as one of the leading intellectual historians of the Arab world. He served as visiting lecturer at U.C.L.A. from 1966-1968. Edward Said is Professor of English at Columbia University, having received his Ph.D at Harvard. In addition to contributing numerous essays and reviews to leading literary journals, he has published two books: Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Harvard U. Press, Cambridge, 1966) and Swiffs Tory Anarchy (Harvard U. Press, Cambridge, 1969). He is a Palestinian by birth. Uri Avnery is a member of the Israeli Knesset and Editor-in-Chief of Haolam Hazeh, Israel's largest news magazine. Among his works in English is Israel Without Zionist published in 1968. He has also written several books in Hebrew. Yehosh.ua Bar-Hillel is Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is a past President of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and a member of Israel's Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He was visiting lecturer at U.C.L.A. from 1966-1967. Irene L. Gendzier is Associate Professor of History at Boston University and Honorary Research Associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard. In addition to her Middle East Reader (Pegasus, New York, 1969), she is preparing a study of the writing of Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi on a fellowship from The National Endowment for the Humanities. Her present essay was written in the form of a "letter" to Jewish and Arab friends in Israel after her trip to Jerusalem in September 1968.

SAMIR N. ANABTAWI

4

The Palestinians as a Political Entity

One of the most interesting developments to come out of the Middle East confliot of 1967 is the increasing awareness on the part of Westerners as well as Middle Easterners of the Palestinians as a distinct political community. For nearly twenty years the Western world has viewed the Palestinians in charitable and humane terms, a people whose lamentable lot was the regrettable product of irreconcilable regional and world forces. From time to time visual and touching accounts were given of the miserable conditions of their existence in refugee camps, thus spurring well-meaning individuals and organizations to increase or supplement the amount of aid that had been given to them. If any questions were raised, they were raised around such technical matters as to whether the Palestinians were evicted from their homeland or whether they left of their own volition, whether UNRWA figures regarding the number of refugees were indeed accurate, whether the seven cents' worth of daily rations per refugee was too much or too little, whether the United States and other Western Powers should increase or diminish their voluntary contributions; how many could be realistically repatriated to Israel in the eventuality of a political solution, and how best to resettle the remainder in the Arab countries with or without international or Big Power assistance. In short the Palestinians were regarded as a tragic people whose suffering should and could be alleviated if common human decency and genuine goodwill on the part of all were to prevail. That this blight on the conscience of mankind was allowed to exist for nearly twenty years was deemed to be the result of ambitious and immoral politicians who sought to perpetuate

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the refugee status of the Palestinians and to use them as a football in a political game aimed at furthering their selfish goals. In the Middle East itself, the view of the Palestinian refugee has been, quite understandably, somewhat more complex. The Israelis, in the main, saw the refugees as an unfortunate and underdeveloped people whose sordid life could have been ameliorated long ago were it not for the cynical leadership in the neighboring Arab states. Those Israelis who may have felt some pangs of guilt in this human tragedy, and there are more of those than many Arabs think, often assuaged their conscience by arguing that the Arab refugees were after all the problem of their kinfolk, that the Palestinians left their native homes of their own accord and with the prodding of radio broadcasts from neighboring Arab capitals; that except for a relatively small number Israel could not in any event allow all the refugees who so wished to return to their native lands without jeopardizing its security and upsetting its ethnic composition, thereby calling into question its very raison d'etre. Besides, many felt, Israel had absorbed a vast number of Jewish immigrants from Arab lands, and in effect an exchange of populations had for all intents and purhopes taken place. Since Israel had settled those Jewish immigrants, it was only fair and proper that the Arab states should settle the Arab immigrants in their midst. In the Arab world, interestingly enough, there has not been over the years one single and uniform attitude that was all pervasive toward the Palestinians. Instead, there were, and perhaps still are, despite all that has transpired since the June War, a number of attitudes depending on the ideological orientation and the socio-economic status of the observer. To the rabid nationalist the Palestinians were first and foremost an uncomfortable reminder of what he keenly felt to have been the worst calamity to befall the Arab nation in modern times. His sense of personal involvement in their lot did not stem from his humanitarian impulses, or from his sense of compassion, but from his political consciousness and his nationalistic perceptions and aspirations. I do not wish to imply that such a person is necessarily callous or insensitive to the plight of many of the refugees, but merely to state that his feeling of outrage was more directed at the origins and political consequences of the Palestine problem than the result of his revulsion at the nature of the refugees' existence. Indeed, it is doubtful that many Arab nationalists have been fully acquainted with the conditions of life in the refugee camps, and even if they have it is quite possible that their

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sense of empathy might have been blunted by their familiarity with not too dissimilar standards of living which they probably observed among their own compatriots. Nevertheless, it is his feeling of shame that the Arabs were unable to stem the forces of Zionism that wounds him; it is his sense of soiled honour that grieves him; it is his frustration at having been unable to erase a grave political injustice that gnaws at him. And the Palestinians are a living presence that endlessy bring to recall those distressingly uncomfortable multitudes of passions. The intensity of these aroused emotions is often so overwhelming that it generates as a defensive mechanism a disposition to lash out at the Palestinians themselves and to accuse them of having been the cause of the current Arab predicament. There are, however, those Arabs whose ideological commitment to the "Arab cause" is less complete, and to whom Palestinians have not been as much a source of deep anguish as they have been a stumbling block in the pursuit of personal and/or limited national aspirations. I refer here to those individuals who, while sharing in the all-pervasive yet somewhat vague yearning for Arab unity and glory, and while capable in times of heightened Arab-Israeli tensions of emotional involvement, are nonetheless more intimately concerned with the attainment of more personal goals and the satisfaction of material desires. On a day-to-day basis it is not the refugees in the camp that concern them, but the educated, skilled, urbanized, and entrepreneurial Palestinians who have insinuated themselves into all sectors of the neighboring Arab societies, and who gradually came to be perceived as competitors in the marketplace, education, etc., even in certain corridors of power. Ordinary feelings of resentment, jealousy, envy and hostility, common to all such sociological situations wherein real or imaginary fears of displacement give rise to class or group tensions, were further aggravated by the Palestinian literati who 1) continued to maintain their separate national identity often despite the acquisition of the legal benefits of citizenship from the host countries; 2) assumed a posture of superiority through derogatory references to the governmental, administrative, and organizational machinery of the Arab states, as well as through constant reminiscences about how things were done in Palestine; and 3) chided other Arabs for their lack of preparation and weak resolve in their confrontation with Israel. Understandably enough all this and much more hardly served to endear this Palestinian dispora who in the eyes of many have come to be looked upon as the

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"new Jews" in their midst. Indeed, charges of ingratitude were often levelled against them, and many a Palestinian could recall being told in the heat of an argument to leave the country if he did not care for the way things were. It would be presumptuous and inaccurate, of course, to suppose that the above classifications exhaust all the feelings and attitudes regarding the Palestinians that are current throughout the world and in particular the Arab portion of it. There are probably as many reactions to the Palestinians as there are individuals. However, what is above all else common to all these views is that none of them sees the Palestinians as a corporate political entity, possessed of preferences and aspirations, and having an independent will of its own that is sufficiently crystallized as to have merited consideration in the determination of affairs in the region during the past twenty years. On the contrary, the underlying supposition that is frequently betrayed in the discourse of individuals, at all levels of public accountability, be they Arab or non-Arab, is that the Palestinians are a malleable group that can be politically distended or constricted, as the case may be, to conform to the shape of any political agreement that may ultimately emerge. They are essentially regarged as a "problem," an "impediment," a "cancer" as C. P. Snow recently put it, whose solution, removal, or excision must be accomplished in order that the larger and more significant goal of peace can be reached. Just exactly how this task is to proceed, or what will become of the Palestinians is never clearly spelled out. Instead, vague generalities are given. The now celebrated November 1967 resolution of the U.N. Security Council calls for a "just settlement of the refugee problem." World leaders speak of an "honorable" solution. Others talk of "fair" compensation. Some discuss "minimum" repatriation, while still others advocate "resettlement." Aside from the simple fact that no one seems to know exactly what is meant by "just," "honorable," or "fair," or how many would be repatriated, or where the remainder would be "resettled" there is the impliciet assumption that the Palestinians will meekly accept, and comply with, whatever scheme that may be worked out by others. Indeed, one suspects that the Palestinians are regarded as morally obligated to submit to any solution that may be devised by the international community no matter how repugant or unpalatable they may deem it. Even certain Arab leaders, in their attemps to find a solution to the current impasse, assure the world that once agreement has been reached with Israel

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regarding her withdrawal from occupied territory, the Palestinians would no longer pose a "problem," and if they did they would be muzzled. How is it that a people have come to be seen in this light? What regional and global forces have come to play during that past two decades which would gradually cause what was once an active and corporate Palestinian Arab community to be viewed as an amorphous entity whose character can be molded to suit the predilections of others? What factors made a rapidly multiplying population so recede into the background for more than twenty years? And why is it that the present Palestinian movement, as symbolized in part by the activities of the fedaeyyeen, should have taken the world by surprise? Answers to such questions are not easily obtained, and I do not pretend to have them. Neither can they be found in the simplistic and glib account that are ordinarily given in the press and which surprisingly enough receive credence in academic circles. Certain clues, however, mey be derived from an examination of some aspects of the struggle for Palestine during the past half century. Even though the current Arab-Israeli impasse is viewed by the world community with justified alarm, and despite the fact that it has captured the attention of the major statesmen of our time, it should be remembered that in its early history, what came to be known as the Palestine Question barely merited more than a footnote in the chronicles of the post Word War I period. The Balfour Declaration which now looms so large in the minds of many hardly had the resounding international repercussions that, say, the Truman Doctrine had thirty years later. The struggle for Palestine between the Palestinian Arabs and Jews was regarded, first and foremost, as an internal one which, despite its significance to certain world-wide interests, was hardly one with which the international community was seized. Britain was, as the mandatory power, definitely involved. But its role tended to seek a balance between what eventually proved to be irreconcilable commitments made to the principal parties concerned. The League of Nations, though technically exercising suzerain powers over the country had, owing to its internal and constitutional make-up, no more than superficial involvement in the dispute which gradually took on the character of a communal strife, albeit with occasional international overtones. However, when the United Kingdom, for reasons beyond the scope of this inquiry, decided to unburden itself of what it eventualy came

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to feel as a taxing responsibility by placing the future of the Mandated territory before the U.N., the Palestine Question had already begun to assume international proportions. The plight of Jews in Europe during the War and the horrid revelations of the Nazi extermination camps captured the sympathy of human being everywhere and brought international support, particularly from the United States, to the idea of the establishment of a Jewish state already long advocated by Zionist groups. The "internationalization" of the Palestine problem placed the Palestinian Arab community at a distinct political disadvantage. Lacking adequate organization, inexperienced in the by-ways of mid-twentieth century diplomacy, wanting the necessary apparatus with which to wage a diplomatic offensive, unskilled in the techniques of propaganda, devoid of the unequivocal support of a Major Power or the staunch advocacy of a powerful constituency therein, the Palestinian Arabs were in no position to mount an effective campaign in international forums. They were further handicapped by a leadership that was heavily tinged with semi-feudal and theocratic colorations and which was not at all receptive to dissent or at least to open inquiry which is a necessary requisite of rational planning. If anything, it was given to unyielding and exaggerated rhetoric that was often a source of embarrassment to friends and disenchantment to those who might otherwise have been in their camp. It was almost natural in such circumstances for the Arab States to step forward and to fill this diplomatic void. They were, after all, independent political units, recognized by the international community, possessed of all the trappings of sovereignty, and having representation in world capitals as well as in the United Nations. Their reach and influence extended into circles to which the Palestinians had no access. Furthermore, the Arab States had only recently banded together to form an international regional organization (the Arab League), which provided the mechanisms for unified and concerted action that aimed at magnifying their diplomatic effectiveness. Whatever else these transformations may have accomplished, they caused the entire Palestinian Question to be cast in an entirely different light. It was no longer perceived as a localized dispute between the Arabs and Zionists of Palestine, but as a much wider confrontation between Arab and Jew, encompassing far larger communities. From this vantage point the Palestinians' identity was gradually being sub-

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merged or diluted in his Arabdom, a development which was further accentuated by the outbreak of armed hostilities in which the armies of the neighboring states took part and which, significantly enough, came to be known as the first Arab-Israeli War. The consequences of the 1948-49 conflict are now a matter of history. They have been analyzed and dissected in countless books. Strategy has been studied, heroism extolled, accountabilities unravelled, deficiencies noted, and remedies exhorted. Rarely, however, has attention been devoted to its impact on the Palestinians in political terms. Aside from the fact the majority of Palestinian Arabs found themselvess all of a sudden as refugees, with all the human, legal, economic, social and psychological liabilities that this naked status entailed, politically speaking they were a bludgeoned group. Scattered throughout the neighboring states, denied the requisites of freedom of movement across state boundaries, their leadership discredited and defunct, whatever rudiments of organization they possessed in Palestine was now tattered and irrelevant. Furthermore, the immediate and burning issue before them was no longer the fundamental question of the future of Palestine, but of their right to return to their homes, lands and property, and to escape the privations and indignities which their newly acquired refugee status often brought. Efforts to revive the old political networks through the establishment of a government met with little enthusiasm on the part of the younger westernized Palesinian intelligentsia that was often contemptuous of the policies and personalities of the past and which could no longer be intimidated into silence at it once was. Besides, the creation of a vigorous and vociferous Palestinian movement would not have met with universal blessing from every Arab quarter. For all of its intrinsic tragedy, the Palestinian problem nevertheless did not eleminate old rivalries or dissipate deeply harbored ambitions. Indeed, in some instances it provided new opportunities for aggrandizement and the satisfaction of long-held desires. In any event, the political initiative had long passed from the Palestinians to the Arab States who, in the aftermath of defeat, became steeped in a tumultuous soul-searching that unleashed a period of severe political instability and which gave added impetus to a long-felt desire to adjust a pattern of relationships with the Great Powers that derived from an imperial past. The general consensus was that the Palestine Question could not be tackled until internal political and economic stability was accomplished, a goal that was, in turn, deemed

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attainable only after the shackles of the colonial era had been entirely removed. So for the next few years the Palestinians had to take a back seat to such matters as the re-negotiation of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, agrarian reform, withdrawal of British troops from the Suez Base, the future military ties with the West, Baghdad Pact, Aswan Dam, Glubb Pasha, etc. One should not assume that what eventually ensued in the next several years after 1948-49 was the result of a well conceived and rational process. Some of it was, of course, the product of planning. But much of it was the by-product of accident, fortuitous circumstances and of what that great sixteenth century Florentine Secretary (Machiavellie) called the caprice of fortune. The 1956 Suez Crisis, far from refocusing attention on the Palestinians, served only to divert attention from them. The conflict over Palestine, once a localized, and subsequently an "internationalized" dispute, had now become global in its overtones. In addition to dragging Britain and France, it now brought the ominous prospect of U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. involvement. The issues posed had now transcended those of the region; the peace of the world was deemed at stake. The likelihood of nuclear warfare in an ever-shrinking universe in which local and regional conflicts could no longer be neatly separated from total world disorder had rapidly impinged on the consciousness of thinking human beings everywhere. However, even when the spectre of nuclear disaster had faded, the Palestinians did not come into view. The international community was far too concerned with the immediacy of the issues attending Suez to pay them heed. Instead, the resources of the United Nations, and the suprisingly fertile imagination of its statesmen, were devoted to such matters as the future of the Canal, the modalities of British, French and Israeli withdrawal from Egypt, the creation, deployment and mandate of a United Nations Emergency Force, demilitarization, Sharm El-Sheikh, Straits of Tiran, Gulf of Aqaba, shipping, etc. One might say that, ironically enough, the more complex and magnified the Palestine Question became, the less visible were the Palestinians. The events of 1967 hardly served to change the picture. Aside from the spate of humanitarian resolutions calling upon Israel to allow the new refugees to return to their homes, resolutions similar to the scores that had been passed over the last twenty years by various organs of the U.N., and which perhaps by their repetitiveness seemed to have

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deprived them of their potency, the Palestinians did not seem to count a great deal in the new equations. Indeed, if anything, they were pushed even further into the background. True enough, the November 1967 Security Council resolution "Affirm(ed)... the necessity... for achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem." But the bulk of ihat resolution was directed at such questions as the termination of belligerency, withdrawal of Israeli forces, acknowledgment of sovereignty, boundaries, territorial inviolability, navigation through international waters, inadmissibility of territorial annexation by conquest, demilitarization, designation of a Special Representative, and so on and so forth. However, even though they may have been drowned out in the U.N. by what they may have considered tangential matters, in the Middle East itself the Palestinians were coming into their own. In the aftermath of the shattering defeat of the Arab armies, all the elements converged to bring them into prominence. It was obvious to nearly everyone that the traditional and orthodox methods employed by the Arab States in dealing with Israel had proven themselves a failure. It was also clear that the higly vocal Arab leadership which had been so shrill prior to the War had now been tarnished, if not altogether disgraced. It was further evident that the remnants of the old Palestinian leadership, as symbolized by Ahmed Shukairy, which still pretended to speak in the name of the Palestinians, and which was heavily reliant on, and indeed subservient to, the will of the Arab League and some of its members could no longer claim the Palestinians' allegiance. And in the probing self-examination and remarkably open debate that followed the Six-Days' War, the voices of hitherto silent and non-too-prominent younger Palestinians came to be heard. These were in the main the voices of the children of the old Palestinian middle and lower-middle classes that despite their severe dislocation somehow managed to provide their sons and daughters with a university education. These off-spring were individuals who were much more performance oriented than their elders, far less given to pompous pronouncements, a litde better adept at organizational skills, and far more possessed of a sense of political realism. An examination of the history of the past two decades finally convinced them of the futility of their dependence on the Arab States. They could clearly see that far from saving Palestine for the Palestinians, the Arab States only succeeded in surrendering more of the

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territory to Israel after each try. And far from holding what remained of it in trust for the Palestinians after 1949, they dispensed of it in a manner suited to their interests. Furthermore, some of the Arab States were now so anxious to preserve their own territorial integrity that in exchange for Israeli troop withdrawals they were ready to concede the loss of Palestine through the recognition of Israel and the ending of all claims to belligerency. The general feeling among this younger generation of Palestinians was that the road back to Palestine could only be paved by the Palestinians themselves. They drew inspiration from the activities of the Algerians, Cubans and Vietnamese, and a few of them were wellversed in the literature of Guerilla warfare and national liberation. Some went so far as to establish contacts with these groups and even received training and support from them. Gradually, the rudimentary beginnings of a few guerrilla organizations came to be formed. It was not, however, until after the 1967 June War that they finally came into prominence. The few attacks that they mounted in Israel and in the occupied areas were seized upon by the Arab masses and their governments as a sign that the struggle with Israel had not yet ended, that resistance was still in effect, and that while the Arabs may have lost a few battles the war itself was far from over. Contributions came pouring in from all corners of the Arab World. Money, supplies and weapons were sent. And in the publicity given the Israeli raid on Karameh in Jordan, recruits were easily obtained. Somehow the movement captured the imagination not only of the Palestinians in the refugee camps, but also of the ones in the universities, medicine, law, engineering and other professions. Donations of skills became readily obtained. Bases were established, clinics installed, and schools staffed. Almost overnight what was only an incipient movement turned into a well structured and intricately woven organization, with a will of its own is increasingly becoming an important factor in the new Middle East equation. The object of the movement, as expressed by some of its leaders, is plainly and simply put: the return of the Palestinians to their homes in a Palestine that would be de-Zionized. In other words, Palestine would revert to its old self when it consisted of two communities working in harmony side by side as they once did, under a political arrangement wherein Judaism would not bestow any special privileges. Just exactly what sort of government would be established, whether a

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"balance" would be built into the political system, how Arab property would be restored and what would become of the Jews currently in possession of it, are not clearly spelled out. The impression one derives is that at the moment the attention of this new Palestinian leadership is focused far more on the operational and military aspects than on the long-range political ones. Nevertheless, they seem tenacious in their determination to return to Palestine come what may and regardless of the obstacles. And toward that goal they are willing to sacrifice almost anything and risk the ever-increasing likelihood of escalation and total conflict. Neither will they allow the Arab Governments to assume control over them, or to restrict them in their military conduct, as the current clashes in Lebanon have shown. Indeed, some have been known to express the belief that no Arab Government should be allowed to remain aloof from the struggle, and if its involvement ultimately resulted in military defeat and occupation by Israeli forces, then the chances for ultimate victory would be enhanced. In such circumstances the Israelis would then constitute a minority within a framework far better suited to waging guerrilla warfare. It is not my purpose to indulge in forecasting the likelihood of this possibility coming into being, but to indicate the type of thinking and activity that seems to be rampant among Palestinians. There is the tendency in certain quarters, particulary in Israeli ones, to play down the military effectiveness of the fedayin. The argument usually presented is that the Palestinians are obviously no match for the Israeli Army, that they are merely a small thorn in its side, and that in the final analysis they fall in the category of a nuisance that cannot, in all realism, pose a serious threat to the survival of the Jewish State. Such a view, to my mind, is mypoic. It merely concentrates on the present and places far too much emphasis on its military aspects, as the Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians clearly indicates. The sending of Israeli jets across the Jordan River or into Syria to strike at Fatah and other bases has become an almost daily affair. Inside the occupied territories unrest is met with incarcerations, expulsions, curfews, demolition of homes and other forms or threats of stanctions. Policies of this kind are probably due to the increased role of the professional military in the decision-making process, the emergence of a new form of nationalism in Israel, and the readiness to submit to demands for reprisals from the rank and file. But it is also due, one suspects, to a distorted and uncomplimentary picture of the Arab in

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general, and the Palestinians in particular, in the Israeli mind. The image carried is that in the final analysis he is incompetent, lacking in organization, discipline or resolve, unable or unwilling to comprehend reality, having an infinite capacity for self-delusion, capable of understanding only force, and ever unlikely to sacrifice personal comfort for the demands of national goals. These and many other unflattering associations, further re-enforced by three Israeli military victories, have somehow planted in many an Israeli a "Herren" mentality where the Arab is concerned, one not unlike the intellectual framework which governed the behavior of nineteenth century Europeans toward their colonial subjects. Indeed, so prevlaent is this image that it has even been transmitted overseas to American shores. The simple fact is that despite assertions to the contrary, many Israelis do not know the younger generation of educated and Westernized Palestinians. There are a great many Israelis, born since the creation of Israel twenty-one years ago, whose contacts and associations have been almost exclusively with the Palestinian minority in Israel which in the main is not one that has been able to achieve great economic and educational attainments. There are not many Arab students studying in Israeli universities. Nor are there many Arab scientists, doctors, or engineers working in Israeli laboratories, hospitals, or factories. The Palestinian Arabs now in Israel largely fall in the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder. Besides, they are politically suspect, and feelings of hostility and suspicion further accentuate the gap or distance to which class discrepancies give rise. Neither can it be said that the "Arabized" or "Islamicized" Jew who came from the Arab countries is acquainted with this new breed of Palestinian. Indeed, whatever their previous conceptions may have been toward the Arabs in general they very likely had, since coming to Israel, undergone great transformations. Largely unskilled and uneducated, the Arabs in Israel were their competitors in the labor markets. Furthermore in their efforts not to be confused with the Arabs, they reacted in accordance with classic sociological patterns by seeking to dissociate themselves from them and by quickly incorporating the dominant values of the European group which again were replete with derogatory stereotypes of the Arab. The one thing that Israelis, and incidentally many others, do not seem to realize is that the current Palestinian movement is directed by an impressive elite whose academic credentials would do credit to any

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country. It is not anything like that which dominated the various paramilitary groups that came into being prior to the establishment of Israel and which some older Israelis may still remember. There are estimates that there may be as many as fifty thousand Palestinians today holding university degrees. And an increasing number of these have been moved by the activities of the fedayin to join in the general movement. It is interesting to note that Yasir Arafat, the present head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, is a university trained engineer, and that the leader of the Front for the Liberation of Palestine is a medical doctor - a graduate of the American University of Beirut. Admittedly the rank and file are not of such educational attainments and many are recruited from the refugee camps. But they are receiving superior training and direction which is already becoming a source of greater discomfiture to Israel. I do not mean to suggest that they are likely to attain such an overwhelming military capacity that they could defeat Israeli forces in open combat. But by their activities they may spur a greater number of Palestinians, presently under Israeli occupation, to join the struggle. Elements are quickly converging which may propel a substantial body of Palestinian youth to participate in the resistance movement. There are already conditions of privation in Gaza. Unemployment is widespread, and under-employment is high. Secondary school graduates - and bear in mind that this June the third class will have graduated since the occupation, with 4,500 in each class - are cut off from universities in Arab lands and face future of continued idleness with severe consequences to their lives and to those of their families. Despair may drive them to acts which may in turn breing on an everwidening cycle of sabotage and repression whose consequences can only bear ill to the future of the region. For Israel the resort to military measures cannot help but in the end prove morally and institutionally corrosive. A society cannot maintain its professed character with repression in its midst. The impact of emergency laws enacted, of violence and counter-violence, of the deep hatreds that are engendered, would most assuredly shake the foundations of any society. Reliance on force would become automatic, and the continued and increasing suspension of civil liberties would be constitutionally debilitating. Indeed, the greatest threat to Israel, it seems to me, is the one that may rise from within itself as a result of its increasing dependence on military means. No society espousing

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democratic principles can ultimately maintain its values and at the same time become a praetorian state. The Palestinians, the Israelis must realize, if any peace is to be achieved in the region, are a living reality. It does not do Israel, the Middle East, or the world, any service to pretend that they never existed. Unlike what many Zionists would have had the world believe, Palestine was not a land without a people to be earmarked for a people without a land. Neither was it a desert which Israelis in the span of twenty years made bloom. Palestinians lived there for centuries. They ploughed their fields, planted their crops, ran their small industries and tended their commerce. They were not, of course, as technologically advanced as the European Zionists who came to settle in their midst. But that does not mean that the Palestinians are a kind of "Untermenschen" that can be continuously expelled to give way to settlement and security questions. Neither does it mean that they can be herded into a corner of the West Bank, integrated economically but deprived of citizenship rights. Such notions are outmoded and untenable. The economic cannot be separated from the political, or the other way around. Nor are the Palestinians, in any case, willing to concede that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirming that man is endowed with inalienable rights that include Life, Liberty and Dignity falls short covering them. And unless the Israelis recognize this, I fear that the worst is yet to come.

ABDULLAH LAROUI

5

Reflections on Three Concepts of Justice Regarding Palestine*

At the root of all positions regarding Palestine three concepts of justice, referring to three different ideologies, are distinguishable. The first and simplist has the most terrible consequences. "Why did they come? Why are we obliged first to make room for them in our country, then to give it to them entirely? Why must we be bound by agreements and promises made by foreign powers?" No one answers these questions raised by the Arabs of Palestine; no one believes these questions should even be considered. Other questions merely echo the above. "If everyone rejects us, where can we go? By what right are we prevented from recovering the land which was ours? Why should we be the eternal victims of history?" No one has better established the incommensurability of these two series of questions than Martin Buber. Replying to Mahatma Gandhi, who was discussing the Arabs' complaint, he asserted that it was a matter of two essentially different claims, between which no objective discussion can be made as to which is just, which unjust.. . We could not and cannot renounce the Jewish claim; something even higher than the life of our people is bound up with this land, namely its work, its divine mission."1 Backed up by a certain literary prestige, Barbara Tuchman writes about the June crisis in the following terms: "This is - or should be - an American, not a Jewish, issue. To sacrifice the land of our spiritual birth, the land, as an Englishman said, to which we all turn our faces in the grave . . . is * "Reflections on Three Concepts of Justice Regarding Palestine" represents an extract of Part I of Professor Laroui's originally submitted and much longer essay. The extract has been made with the author's approval. Translated from French by Herbert Hartman.

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an extreme of absurdity."2 Miss Tuchman is only providing a practical conclusion to the moral dilemma maintained by Buber's philosophical conscience. This perspective naturally produced the currently fashionable idea of a tragic opposition: both sides are right and both are wrong - but at different levels; each protagonist is all good and all bad depending on the angle from which he is seen. Optimists ask each side to recognize their wrongdoings before asserting their rights. I. Deutscher3 employs a striking image in which the Jews are the inhabitants of a building that has caught on fire. Thinking only of saving themselves, they jump from the windows and land on passers-by below, breaking the latters' legs. Faced now with the startled cries of the injured pedestrians, the Jews reply with blows of increasing violence instead of explaining the situation. The image is good, but one can anticipate the Zionist retort: the passerby did not want to know anything, he did not want to forget or pardon; all he understands is force. A religious Deutscher might propose that the Zionists publicly admit their wrongs, which they did not intend to commit but which they nevertheless caused, then agree to pay for the damages. The Arabs, in the name of charity and peace, would be obliged to settle accounts and turn the page, and naturally the refusal to do this by the Arabs of Palestine and elsewhere, could serve as an excuse for the Zionists to ignore their wrongs. This proposal has taken different forms; it was the basis of the Weizman-Faysal agreement and is the essence of the plan put forth today by a writer such as Uri Avnery. It is really a dialogue between two deaf people which can go on indefinitely with no results whatsoever. Each refuses to include the other in his vision. Certain Zionists seek attenuating circumstances by saying: "No one realized that Palestine was inhabited." Others add more subtly: "In the colonial era, when the movement was born, nonEuropeans were not considered to actually exist. They were thought of as only living on borrowed time like the American Indians or the Maoris." Must we go so far? The Zionists knew, but did not care; an absolute prerogative (theirs) never takes a relative prerogative into account. Two thousand years is of no importance to a reader of the Bible. It is not for nothing that the passages of that book which relate the massacre of the Palestinians by the Hebrews are read by preference in the primary schools of Israel today;4 it is not for nothing that the Zionist policy has always been preventive and terrorist. These are only minor blemishes which will be transformed and purified by the

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Holiness of the ends pursued. Here the only judge is one's own god, in other words, one's self; and this, finally, constitutes Israel's policy. At a time when America, with all her power, must listen to international opinion concerning Vietnam, when Russia finds it good propaganda to justify to non-Communist peoples its territorial disputes with China, Israel asserts with increasing aggressiveness that she will be the sole judge of the necessities of her security and the best means to implement her policy. It is not so much this Israeli position which offends us Arabs, but rather the position of a third party, essentially the West. It is all right for the West to see behind the two grievances the same simplistic concept of justice which derives from the peasant's idea of ownership, and can only lead to Divine Judgement, i.e. war. The West can even go so far as to place the two adversaries back to back, ignoring the fact that the Arabs never held an official policy which demanded that Palestine be entirely Arab. But when the West answers us by saying "Justice is terrible, have a little pity; an injustice is not rectified by another injustice," and then only sees in Israel's behavior a fascinating faithfulness to herself, admires the belligerent declarations of the armed prophet and the one-eyed general, and gives thanks to God that in a world without faith a minority is still capable of dying in order that the Divine Promise may come true; we will never accept this basic partiality. That the injustice committed in Palestine, in part to Christians, becomes for other Christians in the West the proof of the truthfulness of their Holy Book, seems and will always seem to us an extreme example of alienation. Westerners should not come to us and talk about the Holy War of the Moslems. If by Holy War is meant one in which God's word justifies all the atrocities, Israel's wars are the perfect example of religious fanaticism, worsened because it is in the service of ideologies, interest and persons far removed from any religious sentiment and thus insensitive to fraternity and universalism. The major victims of the June War, after the Palestinian refugees, were the supporters of secularization in the Arab countries, because they observed a less secular society than theirs in action, displaying more hate and fanaticism than they could imagine, thus rendering the secularization crusade apparently unnecessary. What a weak argument to imagine what an Arab victory would have meant, to compare what Arab leaders said and what the Israelis did! This may have had an effect in New York and Paris, but it will never convince the victims. As long as the debate is continued within the religious messianic

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framework, the Moslem Arab has every right to talk of a continuation of the Crusades;5 and the Arab politicians who, obviously for nonreligious reasons, try to make the Palestinian problem the concern of the world's Moslem, will find attentive audiences. One might reply that this messianic perspective is not current in the West. This is true during periods of calm, but how quickly it grows in times of crisis in Israel, both in the Diaspora and among Western Christians! As long as these groups do not free themselves from this approach of another age, another world, whether they want to or not, with or without the grace of God, they are fostering war. One cannot congratulate them for this nearsightedness. A whole body of more modern literature is supported by another concept of justice: land belongs to he who works it. Even if they did not pay high prices to purchase parts of the Palestinian land, even if they have no historical title to Palestine, the Jews are justified in keeping that land because they have worked it and, as it is commonly said, made a garden from the desert. M. Buber gives this notion mystical form: "This land recognizes us, for it is fruitful through us and precisely because it bears fruit for us, it recognizes us."6 Here is the same idea stated more bluntly: "What are Palestinians? When I came here there were 250,000 non-Jews, mainly Arabs and Bedouins. It was desert, more than underdeveloped, nothing . . . It was only after we made the desert bloom and populated it that they became interested in taking it from us."7 Title to property is no longer an inalienable right but simply an expression of true possession, namely, accumulated daily work. This thesis, fundamental in any analysis of modern capitalism and used to justify the transfer of private property to public domain, allows the pro-Zionists of the East and the West to form a tactical alliance in spite of their numerous differences. Many Arabs, both liberals and socialists, accept this doctrine and even use it ideologically in their campaigns for agrarian reform. This justification of the Zionist undertaking is not criticized by them at the theoretical level; but how can one fail to see that in this instance the Palestinian case is artifically isolated? All colonization can be justified with this argument; all the European minorities in the world can arm themselves with the same alibi. Both the French colons in Algeria yesterday and the English in Rhodesia today maintain that before their arrival the land was used only as pasturage, that it is only their own passionate and methodological work which produced the garden envied now by

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the native peoples and which the latter will quickly ruin once they take over. How is it that liberals refuse to even listen to such arguments as long as it is not a question of Palestine? It is this lack of consistency which strikes the Arabs above all else. One must either accept the validity of all anti-colonialist movements of the twentieth century, which essentially question the imperialistic ideology generalizing the principle that "the land belongs to those who make the best use of it," or else reject these movements in toto as the backlash of pre-capitalist mentality. To first concede to the blacks of South Africa and Rhodesia the right to remain in the white economic system and to conquer it from within in order to become a majority, and then to refuse this same right to the Palestinians, is, in Arab eyes, an injustice. Only racists supporting every minority government are logical, and the Arabs are unable to answer them; but those who refuse to accept the ultimate consequences of their own arguments have often recourse to false reasons which are worse than the conclusions they attempt to avoid. They maintain that the Arabs are not an exploited proletariat in Palestine; but if Israel is different in this respect from the colonies of the nineteenth century, it is only that much closer to the colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where the native peoples were not exploited but were displaced and then put on reservations. This is not the proof that Israeli colonization is more progressive, but rather indicates that it is backwards in so far as the economic, religious and racial motivations are again inextricably linked as they were in earlier times. It is not for nothing that this vision leads to a comparison of the Arab Palestinian and the American Indian,8 a victim of history for whom one has compassion but to whom one cannot fully render justice. If this analogy proves to be false, then Jewish colonization will have become like that of South Africa and the destiny of the two state structures will be identical. The present difference between the two is temporary: South Africa will become what Israel was before June 1967, and Israel since that date is in the process of becoming what South Africa is today. For the Arabs the injustice is the persistent denial of the obvious. In this case universal conscience is the judge who approved the Algerians against the French colons, the Africans against the whites in Rhodesia and elsewhere, but who is extraordinarily timid when it comes to the question of the Palestinians. Why? One can dream of a world in which conscience is truly universal, in which each human group will be able to recognize his own conscience. One can

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also delude oneself with the illusion that this state is already in the process of crystalization outside of the official organizations claiming to represent the voice of Law and Justice.9 The fact is, however, that this conscience reflects, in large part, the phantasms of the West. Not free enough nor innocent enough to be really neutral, it is the congenital partiality of the West which is echoed in all the individual consciences on all parts of the globe. This partiality would be acceptable to the Arabs if it were restricted to the framework of its own rationale - the laws of economics, politics and war; but it encompasses the prejudices which a long history leaves in the memory. In order to justify the masses of refugees that have been produced, the dynamited houses, collective responsibility, concentration camps and napalm, one cites not only the harsh realities of war but, depending on the climate, the spectre of the Saracen, the Barbary pirate, the Turk, the Mongol or the Arab slave trader. Palestine is lost in the fog of a cruel but not unique history. The Slavs who struggled for centuries against the Germans, who were justified by their better organization and increased productivity, the Mexicans who lost a third of their country in the name of the same logic, the Indians and the Malaysians who have already heard similar slogans from their Asian neighbors and will soon hear them again - all these people have been confused by the hate and bitterness of an unforgetting West when they could have easily recognized the basic similarities between their own destiny and that of the Palestinians.10 Through this specific conscience which posits and imposes its universality, a diplomacy is created, yesterday by England, today by the United States. The rights of the Palestinians are forgotten in the egotistical game of States. The capitalistic notion of justice (ownership = work) negates itself and leaves the door open to the fait accompli, to force. Since June 1967 a third concept of justice has rapidly won favor: it is, in a certain sense, the result of the comparison of the Palestinian case with that of the American Indians. Typically Hegelian, this notion is summed up thus: all that is real is rational and therefore just. Under the pretext of only being interested in the future, the fuse is removed from elements potentially explosive in the past and the present. The Arab grievances are disagreeable but unavoidable consequences of a movement which history made necessary. Everyone is excused: the Jews could not help but be Zionists given the evolution of East European societies; they could not help but desire Palestine and thus dis-

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possess the Arabs. The latter in their own right could not avoid resisting and by that oblige the Jews to organize themselves militarily. The Jews had to win given the level of their intellectual and social development, the Arabs had to refuse defeat and thereby set the stage for additional Jewish victories.11 Once more the tragic imagery and the idea of a vicious circle: violence and confrontation which no one wanted in the beginning. The only way to break the cycle of repeated injustices is for one of the adversaries to decide not to seek revenge upon the other and as the Jewish wrongdoing cannot be erased, then it is the Arab's duty to stop the fatal evolution by accepting, clearly speaking, their defeat. This idea underlies all the solutions of the "Ijeft", all the plans which aim at an integration of Israel in the Middle East. This concept relativizes the notion of justice if it does not nullify it altogether: History is the judge and one can do nothing but analyze its decision, which means take apart the mechanism which implemented History's judgement. The Eastern European bourgeoisie is taking revenge upon the Jews for its inability to develop economically (because of the competition of Western capital), the Jews in turn take revenge on the Arabs of Palestine, who are asked to pay the price of their backwardness by taking charge of the universal movement of History. Again, certain Arabs are able to accept this analysis, in the same degree that they themselves have recourse to the presupposed meaning of historical events; but as it is a question of an historical decision, why only consider certain elements and disregard others? If one maintains that the Jewish fait is implemented, real, that the Hebrew nation already exists, in whose name is it stated that the Palestinian nation is dead and buried? If one takes account of the Israeli will to impose itself, why discount the will of the Palestinian Arabs to change that situation? In the framework of this historical analysis, the door must be kept open to all possible developments which could justify or disprove the prognostics of both sides. To remain open to the future is no more than to accept the free exercise of democracy, which could lead to a fundamental change in the democratic setting itself. The Hebrew nation is a reality today. Why not let the Palestinian nation assert itself? But no, those who maintained in 1946-47 that the Jews of Palestine were already a nation, with or without recognition, with or without an army, today claim that the Palestinians are not a real interlocutor because they have neither an army nor territory; those

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who assert that England had neither the political nor the moral prerogative to oppose the emergence of the Hebrew nation demand, in the name of international law, that the neighboring Arab states crush the Palestinian Liberation movement. To ask, however, that one not artificially stop the course of history in order to extract as one desires the judgment of history, is to assert ultimately once more the terrible weight of reality: the relationship of politico-military forces. Thus, no matter which concept of justice is employed as a reference point - religious, liberal, or historical - one always ends up at the reality of the facts and in the name of this "realism" the Arabs are refused fair treatment. The Arabs ask that the analyst be simply logical, objective and disregard the particularities (true or false) which protect Palestine, but they are always denied this because the "plain fact" in Palestine is against them. Justice transforms itself into the justification of what already exists. Must we stop here? Is there no more to say and do beyond this observation? Do the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine have similar attitudes towards these concepts of justice and moreover are these concepts of equal value? Obviously not. Even if reality remains the decisive element in the entire debate, the third concept, historical and dynamic, offers more possibilities in spite of appearances, than the other two, to one day go beyond the logic of violence: the Arabs (at least intellectuals and politicians) are moving closer to this point, the Israelis and their admirers moving away.

Personal Reflections on Arab-Jewish Cooperation * I do not belong to those who believe that a racial kinship is a favorable argument for understanding and lasting cooperation.12 Semitism is not a reality to begin with, and secondly the Arabism of today is founded on a cultural tradition in which the Semitic element is certainly not dominant. The Arabs want to expose themselves to other cultural traditions (ancient Greece, Buddhist Asia, the modern West); above all they do not want to limit themselves only to the Semitic component of their history. A Jewish-Arab understanding based only or mainly * "Personal Reflections on Arab-Jewish Cooperation" represents a summary (with author's approval) of portions of Part II of Professor Laroui's longer essay. Translated from French by Charlotte M. Teuber-Weckersdorff.

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on that would be in itself a regression, compared to the symbiosis known in the Muslim Middle Ages, and would in consequence enforce in both peoples their major vice: ethnocentricity. Those of us who call for religious universalism and progressive humanism have no interest in ethnocentric activism's increasing among us through any collaboration or blind competition with the Jews of Israel. I am also skeptical about a potential economic and technological cooperation between Israelis and Arabs. The latter must learn from the true creators of modern technology, not from intermediaries. Furthermore, in my opinion, the question is: what ideal is modern technology meant to serve? If it is a nationalistic, ethnocentric purpose, as is obviously the case in the Zionist ideology, the Arabs had better avoid a similar adventure. The only way out of this long lasting confrontation would be a simultaneous acceptance of the humanistic values of modern society, a convergence, in which the revitalizing value of work might serve as a means of unity between Arab workers and their Jewish comrades, in which political democracy would no longer be used as propaganda for denying rights to the Arabs presented in contrast as "feudal", and in which the spirit of organization inherent in business would cease serving only a militaristic society, would be the best route to peace. The key to its approach would be the setting of a limit to the exclusivity in our two societies, recognizing the fundamental rights of individuals and communities, and making no more claims to any "Divine promise". I believe the Arabs are in a mood to de-traditionalize themselves; and one may hope that they are not going to retraditionalize themselves, as we know what a neo-traditionalism combined with modern military-technocracy is able to produce. Are the Jewish and non-Jewish democrats ready to live up to their tasks?

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NOTES 1. Israel and the World, Essays iti a Time of Crisis. New York, Schocken Books, 2nd ed., 1963, p. 231. 2. The Herald Tribune, European edition, June I, 1967. 3. On the Israeli-Arab War, New Left Review, August, 1967. 4. G. M. Tamarin, "Influence of Ethnic and Religious Prejudices on Moral Judgement", New Outlook, January and March, 1966, quoted by N. Weinstock, Le Sionisme contre Israel. Paris, Edition Maspero, 1969, p. 368. 5. Viewpoint expressed in Moh. Jaläl Kushk, Al-Qawmiya wa'l-ghazw alfikri. Kuwait, 1967, pp. 180 ff. 6. Op cit, p. 233. 7. Levi Eshkol, Newsweek. February 17, 1969. 8. It is significant that Avnery in a longwinded style coming straight out of books on the American West should write that "gentle c h i l d r e n . . . . dreamed of the day when they, in their turn, would till the soil and fight the Arabs." Israel Without Zionism. New York, Macmillan, 1968, p. 129. 9. As was done by Anwar Abdalmalik, Libre Opinion du Journal Le Monde, February 13, 1969. 10. This influence of the Western on the non-Western world is well drawn by M. Rodinson in Israel Devant le refus arabe, Paris, Seuil, 1968; English ed., London, Penguin Books, 1968. 11. Cf. N. Weinstock, Op. cit. p. 561. 12. The only Arab who was enthusiastic about that racial basis of kinship was Faysal Ibn Husayn, who did not speak on his own initiative.

EDWARD W. SAID

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The Palestinian Experience

Anyone who has tried seriously to examine the contemporary Near East is frequently tempted to conclude that his project is unmanageable. Every sort of distraction gets in the way; after a time, a distraction seems as inherent a necessity as an essential. Yet if one believes that the crux of the Near East today is the conflict between Israel and a dispersed, or occupied, population of Palestinian Arabs, then a clearer view of that problem becomes possible. For the major distraction to any scrutiny of the region has been everyone's unwillingness to allow for a Palestinian presence. This has been no less true of the Palestinians themselves, than it has of the other Arabs, or of Israel. My thesis is that since 1967 the confusions have somewhat diminished because the Palestinians have had to recognize this truth, and have gradually begun to act upon it. This recognition is the source of what I call Palestinianism: a political movement that is being built out of a re-assertion of Palestine's multi-racial and multi-religious history. The aim of Palestinianism is the full integration of the Arab Palestinian with lands and, more importantly with political processes that for twenty-one years have either systematically excluded him or made him a more and more intractable prisoner. It seems to me to be a useless dodge to assert - as most anti-Palestinian polemics do - that the Palestinian popular resistance to the exclusions of Zionism is simply a version of Arab anti-Semitism, or still another threat of genocide against the Jews. I have felt that the best way to disprove this view would be to put the Palestinian experience to the reader on both a personal and a public level. Each, I think, is as honest as I could make it, and that has required an

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approach to Palestinianism by a passage through other Arab countries, notably Lebanon and Egypt. By a happy coincidence both countries have been familiar to the Western reader, accessible to me, and logical geographic and ideological ways of getting to Palestinianism and to its temporary headquarters in Jordan. Another virtue of the approach is that it helps to reduce the difficulty of writing about the Palestinian experience in a language not properly its own. For by moving to the Palestinian through the screens that have surrounded him and are now unsettled by him, even as he continues in exile, an English transcription of the process dramatizes the real difficulties of peripherality, silence, and displacement that the Palestinian has suffered. Palestinianism then is an effort at repatriation, but the present stage of the Palestinian experience (as this essay tries to show) is a problematic early transition from being in exile to becoming a Palestinian once again. Two of the oldest beach facilities in Beirut are called Saint Simon and Saint Michel; they are also known together in Arabic by a different name, Al-Ganah', that does not approximate a translation of their French titles. To this peculiar cohabitation of French and Arabic, tolerated by everyone without much attention, was recently added a third beach establishment adjacent to the other two: Saint Picot. In June 1969, when I was in Beirut, the new place and its name assumed a powerful symbolic value for me, as did all the discordia concors that makes up Beirut. Clearly someone had assumed that "Saint" meant beach, and since Georges Picot was still a name to be reckoned with, what better conjuotion than Saint Picot. But then the contradictions and ironies multiply without control. Lebanon was in the midst of its worst internal crisis in many years, a crisis whose dimensions, depending on whom you talked to, seemed at once definitively critical and endlessly analyzeable. The fact was that only a caretaker government held office since no cabinet could be formed. One supervening reason for this state of affairs was the lack of a workable definition of Lebanon's sovereignty: an undetermined number of Palestinian fedayin were encamped in the South (next to the Israeli border), and although "accepted" as Arab brothers engaged in a legitimate struggle against Israel, the presence of these men had in some very fundamental way unsettled Lebanon's identity, if not its remarkable economy. Yet they remained, the crisis continued, as did Leban-

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on in suspense for many weeks. Beirut contained this paralyzing collision of views, just as it has contained, indeed exposed and incarnated, almost every contradiction of the Arab Near East. Thus in a small way the endowment of Picot's name (to which the Arabs have no reason to be grateful) with sainthood, and the entitlement of a Lebanese beach to so oddly decorated a European name, was a reflection of the cabinet crisis, of reverberations that came from Syrian, Jordanian, Israeli, Egyptian, American, and Russian unrest, but above all, of Beirut's unique status as a place of natural entry from the West onto the confusing modern topography of the Arab world. Engaged in the astonishing variety of his history the Lebanese is used to finding himself split several ways, most of them contradictory and, as I have been suggesting, utterly Lebanese in the near-freakishness of their resolution. (I use Beirut and Lebanon interchangeably, despite an inevitable slurring of nuances. There are enough nuances to be taken account of, however, without worrying too much about these.) What is Lebanese is the public and direct availability for daily use of these contradictions in so tiny a country. They are Lebanon, and have been for at least a century. The order of Lebanon is how miraculously it accomodates everything, and how its citizens can stand the accomodations that might cripple everyone else. To live in Beirut means, among other things, having the choice of doing, feeling, thinking speaking, and even being, the following, in a huge assortment of possible combinations: Christian (Protestant, Maronite, Greek Orthodox, Melchite, Roman Catholic, etc.), Moslem (Sunnite or Shiite), Druze, Armenian, Jewish, French, American, British, Arab, Kurdish, Phoenecian, part of pan-Islamism, part of Arab nationalism, tribal, cosmopolitan, Nasserite, communist, socialist, capitalist, hedonist, puritan, rich, poor or neither, involved in the Arab struggle against Israel (i.e. for the fedayin, for the Israeli airport attack as a sign of involvement), disengaged from the Arab struggle against Israel (i.e. against the jedayin, for the airport attack insofar as it demonstrated Lebanon's peaceful position by the absence of any resistance given the raiders) and so on. The poverty of labels like left-wing and right-wing is immediately apparent. Lebanon then has stood for accommodation, tolerance and, especially, representation. It is no accident, for example, that such disparities as the ideas of Arab nationalism, the renaissance of Arabic as a modern language, the foundations of the Egyptian press, the living

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possibility and continuity of the good life and commercial entrepreneurism (at least for the twentieth-century Arab) orginated in Lebanon. Yet the crisis of 1969 developed out of the wealth of what was represented in the country and the lack of suitable Lebanese instruments, for once, to extract the best possible combination for Lebanon's destiny. For if past, present, and future are all readily negotiable with most interests, as I felt they were in Beirut, then crisis ensues. Call it equilibrium, and it still remains critical. As I saw it, Beirut was a victim of its openness and its true cultural virtuosity, as well as of the absence of an articulable foundation upon which to draw. By comparison Damascus was scarcely visible at all. An accident of personal history made it impossible for me to visit the city: no Americans are permitted there, and since I had American citizenship, despite my birth in Jerusalem into a Jerusalem Arab family, I could not even drive through Syria on my way to Amman. As the plane to Amman flew over Damascus, the city's appearance from the air confirmed my impression of it as the most impenetrable Arab city I had ever known. It seemed gorged on its hermetic involutions. The Syrian regime, which tangled the rhetorical mysteries of Baath politics with the secret intricacies of Aliwite religion, had closed the country off and turned away the flavor of its life from the observer. Everything about Amman, whose central position for the Palestinian has been strengthened since June 1967, testifies to austerity and Ersatz. Scarcely a town before 1948, its helter-skelter growth has made it a city by default. Many refugee camps surround it of course, but unlike Beirut, whatever internationalism Amman possesses remains only in a lingering sense of British discipline one encounters here and there. The streets are hopelessly crowded with pedestrians and cars, although a kind of martial informality pervades all activity. At first, I kept asking myself and others which people were Palestinians and which were Jordanians. The number of men in uniforms or green fatigues prompted my questions, but a few hours after arrival I gave up asking. By then it had become evident to me that in spite of its Hashemite throne, all of Jordan had become a temporary substitute for Arab Palestine. So far as I could tell - and this was certainly true for me - no one really felt at home in Amman, and yet no Palestinian could feel more at home anywhere else now. Aside from a few places on the hills where rather commonly despised parvenus had built ostentatious villas, Amman is a

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city carrying the single-minded Palestinian energy. No particularly apparent heroism or self-conscious causemongering are in the air: both Amman's setting and its means are too daylit in their poverty to permit these futile games. The city has a bustling commercial life, but an impressive dedication to Arab Palestine overrides even that. In Amman, one cannot escape the necessity of that cause (and this accounts for the city's austerity): everyone, you feel, has been touched in a concrete way by "the Palestinian question." Cafés, television, movies, social gatherings - all these amenities are permanently subordinated to an overwhelmingly powerful experience. In Amman today two ways of life enclose all the other ways, which finally connect the main two. These two are being a refugee in a camp and being an active member of one of the resistance groups. It is difficult to remember, as one visits the refugee camps, that such places, with their mean rows of neat, ugly tents, are not there to be visited, nor even to impress one in a sentimental way with their poverty and squalor. Each camp is an absolute minimum, where a communal life can be led just because refugees believe that they need continue in this confining fashion only until they can return to their place of origin. A Palestinian UNRWA official with whom I chatted said that what never failed to amaze him was how the refugees simply hung on. He had difficulty describing the quality of the refugee's life, and I noticed how anxious he was to avoid the word "passivity." He went on to say that although each camp contained about 35,000 people there was no crime to report, no "immorality," no social unrest. I saw that what he was doing - since he himself was also a refugee - was protecting the campdwellers, or rather protecting their right to be as they were, for the time being: I took this as I think he wanted it taken, that the duration of a refugee's life in the camp was a moral fact with unspoken meaning, attested to by some deep faculty of knowing endurance, and a faith that being a refugee would end at the right time. Women and children were very much in evidence, but hardly any men or young boys. If they are not engaged as day laborers in the Ghor (the valley between Amman and the river) they belong to one of the guerilla groups, the boys to the Ashbal (cubs) whose regimen includes a standard education and military training. There are almost daily air attacks (about which little is heard in the U.S.A.) by the Israelis over the fertile Ghor. The pretext of these raids is military targets, but their archievement is the destruction of crops and of the few inhabited

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villages left. Yet life there, like that of the camps, goes on because there is some evidence that hope is not entirely baseless. I talked with three Fatah men who had just returned from a raid; five of the original party were killed, but the three who came back had expected a loss of this magnitude. They all had wives and mothers in the camps. Now they also have dead or living comrades and relatives on the West Bank: this investment has made a difference, and no amount of tiresome cant about being refugees who won't settle with, or won't be settled by, the other Arabs, or being "pawns" or "footballs" or "terrorists," can alter it for them. The other Arab cities are, of course, touched by the experience of the past twenty years, but none today so urgently enlivens that experience as Amman. This has not always been true since 1948; but it is true now, for reasons that have to do with each Arab country. I shall return to those reasons shortly. To the Palestinian Arab the Jordanian border with Israel is the border: the closest one spiritually, the one travelled across most painfully, the one that most fully characterizes the displacement and the proximity of its cause most fully. Therefore, as a place Amman has become a terminal with no other raison d'etre than temporarily to preserve displacement; beyond the city, physically and in consciousness, are a desert and extinction. In Amman the Palestinian either stays on as best he can, or he repatriates himself from it as a guerrilla. He has really stopped thinking about Kuweit, or Beirut, or Cairo. He has only himself to consider now, and what he discovers, by whatever technique he uses, is how he is a Palestinian - or rather, how he has already become a Palestinian again and what this must mean for him. For the most recent arrivals in Amman it has been a necessity, and this necessity has galvanized the residents who have been there since 1948. What has emerged, in short, is Palestinianism. States of the popular soul are, I know, almost impossible to examine scientifically, even discursively. It is no false modesty on my part, for example, to feel that what I am now writing is at too far a remove from the on-going fortunes of Palestinianism. The realities of the Palestinian experience are both complex and elusive, so much so as to escape the descriptive order of what must appear to be a series of afterthoughts. But this recognition, which I certainly make, is an exact analogy of a significant new aspect of the Palestinian experience. The discontinuity between writing about, let us say, and the direct experience of which the writing tries to treat, is like the essential condition for the Palestini-

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an's transformed consciousness. Just as he can see that Amman is not Jerusalem, Beirut not Amman, Cairo not Amman — hitherto interchangeable parts of a collective Arab dream, strung together like identical beads on a string — he can now know that being a Palestinian includes, but does not reconcile, being in Amman and being under military occupation in Jerusalem, Gaza, Nablus, or Jericho. Yet what he feels as discontinuity is no longer a void which he had previously tried to forget — by going to Beirut, or coming to the United States. That void had been an inert gap that stood for the absence of any real encounter with Israel. For there has been one major encounter between the Palestinians and Israel since June 1967, an encounter that aptly concentrated and thereby symbolized the possibility of popular resistance to a political enemy (despite a whole prior series of sporadic guerilla operations, which had lacked coherence). That was the battle of Karameh in March 1968. At that moment, when an invading Israeli force was met by a local one defending what it could no longer afford to give up, at that moment the void changed into a direct experience of true political discontinuity: the actual face-to-face enmity between Zionism and Palestinianism. This conflict thus became an event, not simply a news release doctored to fit a wildly polemical broadcast. All events become events after they occur: and than isn't as tautological a statement as it seems. In part, events are mythic, but like all effective myths they record an important aspect of a real experience. An event like the battle of Karameh was a decisive moment which, for the Palestinians, was suited to be a certain demarcation between what came before it and what came after it. At Karameh - unlike the West Bank village of Al-Sammu, which Israel had razed unopposed — the opponents were clearly pitted against each other. A regular Israeli force moved against an irregular Palestinian one, and the latter answered with a refusal merely to push off and let Karameh (a vilage built by refugees: hence its significance) be destroyed; by refusing, it stayed to become a truly popular activation of a conflict that had formerly been left to the Arabs at large. Thus Karameh divides the Palestinian experience into a before that had refused an encounter, which meant accepting a retrospective fiat declared against the Paestinian Arab past, and an after that finds the Palestinian standing in, becoming, fighting to dramatize, the disjunction of his history in Palestine before 1948 with his history at the peripheries since 1948. In this sense then a void,

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felt by every Palestinian, has been altered by an event into a discontinuitiy. And the difference between void and discontinuity is crucial: one is inert absence, the other is dis-connection that requires reconnection. The odds against a re-connection of the displaced Palestinian with his land and with his subjugated compatriot are severe indeed, and the battle has only just begun. Israel's stated policy has been categorically to deny the reality of a Palestinian people, but such a policy is thoroughly consonant with the Zionist vision since Herzl. Nevertheless morale is probably higher amongst West Bank Arabs than it is outside, because on the West Bank at least one is an inhabitant (albeit a third-class citizen), whereas outside, the Palestinian is excrusiatingly aware of how thin his existence has been during the past twenty-one years. A better way of saying this is that the displaced Palestinian has had his human prerogative, i.e. the right to object to his exile, suffering, loss, death, taken from him in his political struggle. His oppressor has been a political enemy surfeited with this prerogative. But whereas the very most has been made out of Jewish suffering, the very least has been made out of Palestinian Arab suffering. For example, the diplomatic haggling between Israel and the Arab states is always depicted by Israel and its supporters as a quarrel between "Jews" who want peace and a place of their own at last, and "Arabs" who will not let them have either. That Israel has been more than a match for a whole world of Arabs, or that it is presently inflated to three times its original size or, most important, that Palesinian Arabs, who have suffered incalculable miseries for the sake of Western anti-Semitism, really do exist, have existed, and wil continue to exist as part of Israel's extravagant cost — about these things very little is heard, apart from the usual unctuous complaints about injustice, the lack of reason, and the necessity of peace. It is becoming more and more certain to the Palestinian that Israel in its present state of thriving militarism, has no need of peace. If it does want peace that would be because the Israelis wanted some rest from the strain on their economy or on their "image." Most Palestinians fear large-scale sell-outs by the Arab states, themselves tired out by the uneven struggle. It is due to this fear that relations between the fedayin and the Arab governments are so problematic: each suspects that the other's interest will suffer, as it must of course. Another danger is that the Palestinian organizations will allow themselves to

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become enmeshed in local Arab conflicts. Yet from the larger world the Palestinian expects (and is getting) attention, but no more than that. He has no benefits to gain from Western good-thinkers who sympathize so effortlessly with the Vietnamese peasant, the American black, or the Latin American laborer. And this only because he is an "Arab" who is opposed by the "Jew." To live in America, for example, and to know this truth is especially painful. For here the emotional residue of what has been a singularly dirty chapter in world history, from no matter whose side it is studied, has been turned against the Arab. Even the word Arab works quite easily as an insult. From the Final Solution, to American unwillingness to permit European Jews entry to the United States, to Lord Moyne's murder, to the sordid role of the British, to the Lavon affair, to Sirhan's assassination of Robert Kennedy (which was stripped of its political significance by the press), to Bernadotte's murder by the Stern Gang: the tracks are messy, yet scarcely recognizeable in, for instance, Commentary's clean pages. Insofar as my personal experience is admissible in evidence, I can try to substantiate a few of these troughts. In 1948 I was twelve, a student at an English school in Cairo. Aside from my immediate family, most of my other relatives were in Palestine. For one reason or another they were to resettle themselves either in Jordan, Egypt or Lebanon: a few remained in Israel. My closest friend at the time was a Jewish boy who had a Spanish passport. I remember him telling me that autumn how shameful it was that six countries were pitted against one; the appeal, I believed, was to my sporting instinct developed at cricket and soccer games. I said nothing, but I felt badly. On similar occasions many years later I also said nothing (actually I said I was from Lebanon, which was as cowardly as saying nothing since it meant saying something that was intended to be deliberately not provocative). I was born in Jerusalem, so was my father, his father, and so on; my mother was born in Nazareth. These facts were rarely mentioned. I earned my degrees, I became a professor, I wrote books and articles on European literature. And, as the jolts of Near Eastern politics dictated, I occasionally saw my family on vacations: some times in Egypt, in Jordan, finally in Lebanon. In 1967 I was "from" Lebanon. That did me no good during that awful week in June. I was an Arab, and we - "you" to most of my embarassed friends - were being whipped. I wrote one or two eloquent letters to the Times, but these were not published, and with a few other Arabs had sessions of group-

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think that were really group therapy; then I began compulsively to clip things out of papers and magazines. A year and a half later, out of those smoldering extract and with a dose of self-pity, I wrote an essay called "The Arab Portrayed" in which I lamented and documented the ways in which the Arab, in contrast to the Israeli, had been depicted in America. This vulgar demotion, as I called it, was what made American accounts of the June War so unfair and so disgraceful an example of anti-Arabism. Yet what I was also saying, almost without realizing it, was that a too-integral nationalism, which the Arab himself purported to embody, had failed him as much as it had failed even the Israelis, who in the months after June 1967 were robbed of "Arab" recognition. In the meantime I continued with my own work, and the "Arabs" with theirs. By Arab work I mean the way in which, grosso modo, the Arab countries set about their national existence as a result of the June War (of course I am being impressionistic). Much of the very recent work done by the Arabs has been reductive. This is not entirely bad and, to my mind, it has been necessary. Arab independence, like Arab independence was, and in some cases still is, a Western construction. I am not a political scientist nor a social psychologist, but what I am trying to articulate is my sense that Arab independence was not so much earned but granted in forms that suited the former colonizers. One becomes especially conscious of this in, to take a classic case, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, where it is gradually revealed that Lawrence's triumph was in having used the Arabs' vague national aspiration as the stuff out of which his chivalric-medieval-romantic dream could be carved. Even if Lawrence and the Arabs both awakened to the dream's betrayal, it has taken the Arabs a longer time to rid themselves of its haunting effects. Therefore the nationalism of independence, when finally left to itself, was in part borrowed, grandiose, aimless, self-serving, relatively authentic - but fairly inexpensive. The reductive process has been costly, for there has been a realization of these inadequacies, and an attempt to decompose Arab nationalism into discreter units finely sensitive to the true cost of real independence. In most Arab countries today (Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon in particular) the reduction has taken the form of left-wing critique amongst many, but by no means all, thinkers: thus it could be shown that the traditional class-structure of those societies has yet to undergo revolutionary change. This may be true, but lurking in everyone's mind is

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the massive fact of Israel's presence, and the costs of that presence have still to be fully felt universally. Hence the accentuated importance of the Palestinian today, for he is being pragmatically forced to create his identity in accordance with real impingements upon it. I remarked above that one working psychological change since 1967 was that Amman and Jordan had become more central to the whole Palestinian question than ever before. The reason for this re-focussing is not only because the Palestinian has made the change, but also - let it be admitted - because of a general feeling in other Arab countries that Palestine had neither served, nor been adequately served, by actions taken in the interests of Arab nationalism. I don't want to dwell on this too much because, like my comments on Arab independence, at best I am making general, rather presumptuous speculations about some very complicated movements in the Arab world at large (from which I have conveniently excluded Libya, Sudan, Algeria, Tunis, and Morocco); besides, things are in too much flux to do more than suggest reasons tentatively. First, of course, was the military defeat, as well as the humiliating difference between the exhuberance of prediction and the aftermath of rout. For no matter how correct the moral stand it could not be detached from the methods of its implementation and expression, and those were shown to be disastrously wanting. Second, it became apparent that Arab nationalism was far from unitary; the creed was fed by many subsidiary ideologies, and therefore assumed differing roles. Abdallah Laroui's book, L'Idéologie arabe contemporairte is an excellent recent account both of what makes up Arab nationalism, as well as its differences from other Third World movements. I need not go over what he has discussed so well. On what seemed Arab nationalism's most unanimous argument, opposition to Israel, there could never be real thought since, as Sartre and Cecil Hourani have both observed, one cannot truly oppose what one neither knows nor confronts. The hiatus that prevented Arab unity was Israel, and this the Arabs collectively proclaimed; but a hiatus, like any other rupture, cannot be dealt with by not dealing with it. By this I mean that the problem of Israel always remained on the other side, literally and figuratively, of what the Arabs collectively did. Israel was always being left to the realm of generality (in which, not surprisingly, Arab nationalism also operated) where it was hoped that Zionism could be treated as an interruption to be ignored, or drowned out by a general concert of voices and action. This concert then was

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the job of Arabism, just as on other levels it was the job of the army, of the ministries of information, of the Arab League, in sum, of the Arab Nation. Since Israel was the Other, which of course it still is, it was felt that other agencies would take care of it on behalf of us. One always felt involved in the sentiments of anti-Zionism, whereas the action always seemed to be taken by proxy, at some distance from the sentiments. That sort of cleavage, then, is what 1967 exposed. It was as an understandable reaction to the devastations of the June War that in Egypt, to take the principle case in point, open-minded intellectuals recognized the limitations of the pre-War psychology by rediscovering the limits of their own national interests. The expedition to Yemen had further irritated their awareness. In refusing to be deluded by proclamations that the June War was only a set-back, these intellectuals saw that what one of them called "nationalitarianism" did Egypt itself a disservice. One perhaps minor but fascinating development out of this view was a renewed interest in works like Hussein Fawzi's brilliant Sindbad Misri (An Egyptian Sindbad) which had originally appeared in 1961, subtitled "Voyages Over the Vast Spaces of History." Quite the most original work produced in Egypt over the past twenty years, Fawzi's book took for its theme the absolute coherence of Egypfs history, from the pharaohs to the modern period. Although the book's theme was not a new one, the assured subtlety of his thought enabled Fawzi to construct a series of historical tableaux in which a specifically Egyptian kind of history developed which, he argued, showed Egypt's people to be "makers of civilization." The implicit point here, made explicitly by other Egyptian intellectuals like Lewis Awad, was that Egypt had its own mission, quite apart from an Arab one, to fulfill, and that did not primarily include violence. Israel's occupation of Sinai has unfortunately vitiated the argument somewhat. There were comparable re-definitions of the relationship between Arabism and local nationalism taking place, in different forms of course and not always as standard left-wing critiques, in the other Arab countries. However I do not wish to imply that such re-assessments had never taken place before; they have been taking place all along - witness the earlier work of Constantine Zurayck, Ra'if Khouri, Ibrahim Amer, and Salama Musa, to mention a few examples at random. It is just that the present re-difinitions possess a cumulative thrust that has sharpened and extended the horizon of national self-knowledge.

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Like the Lebanese cabinet stalemate of 1969, the recent re-definitions and self-criticisms can be understood in psychological terms as what Erik Erikson has called identity crisis, although certainly I am aware that analogies between individual and collective identities are dangerous to make. Another risk is that Erikson's use of his own concept is so finely ingenious as to make gross adaptations like mine seem clumsy and hopelessly far-fetched. Still there is something to be gained, I believe, from applying the following description by Erikson to the post-1967 period: I have called the major crisis of adolescence the identity crisis; it occurs in that period of the life cycle when each youth must forge for himself some central perspective and direction, some working unity, out of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood; he must detect some meaningful resemblance between what he has come to see in himself and what his sharpened awareness tells him others judge and expect him to be. This sounds dangerously like common sense; like all health, however, it is a matter of course only to those who possess it, and appears as a most complex achievement to those who have tasted its absence. Only in ill health does one realize the intricacy of the body; and only in a crisis, individual or historical, does it become obvious what a sensitive combination of interrelated factors the human personality is - a combination of capacities created in the distant past and of opportunities divined in the present; a combination of totally unconscious preconditions developed in individual growth and of social conditions created and recreated in the precarious interplay of generations. In some young people, in some classes, at some periods in history, this crisis will be minimal; in other people, classes, and periods, the crisis will be clearly marked off as a critical period, a kind of "second birth," apt to be aggravated either by widespread neuroticisms or by pervasive ideological unrest. (Young Man Luther, p. 14) "Adolescence" must not at all be understood as implying condescension towards a recent history that has so obviously been painful: this is why the present identity crisis is not minimal, but a matter of profound moment. What is crucial to Erikson's definition is awareness of the crisis on the part of those undergoing it - and this, I think, is the new situation amongst those who together make up the vanguard of the Arab mind today. Whereas Jacques Berque, in some minds the most brilliant Western thinker about the Arabs, had deliberately called the first chapter of his book on the Arabs "The Disruption of Traditional

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Man," the notion was not commonly recognized to be true, and thereby acted upon, by Arabs themselves. The identity crisis solicits above all a recognition of disruption. And to have this recognition one needs a very clear idea that something has been left behind in order that a new development based on a stronger identity might become possible. I speculate once again when I suggest that what is now being left behind is the Arab-Islamic idea of reality, staggeringly complex no doubt, but based, as Berque argues so cogently, on the plenitude of the present. Hitherto the Arab genius had taken the world as fullness and simultaneity; thus, there was no unconscious, no latency that was not immediately accessible to vision, belief, tradition, and especially, language. Any change in that sort of order can only be a mixed blessing that disturbs confidence, yet in the context of Arab national independence (which roughly coincided with the inception and growth of Zionism) the phase to 1948 was a period of youth and adolescence, of initiation into a new history. After 1967 came the slow realization of what that really meant. It is useful to compare the course of Arab nationalism with that of Jewish nationalism in order to indicate the traumas involved in the change I have just been discussing. Near the beginning of this century both nationalisms seem to have been phenomena of projection, like all emerging national ideologies. Each had its aims, its plans for realizations, and its philosophical and rhetorical styles. The Arab version has been studied and re-studied at great length in works like George Antonious's The Arab Awakening and Albert Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age. What 1967 climaxed for the Arabs, however, was a gradual attenuation of their projection; and it seemed to them that Zionism - no longer an idea but a state that sprawled over much of their territory - had realized its original projections. Neither side, each occupied with its own problems, was charitably aware of hardships suffered by the other. For the Arab then it seemed that quite without him a foreign growth had spread in his midst, forcing him to attenuate his vision from pan-Arabism to collective as well as individual defeat, displacement, loss. To him the Israeli had asked for and received the world's backing in a well-planned project of dissemination and growth. Yet the current emergence of the Palestinian movement is not only, I think, a sign of the diminished vision of Arab nationalism, but also a hopeful sign that the contrast between Arab and Jewish nationalism has been muted. In having to respond to the

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claims of Palestinians Zionism must itself undergo the attenuation it had forced on the Arabs at large, and if there is any future reconciliation between Jewish nationalists and the Palestinians it must be as a result of this reversal of trends. It can also be said that during the years up to and including 1967 it never did the Arabs much good to believe that absolute right was on their side. I do not mean by this that Zionism was something to be tolerated passively, but rather that the elevation of a political conflict into a framework of cosmic morality had two noticeably damaging effects. In the first place, it made the Arabs rely on the self-convincing moral force of their arguments which, as I said above, isolated the Israelis and insulated the Arabs from the essentially political nature of the conflict. Emotion and rhetoric can never be wholly divorced from politics (this is particularly true, as I shall remark a little later, in so fraught a region as Palestine) but it is when they are employed as a substitute for politics that they do most harm. Worst of all they play directly into the hands of a political argument whose greatest strength is its apparent aloofness from history and politics: and this is the second damaging effect. For Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, has prospered on arguments and actions either for or against its exclusivity, whether as positive good or, from the Arab side, as negative evil. This is not as paradoxical as it may seem. Zionism is historically incommensurate with any sort of liberalism so long as Zionism is believed by its supporters to be identical with, or at least a logical extension of, Judaism as a religion of secular exclusion and non-assimilation. This is not to say that every Zionist is a Herzl or a Jabotinsky or a Dayan; Buber, Magnes, and in America, I. F. Stone had argued for some sort of dilution of the extremist view. In the main, however, the moderates have not fared well. The dialectic of polar opposition has been too strong for them. With every apparent consolidation of its national existence Israel seems more and more to represent not only the place apart of Judaism but also the concentrated actions of Judaism. And Judaism, in two dimensions, each, commonsensically, incompatible with the other: the universal (timeless) and the secular (temporal). Thus Israel can make claims for its historical presence based on its timeless attachment to a place, and supports its universalism by absolutely rejecting, with tangible military force, any other historical or temporal (in this case Arab Palestinian) counterclaims. I do not think is unfair either to the Israelis or to the Arabs to say that both contributed, each

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in his own way, to of this maelstrom of exclusions. The Arab has acceded to that aspect of Judaism which, as Arthur Koestler put it in The Trial of the Dinosaur, "unlike any other [religion], is racially discriminating, nationally segregative, socially tensioncreating." In his refusal to deal with Israel at all, the Arab simply enforced the selfsegregating tendency in Judaism, for which Israel assumed secular responsibility. The obvious bearing of the Jewish experience in World War II on present-day Zionism cannot be over estimated. Yet even there, as Hannah Arendt, for one, sensitively exposed the issues in her Eichmann in Jerusalem, problems for the non-Israeli Jew, especially for the notoriously conservative American Zionist, persist. It is not my task to consider here the ambiguities of being a Zionist, remaining in America, and thinking of the Arab solely as Israel's opponent, beyond remarking how American Zionism symbolizes the vast range of the Zionist projection and, conversely, the attenuation of Arabism: both nationalisms have reached their furthest extremities. Yet because of the Palestinian resurgence the conflict has been compressed into its most economical local form in the present confrontation between the conquering Israeli and the resisting Palestinian. For all its difficulty and violence this form of conflict strikes me as being more clear, and more hopeful, than the morass of thought which seeks to drag in every conceivable confusion. Nevertheless, many doubtless imponderable forces also intersect at the essential node of the conflict. These range from overtly bumbling great power competition to, equally irrational and perhaps even more compelling, the subliminal forces of primitive religious emotion, mythic racism, and ideological originality of the worst sort. For it must never be forgotten — and this may be the clue to the entire imbroglio — that Palestinie carries the heaviest weight of competing monotheistic totalitarianism of any spot on earth. While it may be dangerously optimistic to pretend that a reconciliation of supernatural arguments can take place in a natural setting, there is some encouragement in remembering that until 1948 Palestine seems simultaneously to have given birth to interconnected ideas of the One and the Many, of the indivdual and the community. Since 1948 the Arab Palestinian has had to endure a political living death, and whatever he now experiences in the way of vitality is because since 1967 he was begun to re-vitalize his thought just to avoid total extinction, and because the dreams of Arabism have broken on

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his acutely exposed situation. The two reasons are different sides of the same coin. The main characteristics of the Arab Palestinian's life since 1948 have been his peripherally, his isolation, and his silence — all of those are conditions of displacement and loss. (It cannot fail to escape the Palestinian's notice, by the way, how much his experience begins to resemble that of the Diaspora Jew). Peripherality, like the other two characteristics I've mentioned, is not tolerable past the point where displacement (not being where you ought to be) means not being any place else really, not being able to stand at the center of your destiny, feeling that all you prerogatives have been usurped. If you cede your initiatives to a larger entity, and if you tie your fortunes to others', you are apt to be awakened from this passivity when you discover that your priorities have been disordered. Like every other Mediterranean, the way Maurice Le Lannou describes him, the Palestinian belongs first to his village, land, and tribe, then second, and with many misgivings, to the vaster group. When after 1967 it became apparent that the first fact of the Palestinian's life was Israeli occupation, the second his dispersion amongst the other Arabs, and only third, his Arabism, the priorities had righted themselves. Peripherality took on a close literal meaning, and was intolerable. Political silence, in the case of the Palestinian, has meant not knowing to whom or for what to talk, and therefore talking with different voices, none of them his own. The silence was broken under the new, more oppressive occupation of 1967. Here too the priorities emerged more clearly: the Palestinian must first address the Israeli, now as a rebellious prisoner speaking to his guard, or as a challenge to a coercive presence. It is the Arabs inside occupied Palestine whose restiveness, at least as far as the outside world is concerned, has made pre-1967 silence seem inauthentic. A whole range of Palestinian speech has erupted, all originating at the proper source — Arabs under occupation in Palestine — and thereby channelled out to the world. Call them rumors, myths, para-literature, propaganda, or whatever: they replace the silence with what is now only a substitute political voice (just as Amman is a substitute political center), but which at least derives from an objective, because directly experienced, condition of imposed silence. This essay of mine, I feel, because it is in English partakes both of the peripherality and of the paradoxical silence that I have been trying to describe. The Palestinian's isolation has been a disorientation more than any-

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thing else. Or so it now appears. Previously a classless "refugee," since 1967 he has become a politicized consciousness with nothing to lose but his refugeedom; that isn't much of a possession, and it is his only political possession at present. The attenuation of the Arab project, or the demythification of the Arab potential, has left the Palestinian with his original starting-point, as Gerard Manley Hopkins phrased it, being "a lonely began": the fact that he is a deracinated refugee from Palestine. Karameh presented the refugee with a new alternative, the chance to root peripherality, isolation, and silence in resisting action. If once it made the Palestinian generally angry and resentful that neither the Arabs, the Israelis, nor the rest of the world fully grasped his predicament, such organizations as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, al-Fatah, and even the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut are his way of grasping himself and his predicament alone. Before discussing the meaning of the Palestinian movement more fully, it may be worthwhile to comment briefly on two sympathetic sources of outside interest in the Palestinian issue. One is the so-called realistic view, which is held by some Zionists and many non-Zionists as well. In this view the word tragedy turns up with cloying frequency. Thus, runs the argument, while the Jews have an undeniable right to what they have so laboriously earned, it is a tragedy that a million and a half Arabs, innocent of European anti-Semitism, have had to be one of the costs of the enterprise. Such is the material of tragedy, but life must go on. Reason, and negotiation, ought now to prevail. The trouble with this argument is that, no less than Four Power settlement, it is an imposition of an occidental aesthetic model on what is in large measure a non-occidental political situation. Tragedy, as Jaspers put it bluntly in another connection, is not enough. It would be just as silly to try to convince a refugee living in a tent outside Amman that he is the daily victim of a tragedy, as it would be to tell an Israeli that he is a tragic hero. Tragedy is not a Semitic idea, much less a universal one. Moreover, the tragic vision is a static one, unsuited to the dynamics of political action currently enacted and lived through. If there was a tragedy, it was part of the common Semitic past in its sufferings at the hands of the West: the Jews in World War II, the Arabs in Palestine evicted by the power of Western-backed Zionism. The reality of Palestine remains, however, and that requires action, not tragic suffering.

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The second source of sympathy is from the international radical Left. Although wishing to accept that sympathy, the Palestinians — myself included - suggest a number of reservations. One is that the Left argues the case against Israel too much from the outside, whereas what is needed is a corrective from the inside of the situation. It might have been possible to show how Israel was originally a creation of Western colonialism (as Maxime Rodinson has done with such telling effect), yet it does not alter the fact that there is such a thing as Israeli imperialism and that is now affecting all Palestinians more directly than Western colonialism. The latter, to Israel's immediate credit and to its ultimate disadvantage, has had the function of helping the Israelis remain in the curiously skewed position of assuming territorially sovereign status as well as a historically and politically aloof and repressive position whenever it came to the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. To the Palestinian, what matters now is the troubling immediacy of the Israeli presence, not the contradictions inherent in European and American colonialism. Another aspect of the Left argument that disquiets me (I can't speak for anyone besides myself) is what bothered me when I quoted Erikson so tentatively, or when I disavowed the tragic view. I simply have no way of knowing how political analyses developed in the West ultimately apply elsewhere. There is, for example, an Israeli Left, just as there is an Arab Left: they are still opposed on more direct grounds than theoretical ones. I have no answer to this problem, and I raise it only as a symptom of difficulties with any so-called internationalist over-view, whether political, psychological, or aesthetic. Finally, no Palestinian can forget three things about the Left. First, that it was Russia and its satellites that went along with the United States in the Partition Plans and in UN creation of Israel in 1948. Second, that there is an alarming symmetry in the manner by which the Left has recently joined or replaced anti-Semitic supporters (who were a source of endless trouble) of the Arabs against Israel. Third, that the new Palestinian ideology owes next to nothing to the Western Left which, bogged down in its dynastic worries and conflicts over racism and/or conflicts and/or its own internationalism, had little to contribute to the Palestinian during the 1967 War. The present phase of the Palestinian experience is in trying to sharpen the experience by keeping it pertinent to Palestine, thereby liberating Palestine, actually and intellectually, from the segregations

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and the confusions that have captured it for so long. All sorts of difficulties tamper with this effort, Israel most of all. Every Jewish Zionist I have either read, heard, or spoken to, whether he is an Israeli or an American, adheres to a notion whose common denominator is that Israel must remain as it is now is in order to safeguard the Jewish rhythm of life, a phrase that presumably serves to camouflage the wide social discrepancies between the European, the Oriental, the Orthodox, and the secular Jews in Israel. This, I gather, makes sense to many Jews: I can't tell. For a Palestinian, it is difficult to accept the rhythm-of-life view except as one of two things. Either the phrase stands for a fear that the Holocaust could be repeated, which makes of Israel (after twenty-one years of much-vaunted independence) what the English would call a funk-hole for every still-dispersed Jew. Or the phrase is an argument for preserving Israel from having to face the no less real truth that the Jewish rhythm has supplanted a more inclusive one, the Palestinian, which has and would allow Christian, Moslem and Jew to live in counterpoint with each other. Probably the most serious psychological obstacle preventing close and fair political scrutiny political of Palestinialism is, as I said above, the heavy emotional pressure of the Holocaust. To this pressure every civilized man must of course submit, so long as it does not inhibit anyone's political rights, particularly those of people who are absolutely dissociable from what has been an entirely European complicity. It connot be emphasized enough, I think, that no Arab feels any of the sort of guilt or shame that every Westerner (apparently) feels, or is impelled to show he is feeling, for that horrible chapter in history. For a Palestinian Arab, therefore, it is not taboo: to speak of "Jews" in connection with Israel and its supporters, to make comparisons between the Israeli and the German occupations, to excoriate journalism that reports Jewish suffering but ignores, or discounts, Israel's razing of Arab homes and villages, Israeli napalm bombing, Israeli torture of Palestinian resistance fighters and civilians, Israel's deliberate attempt to obliterate the Palestinian Arab, Israel's use of its understanding of "Arab psychology" to offend the Arab's human status, Israel's callous use of Jewish suffering to blackmail Christians and Moslems by toying with "plans" for Jerusalem - and so on. The Palestinian organizations active today have Palestinianism in common. They do not project too far ahead of plans somehow to open Palestine to all Palestinians. Despite Israeli disclaimers, their pene-

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tration into occupied territory and the surprisingly tough resistance of the Arab residents in those territories, are keeping the possibility of Palestine very alive. During a period of a few weeks this past spring alFatah claimed 168 raids within Israel: this is a considerable toll on Arabs and Jews, but given the self-defeating Israeli inflexibility, it is not a senseless toll. If Jews are to stay, the Palestinians argue fairly, then Christians and Moslems must be allowed the same, equal privilege. Interestingly, past tension between Arab Christians and Moslems has been surmounted among the Palestinians. Christians sit on the Fatah Executive Committee, and the leader of the Popular Front is a Christian. While in Amman I spoke with a clergyman who had been active in West Bank resistance - he had been imprisoned by the Israelis, abused, then deported; to him, the Moslems and the Christians in the village were exactly alike in their interests and in their enemy. But the plight of Arabs in occupied Palestine is morally awful. To believe in a democratic, progressive, multi-confessional Palestine and yet to be forced to live "cooperatively" under Israeli domination is a condition not born easily. Only the merchant class, never particularly admirable, has found life not so bad, cooperating with whomever has seemed most profitable to it. As to methods for achieving Palestine, they are shrouded in circumstances as yet not fully known. The essential point is that the goal has to be won from the ground up. It might mean — if Israel were to expand still further — the turning of many more Arabs (Jordanians, Lebaneses, Syrians, for example) into "Palestinians". The present regimes everywhere in the Arab world are in a state of tricky balance, but for the moment the Palestinians anxiously avoid involving themselves too deeply in the mire of Arab politics. Most Arab leaders presently can win a measure of popular favor, and much-needed glamor, by openly consulting with Yasir Arafat. For example, yet al-Fatah still plays its part independently of Nasser, Hussein, or the Syrians. To what extent this can continue, and to what extent the Americans and the Russians are (or will be) involved in Palestinians affairs are hard questions to answer. What matters most is that the Palestinian has made of his dismal experience an important political weapon for his purposes, and so long as it remains his own, developed as it is out of attachments to his native land, the cost will not have been too high.

7

URI AVNERY

The Third Year of the Six-Days' War

Today is Israel's Independence Day, 1969. Exactly two years have passed since General Rabin whispered to Levi Eshkol that Gamal Abdel Nasser had started to concentrated his forces in Sinai. This morning, the usual artillery battle took place along the Suez Canal. One soldier was killed. Along the Jordan River, fighting followed the familiar pattern. The greatest event of today was the annual giving of the Israel Prizes to outstanding personalities. This year, the most important prize was given to Israel's biggest expert on the Crusades - he had just "proved" again that there is no similarity whatsoever between Israel and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. (I happened to hear the broadcast of this ceremony in Ceasarea, once an important city of the Crusader Kingdom. The blue-white national flags were waving gaily over the ancient Crusader fortress, and American Jewish tourists were climbing excitedly over all the ruins.) Another event in today's celebrations was the choosing of the winning entry in the annual Israel Song Festival. The public's choice was a ballad praising the bravery of a medical soldier who sacrifices himself to save a wounded comrade during a skirmish on the Jordan River. Most of the other entries dealt with the war, too. Throughout the day, the radio has blared out military songs. One has had only to move the knob a bit in any direction to hear the equivalent Arab songs of patrotism and revenge. Two years after the "war's end", our region is still at war. The Six-Days' War did not really start on June 5, 1967 - nor did it finish on June 10. It started 90 years ago, and it goes on with gathering momentum.

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It is my feeling that, despite the seemingly endless artillery battles, the decisive struggle of today is not being fought on the canal or along the Jordan River - it is not being fought between the Israelis and the Arabs at all. Rather, it is a struggle between the Israelis among themselves on the one side, and between the Arabs among themselves on the other. In this double battle, there exist an extraordinary cooperation - even coordination - between the extremists in Israel and the extremists in the Arab states. Whenever we in Israel try to convince the government, or the general population, that a paceful settlement is now possible, the latest article of some Arab journalist or the latest speech of some Arab politician is brandished in our faces, making us look ridiculous even in the eyes of our own audience. Whenever some new approach gains ground in the Arab world, it is usually met, and hit squarely on the head, by the latest statement of an Israeli cabinet minister, talking about the sacred right of the Jews to the whole of Eretz Israel. Between Migs and Phantoms, terrorist outrages and napalm retaliation, the Chauvinist International in the Middle East thrives. Unfortunately, no such cooperation exists between those Israelis and Arabs who believe that the mutual willingness of the extremists to cooperate with each other will lead, eventually and inevitably, to mutual nuclear extinction. Yet, can one be angry? Can one even by surprised? Since the war, as much as during the events which led up to the war, both sides are behaving according to the established mental patterns, acting their roles according to a script written long ago. Let us try to examine these attitudes, in order to understand the situation of today - the starting point for any new initiative. For Israel, that first few weeks after the war was a time of Great Expectations. The mood was enthusiastic, if not delirious. Everything seemed possible. Following the intense anxiety which had preceded the war, and the incredulous feeling of redemption during the days of victory, there was a feeling of profound change. Everything, thought the average Israeli, is going to be different now. The Arabs have learned their lesson. Now they will make peace. "Why 'they', and not 'we'?" the foreign reader will ask. But here we return to the basic mental pattern. The average Israeli is quite convinced - nay, is absolutely certain - that we have always wanted

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peace, that it is the Arabs, with their perverse obstinacy, who have thwarted this profound desire at every turn of history. But now, so it seemed, the Arabs would have to behave differently. Had there been, at that percise moment, any real leader, any wise and resolute personality - on either side - peace would have been possible. The mood was there, the situation was there. The tremendous shock of both sides made deep changes possible, even plausible. There were voice, there were warnings. But no leader with real political power emerged. I believe that the decisive initiative should have come from Israel. It was up to the victor to start the ball rolling, to astonish the vanquished and the humiliated by a show of magnanimity and respect. In this spirit, on the seventh day of the war, I wrote an open letter to Levy Eshkol, urging him to grant immediate self-determination to the Palestinian people, now largely under Israeli occupation, offering them freedom, sovereignty and independence in return for peace. Nothing happened. Masses of Israelis poured into the occupied territories and bought up everything that looked exotic. They were a new breed: tourist-conquerors, more curious than arrogant, buying instead of plundering. Yet the physical contact did not create a mental one. Social contact remained nearly non-existent. The Arab way of thinking about the conflict remained a closed book to the Israelis who streamed into Arab towns, drank coffee and fingered the oriental wares. Strangeness was not reduced by closeness. In government circles, Levy Eshkol personified the general trend. No decision. No haste. Postpone. Don't give away anything. Wait. Let's see what happens. We are in possession, the status quo is in our favor. Moshe Dayan, making extravagant and contradictory statements, none of them intended seriously, succeeded in befuddling everyone, and most of all himself. Abba Eban, lost in narcissism and grandiloquence, battled the Soviet and Arab speakers in the United Nations, sunning himself in the admiration of his American-Jewish television audience. In short, the historical moment did not find historical leadership on our side. A tragic, but not unusual situation. After the stage of Great Expectations came the stage of Waiting. Waiting for what? No one quite knew. But time did not seem pressing. Dayan assured the Israeli public that the military occupation could go on endlessly. People began to believe in the Liberal Occupation - a

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very contradiction in terms - as a means for winning Arab affection. The ridiculous mission of Gunnar Jarring went on and on, fortifying the status quo. Terrorism seemed on the verge of being finally vanquished. Arab armies looked ridiculous. The great powers were neutralizing each other. On the home front, the great coalition, under the paternal and tranquiziling presidency of Eshkol, signfied unity and a comfortable immobilism. During this stage, something like a Great Debate started within Israel. The traditional chauvinistic, orthodox and right-wing elements started their campaign for the official annexation of all occupied territories. Several fringe-groups - fascist, Cannanite, ultra-religious cooperated with them in creating the Movement for the Whole of Eretz Israel (or Greater Israel). Yet, to their own intense surprise, this movement did not gain ground beyond the traditional fifth or quarter of the population which was always for the expansion and annexation. No real mass-movement was generated. On the other side, another minority, about half as large, was actively propagating peace. My own party, the Haolam Hazeh - New Force party, adopted a detailed peace-plane in March 1968. Several other groups took up similair, if less detailed, positions. But somehow, the Great Debate never really got off the ground. The status quo seemed frozen, the great coalition was immobile, and no encouraging signs came out of the Arab world. Everybody else seemed to be waiting, too. Annexationists and anti-annexationists neutralized each other (no mean feat for we anti-annexationists, and our biggest achievement so far). Slowly, imperceptively, the mood changed. Instead of overt chauvinism and out-right annexationism, something else set in. It signified the tird stage in Israel - the present one. What can we call this new stage? No ready name present itself. It is the stage of despairing of peace, of a whole people resigning itself to endless war, not unwillingly, but rather with a sign of relief, preferring the known and usual to the unknown and bewildering. The passing away of Eshkol somehow personifies the change. He was a classical Zionist, as stubborn and extreme as any, but he looked like a compromiser. No such illusions could cling to his successor, Golda Meir, the righteous kindergarten-teacher, Mrs. Immovable par excellence.

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What is this new mood? The average Israeli — not an abstract figure this time, but 9 out of 10 Israelis stopped at random on the street would put it this way:"The Arabs don't want peace; they never wanted it. They will never recognize the existence of Israel. Any idea of peace is Utopian, perhaps a dangerous delusion. If they did not make peace in 1967, after such a shattering defeat, peace is impossible. We shall have to fight again and again. There is nothing we can do about it." Once such a mental pattern is established, it is extremely difficult to dislodge it. Hussein or Abdel Nasser made a moderate speech? That just shows you how devious Arabs are. And even if they were sincere, who says that they really control anybody? And why, if they want peace, are they shooting? Such simple attitudes would not count so much if we had in Israel a political class, as in England or France. But no such thing exists here. There is no real difference between the view aimed in a cafe on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, and those pronounced ponderously in the Knesset, or knowingly in the cabinet. Foreigners find this difficult to believe, but it just is so. If anything, the political circles of Israel are more chauvinistic than the general public, because they are far more imbued with the traditional Zionist attitudes. In spite of everything, the Israeli public is still remarkably sensible, and the younger the age-group, the less chauvinistic it is. The army, the youngest institution in the country, is on the whole more sober and sensible than both the government and the public at large. If today a clear choice between annexation without peace and peace without annexation were placed before the Israeli public, peace would win by a great majority. But no such choice presents itself. To the Israeli public, the shoice simply does not exist. Yet I am convinced that such a choice does exist, exactly in these terms. Why, then, is this denied by our government, by our parties, by our establishment as such? Because by denying it, it can be evaded. If our Zionist establishment had to make the choice between annexation or peace, it would be torn assunder by conflicting emotions. On one side, the idea of a homogeneous Jewish State, with Jewish Labor. On the other side, new territories with new colonization. In between, a desire for peace and a profound mistrust of the Arabs, any Arabs. It is significant that in the present government, comprising 24 ministers,

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there is not one ready to make peace without any annexation. The 24 cabinet members, some of whom arrived at their present station by pure accident, long before the Six-Days' War, can be divided roughly into three categories, cutting across the party lines: a) Those who want to annex all occupied territories. They are led by Menachem Begin, the Herut leader, but some of them would certainly claim to be leftist. This group comprises about 25% of the cabinet. b) Those who want to annex much, but not all. They are agreed, more or less, on the so-called Allon Plan which insists on annexation of the following: the Golan Heights; the whole Jordan Valley down to Jericho (but not including it), and some areas along the former border near Latrum and Kalkilia; the entire Jerusalem areas; the west coast of the Dead Sea up to Hebron; the Gaza Strip; Nothern Sinai with el-Arish; and the Red Sea Coast, including Sharmel-Sheihk. In short, everything except Southern Sinai and the inhabited areas around Nablus and the town of Hebron. This group includes the great majority of the cabinet and all important ministers, such as Yigal Allon (whose name the plan bears), Golda Meir, Abba Eban and Moshe Dayan (who wants the hills near Nablus, too). c) Those who want some annexation. They include the two Mapam ministers and several others. Mapam officially demands the annexation of the Jerusalem area, the Golan Heights (already in the process of being colonized by Mapam men), the Gaza Strip, and certains areas along the former frontier with Jordan, for security reasons. The point is that no Arab leader is going to accept annexation even within the limits of the Mapam plan. And, since all cabinet members agree that without an official peace treaty with Arab governments not an inch of territory will be given up, there is no practical difference between Mapam and Herut, cabinet moderates and cabinet extremists. This explains why Mapam ministers insistently favor right-wing ministers remaining in the cabinet, knowing that their chief objective, openly proclaimed, is to prevent any cabinet decision for a compromise peace-plan. (It also explains why Mapam, the traditional Zionist peace party, is in the process of disintegration. It did not take part in the 1969 elections as an independent party, but only as a part of the Labor Alignment, headed by people like Golda Meir and Dayan - and in-

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eluding even some extreme annexationists. Within another year, Mapam may be officially submerged in the Labor Party, in keeping with the general proces of cartelization within the Zionist establishment.) This being the state of affairs, one can hardly wonder that this establishment prefers the axiom of the Impossibility of Peace to a more complex picture which would present options and necessitate decisions. Thus, on the second Independence Day since the war, the Israeli manon-the-street is faced with a picture reflecting only the continual operation of a vicious circle. Perpetual warfare on the cease-fire lines and acts of terrorism claim several Israeli lives every week. Nearly every day one sees in the paper the photo's of a nice, sympathetic young person - yesterday's victim. The public now pays nearly three times more for security than in the year preceding the Six-Days' War - an illustration of victory's price. All this seems natural, even inevitable - a state of affairs that will go on forever. Everyone in Israel hears this daily, hourly - on television, over the radio, in all mass-circulation newspapers and magazines (except, of course, Haolam Hazeh), and in nearly all public speeches. One has to be a very strong person, supremely immue to brain-washing, to retain a different opinion. Yet this is not brain-washing in the literal sense, instigated and executed by some sinister Ministry of Thought Control. Rather, it is the general consensus, embracing all strata of Israeli society, shaped by 90 years of war and Zionist thought-pattern, and fed by reactions from the other side. What were these reactions? We must now examine what happened to Arab thought-patterns under the impact of these same events, especially those Arabs in the occupied territories. The first reaction of the Palestinians was one of intense shock. The world, so it must have seemed in Hebron and Nablus, had come to an end. When the population awoke from this shock, and the reality of the occupation became clear, feelings were mixed. There was surprise, because on the whole the Israeli conqueror behaved honorably. (Exceptions did, of course, occur.) There was curiosity. (So this is what the Israelis are like. This is how Western Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa look now.) There was humiliation. There was a general, instinctive urge to behave with dignity.

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There was also, I think, something equivalent to the Israeli mood of Great Expectations. All accepted truths had broken down. Now everything will change. The Jews axe clever. The Arab leaders will have to do something. In short, out of this cataclysm, peace will emerge. One great act of statesmanship, one great dramatic gesture, would have opened a new chapter in our history. Instead of that, there came the resolutions of Khartoum: No recognition of Israel, No negotiations with her, No peace-treaty. Khartoum was a calamity for the Arabs; a catastrophe for the Palestinians. For the annexationists in Israel, it was a phantastic gift. One can understand why these resolutions were adopted. The Arab armies were shattered, the regimes shaken. Something was needed to offset humiliation, to salvage Arab dignity. Yet when the destiny of nations is concerned, should understanding lead to forgiving? Khartoum consolidated the status quo. The status quo was the Israeli occupation. Khartoum dominated the scene for nearly two years - two years in which the world got used to the fact of occupation, while the Israelis themselves did everything to make it permanent. How different would the situation be today if the Nasser-Hussein initiative of April 1969 had come in September 1967? For the Palestinians living under occupation, Khartoum ushered in the second stage - for them, as for the Israelis, a stage of Waiting. Waiting for what? For whom? For some kind of settlement that would liberate them from a military occupation, without further destruction. Perhaps the King would do something. Perhaps the Americans. Perhaps the Russians. Perhaps even the Israelis. Newspaper stories were read, studied, analyzed. Rumors followed upon rumors. During all this time, the population suffered the occupation with dignity, cooperating in essential services, but not providing any quislings. The occupation authorities behaved as correctly as possible, with very little brutality, trying to avoid friction. The Palestinian guerilla organizations were admired, but not actively aided by the population. The military courts did not impose death penalties. Captured guerillas or terrorists were sent to prison. Everbody was waiting. One can ask: why did no strong, independent Palestinian leadership emerge in the occupied territories during this time? Why did no one

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stand up and say: here we are, Palestinians, ready to negotiate with the Israelis for our own destinies? Many reasons for this were advanced, at my urging, by my Palestinian friends. The fear of becoming Israeli tools. The fear of being considered traitors by the Arab world. The fear of being deported by the Israelis, as happened to several nationalist leaders. The fear of becoming victims of a direct deal between Israel and Hussein. The conviction that Israel was not ready to offer anything. All these are logical reasons. It certainly requires a special kind of moral courage to assume responsibility during a military occupation by the enemy. Yet in a national emergency like this, a nation needs this kind of courage. The deeper reasons for why no Palestinian leadership has emerged are a result of the recent history of Palestine. For too long Palestinians have been governed by others, their destiny decided by Egyptians and Jordanians. No united national leadership could emerge while the fate of Palestine served as a ball in the intricate game played by the Arab governments. The population in the occupied territories could boast of many highly intelligent personalities - local leaders, the heads of great families, mayors, former functionaries of the Jordanian regime. Some of them are very impressive persons who see clearly what is happening around them. Yet even they were divided among themselves. Roughly, there were three general trends among these personalities: a) The Jordanians. These said: the Palestinians have merged with the Jordanians; there is no sense in creating a Palestinian state. We want to return to Jordan. (Some of them qualified this: We want to return to Jordan - and then we shall overthrow the regime there.) This sentiment was found mainly in Nablus. b) The Palestinians. Those who said: we must take our destiny into our own hands. The only way to liberate ourselves is by creating a Palestinian state, which can then settle its affairs with Israel. For this we do not need any confirmation from those Arab states who have made such a mess of our lives. This sentiment was found among some of the most respected leaders. Its centers were Hebron and Ramallah. c) The in-betweens. Those who said: the most sensible solution is a Palestinian state, in peace with Israel. But first Israel must offer us this. Then we shall go to Cairo and get the Arab world's consent to

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this plan. If Abdel Nasser gives us the green light, as we assume he will, we shall go ahead. If a constructive initiative had come from Israel, such a solution would have been implemented - I am quite certain of this. My party issued a peace plan along these lines which was personally approved by most of the Palestinian leaders concerned as a basis for negotiation. But while some Palestinians voiced their opinions loudly and clearly, no unified leadership stood up to demand it. As we have seen, the Israeli government was wholly unsympathetic to this idea, knowing that a peace between Israel and Palestine could only be based on the frontier of June 4, 1967 - a frontier which not one single cabinet minister was ready to reestablish. When Golda Meir said, in April 1969, that her government objects to setting up a Palestinian state, she also said in that same speech that "the frontiers of May 1967 are as dead as the partition lines of 1947." By this time, the mood of the population in the occupied territories had changed. Real opposition had started. Only an empirical mind like Moshe Dayan, supremely contemptuous of the experience of others, by his very nature unable to see beyond the immediate present, could believe that the Palestinians would forever submit passively to the "liberal" occupation. (As a Jeruralem Arab, an ex-Colonel in the British Army, once told me: "If I have a splinter in my eye, I don't care whether it is iron or gold.") Occupation, even the most intelligent one, breeds humiliation and rebellion. Humiliation breeds sabotage. Sabotage breeds retaliation. Retaliation breeds terror. Terror breeds counter-terror. Thus another vicious circle is born. A year ago, in a meeting with the most prominent notables of Nablus, I asked them if they had any concrete complaint. They answered that their only complaint is the fact of occupation itself. Two weeks ago, when I posed the same question to the same people, I was answered with a multitude of specific complaints. Dayan has become their enemy, their oppressor. His effigy was burned the other day during a routine demonstration, which ended in routine reprisals. The deterioration of the occupation regime is most severe in the Gaza Strip, where economic conditions, bad to start with, were deliberately worsened in order to encourage emigration of the inhabitants, mostly refugees of the 1948 war, to the West Bank and beyond. As all

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members of the cabinet are resolved that the Gaza Strip must be annexed to Israel, this seemed to them a logical course. The result was intense sabotage, repression on a grand scale, rampant terrorism. When Jordan closed the bridges in the face of Gaza inhabitants, emigration stopped. Too late, the Israeli authorities started to ameliorate the economic situation there. What is happening today in Gaza, is bound to happen tomorrow in Nablus, where conditions are already worsening, and the day after in Hebron, where conditions are still best - thanks to the intelligent leadership of Mayor al-Jabari. The days of Liberal Occupation are over and classical occupation methods begin to take their place. In the face of this situation, Moshe Dayan, who has shed his liberal pose, now demands the setting up of Israeli villages and townships throughout the occupied territories, the "integration" of the territories into the Israeli economy, and the application of Israeli law there. In one word: annexation, pure and simple. All these events and moods were overshadowed by one new factor: the Palestinian fighting organizations. Seen through Arab eyes, they are armies of liberation and resistance. Seen through Israeli eyes, they are gangs of terrorists and saboteurs. I do not intend to indulge in semantics. It is a general axiom that your own people are liberation fighters, while the opponents are terrorists. Prior to 1967, these organizations resembled the ghost of Hamlet's father. They were rather ineffective personifications of the Palestinian identity, a reminder that Palestinian nationalism refused to die. Their military and political power was negligible. But this war has changed their potential decisively, turning them into a major power in the Arab world. There are several main reasons for this: First, they were the savior of Arab honour - a very important consideration in a society whose culture places great emphasis on honour and dignity. Three great armies were shattered in a stupendous debacle, coming on the heels of the most extravagant boasts. Contempt for Arab efficiency, military prowess and masculine virtue was universal, especially in the Arab world itself. Honour seemed irredeemably lost - when suddenly a small band of fighters, with primitive weapons, took up the fight against the victorious enemy. The fact that from a military point of view their fight against the vastly more efficient Israeli army was

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quite hopeless did not detract from the admiration accorded them - on the contrary, it heightened it. A second reason was more rational. Up to June 1967, these organizations were fighting solely for the destruction of Israel. But since the war, they have been fighting also for the liberation of occupied territories which no one in the world recognizes as belonging to Israel. Turning the wheels of history back, supplanting an old injustice with a new one, is one thing. Fighting to liberate a subjugated population form the yoke of military occupation is something else altogether. Thus, as resistance fighters, they now enjoy a measure of support and sympathy to which they could not have aspired as wreckers of the peace. Arab governments, who could dare to oppose them before June 1967, could not and did not dare to do this now, unless a general settlement were to be reached, approved by the Arab world. The third reason is paradoxical, but perhaps even more important. By its very victory, Israel has resurrected Palestine and given Palestinian nationalism a new sense of purpose and direction. For the first time since 1948, all of Palestine is now united under one rule - an enemy rule, certainly, but nevertheless, a unifying rule. (One should remember that India and Algeria, for example, were both united for the first time by foreign invaders.) Thereby, unintentionally, Israel did a great service to Palestine. Israel has also given the Palestinians new purpose - the fight against the occupation. (As a Palestinian told me the other day: "Whether we want it or not, you are turning us into a new people, teaching us to fight.") Today, the Palestinian fighting organizations are a significant part of the picture. The exert a growing influence on the whole Arab world, competing with and undermining Arab establishments, dictating political developments. They control great parts of Transjordan, where they have established a kind of "liberated territory", with its own taxes, schools, prisons and hospitals. How will they influence the crucial fight for peace? No unequivocal answer can be given to this question. Attacks on women and chidren, perpetuated by one of these organizations, mar the picture. Extravagant and completely ridiculous claims - such as having killed Levy Eshkol, wounded Moshe Dayan - injure their reputation, making it easy to regard them as ineffective jokers. But if the organizations mature into a responsible national force, they might possibly facilitate conditions for peace. If I am right in believing that

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the Palestinian nation is the main potential partner for peace with Israel, the role of these organizations — one or all of them — cannot be over-estimated. Last December, before an audience of 1000 in Haifa, I asked one of Israel's most respected military figures, General Haim Hertzog, whether he envisioned the day when we would sit down and talk with the saboteurs. "Certainly yes," he answered. "If we want a dialogue with the Palestinians, it will probably start between us and the leaders in the occupied territories. But in the course of these negotiations, at some stage, we will have to call in the leaders of the fighting organizations." The public, I would like to add, took this quite calmly, in spite of recent outrages - another proof that the Israeli public is by far more sensible than it seems. But do the Palestinian guerilla organizations want to be partners in peace? Are they not committed, irrevocably, to a course of uncompromising war until the final destruction of the State of Israel? The official ideology of al-Fatah and the other organizations leaves no room for compromise. Yet, as an old ex-terrorist myself, I may be forgiven for discounting much of the ideology while speculating on the authentic dynamism of such groups. As long as Israel does not present to the Palestinians a clear choice between a just, reasonable and honourable peace and endless, hopeless war, the fighting organizations will perforce remain in their present ambiguous posture as agents of both destruction and resistance. But offer a choice - posing the immediate prospect of a sovereign, national Republic of Palestine in a part of the country, against a war without the possibility of victory for the whole of ancient Palestine - and something is bound to happen. The reasonable people, the idealists who are not fanatics, the fighters who joined the battle to liberate their home-towns, but not for a chimera - will become honourable partners to a peace structure, a "Peace of the Braves". In the meantime, as the Palestinian fighting organizations were showing increasing dynamism, the Arab governments were frozen in their misfortunes, prisoners of their own mentality, and to some extent victims of their own propaganda, which did not allow them any freedom of maneuver. King Hussein's main objective was to regain the West Bank, and he knew that this could be achieved - if at all - only through a settlement.

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He could look for such a settlement only with the consent of Abdel Nasser. By October 1968, he received it, with one qualification. Abdel Nasser told him, according to reliable sources, "You can do what you want. But if you give up Jerusalem, Arab history will never forgive you." During that month Hussein had secret conversations in London with several Israelis. The most important ones were Abba Eban and Dr. Jacob Hertzog, Eshkol's chief political adviser. The King said that he was ready to open official negotiations with Israel, in New York, provided that Israel declared in advance that it seeks no annxation whatsoever. (However, it was understood that Hussein was prepared to agree to some special status for the Arabs in Jerusalem in order to keep the city united, as well as some minor border rectifications.) Eban seems to have wavered for a few hours, but he was told unequivocably by Eshkol that no one in the cabinet would agree to a No Annexation declaration - and Eban, never a staunch fighter for convictions, gave in. Contact with Hussein was broken off - and the King prepared his great American Peace Offensive of April 1969. Thus, all positions were frozen into long-established mental patterns when the Nixon administration took over in January 1969. It was a crucial moment - because by now the Great Powers were thoroughly alarmed. None of them could view the status quo in the Middle East with equanimity. Moscow was afraid that its main base in the region - the establishment of Nasserite Egypt - would come tumbling down. It could not possibly support Egypt's hopeless economy, a bottomless barrel. It wanted the Suez canal opened, in order to penetrate the Persian Gulf which was becoming a vacuum after the Britich evacuation, and it wanted to establish quick communications with India, now a valuable ally against China. Washington, for its part, did not object to any of this. It did not want to crush Abdel Nasser, fearing the anarchy that might follow. More importantly, it feared that any new upheaval in the Arab world, following a war in which the United States would have to support Israel again, would lead to a disappearance of the oil-kings and oilsheikhs on whom American economic interests in the area depend. However, all these were secondary considerations. They paled before two all-important fears which bound the two Powers together. One was

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that another Israeli-Arab war would bring the world to the verge of nuclear war — and beyond. With the probable introduction of nuclear arms into this area, this danger looked appalingly real in both world capitals. Second, the fear that the Palestinian guerillas would present an opening for Chinese influence in the Middle East, upsetting both the pro-Soviet and pro-American establishments in the Arab world. This is also a very real possibility. Thus, the Great Power colloboration in the Middle East is an essential part of the emerging Russo-American world alliance against their common enemy, China. The philosopher of this Russo-American collaboration is Charles Yost, the new chief of the American delegation at the United Nations. As a member of the new Nixon cabinet, it is Yost who directs what has become known as the Four Power Consultations, which are really a Two Power effort to impose a settlement on Arabs and Israelis alike. The elements for the settlement, acceptable to the Great Powers, are defined or implied in the famous Security Council Resolution. They are: retreat of Israel to the June 4, 1967 frontiers, probably with slight rectifications around Latrum, Kalkiliah, etc.; some solution for Jerusalem which would satisfy Israel's resolve to keep the city united in its hand, as well as satisfying Arab honour and resolve to keep some sovereignty there; demilitarization of all the returned territories; keeping the status quo in the Golan Heights until Syria changes its mind; joining the Gaza Strip to Jordan; recognition by the Arabs of Israel's frontiers, sovereignty, and integrity; abolition of belligerency (and the Arab boycott); free passage of Israeli ships through the Suez Canal and the Straights of Tiran; some compromise solution of the refugee problem, by returning some and paying compensation to others; international guarantees for the frontiers. This settlement is, by now, accepted by Abdel Nasser and Hussein, both of whom are eager to bring an end to the status quo. But the Egyptian leader is committed to a course of non-negotiation with Israel, while Israel is committed to a course of refusing any settlement at all, unless by direct face-to-face negotiations with Arab governments, leading to the signing of a classic Peace Treaty. In order to evade this obstacle, the Yost strategy is to advance by stages: a) reach agreement between the Two Powers, each of them consulting its clients; b) consolidate the agreement with a Four Power statement; c) call upon the Arabs and Israelis to participate in the

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Four Power conference, allowing the Israelis to pretend that these are direct negotiations, while allowing the Arabs to cling to the contrary interpretation; d) twist the arms of both sides until they agree to the terms already agreed upon by the Two Powers; e) embody the agreement in a contractual document, again, allowing one side to claim that this is a peace treaty and the other side to claim that it is something else; f) finalize the whole thing by some form of international guarantee. Two factors in the Middle East object to this strategy: the Israeli government and the Palestinian guerilla organizations. The Israelis, because - as stated before - all cabinet members demand annexations much beyond anything possible under the Security Council Resolution. The guerillas, because a settlement would cripple their fight for a free Palestine and induce the Arab establishments to destroy them physically. They have no illusions at all about this. The logical course would seemingly be for the two sides to unite in a common fight, but for reasons already given, this is impossible. In view of this double opposition, has the Four Power initiative any change of success? One may doubt whether the Arab governments are still strong enough to withstand the onslaught of the Palestinian guerillas. Much will depend on the mood of the Arab world. Much will also depend on whether Nasser succeeds in his present efforts to divide the guerillas by winning over Arafat and integrating him into the Arab establishment. If the guerillas compel Nasser to stiffen his terms, thereby compelling the Soviets to do the same, agreement between the Powers may become impossible. This is the great hope of the Israeli government. An even greater hope of Golda Meir and her 23 colleagues lies in the general mobilization of American Jewry, with all its vast influence in the field of mass communications and in Congress, against the Nixon administration. This was always successful under Democratic administrations, but Nixon is far less dependent on Jewish votes. The oil interests play a great part in his administration. And people like Yost may hope that the mood of the American people for peace, in the face of global nuclear dangers, will be so strong that even the well-organized Zionist groups will find it difficult to mobilize the Jews against it. Indeed, this may be the major test of Zionism, as an ideology: will

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American Jews, in a clash between the American government and Israel, take the side of Israel? Or will they seek to avoid the clash by pressuring Israel to change her policy? Three courses are open to Israel now: accept the imposed settlement; stay put and risk total isolation; move towards a direct peace with the Palestinians. The first course is in direct line with the traditional Zionist policy of cooperation with at least one Western power. But retreat, bordering on surrender, is not impossible, but highly unlikely. It would demand a moral courage and a political constellation which it is difficult even to imagine. (If the Arab were right in their dogma that Israel is but a creation of Western imperialism, Israel would, of course, have to follow this course. But to their utmost astonishment, the Arabs may yet find themselves allied to both Western and Soviet imperialism, in a clash with a recalcitrant Israel.) The second course suits Jewish psychology even more. It would isolate Israel in the world community. It might cut off her arms supplies, compelling her to rely on an independent nuclear deterrent. It may cut off American money and necessitate the agonizing reorganization of Israel's economy, with either greatly diminished or greatly enlarged Jewish support. Today, this course seems the most likely to be followed. The mood of the country, stiffened by incessant propaganda in all mass-media, is geared to it. The third course would be to create a completely new situation by a direct Israeli peace initiative, aimed at the Palestinians, including the guerillas and, through them, the whole Arab world. I believe that this third possibility is the only peace which would last - because it would not be "imposed", not come from the outside, but from within. It would not only settle concrete problems, important as these are, but it would first of all create new mental attitudes, a willingness to live together, to cooperate in forging a new structure for the region. Without new attitudes, what prospect does peace have? A n imposed solution, accepted under the duress and bringing no change to the basic outlook - how long will it last? Only direct action, motivated by new atitudes and in their turn creating new mental pattern, can create the basic change needed. This action must bring together the two originators of the struggle, the

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two great national movements which have clashed in this country for so many years. Today, one may think that this is the least likely of the three courses to be followed. But things are moving under the surface, both in Israel and in the Arab world. Under the pressure of events, new forces and new trends may ripen more quickly than expected.

8

YEHOSHUA BAR-HILLEL

A Plea for Rationality in Israel-Arab Relations

I was a Zionist. Though raised in the Diaspora, I spoke modern Hebrew at the age of eight. At the age of twelve, I joined a Zionist youth movement in Berlin. Among other activities, we also discussed "The Arab Problem". We heard and read about the heroic defense of TelHai by Josef Trumpeldor in 1921 against Arab hordes and about the pogrom in Hebron in 1929. When I came to Palestine in 1933 it was clear to me, as it was to tens of thousands of other Jews who immigrated at the same time, that we were coming home and that we were going to live in our own country. I knew, or came to learn very quickly, that the Arab problem was still very much in existence, that the British would be very reluctant to give up their mandatory power, and that our country at that time consisted of a number of disconnected stretches of land which to develope and defend we regarded as our duty. I joined the "Haganah", the "official" underground para-military organization. I knew little Arabic and few Arabs. I had little opportunity to discuss "The Arab Problem" with Arabs. There was an organization called "Brith Shalom" (Peace Covenant), to which some of my teachers at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem belonged, and I knew about their most sincere attemps to come to an agreement with the Arabs in Palestine as to the establishment of a bi-national state. I had a considerable amount of sympathy for that movement but did not join it officially. Some of the views voiced by its leaders also sounded too metaphysical for my taste. Then came World War II, and near its end, while I was serving as a volunteer in the Jewish Brigade Group with the Eight Army, we

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learned about the Holocaust and the extermination of millions of our brothers in Europe by Hitler's hordes. There was little doubt in my mind at that time that a Jewish state had to be established to enable as many of the remnants who wished so to settle down and live a life of peace and dignity, though perhaps not necessarily one of comfort. In the years 1945-47, there just was no other rational solution in view for them. I also knew that there were hundreds of thousands of Jews living among the Arabs in poverty and indignity and that many of them still felt keenly the urge to live in a country of their own. I am still convinced that the establishment of the State of Israel was overall a good thing and that it could have been an even better event had the Arabs in Palestine and Neighboring Countries decided to live with the new state rather than to destroy it in the bud. I understand fully the Arabs' motives, and I do not hate anyone on account of any ill-will he may feel toward the State of Israel. But annihilation of the State could be such a disaster for all humanity and, of course, in particular for all Jews, whether living in Israel or outside, that it is just inconceivable. It is an absolute necessity that our Arab neighbors acquiesce in the existence of a Jewish state in a region which for hundreds of years was Arabic. I do not think that time spent comparing the historical "rights" of the Jews with those of the Arabs to Palestine is a useful occupation. It should be rather clear that, as much as such things can be weighed and measured at all, these rights are about equally divided. Our Arab neighbors will have to adjust themselves to living in peace with Israel. But they are entitled to put a number of conditions to their formal or informal agreement to that end. I shall enumerate these conditions here, not because I wish to appoint myself as their spokesman, but because I, as both an Israeli citizen and an independent thinker, regard them as morally imperative and politically advertent. I, and many of my friends, have voiced opinions to this effect long before the Six-Days' War and continue to voice them now. Ours is a voice of a small minority, so far - we have no illusions in this respect. It runs counter to the feelings of the general population, to the official politics of the Israeli government, and to the public pronouncements of almost all Israeli political leaders. I do not know of any way to convince the Israeli public and its leadership that they are wrong, politically and morally, that their conception will lead, in all likelihood, to con-

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tinued occupation of a territory inhabited by a hostile population, that this will lead to increasing repressions and to repeated wars with our neighbors, to a militarization of the whole life of Israel, and so on. I shall not discuss tactics for change here, as I do not have all the prerequisites necessary for making informed rational tactical proposals, nor am I concerned at this point with tactical problems. What I am trying to advocate here is simply a change of heart, one that could well lead to a change in tactics on the part of my fellow-citizens but which I cannot at present describe in such terms, knowing as I do all the irrationalities that stand in the way. Israel has to make it perfectly clear to itself and to its neighbors that it is not an expansionist nation. Whatever the borders that will be agreed upon at the next peace meetings with its neighbors, Israel will have to solemnly declare before the world, and prior to these meetings, that it will accept these borders as final and will educate its youth in this spirit. (Clearly, the Arab states will have to do the same, but it is not up to me to tell them this.) All talk about the ingathering of all the Diaspora (eleven million Jews, approximately) by Israelis in official positions will have to cease. In other words, Israel, as a state, will have to dissociate itself from Messianic Zionism. And not because Messianic Zionism is all empty verbiage, lipservice to bygone ideals, which only a very small part of the Israeli population takes seriously to any degree, but because it is immoral. No Jew in the Diaspora is under any obligation to Israel. If he wants to immigrate to Israel, he will be welcome; if he wants to stay where he is or wants to emigrate from there to some other country, his decision should be honored by everyone, including the population of Israel. If he wishes, while living outside Israel, to support Israel and to help potential immigrants find their way here, we shall be happy to acknowledge his good will. Should he decide that all his loyalties are to his home country, or to the world, or to what have you, his decision shall be honored. Should some Jews abroad think that it is their duty to make propaganda for immigration to Israel and for that purpose want to create some appropriate new organization or continue to support the extant World Zionist Organization, it is their privilege to do so - but Israel has to stay out. In slogan terms, Zionism - insofar as Israel is concerned - is dead. It was an important and useful idea. With the establishment of the State of Israel, its aim has been achieved. Continued adherence of Israel to the Zionist Organization cannot be

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otherwise interpreted than as subscription to Messianic expansionist ideals. Continued talk about the duty of the Jews in the Diaspora to immigrate to Israel in order to help it against its enemies is not only empty and utterly ineffective propaganda, is not only a reversion, even a subversion, of original Herzlian Zionism (which aimed at the establishment of a Jewish state in order to solve the world's perennial Jewish problem) into a farcical Zionism in which the Jews in the Diaspora are called upon to solve the problems of the Jewish state, but cannot be interpreted by any impartial observer, not to mention our Arab neighbors, in any other way than as an undisguished attempt to strengthen the might, including the military might, of the State of Israel. Eleven million additional Jews could not be absorbed within the present borders of Israel. Why should anyone believe us that our plea to them to come and join us here is not meant seriously? Why not just stop using these worn-out phrases, effective enough perhaps fifty years ago, but detrimental and intolerable under present conditions? Well, why not? Israel, within the agreed upon borders, should be able to take in 30,000 to 40,000 new immigrants per year, should there be that many Jews who should like to come and will be allowed to leave their present countries, without any undue pressures being created thereby. Should a few hundred thousand Russian Jews be allowed to leave Russia - and we all sincerely hope that sooner or later Russia will have to permit this - and should the majority of them want to come to Israel, we shall almost beyond doubt be able to absorb them, without creating any pressures on our borders, if necessary - I hope - even by advocating a decrease in our local birth rate. The mentioned rate of immigration, 1.2-1.5 %, plus the present national annual Jewish population increase of 1.6 %, amount to an increase of about 3 % per annum, which is approximately the current rate in our neighboring countries. But I have entered the realm of tactics, which I intended to avoid and from which I shall extricate myself quickly. I repeat: 1) Israel has to wholeheartedly renounce any sort of expansionism and to dissociate itself from the ideology of Messianic Zionism. 2) Israel has to recognize the full right of every former inhabitant of those parts of Palestine that will be under its jurisdiction at the time of the peace treaty, to return. The Arab refugee problem is now

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as much of a Cain's mark on the world conscience as was the "Jewish problem" that has been solved with the establishment of the State Israel. (I shall not talk about tactics again, though I am aware of the grave problems involved and even believe that I know a number of ways to solve them.) Let me express the hope that the Arab states will not misuse this recognition by forcing the refugees to return to Israel against their will but, on the contrary, when their right to do so will have been recognized by Israel (an aim they had been fighting for, rightfully, for many years), they will do their best to return to these unfortunate pawns of political maneuvers their human dignity and the possibility to live their lives in the country of their choice. 3) I have no solution for Messianic Pan-Arabists or Messianic PanMuslims except, as in the case of Messianic Zionists, the recommendation to give it up: to recognize these ideals for what they are at the moment (regardless of what their role was in the past): Dangerous, irrational Utopian dreams, a constant menace to the peace of the world as a whole and of the Middle East in particular. Israel is mainly secular state, though there exists in it a considerable amount of religious coercion, with respect to the imposing, by state law, a certain number of restrictions on the behaviour of the non-orthodox majority, in payment for the loyal participation of the religious parties in the government. The Chief Rabbis will continue to deliver their sermons in the foreseeable future, and these sermons will continue to be chauvinistic and will defend chauvinism in the name of (the Jewish) God, but it will be a mistake if our neighbors were to take these exhortations and declarations too seriously (just as we are not too impressed by the sermons of the Imans and their repeated declarations of Holy Wars). When honest peace will be between us, we shall find ways to minimize the detrimental effects of religious fanaticism, and I hope that our neighbors will do the same. I would not recommend that people put their hopes in any sort of Pan-Semitism. There exists in Israel a miniscule group that in all seriousness is thinking along this line of establishing an Arab-Jewish community. I regard this trend as Utopian and baseless. The majority of Jews living in Israel were born in Europe or born to parents at least one of whom was born in Europe. The educational system is a European one (with American ingredients), and our universities are indistinguishable (except for the language of instruction) from European or American ones. Almost all of us are convinced that this is all to our

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good, and that the adaption of the best that European and American tradition has to offer in education, economy and political life, while preserving the best elements of the local traditions, is a necessity for our neighbors if they ever intend to raise the general standard of living in their countries to a really human level. Should they at any time want our help in this endeavor, because of our unique experience in this part of the world, I am sure that we shall be pleased to extend it. We shall certainly make no effort to enforce Western culture on those who do not want it. But I think it must be clear to our neighbors that Israel is going to remain a Western, secular country and that in all probability the Arab citizens of Israel will become, within a generation or two, Westernized and secularized, as is happening before our eyes with the children of the Jewish immigrants from Asia and Africa. I think I see the problems created thereby, but I do not think they can be solved by illusions. I hope that our Arab neighbors will realize that any talk about the "inflammatory effects of the Zionist cancer" on the healthy body of Pan-Arabism is empty and reactionary. I am not happy with the overwhelming political dependence of Israel on the United States. Many of us, perhaps even a majority of the population, would first of all hope that the polarization of the present world into NATO and Warsaw Pact nations will come to an end sometime, but that in the meantime Israel should, if possible, side with the uncommitted nations. Sincere peace with our neighbors would enable us to do this. So long as political and even physical extermination threatens us day by day, this decisive political step is simply impossible, just as our Arab neighbors, in their fear of Zionist expansionism, regard it as impossible not to constantly beg for arms from Russia and China, sacrificing for this purpose many of the values which they regard as important. The Israel I know is, or rather was until very recently, a deeply peace-loving country, for which such epithets as "imperialistic", "colonialistic", "aggressive", "expansionist" or "racist", so much in use against it now, are just ridiculous. But it cannot be denied that such words become more and more applicable to it, in a vicious positive feedback spiral from which no way out is foreseeable unless, by some close to miraculous development, everyone concerned comes to his senses. Israel is the strongest military power between Afghanistan and Morocco, and this fact is doubtless going to the head of its present leadership, its establishment, its newspapers, and, finally, its general

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public. But it has acquired this position only because almost everyone is fully convinced that unless it did, it would be literally annihilated. The stronger the Arab terrorist groups will get, the more militarized and militaristic Israel will become. There is no need to belabor the point. The Israel I know is, or rather was until not too long ago, a deeply humane country, sensitive to the sufferings of all human beings. It could hardly be otherwise, when a large part of the Jewish population has itself suffered so greatly from inhuman treatment by its hosts in the Diaspora, prior to immigration. But it cannot be denied that increasing portions of the Jewish population in Israel are becoming less and less tolerant of the Arab portion of the population of Israel and the occupied territories, as they realize the latter's increased cooperation with the terrorist groups which again puts the very existence of the State in jeopardy. As I see it, the vicious circle into which both Israel and the neighboring countries have manoevred themselves has to be broken, and rather quickly so. Almost every non-violent means for this end is welcome and must be tried out. The responsibility for the situation that has been created is again about equally divided and, more imporant, the responsibility for its improvement must be about equally shared. I myself, and my friends of like opinion, will continue our efforts to bring about a change of heart in Israel. We know that our chances for success in this are extremely slim, but they would doubtless greatly improve if it became known that similar efforts are being made on the other side of the border. Let me then, in conclusion, express the hope that this volume will do its share towards increasing the odds of a peaceful solution to a tragic conflict, which if rationality will not prevail, seems doomed to run its course to its bitter end.

IRENE GENDZIER

9

Letter to a Friend: An Essay on a Hope for Peace

My friend: I am writing this to you because you have taught me many things and with you I have learned to feel hope again. I have just returned from the Middle East, as you well know, to the United States. It is a shock to return, a disagreeable shock. Don't envy anything you may believe we have. If you think yourself brainwashed, remember that to fear the condition is proof enough of the opposite. We live here surrounded by anonymity, by the triumph of the machine, by the death of life and the continuity of what used to be man. Here we exist and act frenetically, and when we stop, we are rushed to our psychiatrists who adjust us to what their profession has taught them to call normality. We speak of democracy and of the common man. We have given them all enough to die of, but the words are so strong and the myth so great that it will be a long time before the people awaken. Perhaps they never will. They may be better off not knowing what it is that has happened. So you see, it is those who have not yet succumbed to the bliss of adjusted life who still speak. Do you remember how we spoke of our children, of your son and of mine? When I came back here, I was seized with the fear that my son would grow up like the objects around him. My fear in this society is to survive as a human being. It is not quite a "political act" in the normal sense. Your fear is to survive intact in a country which is yours and yet against you. I cannot help thinking that these two goals are related. I never believed the hostile critics of the West who spoke with such happiness of the agonizing alienation they felt. I never realized to what depths of despair a man can be driven so that his happiness resides

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in his being able to express his misery, and his humanity consists in his deploring its absence. I am that man now, and my humanity is the consciousness of what I have lost. When I returned to the U.S.A., the Democratic convention was about over. Do you remember the photographs of that performance? Do you remember the police, the riot police and their clubs, protecting the greatest democratic country in the free world? Do you remember the faces of the delegates? Do you remember how we talked of Vietnam and of the lust of battle; of the terrible quantification of death; of the sinful abuse of patriotism and the desecration of nationalism? I despise this sickness of nationalism; this worship of an exclusive illusion. I despise the words that lead men to battle and that make death of life, and life of death. I am not against nations. I am against nationalism. I am not against men, I am against the idea of the "masses", the heroes of cynics who would not mingle with a crowd but who isolate themselves and dream the dream of the greatness of the multitudes. Is it the machine age, the triumph of industrialization, that has created this monster of efficient, irresponsible anonymity? Violence existed before the so-called modern age. But it seems to me that the real success in controlling society came only with the advent of communication, with the advent of new weapons, with the advent of centralization, with the advent of those conditions that made total control a possibility. I know how you yearn for your people to be free and independent and prosperous. I remember how sad you were to see the plains of Jericho so barren. But I pray that you and those who work with you will succeed in making the plains green again without destroying the men who will profit from your labor. Many years ago, I came and I travelled through the countries that we call Arab and through Israel. I travelled and I saw many things. I met men and women. I met them as a human being, French born of Russian origin, and an American citizen. I should add that I was a refugee myself, the daugther of refugees, a Jew. Maybe for me to be a Jew and to be a refugee were then synonymous. When I travelled to the Arab East, to Cairo, to Damascus and to Beirut, I was a Jew, because to those Muslims and Christians who met me, it was natural to identify me in that way. It was not natural to me. I came to understand what it meant for them to call me a Jew. For some it was a mark of identification. For others, it was to associate me with Israel, with the U.S.A., with "international Zionism", with the West, with all the things that were feared or hated, or both. I was shocked. I did not

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understand. When I began to understand, I was all the more grateful to those who recognized me, a Jew, as having a personal dimension rather than being just an occasion for attack or automatic rejection. I had known anti-semitism and the memory of it and the fear of it, and I met it again. But I also met men who were innocent of this, whose lives were dedicated to other matters, or whose indifference hid this distraction. I saw lands that I had known but that I recognized. I saw people whose faces were strange to me but who expressed the welcome of friends. I saw people who had not forgotten how to live. All this I saw without saying it. It is necessary to say only when one loses it - and then the memory becomes myth. I saw injustice, indifference, men of sublime corruption, others of passionate goodwill. Do you remember Michel Aflaq? Do you remember how touched I was, like so many others, by his early ardour; by his courage to say that it is in you that the change must come first, and then the world will change. Do you remember his rival, the saintiy pragmatist, Kemal Jumblatt? Do you remember the conversation about Israel, about justice? I did not know then what their history was - these young men and women. It was not mine. But was I forever barred from understanding it? All of this touched me, the me I knew, the Jew in me, the me and the Jew that I had not known. When I left and entered Israel, for the first time twelve years ago, I was carrying all of this invisible luggage. I left with questions, with a heavy sadness at meeting hatred, and with a heavy sadness at parting from friends. The Mandelbaum Gate, to me, was the last frontier, and the guards who said goodbye and those who said hello, did more than they ever knew. Do you remember who took me to the Gate in Jordanian Jerusalem? I have not forgotten his name and when I understood the risk he ran by accompanying me that far, I knew that I would not forget him. He and those like him who had risked the contempt and the hatred we had seen and heard in those endless discussions of Israel and the Arabs, gave me the love and courage to fight the same elsewhere. I came to Israel. It was a different world. You know Israel better than I. It is your country. I came as a Jew then to Israel, perhaps because if one is a Jew, one comes to Israel first as a Jew. But I came having seen and felt the world outside of Israel. I came from the land of the "enemy" and I spoke in a way that disturbed those whose vision of the enemy was as clouded as the enemy's image of him. I will not tell you what I thought then of Israel or Israelis. I was not a Zionist,

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nor am I now. But I was happy and pround and curious and sad. There was anger, hatred and ignorance here too. Why not after all? Normality is a robe of many colors. There are those who rejected the concept of normality and who lived the dream of a chosen people. I accept history. Mine is different from yours. But I do not worship mine to denigrate yours. I cannot believe that in the eyes that exist or that we have created - of the Creator - there is any difference between you and me. I cannot accept that a people is chosen, only that its history is unique, peculiar, and in the case of the Jews, long and strange and difficult and rich, and in this century, singed by the greatest madness of mankind. In Israel, then as now, I met people who would never forget that past and others for whom it is an unknown, a legacy they would like to forget. I met people who were curious about their neighbors, others who were distant, narrow, chauvinist, in other words, like the population of any country. I remember going to a synagogue the first night that I arrived in Jerusalem. I was overcome by so many emotions. The Israeli guard who had admitted me at the Mandelbaum Gate was not particulary happy to see where I was coming from, nor that I hoped one day to return "there". His unhappiness was a foretaste of things to come. And those who waited for me expected me to tell them how relieved I was, at last, to be safe. But these were not my feelings. I was happy, very happy to have arrived, but not happy to have left the other side — simply because it was the Other side. I went to the synagogue to think if not to pray; to ask why it is that one must always choose to be with one against the other. Why not be for men and against willfull misunderstanding and hatred. There were very few people in this synagogue on that Friday night, only some elderly women who seemed surprised at my visit. I remember the endless discussions in Israel as in Egypt on the relationship between concentration camps, Israel and the Arab world. I remember the feeling of utter despair at trying to compare what is incomparable. I remember hearing what we have all heard about how the concentration camps were the responsibility of Europe and how the Jewish question ought to be solved in Europe. I remember last June reading Lotfallah Soliman's article in the special issue of the Temps Modernes in which he said the same thing, with such finality. There are problems for which it seems to me there are no logical solutions. There are historical situations which one is forced to face and deal with that cannot be easily or entirely justly squared away. It is perhaps

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banal to think this or to write it, but it seems to me that under the circumstances it is a reflection that ought to be repeated. The connection between the Second World War (with its attempted Final Solution of the Jewish Question) and the State of Israel, is one that obsesses Jews and Arabs alike. To some it appears that there is a direct relationship between Hitler and the creation of the state of Israel. But this view is too simple, it overlooks the fact that the forces of Zionism were at work before the Second World War, and it overlooks the fact that anti-semitism was not the only factor that drew Jews to Palestine. Of course, if the War had not involved the Jewish question then the course of history would have differed, European history as well as that of the Middle East. The attitudes of many nonZionist Jews would have differed, and the attitudes of those governments whose silent complicity was something to atone for after the War, would also have differed. But the War did not create a situation that did not already exist in Palestine. It is also true, that the friendships of the Arab governments and the Axis powers designed to help the former expel the Mandatory occupations, did nothing to improve the later relations of Palestine Jew and Arab, or Israeli and Arab. And again, although this tangle of contrary friendships can be explained as the long term result of the forced entry of the western imperialists against whom anything was allowed for the purpose of obtaining independence, the existence of these arrangements should discourage us from separating the European experience from that of the Middle East entirely. The Jewish question and the phenomenon of the Third Reich belong in the realm, unfortunately, of western experience. But after it has been made clear that the experience of the Jew in the Muslim world differed radically from that of the Jew in Christian Europe, and after having understood the nature of European colonialism in the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is imperative to understand and to admit that in those complex circumstances that followed the First World War, the history of Middle East and West were no longer totally independent of one another. This is not to put the responsibility for the behavior of one group on the other: it is merely to do away with the myth of completely separate and totally unresponsive action. Now where do the Jews fit in? I do not believe that the Palestinian Arab, be he Christian or Muslim, or a Lebanese of Greek Orthodox descent, is in any way responsible for the deportation of French, German, Polish and other European Jews. But I

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believe the time has come to say more than: we, Arabs, are not responsible for what you, Europeans, perpetrated against the Jews. I believe the time has come for all men, Arabs as well as others, to say what many have said: we, as human being, respond to and are resonsible for what happened, regardless of who we are and of who you are. In so far as we are touched by what happens to man, as Lotfallah Soliman wrote,1 then we are concerned with the holocaust, as with Hiroshima. It is not a question of the transfer of guilt; that is indeed another matter. If I believe this, I also believe that the time has come for westerners, Jews and non-Jews alike, to learn what the history of the Middle East was prior to 1948. It is time to discover what crosscultural and comparitive studies have apparently not succeeded in teaching us, that the history of people does indeed differ, and that their experience is sometimes different and not inferior to ours, I persist believing what you know better than I, what Nissim Rejwan has written so convincingly about in the same Temps Modernes' issue of June, 1967, and which remains true regardless of what has happened since. I refer to the period of Arab-Jewish coexistence, and not only to the manner in which Jews were tolerated in Muslim society, but how they regarded their Muslim compatriots, how they regarded themselves, how they and others lived in pre-nationalist days. Is there not something we can learn from this today? I do not write this to you, for whom this is a live memory. Unfortunately my own compatriots, for whom it is not a live memory, neither believe in its possibility for the future, nor in its reality in the past. The tragedy of the Palestinian-Israeli situation is not that the survivors of European concentration camps came to Palestine. It is that the creation of one homeland should have, ultimately, resulted in the deprivation of another people from their land, the same land. Do you remember the morning we went to Yad Vashem?2 You asked me how it was possible and I said I did not know. I do not know. But I said that those who ask have more protection against becoming murderers than those who observe in silence. I was happy that you came with me. I asked you to come because it was not your history and yet its reality has affected you. And I wanted you to come because before you had seen Yad Vashem you had already taught me that it was possible to reconcile the despair of two nations. There will never be a way to convince a man with a number on his

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arm that there is anything more important than his survival. And what more can one ask of him? There will never be a way to convince a man who has lost his home that the conditions that forced him to go were just. There is no justice here, and there can be no solomonic decision that will bring both men all they want. But can we not find an alternative to throwing up our hands and saying, with one side or another. "Let us fight for everything, anything less is suicide." There must be an end to mystification. There must be an end to the willful confusing and confounding of each other's motives. There must be a beginning, and, indeed, since the June War there is evidence of such a beginning of collective self-criticism and reappraisal. But how far will it go? There are those, Israelis and non-Israelis, who believe that the Zionist phase of Israel's history is approaching its end, but this is not equivalent to saying that the State of Israel is approaching its end. It implies that the ideological bases of the state may change now that the historical circumstances, internally and externally, have changed. Among such people, the prospect of creating a pluralist society which would one day become a completely integrated society, including Jew, Muslim and Christian alike, is a distinct hope. There are those, particularly among ardent socialists, and often among the most sincere Arab socialists who are conscious of fighting the same battle at home, for whom the goal is also to help create a secular state. The reactions to such expressions are predictable. But one issue which emerges repeatedly from these reflections, whether by Israeli or Arab, is the urgent need to clarify the relationship between Jews and Zionists; and simultaneously to define the nature of nationalism in the Middle East today. If we cannot provide the answers to these questions, at the very least, the time has come to pose them. The critical views expressed by Ahmed Baheidine, Lotfallah Soliman and Gebran Majdalany on this score, are not merely to amplify the attack against the present State of Israel. They represent the positions of men for whom Judaism, the Jewish question, and the State of Israel remain separate problems, to be considered separately and not to be inevitably merged. All three are profoundly concerned with the nature of anti-semitism and its impact on the Jewish question. All three are devoted to the liberal ideal of assimilation which they do not regard as a preliminary step to conversion. All three are hostile to the exclusively Jewish nature of the present state of Israel, and to what they consider to be its racial and

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religious exclusivism. Although all three are sympathetic to the concept of the European transfer of guilt - not in any inhuman fashion - they are sufficiently knowledgeable about the West to suspect its motives and its reputation with respect to Jews and anti-semitism. T o be sure, for those dissenting Israelis who are patriots and who will not be the last to defend Israel, there is an urgent desire to reexamine the relationship between Jews and Zionism, between Jews and Israelis. Among these Israelis, I include Israeli Arabs as well as Jews, especially those of non-western origin. That these are, in practice, the marginal men of Israel, reflects something about the nature of the State, and not about the loyalty of these groups. The political solution did not eradicate the Jewish question: in the Arab world anti-semitism has increased since 1948. I do not interpret this to mean that the State of Israel should therefore be destroyed because a happier and more successful solution cannot be found. It is still important that the roots of Zionism be understood by the Arab world, that the nature of European anti-semitism be understood, and that the contemporary Arab anti-semitism, which is different in nature and in origin, also be exposed and eradicated. If anti-semitism should cease to exist, then it is not inconceivable that the political effort to concentrate all Jews in Israel, would also diminish. If it is possible for Jews to live outside of Israel, as full Jews, not as dismembered men who live in the knowledge that in times of crisis they will be able to go or they will be forced to go to Israel, then a new relationship will exist between Israeli and Jew. There are those who will oppose this on religious grounds, those whose presence in Israel is not related to anti-semitism and for whom discussions of political conditions or situations are totally irrelevant. But it is not to be forgotten that there are also Jews outside of Israel who feel themselves members of a community which is not limited by political boundaries. If they are not to be excommunicated, in spirit, then their ties to Israel will assume a less ambiguous nature than they have at the present. The relationship between the "two Israels" will then change, a situation which cannot but have profound repercussions on the State of Israel and on the Zionist ideology which now dominates it. This in turn will affect the position of non-Jews within Israel, and ultimately of Israel and its Arab neighbors. We have often lamented the fact those who should speak against fanaticism are silent. You have asked me where are the voices of

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reason in the Arab world? They are there but we do not always hear them. And today, I have received a letter from a Lebanese friend who asks where are the voices of those Israelis who share your dream and mine, who want the end of hatred, and war and who are not afraid to confront the choices that exist. There are those who will always be ready to see the evidence of danger as a reason to silence the voices of moderation. Who will risk counseling caution when there is a responsibility for life and death? But we have lived through this before. This, it seems to me, is also a tragedy: those who speak for reason, for sanity, for life; for Jew, for Palestinian, for Arab, cannot hear each other expect through the distant echoes of intermediaries who beseech them to have faith. This is the first barrier that must be breached. You may tell me that the barrier exists where there is no longer a frontier, in Israel between Israeli and Palestinian of the West Bank. I agree and I do not minimize the internalized forces of caution and hostility, on both sides, that make meeting where it is physically possible, emotionally difficult. But where there are physical barriers that exclude those with whom talk is possible, then it is more lamentable. It is not a question of agreement, it is a much more primitive matter of putting human beings in touch with one another and putting those who share the possibility of a common language in contact. There is very little room for optimism but the alternatives are so grim that I wonder how much longer we can avoid trying everything short of war. This morning the news of terror is in the newspapers with photographs of Tel Aviv. What is one to do? What is one to think? I remember the conversation with the owner of a restaurant in East Jerusalem who insisted that he was going to leave because it was no longer safe. I remember the evening at our friends' home, when everyone listened apprehensively to the radio. I know the fear for children, for the innocent. And I fear for those who fall victim on both sides of this border. I remember the conversation I had with an Israeli official who angrily decried the Jerusalem blasts of August 18, 1968, because they lessened the chances of a political solution. Terror only polarizes sentiment, it does not make for moderation. But I also remember the man we met in one of the West Bank towns who proudly identified himself as the "someone" who had been quoted in an American newspaper as saying that if a member of al-Fatah came to his home, he would not throw him out, thought he would not invite him to come in the first place. You know what I think of al-Fatah. You know that I

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was impressed by the members of al-Fatah I met in Beirut, by their talk of bi-nationalism, by the politics that grew out of their despair, by their confrontation with reality. You will tell me that one cannot smile at al-Fatah in Beirut and condemn their activities in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. I answer that it is not either or, it is a matter of understanding what the signs mean. In Beirut, in Amman and other places, the Palestinians are sympathizers of al-Fatah, if they are not members. They have seen the cynicism of the governments of their "brothers", they know that they can expect little, and they continue to be deceived. You will tell me that they deceive themselves even more by believing the stories they write about their successes in the Jordan Valley. I agree. There is no use in perpetrating lies or myths. There must be an end to such things, since they are a hindrance to any just cause. In Beirut, and how much truer this is in other places, the ability to confront the position of the Palestinians, and the ability to confront Israel (and I do not speak in military terms) are predicated on the ability to confront one's own society. Just as in Israel, I believe that the inner integration of that society and its ruthless self-examination, is a prerequisite to the integration, not the disintegration of Israel into the Middle East. Everywhere the talk is about realism. Have the Arabs become more realistic? Have the Israelis become more realistic? For the Israelis realism is recognition of their own existence as a sovereign state. For the Palestinians, it is recognition for their existence as a nation deprived of its homeland. To the extent that they identify with the Palestinians, which is no longer something to accept as a matter of course, other Arab governments share the same desire as their Palestinian brothers. In the most general sense, this involves recognition of the validity of the claims made, and recognition of the reasons for hostility towards the Zionist movement. It may sound paradoxical and naive, but is it any more so than asking Palestinians to understand Zionism and the movement that they consider to have robbed them of their land? It is only by rediscovering the past, the two different pasts that have been forcibly merged, that a common language about a common present and future can emerge. There are specific demands, the satisfaction of which, or at the very least, the recognition of which, will one day also denote a new realism. The solutions to the refugee problems of 1948 and 1967 are part of the Palestine problem. Their solution will form part of the larger solution which must be negotiated between Palestinians and Israelis. Wheth-

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er or no this solution will terminate what we call the Arab-Israeli question is another matter. It is far more important today, and far more problematic, to ponder how this initial and most urgent issue can be resolved. Any attempt to deal with it forces both Israelis and Palestinians to cope with far more than the contents of a political solution. Whether or no you agree that this is necessary for an immediate solution of the Palestine question, you must agree that the June War has confronted both Palestinians and Israelis with what we may call the problem of their respective identities. And I persist in believing that this aspect of the situation will affect the possibility and the nature of an accord that can eventually be worked out between the two. We come back to the questions that were raised earlier, about Israel, and that have been raised again since the June War, which resulted in the occupation of one million Arabs in Israeli territory. What is the future of these people? What is the future of the Israeli Arabs? Are the first to be expelled and the second to be permanently reduced to the status of a politically irresponsible minority? I do not have to tell you with what anguish this question is discussed, nor can I pretend to do anything but give you my own views. I stand with those in Israel who wish to see the Arabs of Israel integrated into the State; with those who wish to see an end to the exclusively Jewish nature of the State. I stand with those who are for a pluralist society; and eventually a totally integrated one; who wish to see Arabic and Hebrew the spoken languages of Israel; who wish to see both Arab and Jew as equal citizens of Israel. I stand with those who want to let the Israeli Arabs into all political parties, to lift all bans against them, and to cease treating them like the members of a suspect minority. I stand with those who look forward to the day when Jews will again become citizens without fear in all of the Arab world; when they will live as a minority that is not suspect, that is more than tolerated and that is not considered foreign. The time for the Arabs of Israel to become integrated completely into Israel is now. Their integration must proceed simultaneously with the integration of the Oriental Jew into Israel; not his assimiliation into the State. I do not fear the de-Europeanization of Israel, I welcome the thought that Israel will be what its majority is, that is to say, that it will not be a preserve for European, and East European Jews. Why should we perpetuate the idea that Judaism is the religious, cultural and political experience of Eastern Europe alone? Why should there be a policy of assimilation and absorption into what is considered the domi-

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nant culture? Why should there not be a policy of allowing the different ethnic communities in Israel to live their own lives; not to be assimilated and "raised" to the level of their western colleagues. Is it sentimental naivete to believe that the Iraqi and the Yeminite and the Palestinian have the right to live what they are and to cease being fed into the charitable machines that promise material salvation and transformation? Do you think that I have strayed far from what we are interested in? I do not think so. In Israel, the Arab ranks below the Oriental Jew in the esteem which his Israeli colleagues have for him. The reasons for the hostility involved in each case are different. After all, the Oriental Jew is a Jew and the Israeli Arab is Christian or Muslim. But their integration into Israel depends on different facets of the same problem: what is Israel? The answer to that question will provide an answer to the question of what position Israeli Arabs may have in Israel. And like you, I believe that if the position of Israeli Arabs was improved, then these Israelis could act as mediators between their brothers outside Israel and the Jewish Israelis. And then, one day, when there will be a choice between living as a Palestinian Arab in Israel, or in an Arab Palestine, you will be able to make that decision out of something other than frustation. When that day comes, it may also be possible for Iraqi and Egyptian and Lebanese Jews to decide freely whether they wish to live in Iraq, Egypt, or Lebanon, or in Israel. We are all depressed by the absence of peace, and we are all depressed by the apparent irreconcilability of the total demands of Arabs and Israelis. But it seems to me that we are beginning to learn what is possible between those alternatives. The War forced one million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza into Israeli controlled territory. This has made the greatest change in the world. The map of 1967 is the map of 1947 and we are again confronted by the choices that existed at the earlier time, only now we have the experience of twenty years in between. I know that the Palestinians of Ramallah and Hebron and Qalqiliyah are divided; that East Jerusalemites will not follow what they hear from other Palestinians living elsewhere. This atomization is something that you must help them to overcome. Is this not the same problem that exists in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Arab world, the absence of a sense of solidarity and mutual responsibility? What does it matter by what name we describe it, the results are intolerably expensive and destructive. Before the Palestinians can face the Israelis in order to negotiate, they must have some internal unity.

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Yes, I know you will remind me that there are Palestinians outside of Israel and their predicament is the same. I know this is so, and it is one of the conditions that is symptomatic of the general and profound disunity that exists in this part of the world. But after all, the Palestinians have been scattered. They have been aided by the Egyptians or the Syrians, or the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. This is also something that the war has exposed. How will you answer those who say that Palestine never existed as an independent entity? I know that the history of nationalism is young in the Middle East. It is a complicated problem, and perhaps we had better admit that we have not yet found the answers that apply to the Middle East. There is not doubt that there is a Palestine, that there are Palestinians who are nothing else, and whose connection with their land is beyond doubt. Also, there is the negative proof that the Palestinian is not an Egyptian, a Syrian, an Iraqi, or a Lebanese. He has not been integrated: he has remained separate. He has experienced the Sartrean definition of what it is to be a Jew: the Jew is one whom others define as a Jew. I personally do not accept this as a total definition - it is the definition of the Jew in the Gentile world, who has always been the Other! But what of the Jew himself. What of his experience in his own world that is not merely a response to what he is not? Here lies the wealth and the reason and the history that is not merely the history of anti-semitism. So for you, if to be a Palestinian is more than to be a non-Jew in Israel, and to be more than something that is not accepted by those who speak of Arab unity, then the time to learn and reaffirm those reasons is now. This is also true for those who are suffering the crisis of conscience in the rest of the Arab world, for those who have suffered the full dimension of what June 1967 has meant. The defeat by Israel has brought the Palestinians into a new perspective; moreover, it has forced thinking men to question the relationship between what was said and what occurred. What is it to be an Arab? What is the nature of society, in Lebanon, in Egypt, and elsewhere? You asked me what the people talked about in Beirut. You looked at me skeptically when I said that they think and they suffer, and they ask themselves where to begin. But it is true. The night after I had visited the refugee camp of Siblin outside of Beirut, I went to speak with a friend in the rue Mazra. We spoke of the refugees, of what it is to be a Palestinian and a Lebanese, of the nature of resistance and

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rebellion. I asked him, how can you live this way? How do those who live in the huts on the hill look at Beirut and not erupt? I asked him how it was possible for men to accept and live with the truth of indifference and apathy not only in refugee camps but in private apartments. When and how shall change take place? Is it the sense of time that must change? Is it the sense of the past? What is the past? What are the glories and what are the dreams that prevent future glories? What is the mystique of language that lulls the brain with its intoxicating power? The revolution has been betrayed. We know that. But this is not the time to give up and emigrate internally again. It is the time to continue that process of internal self-criticism, to pursue it relentlessly until the new dawn arrives. How does one make men responsible to and for one another? How does one develop a critical sense of the present and the past? How does one make it possible for men to understand that they may criticize the present without destroying themselves in the process? I mean this in a symbolic and in a practical way. The ability to contemplate one's past in a dispassionate manner, to analyze it, to reconstruct it, to evaluate it and to surpass it must precede of the profound changes that are desired. But it must first be possible to criticize society openly, without paying a fatal penalty for this. If this is not yet possible, there are enough men who know that it must become so, and they are struggling to realize that right. I feel with them a total solidarity in this struggle and impatiently await the day when it will be possible for them to write, to publish, to proclaim all that they now proclaim, in the loudest voice to the largest number of people. This is possible in some places, in some parts of the Arab world. Y o u know that as well as I do. But for those who conceive of their destiny as linked to all men who live in the entire region of the Middle East, the spaces of freedom are not sufficient. Until the day comes when it will be possible to speak critically of the state, of the army, of religion, there will be no internal revolution or evolution regardless of what regimes have come. The days of mystification are finished, there is no time left to sink into indifference or to be seduced by what comforts the soul but eludes the mind. The need for change, the need for an internal revolution in the Arab world will not disappear with the solution of the Palestinian question, nor would it have disappeared with the disappearance of the state of Israel. The emergence of Israel and its perpetual challenge have affected the course of that revolution. But it is a dangerous myth to believe that the revolution for the freedom of Arab men has been

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permanently arrested by the existence of Israel. That is a position which makes it possible to remain irresponsible and to accept the status quo until external changes have taken place that make maximum internal stability or security possible. But this is precisely the same argument which one hears in Israel, which progressive Arabs reject. If one accepts the dynamic relationship between internal events and foreign affairs, then it is an axiom that internal changes - which will ultimately affect foreign relations - must take place even under conditions of less than maximum security or stability. How can any of us afford to wait for better days when we know that it is only by our collective efforts that those days will come? Well, my friend, I await your answer to this letter. I have written it conscious of the fact that I write far from where you are, and that you live the question that I discuss. I hope that you will not interpret my distance as one that allows me to be irresponsible or arrogant. I cannot help recalling an incident that occurred shortly before I left Israel last August. Do you remember the evening I went to Tel Aviv to dine with friends? It was a wonderful evening and I returned to Jerusalem at a late hour. The taxi that I took was filled with a party of orthodox Jews who were in gay spirits. The driver of the taxi was of Palestinian origin, a fifth generation Palestinian Jew he told me. The ride was cool and in the darkness of the night and among the strangers forced so willingly on one another, talk came easily. What had these men to do with the Palestinian Arabs who are also Sabras? What had these orthodox Jews to do with the Arabs of Galilee, or with the frightened young girl in Bethlehem who had gone as far as East Jerusalem, but no further? I thought of Nablus and Ramallah and Qalqiliyah and I thought of Baba and the breakfast we had all had the morning we met him. These are different worlds. The East European Pale is not the Old City, even though today the Pale has come to the Old City. That night I did not think the answer was impossible to find. It was not born of logic but of experience. In the absence of racism and superiority, in the presence of compassion and in the acceptance of a past that must not be obliterated but accepted and reformed, there is still hope. Tonight as I write this, my thoughts are with my friends. To them, and to you, I send the hope that we may meet again in peace and that our children may know each other as free men whom no barrier will keep apart.

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NOTES 1. Temps Modernes, June 1967, p. 271. 2. Yad Vashem is the memorial to the Jews massacred by the Nazis during the Second World War.

PART III

General Reflections on the Crisis

Preface to Part III

As indicated in the Introduction, Part III resumes the order of general reflections on the crisis. Arnold Toynbee is Retired Director of Studies, Royal Institute of International Affairs, and Emeritus Research Professor in International History, University of London. He is widely known for his A Study of History and many other works. When the present volume was conceived, he was a Visiting Lecturer at Kyoto Industrial University, Japan, and wrote the editor (November 26, 1967) as follows: "I will gladly write some informal reflexions as a contribution to the book. I shall write with the object, not of taking sides - though, as you know, I believe that, fundamentally, the Arabs are in the right - but of trying to do something to help save Arabs and Israelis alike from further suffering." Jacques Berque is Professor of the Collège de France and is perhaps the Western World's leading social historian in the field of Middle Eastern and North African Studies. Among his books are Les Arabes d'hier et demain (1960), Le Maghreb entre deux guerres (1962), both translated into English. At present he is preparing a sociological study of the Third World entitled L'Orient Second. He has lectured many times in the United States, in South America, Africa and Asia, and is one of the widest read and travelled of contemporary orientalists. Charlotte M. Teuber-Weckersdorff was born in Vienna and is presently residing in Cambridge, Massachusets. She received her PhD. in Ar-

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chaeology at the Leopold Franzens University in Innsbruck in 1956 and made several archaeological expeditions into Asia Minor. She received a Fulbright Fellowship to Radcliffe College, and took her AM in International Affairs at Harvard in 1960. She travelled in Africa in 1965, and is presently finishing her American doctoral thesis on the Third World in the Department of Political Science at Harvard. Michael Gilsenan is Assistent Professor in the joint program of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at U.C.L.A. He received his A.B. in Oriental Studies at Oxford and his Phd. in Anthropology from St. Antony's College, Oxford. A British subject, he has been a postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer at Harvard and at the University of Chicago prior to coming to U.C.L.A. At present he is preparing a volume on the Süfi Orders in Modern Egypt. The editor Herbert Mason, received his AB in English Literature at Harvard and, after living in France from 1957-1960, where he met and studied under the late orientalist Louis Massignon of the Collège de France, he returned to Harvard to take his AM in Middle East Studies and his Phd. in Near East Languages and Literatures. He has taught at Harvard and at Tufts University. In addition to publishing poetry and numerous essays in American journals, he is the translator for the Bollingen Foundation Series of Louis Massignon's Passion d'al Hallaj (New Edition, Gallimard).

ARNOLD TOYNBEE

10

Reflections on the Crisis

In the series of the Arab-Israeli wars that have been waged so far, the Israelis' military victory has been more sensational, and the Arabs' military defeat more shattering, in each successive bout of the struggle between the two peoples. But a military defeat, however severe and however humilitating, is not decisive unless it puts the defeated belligerent permanently out of action, and a military victory, however overwhelming, is like gold. It has no intrinsic use or value. It is worth no more than what the victor can manage to purchase with it. If he will not or cannot expend his victory on purchasing something that he needs, the victory will be a wasting asset. In this important point, a military victory is unlike the golden talent that can be wrapped in a napkin, be buried in the ground, and be disinterred again a hundred years later with its purchasing-power undiminished and perhaps actually enhanced. The Israelis do have one supreme need - a need that is so great that, if they could secure its fulfilment by sacrificing all other desiderata of theirs, the fulfilment of this supreme need would be cheap at that price. The Israelis' supreme need is to obtain the Arabs' acquiescence - not just a juridical recognition but a bona fide acceptance in Arab hearts - of the presence of the Israeli people and state in a territory whose population was almost entirely Arab before the conquest of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire by Great Britain in the course of the last two years of the First World War. Since the end of the Second World War and the establishment in Palestine of the State of Israel, the Israelis have now already been at war with the Arabs three times, but, since the cessation of hostilities in the third of these wars, the Israelis seem to be just as far as ever from winning the Arabs' acceptance of

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the lodgement that the Israelis have made in the Arabs' domain. For the third time the Israelis have failed to convert a military victory into the intrinsically valuable commodity that they need. They have failed to convert victory into peace. Possibly the Israelis might have won peace in June 1967 if, after taking the Arabs by surprise in the Six-Days' War, they had surprised the Arabs again on the seventh day by pursuing peace with the initiative, energy, and vision that, applied to military operations, had won the war for Israel. Let us imagine that Israel had immediately declared her intention not to seek any further annexations of territory beyond the 1949 armistice lines; that she had avowed that she had done a grave injustice to the Arab native inhabitants of the territory inside these lines; that she now intended to make as full amends for this injustice as would be compatible with her own survival; and that her sole objective was to obtain from the Arabs a genuine acceptance of Israel's permanent presence within those lines. It is just conceivable that, if Israel had made these declarations, had made them immediately, and had made them in a sprit as sincere as she wanted the Arabs' acceptance of her own presence to be - it is conceivable that the Arabs might then have been moved to respond. It is conceivable because the shock of surprise can produce profound psychological effects. It can produce these in wars, as it did produce them in the Six-Days' War. It can also produce them when the surprise takes the form, not of a military attack, but of an offer of unexpectedly just and generous terms of peace. The Israelis did not make any such offer. The auspicious moment, if there really was one, quickly passed. For the third time, the Israelis did not succeed in converting war into peace, and perhaps they did not seriously try - not seriously, at any rate, by the standard of the seriousness with which they had just fought and won the third Arab-Israeli war. This fact raises three questions: first, why does Israel need peace with the Arabs, considering that, up till now, she has defeated the Arabs so easily whenever she has chosen; secondly, if Israel does, nevertheless, in truth need peace with the Arabs, why did she forfeit peace on this occasion for the sake of such comparative trifles as the unilaterally-proclaimed annexation to Israel of the Old City of Jerusalem; thirdly, now that Israel still finds herself in the state of war in which she has been ever since her establishment in 1948, what are her prospects on a long view? Why does Israel need peace with the Arabs? For the same reason

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as the Crusaders - and this was also the reason why the Philistines needed peace with the Ancient Israelites, from one of whose tribes the present Israelis are descended. Like these two previous bands of invaders of Palestine from overseas, the Israelis are up against the same insoluble problem as all invaders of Russia and invaders of China. These, too, are confronted with an opponent whose field of manoeuvre is virtually infinite. Napoleon penetrated Russia as far as Moscow and Hitler as far as Stalingrad, but neither of them could get to the end of Russia. Between 1931 and 1945 the Japanese easily occupied the principal ports, railways, and cities of China, but they could not get to the end of China. The military man-power at Napoleon's, Hitler's, and Togo's disposal was colossal compared to Israel's, but the Arab World, in which Israel has made her lodgement, is as big a world as Russia or China. The Arab World extends from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the western shore of the Persian Gulf. There was a moment in the eleventh century B.C. when the Philistines held almost exactly the same area of conquered enemy territory (Israelite territory then; Arab territory today) that the Israelis hold at this moment. The Philistines believed that they had disarmed the Israelites completely and permanently by prohibiting the practice of metallurgy, even for peaceful uses, throughout the Israelites' territory. When Saul ventured to challenge the Philistines' military domination over the Israelites, Saul suffered a crushing defeat. Yet, in the next chapter of that story, David succeeded where Saul had failed. David drove the Philistines - not into the sea, but back within the confines of their original five city-states in the Gaza Strip. The Philistines had no support from overseas. They were a band of refugees who had lost touch with their previous home. They could not hope for any reinforcements. The Crusaders did have support from overseas. They were supported by Western Christendom, as the Israelis are supported today by the Jewish Diaspora in the present-day Western World. Thanks to this, the Crusaders were able to maintain their lodgement in Syria and Palestine for a century, and to cling to a few remants of it for a century longer. In their heyday the Crusaders occupied more territory than the Israelis occupy at this moment (though possibly not more than the Israelis will have occupied at the end of the present story). In the south the Crusaders occupied not only the head of the Gulf of Aqaba but also an island in the gulf. They held the whole Mediterranean coast of Palestine and Syria. They even held

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Edessa, to the east of the River Euphrates, and King Amaury of Jerusalem occupied Cairo for a moment when he was competing with Saladin for the control over Egypt. However, Saladin achieved on a larger scale what David had achieved on a smaller one. Like David, Saladin enveloped the invaders from overseas by uniting the hinterland under his own rule, and, after that the Crusaders were doomed, as the Philistines had been. The Israelis, like the Crusaders, depend on support from overseas. This support may flag, as the Crusaders' support from Western Christendom flagged. The Arabs' successive military defeats by the Israelis have thrown the Arabs into the arms of the Soviet Union. The Russian presence in the Arab World may, of course, be offset by the United States' support of Israel. All mankind must hope that the two superpowers will not let themselves be drawn, by their respective protégés in the Middle East, into engaging in an atomic war with each other. Mr. Kosygin's message to President Johnson over the hot wire at the outbreak of the third Arab-Israeli war indicated that Russia and America hoped to spare themselves, and the rest of us, from being overtaken by this supreme disaster; yet, until genuine peace has been made in the Middle East, there will continue to be a danger that some further bout of hostilities there may escalate into an atomic third world war, against the two superpowers' common wishes and intentions. These are cogent reasons why Israel needs peace with the Arabs. Then what is inhibiting Israel from taking the indispensable steps? Part of the explanation of this inhibition is the Israelis' belief — a belief that is shared by a majority of the Israelis' fellow-Jews who have remained in the Diaspora - that Israel is where she is today, not simply by force of human arms, and not as an intruder, but as of divine right. They believe that Palestine is "the Land of Israel" (Eretz Israel) and that fee real intruders are the native Arab inhabitants whom the Israelis have partly subjugated and partly dispossessed. This Jewish belief is paradoxical. The Israelis are intruders; the Palestinian Arabs have been partly dispossessed and partly subjugated. Yet, though the Jewish belief that the Israelis have a divine right to hold the territory that they have actually taken by force flies in the face of the facts, the Israelis, and probably a majority of the rest of the Jews, do believe this fantastic belief bona fide. The ultimate ground of this belief of theirs is a religious one. It derives from the traditional Jewish belief that Yahweh, the Ancient Israelites' tribal god, promised

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to give Palestine to the Israelites and carried out his promise when, thanks, as they believe, to his supernatural help, the Israelites (invading from the landward side and not, like the present Israelis, from the sea) conquered the interior of Palestine - an area approximately coextensive with the post-1949 territory of the present-day Arab state of Jordan. Because of this belief, the Israelis, with the exception of an honourable dissenting minority, do not feel guilty towards the Palestinian Arabs for the injustice that they have done to them. In their eyes, these Arabs are "natives" in the modern Western sense of the word: i.e. they happen to be there, but they have no human rights. This was the Zionists' attitude from the start of the Zionist movement. This attitude also explains why, when the Nazis committed genocide against the European Jews, the survivors took it for granted that they had a right to an asylum in Palestine and that the Palestinian Arabs had no right to try to retain possession of their own country. Unlike the Palestinian Arabs' claim to be rightful owners of their own homes and property in the country, the Israelis' counterclaim is not founded on any demonstrable facts. It is an indisputable fact that, until the first Arab-Israeli war - the war of 1948 - the Palestinian Arabs were the actual owners - and the lawful owners - of their own homes and property in Palestine. It is not demonstrable that Yahweh gave Palestine to the Ancient Israelites in the thirteenth century B.C. Indeed, it is not demonstrable that Yahweh is anything more than a mythical figure; and, even if we believe in his reality and in his almighty power, it is not demonstrable that he ever promised Palestine to the Israelites. Moreover, if this were demonstrable, it would be a demonstration that Yahweh was trespassing beyond his own divine rights. When the Israelites conquered part of Palestine in the thirteenth century B.C., the country belonged to the Canaanites, as it belonged to the Arabs when the Israelis conquered part of it in 1948. Palestine was not in Yahweh's gift. If it belonged to any god or gods, its lawful divine owners were the gods of the pre-Israelite inhabitants. The Israelites did conquer the interior of Palestine progressively in and after the thirteenth century B.C. (The Jebusite city-state of Jerusalem maintained its independence till it was conquered for Judah by David round about the year 1000 B.C.) The Israelite conquest of part of Palestine towards the latter end of the second millennium B.C. is no doubt an historical fact. But presumably it was just one of the innumerable successful

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acts of human aggression by which the history of mankind has been disgraced. It was, in fact, no different in kind from the conquest of the greater part of Britain from its previous inhabitants by English invaders in and after the fifth century of the Christian Era. The belief that there is a god called Yahweh, armed with unlimited power and with unlimited rights of eminent domain, and that this god gave part of Palestine to the Israelites when these conquered that territory more than 3000 years ago, is neither demonstrable nor rational. Yet this irrational belief is still held by many Jews, and by some Christians too; and this belief alone is the title-deed of the present state of Israel. An astonishing fact is that many Israelis, and also many Diasporan Jews who support Israel, believe bona fide in the validity of the title-deed, though they are agnostics who do not believe in the existence of Yahweh and, a fortiori do not believe that Yahweh ever picked out the Israelites to be his chosen people or ever promised them the possession of Palestine. They reject the mythology that it is the title-deed's sole basis, but they are no less sincerely and passionately convinced than believing Jews are that the Jews' claim to be the rightful possessors of Palestine is legally valid and is morally justified. Here, then, is the crux of the Middle Eastern problem. The Israelis have committed an extreme injustice against the Arab lawful owners of the Arab territory that the Israelis have occupied and of the Arab property that the Israelis have seized. A majority of the Israelis (happily there is an honourable dissenting minority) believe that the injustice which they have committed is justified. They believe this on the strength of a myth. This myth has no foundation in fact. But a factually baseless myth can have immense dynamic power over human hearts and minds, and no myth has been more dynamically powerful than the myth that the Ancient Israelites were "chosen" by a mythical god called Yahweh; that this mythical god gave his "chosen people" the right to conquer and hold Palestine; and that, in making this alleged promise to the Israelites, Yahweh was acting within his own rights. The belief in the truth of this myth has been the psychological force that has enabled the Jewish Diaspora to maintain its communal identity ever since an élite of the population of the extinguished Kingdom of Judah was deported to Babylonia by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B.C. The myth continued to keep the Jewish community in existence in the Diaspora when, after the suppression of the second great Jewish revolt in Palestine against Roman rule — the revolt of A.D. 131-5 — the

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Emperor Hadrian evicted the Jews from the whole of Palestine except Galilee. The Diasporan Jews' successful maintenance of their identity, on the strength of their myth, for more than 2500 years is an extraordinary achievement. The myth has, by now, acquired the cumulative momentum of twenty-five centuries of history. This Jewish myth's potency is demonstrated by the Jews' feat of establishing a Jewish state in part of Palestine in our day. But a myth, however potent, is a fantasy, not a fact. The hold of the myth over Jewish hearts cannot convert fantasy into historical reality. Yet, on the strength of this fantasy, the Israeli conquerors of Arab territory have violated rights that are not fantasies but are facts. How can the Arabs be expected to acquiesce in the violation of fundamental rights of theirs - their right to live in their homes and their right to hold their own property - in deference to a Jewish myth which is not credible either to the Arabs themselves or, indeed, to any rational human mind? The Palestinian Arabs are not, as the Israelis are, the devotees and beneficiaries of a baseless myth; they are the victims of brutal facts. These facts are manifest and notorious, and, in the light of them, the Israeli myth will not carry conviction. If Yahweh really existed, if he were really omnipotent, and if he were really morally respectable, he would not have arbitrarily dispossessed either the Canaanites in the thirteenth century B.C. or the Palestinian Arabs in the twentieth century of the current era. And, if he were real and were omnipotent but were immoral, he would not have needed to follow the tortuous and sordid course of action by which the dispossession of the Arabs has in fact been brought about. The facts are common knowledge. The Jewish Diaspora is a power in the modern world - particularly that large section of it that, since the eighteen-nineties, has emigrated to the United States from the Eastern European "Jewish Pale" (the ex-Polish and ex-Lithuanian territories of the former Russian Empire) to escape the penalisation, persecution, and pogroms to which the Jewish population of the Pale was subjected. (Nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, like mediaeval Western Europe, could not do without the Jews' services; it resented its dependence on this efficient alien minority; and it ill-treated the East-European Jews accordingly.) In the United States by the time of the First World War, the Jewish immigrants from the Pale had not only prospered economically; they had also become a political force. The Jewish vote had become important in New York State, and New

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York State's vote was important in the United States as a whole. The Jewish Diaspora in Central Europe had also some influence in the political life of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Jewish experiences in the Pale, and in Western Europe too (e.g. the odious conspiracy against the Jewish military officer Dreyfus) had made the European Jews wish to acquire a country of their own in which they could be secure. The Jewish myth made it virtually inevitable that they should set their hearts on Palestine as the site for a future Jewish city of refuge. In the First World War, Zionism became a factor in the struggle between the Allies and the Central Powers. At that time, Russia was the Jews' enemy number one; since Germany was Russia's enemy number one, Germany had better prospects of being adopted by the Jews as their champion than Britain had, since Britain was Russia's ally. So long as the Tsardom survived, it vetoed the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. (Palestine was a holy land for Christian Russian pilgrims.) When the Tsardom collapsed, Russia ceased to be a useful ally for the Western Powers. Britain now had everything to gain and nothing to lose by over-trumping Germany in her competition with Germany for winning the support of the worldwide Jewish Diaspora. By the time when the Tsardom was collapsing, Britain held a trump card. She had already conquered Palestine, as far north as Jerusalem inclusive, from the Ottoman Empire. Britain played this card by making the Balfour Declaration of 1917. This document was subsequently written into the mandate for the administration of the whole of Palestine that was conferred on Britain by the League of Nations. Under British rule, which lasted in Palestine as a whole for thirty years (1918 - 1948), there was Jewish immigration into Palestine on a much larger scale than there had ever been under the previous Ottoman Turkish regime. The Jewish immigrants came in under the protection of British bayonets against the vehement opposition of the Arab majority (in 1918 still an overwhelming majority) of the population of Palestine. When the immigrant Jewish community in Palestine had become big and strong enough to be able to fend for itself, it made things in Palestine so difficult and disagreeable for the war-weary mandatory power that Britain ignominiously renounced her mandate and evacuated Palestine. The immigrant Jews then proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel, defeated the Arab states in the first Arab-Israeli war, prevented the Arab inhabitants of the Israeli-occupied part of Palestine who had fled during the hostilities from returning, and de-

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graded those who had not fled to the status of second-class subjects of the new state of Israel. The Israelis treated the Palestinian Arabs as the European Jews had been treated by the Europeans. Under the Nazi regime, Germany had committed genocide against the European Jews; after the Nazi regime had been overthrown, the United States and Britain allowed the Jews to make the Arabs pay in Palestine for what the Germans had done to the Jews in Europe. The Germans had been wicked, but, as Westerners, they were still privileged in non-German Western eyes. The Palestinian Arabs had committed no crime against the Jews, but, though innocent, the were "natives" - i.e. people without human rights in non-Jewish as well as in Jewish Western eyes. These are the facts. How can the Arabs be expected to acquiesce in having been treated with such monstrous injustice? This brings me to my third and last question: What are the Israelis and the Arabs going to do now? For the Arabs, the natural reaction is to recollect what happened in the end to the Crusaders and to the Philistines, to keep up their courage, to steel themselves to the prospect of having to pour out more Arab sweat and blood and tears; to try, try, and try again; and to have faith that "he that endureth to the end shall be saved" - as, in fact, their own ancestors were eventually, by their own endurance, saved from the Israelis' predecessors the Crusaders. Say not the struggle naught availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not nor faileth, And, as things have been, they remain. Hie poem of which this is the first quatrain was written by the Victorian English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, on the bridge of Peschiera in Northern Italy. Peschiera was one of the four Austrian fortresses in the "quadrilateral" with which the Austrians were holding the Italians down. The Italians had tried more than once to liberate themselves from Austrian domination by force of arms, and, each time so far, they had been heavily defeated. However, they did not despair, and finally they did succeed in expelling the Austrians. They succeeded with foreign help: French help in 1859 and Prussian help in 1866. With or without Russian help, the Arabs can look forward to overcoming

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the Israelis eventually, if they, like the nineteenth-century Italians, or like the British in 1940, can summon up the spirit to persevere. This would be the natural human reaction, not only for the Arabs, but for any other people that had been treated as unjustly as the Arabs have been. If the Arabs decide to carry on their struggle with Israel to the bitter end, they could not be blamed, except of course in the French rhymster's satirical terms: Cet animal est très méchant; Quand on l'attaque, il se defend. If they do persevere, the Arabs can reasonably look forward to being eventually victorious and to righting, by force of arms, the injustice that force of arms has inflicted on them. We have, however, to ask ourselves: Is this desirable? Ought one, because he detest injustice, to encourage the Arabs to win justice for themselves through war? Or, short of positively encouraging the Arabs to continue to fight, is the rest of mankind justified in sitting back and watching the Arab-Israeli tragedy work itself out to its terrible denouement? If we did take this line, we should, in my judgment, be behaving irresponsibly and heartlessly. We should also be committing treason against mankind - against the world-wide human family that includes the Arabs and the Israelis, as well as all the rest of us. In my belief, the majority of mankind that is not directly involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict ought to do its utmost to reconcile the two parties with each other before the conflict escalates farther. Our objective should be a double one: the maximum of justice for the Palestinian Arabs, combined with the minimum of suffering for all human beings - Arabs and Israelis and others alike; for we should all suffer to the last degree if the war in the Middle East were eventually to escalate into an atomic third world war. Obviously the task of peace-making is going to be enormously difficult. The Arabs are justifiably outraged at the injustice that they have suffered, and they have a fair prospect of eventually being able to redress this injustice by force if they remain intransigent. The Israelis (always excepting the dissenting minority) are today in an arrogant and truculent mood. This, too, is perhaps only human in a people that has just been sensationally victorious in war for the third time; for it is human to take short views, and a majority of the Israelis seem to be taking a short view today.

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If there is to be an attempt at peace-making, how is a start to be made, and by whom? The answer to this question is clear. The Israelis must take the initiative and this for two reasons, one moral and the other prudential. The moral reason is that, as between the Israelis and the Arabs, the Israelis have been the doers of injustice while the Arabs have been the victims of it. The prudential reason is that, if the Israelis do not follow a Jewish rabbi's precept "Make peace with thine adversary, whiles thou art in the way with him", the likelihood is that the Israelis are going to be exterminated sooner or later. I therefore suggest that the Israelis should be the party that makes the first move, and that they should make it in some such terms as these. "Palestinian Arabs, we recognise and confess that we have done you an enormous injustice. We are now going to do our utmost - in consultation with you, if you will talk with us under the auspices of impartial mediators - to repair the injustice that you have suffered at our hands. First let us try to explain to you what has led us to commit this injustice at your expense. The original, and fundamental, reason is our conviction that Palestine has been given to us Jews by the god whom you Arabs, being Muslims and Christians, have adopted as your god too. We Jews believe that Palestine is 'the Land of Israel' (Eretz Israel) by God's fiat. But we recognise that we cannot demonstrate the truth of this conviction of ours in which we believe so whole-heartedly and so unshakably. If you, on your side, hold that this is merely a Jewish myth with no foundation in fact, we cannot disprove this counter-conviction of yours, and we recognise that, since you, on your side, do not believe in Israeli's divine right to the possession of Palestine, the fact that we do believe in it does not in the least excuse, in your eyes, the injustice that, admittedly, we have done to you. However, our 'myth' is not the only reason why we have taken part of your country from you by force. There has also been a second reason - a practical and an urgent one that, unlike our 'myth,' is a matter of indisputable contemporary fact. While the Nazis were dominant, first in Germany and then in the greater part of Continental Europe, the Nazis committed genocide against us Jews. The number of Continental European Jews whom the Nazis put to death in cold blood is reckoned by us to have been about six million. The Continental European Jews who escaped death were desperate. Britain and the United States could have given asylum to all of us if they had chosen; but they did not

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open their doors to us very wide; and we have to admit that, even if an asylum in the English-speaking countries had been accessible for all of us Jewish refugees from Continental Europe, we should, even so, have tried, in preference, to force open the doors of Palestine. This is what, in fact, we have done. We have chosen Palestine for our city of refuge because of our 'myth'. Experience, however, has now taught us that we shall find neither rest nor security in the country which, in our belief, is Eretz Israel so long as we are here at the price of an unredressed injustice committed by us against you Palestinian Arabs, whose homeland Palestine is, not in fantasy, but in fact. We beg you to explore with us all practicable ways and means by which we can repair the injustice that we have committed against you. We have one sole reservation to make. Acquiesce, we beg you, in our presence in Palestine side by side with you. Do not ask us to evacuate a land that you can justly claim as being rightfully yours. Our presence in Palestine is now an accomplished fact, and we have nowhere else to go." Can the Israelis be induced to speak to the Arabs in some such terms as these? Perhaps, if they can get the better of their own unwarrantable arrogance and self-righteousness. Can the Arabs, on their side, be induced to respond to an Israeli overture on these lines if the Israelis bring themselves to make one? Perhaps, if the Arabs, for their part, can get the better of their own well justified indignation.

JACQUES BERQUE

11

Crisis and Role of Decolonization*

"For him the outside world exists": this was said in the 19th century about a writer unique enough to attract such a paradoxical compliment. Today, in the eyes of too many, the non-Western world still remains an outside world. The great difference is that this world no longer needs us in order to exist. A penetrating study of imperialism was undertaken during the second decade of this century in Europe. This analysis revealed a centrifugal force which was dangerously distending the problems of several industrial countries. Today, however, the colonization/decolonization relation is defined in terms of the area where it took place: the countries which were or are affected and whose movements are considered more important than the external stimuli of these vicissitudes. This inversion of perspective provides new dimensions for the object of study, or rather it makes them into new subjects. Never have the basic solidity of the whole and the continuity of the world scene been stronger; but the relations of both determining factors and configurations between subjects are now fundamentally changed. Imperialism projected the technological advancement of certain peoples upon the world through the use of force. Decolonization leads to a more equally shared distribution of the centers of initiative. A first step in this direction is taken by the universalizing of independence - at least formal independence. This is only a preliminary, however, which would remain an empty form were it not filled with social and economic content. * Translated from the French by Herbert Hartman.

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As these first objectives are attained another takes shape. Technological inabilities profoundly devalued non-Western cultures. Almost all of these cultures have now to prove to themselves their compatability with development; but those endeavoring to do just this encounter forms of inequality more insidious than the forms of the preceding period. One no longer asks peoples to sacrifice all or part of their political independence or resources in the name of a universally applicable progress - as in the time of Jules Ferry or Queen Victoria. The same fallacy is now perpetuated in terms of well-being and conformity instead of conquest or productive and organizational superiority. But is it necessary for these peoples who aspire to reach modern consumer standards - the principal types and expansive means of which still remain narrowly monopolized - to sacrifice all or part of their own character? Here then is a fourth challenge, a fourth struggle arising while the first three are far from ended. If it is true that optimism in history does not consist in believing in happiness, but in believing in problems, then we must now confront additional, deeper problems inherent in the process of decolonization. Decolonization and the World Problem The prehistory of the independence movements is not rooted in the European idea of nationalities. It goes back to the resistance and organization movements brought about here and there by imperialism at its zenith. The victory of the Japanese over the Russians in 1905 marked a decisive stage; it demonstrated that the West could be defeated with its own weapons. Following World War I and the Russian Revolution events took a new direction which was accentuated at the end of World War II. The rights of the weak, the humiliated and the ignored openly challenged the right of the Great Powers. Less than ten years after the Algerian uprising at Setif, the Bandung Conference (April 1955) brought together the General Estates of a "world" which, in the manner of the Third Estate of 1798, no longer accepted the status of non-entity. Certainly, at this odd gathering where two incompatible colussuses, Communist China and Congressional India, sat side by side, illusions and contradictions were present. History, however, was seeking a pivot which was not that of the JudeoChristian-Roman tradition - although this point was still recognizable in the two rival forms of industrial civilization.

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The nationalization of the Suez Canal shortly afterwards united technical performance and a resounding political affirmation. The following year Ghana began the series of African movements to independence. In Cuba revolutionary romanticism, having reached the age of responsibility, rallied to Marxism - already almost a classic archetype thereby integrating many of these heterogeneous undertakings into a universal project. The Algerians, like the Vietnamese, claimed a part in the struggle through socialism. The intellectuals of the world ardently followed these searchings. To many of them, myself included, the independence of Algeria (1962) seemed to announce the opening of a new historical era. Syntheses between human passion and reason, bolder than anything previously hoped for, were forseen. A new vitality was infused into the ideological landscape by a wave of images from the steppe, the "djebel," and the tropical forest. Heroes surged forth from these fermenting masses. The recently colonized peoples now thrust forward their own men to face the great men of the West: Castro, Mao, Nehru, Nkrumah, Sukarno, Ben Bella, Bourguiba, N a s s e r . . . These figures may have been very different in stature and direction but they all represented a voice and a person to both their own peoples and to the Great Powers. Of course they were only spokesmen for a greater reality: the advent of a new historical consciousness whose significance is partly apparent and partly hidden. Problems were as large as hope in these vast regions of the world which were liberating themselves, or believed, as we believed, that they were. These were raw zones where the human element had suddenly been uncovered. In many of these upheavals two types of realities - disassociated previously by history - seemed to merge: the effervescence of societies and their own rationale. The latter managed to break the constricting framework of policy and reach the fuller dimensions of the political. A new history began with this participation in the responsibilites of the avant guard of vanquished or unrecognized cultures, a human stratum more disinherited than the European proletariat; a history based not only upon social anthropology but, one might even say, upon an anthropology of Nature. An immeasurable and unforseen agent from the reality of the Third World began to define himself and us as well. In the wake of these discoveries the Marxist and Rousseauian designs were renewed and diversified. But there was no second Bandung in 1964. A little more than a year

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after the decrees of March 1963 instituting self-management for the peasantry, Ben Bella fell. Changes erupted from Brazil to Indonesia, passing by way of Ghana. I need not discuss here the reasons for these changes nor detail the circumstances, but only the general effects. The Arab Course The Arabs occupy an important place in this laboratory of past and present history. Their case is made more meaningful for us by the fact that it strikes the closest to home, perhaps, of all the cases brought about by the renaissance of the non-Western world. The entire history of the Arabs in fact, sums up the advantage and the misfortune of especially close relations with the West. The Arabs appropriated such a large part of the Greek heritage that for a long time we considered one of their philosophers the "great commentator" on Aristotle. In recent times, in at least two instances - Egypt and Algeria - the Arabs have cleared the way for the application of the laws which are currently dictated to the world - in the same fashion that they are dictated to their own proletariats - by the technological expansion of several European countries: on the one hand, the Suez Canal and the supplying of Egyptian cotton to British mills; on the other, land communalization, cultural penetration and even the project the French call "assimilation." The energy of the Arab uprising was, and still is, able to handle the blows which it receives. Since the end of World War I, resistance has affirmed itself in the Near East - against the English in Egypt and Iraq, and against the French in Syria and the Levant - through urban riots, tribal revolts, and political obstruction. The colonialists, each in his own way, resisted, but finally consented, by degrees, to an emancipation which was completed in the years following World War II. The same story was reported in the Maghreb where the independence of the Moroccan and Tunisian Protectorates preceded the costly independence of Algeria by only a few years. Presently only Oman and the Emirates of the Persian Gulf remain under direct of indirect occupation. An irreversible step was taken with political emancipation. But even if the old imperialisms are more or less liquidated now, and the present rivalries between power blocs must take account of increasingly jealous demands for national dignity, a menace still appears which jeopardizes these gains. The Palestinian conflict of June 1967 once again revealed

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the weaknesses and division which had endangered the Arab cause in 1948 and since. What is more serious, it convinced the inhabitants of that region that a desire for annexation, appetites for subsequent expansion, continue to exist, and the powers friendly to Israel are held responsible. This is a staggering blow, at least in the Near East, to the process of decolonization and to the chances of a reconciliation between the industrial nations and the Third World generally. The incident, just as it did in 1948, aggravates the internal contradictions of these countries and will be paid for by political changes. For a long time, moreover, the struggle has been a radical one, with the state or party leaders not always able to retain initiative. The great Egyptian leader Zaghloul had known how to preserve the trust of nascent syndicalism, but this was not the case with his successors. Social demands usually disassociate themselves from the actions taken by the parties in power, or else they compromise with them in one way or another. The role of the nationalist bourgeoisie, which in Syria, Iraq, and Morocco led the people to independence, is now challenged by a left wing composed of workers and intellectuals. The revolt of the young against their elders, the struggles of women for liberation and artists for expression, interfere with the general social thrust in various ways; but they unite with this thrust in questioning political successes and accusing them of being purely formal. These separations come to light even in countries such as Tunisia, which has enjoyed great continuity, or Egypt, which has undergone great transformation. Nevertheless, through periods of conflict and calm, disorder and normalcy, the dissatisfaction of the Arabs arduously seeks its path and expresses itself in a body of anguished and perplexed literature. Self-consciousness does not decrease; on the contrary, it nourishes itself on defeat as much as on success. The demands of both the intellectuals and the masses - whether or not they adopt the ideological formulation of Marxist socialism or other specific socialisms - express an increasingly strong reaction to the still-felt machinations of imperialism or the failure of the groups in power. Military coups d'etat favored by this instability, overthrow the pseudo-parliamentary regimes which issued from the colonial period, as in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. One of these coups became a revolution under the leadership of Gamel Abdel Nasser, who established a long period of authority in the course of which Egypt freed herself from the remains of the British presence, undertook agrarian reform, and started rigorous economic planning.

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The Algerian ascension to independence brought both the party and the army to power. Although the latter has reinforced its position since the fall of Ben Bella, the foundations of a socialist construction, characterized by self-management of the domains taken back from the colons and promising communal reforms, are still present. Liberalism has prevailed since 1960 in Morocco, and Bourguiba's Tunisia is adopting an attitude of extensive cooperation with its pre-Western policy. The overthrow of traditional power in Yemen provides both progressive regimes and conservative regimes like Saudi Arabia an occasion for mutual confrontation which also represents a confrontation of world strategies. In spite of numerous vicissitudes, many regimes are able to realize worthwhile programs in the areas of schooling, adult education and provision. Most of these countries implement plans which, even if they do not produce the desired results, are ample proof of the assimilation of techniques and the mobilization of a national potential. If foreign aid is necessary when the state does not have resources like those guaranteed to certain countries by the exploitation of their petroleum riches, the achievements still mark an advance over those of the colonial era due to their coherence and above all due to their relation to the collective aspirations. The nationalization of the Suez Canal appears an undeniable success. These positive results are partly limited, however, by the demographic growth. This poses a problem to nations undertaking an effort as great as Egypt's, for example, to which the grandiose perspectives of the High Dam Project do not provide an adequate solution. One must naturally add to this the failure due to the inadequacy of economic models insufficiently adapted to the local realities. It is perhaps here that one is best able to grasp the difficulties inherent in these present stages of national development. The Arabs expend a great deal of energy in order to escape the cosmopolitanism imposed upon them by the former regimes and often still adhered to by the ruling class. Their own language was significantly re-established in all roles of modernity. A certain lack of familiarity with foreign cultures, and with "the other" in general, on the other hand, should perhaps be considered favorably. Paradoxically this sometimes-excessive energy does not exclude the phenomenon described by the anthropologists as acculturation. On the technological level the failure of numerous enterprises, and the division of the economy into two sectors - one called

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modern and the other traditional - reveal an inadequate appropriation of methods. These must be redefined in terms of one's own self rather than merely applied in the form in which they are delivered by others. The collective personality, defied by such mis-applications, asserts itself through the failure it inflicts in practice, or through attitudes which are open, unfortunately, to the influence of traditionalism and irrationality. One can observe this phenomenon on a scale larger than the economic one. In the absence of analyses capable of destroying a misleading alternative, such societies, like many parallel societies throughout the world, may oscillate between depersonalizing apprenticeship and an identity based on past-mindedness. It is in these terms that the relations between Islam and socialism and more generally between local cultures and modernity, are too often expressed. The Lack of Foreign Criticism The Arabs, even though they have attained political independence almost everywhere, accept in diverse and rather radical fashions more advanced challenges: economic creation, social renewal, and protection: i.e., cultural renovation. These different objectives are present, in varying degrees, in all the forms of their behavior; but any enterprise punctuated by such inconsistency exposes itself to failure, error, and at the least, hesitation. Foreign pressure of domestic conspiracy can retard the movement or even reverse it and human error, individual or collective, must also be considered as a factor of failure. What is true for the Arabs is true for everyone in Africa. Latin America, and Asia. It is impossible to imagine decolonization as an independent process, excluding all reservations on the part of the observer, and disclaiming human responsibility for the vicissitudes and the means which are obviously directed toward beneficial ends. Even if the essential part of the critical observation called for in this case reflects back to the interested parties themselves, the foreign friend still cannot limit himself to unconditional approval or tacit disavowal in the face of certain ups and downs. If this friend should not intrude in the evolutions which are rightfully and, in fact, the responsibility of the peoples in question, how is he to aid without interfering and become involved without indiscretion? Moreover, what right does he have to judge, qualify and eval-

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uate when he belongs to one of these peoples who axe only-recently distributed across the face of the earth themselves, still enjoy a radiating force, and who are not yet indifferent? Does not criticism retrospectively justify the adversaries of freedom, or at least furnish them with weapons? Does not it hinder the upward movement of the formerly-colonized peoples which should be made without our judgements, just as the rise of the Common Market is made without theirs? Let us go even further and say that to analyze is to reintroduce relations of force, for today methods and models are expected like machines and can yield even larger r e t u r n s . . . These are serious objections but they are not nullifying. We make them ourselves more often than the other parties do. Emancipatory and revolutionary movements have too sharp a sense of current world affairs — they often seek the support of the world's intellectuals — not to accept observation by another. This acceptance is perhaps the essential condition of all self-consciousness. It is by its scarcity, then, rather than by its excess than our criticism is at fault. We often hesitate to apply to the Third World the same vigorous critical observation we subject our own society to, and when we do apply it, it is at the price of many uncertainties. One must agree that academic objectivity, under the circumstances, is singularly inadequate. In many ways decolonization consists in the recognition of a group's and a project's state of subjectivity. To understand this means to confer meaning to the subject's most subtle manifestations and most personal expressions. In this connection the journalist's method is often more pertinent than that of the scholar for it cannot make or accept conclusions. Should we let the technicians speak? These evolutions take place in spite of technology. The technician, the expert, will leave aside that "in spite o f ' wherein the essential element usally resides. Other analyses correctly confront the program in progress with their options: in most cases the ideal and the practice of socialism. Many of these analyses are well-founded but few remain so. Whether they want to or not they feed upon and agree with domestic opposition. This is often justified, but the global effects, by definition, are outside the responsibility of foreign critics. There is something ridiculous, to say the least, in the intellectuals of a constituted society censoring the ardent work of history in societies which are still in the transitory state. For this reason, foreign intellectuals, refusing to establish themselves as a judge and also conscious of

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the inadequacy of their informative role, usually limit themselves to suggestion rather than to passing judgement. They hope at best, to encourage evolutions upon which they have no direct hold. Even when certain regimes were less sympathetic toward the world intelligentsia than others, and in spite of the bitter distinction the intellectuals made between the conservatism of some regimes and the progressivism of others, these same intellectuals were embarrassed to resort to blaming the latter. Thus the imprisonment of the opposition, the persecution of the intellectuals or minorities, police dictatorship and censorship, were often excused by considering them to be in the interests of socialism and decolonization. One must accept the facts; there is no more separate history. The entire debate implies a world strategy where classification is made by reference to such and such an international subject: the war in Viet Nam for example. This creates a difficulty in judging the parts as one fears that this judgement could change the evaluation of the whole. All this took place and still takes place as if the regimes which issued from independence, a fortiori when they align themselves with the socialists and the neutrals, enjoyed a special grace which protects them from the bulk of the criticism occasioned by certain examples of their foreign and domestic behavior. Is this view excessive? We must admit that it is largely the product of self-criticism; but let us also remark that the acknowledgement of these risks, insufficiences, and inconvieniences is not limited to us alone; that it is usually understood as imposing reservation; that reservation in this case can be excessive. Conclusion In any case, these considerations ought not to deter us from our basic concern. The balance sheet of recent years in the Third World, in spite of having several negative items, appears to me to be positive. And in saying this, I feel myself more at ease in criticizing the mistakes and failures. It is criticism itself, which has become largely self-criticism, which strikes me as having advanced in the Arab World since June 1967. And as it inclines both toward a truer idealism and toward a truer realism with respect to the Palestinian question, it appears to me to open the way to better approaches in the future.

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CHARLOTTE M. TEUBER-WECKERSDORFF

Relevance of the "Third World" to the Palestinians

La colonisation apparaît dans de plan providentiel comme un acte collectif de charité qu'à un moment donne une nation supérieure doit aux races déshéritées et qui est comme une obligation corrolaire de la supériorité de cultures. Cardinal MERCIER 1

We have to remember the background of those countries, the long period of struggle and frustrations, the insolent treatment that they received from the imperialist powers and the latter's refusal to deal with them on terms of equality. It is neither right nor practical to ignore the feelings of hundreds of millions of people. It is no longer safe to do so. Jawaharlal NEHRU * Le mal dont souffre le tiers Monde est notre mal à tous et sa guérison, sa rédemption seront aussi les nôtres. Jean LACOUTURE '

From Cardinal Mercier's "disinherited races" to Frantz Fanon's "wretched of the earth," from Toynbee's "external proletariate" to A. Sauvy's "Third World,"4 it was the term Third World which is now generally accepted as descriptive of that bigger part of mankind which, at different stages of recent history, was under the sway of the West. Though there were, and are, difficulties to delineate the realm of each of these "three worlds," it is generally accepted that the developed

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capitalist countries, the First World, comprice the United States and Canada, Europe - excluding the socialist countries, Japan, Israel, Australia and New Zealand; the socialist countries or Second World: the European socialist countries, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Mongolia, Cuba; the Third World includes the rest of the Americas, the whole of Africa, Asia - excluding Israel, Japan and the socialist countries, Oceania - excluding Australia and New Zealand.5 This attempt to categorize the present division of mankind is based on different measurements: the First world is judged by its economic attainments, the Second World by its political systems and the Third World both by its economic situation and its political separateness from but dependence on the politics and economics of the other two. All the elements of interdependence and sharp conflict of the "three worlds" are compounded in the tragic situation in Palestine. The various stages of that enduring conflict faithfully mirror the emergence of the Third World and the failure to resolve its problems by traditional means. When the deliberations on the fate of Palestine began in the United Nations, there were only five Arab Member States, all of them with close ties to the West and none to the Socialist Bloc. When the proposals and counter-proposals reached the stage of a formal vote, there were three final draft resolutions before the General Assembly, that of the Western powers, that of the Arabs and the Indian proposal. The report Nehru gave, a few days after the final vote in the U.N., to the Indian Parliament gives a vivid picture of that drama and warrants to be quoted at lenth: We took up a certain attitude in regard to (Palestine) which was roughly a federal state with autonomous parts. It was opposed to both the other attitudes which were before the U.N. One was partition which has now been adopted; the other was a unitary State. We suggested a federal State with, naturally, an Arab majority in charge of the Federal State but with autonomy for the other regions — Jewish regions. After a great deal of thought we decided that this was not only a fair and equitable solution of the problem, but the only solution of the problem. Any other solution would have meant fighting and conflict. Nevertheless, our solution - which, as the House will remember, was the solution given in the minority report of the Palestine Committee - did not find favour with most people in the U.N. Some of the major powers were out for partition; they, therefore, pressed for it and ultimately got it. Others were so keen on the unitary State idea

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and were so sure of preventing partition at any rate or preventing a two thirds majority in favour of partition that they did not accept our suggestion. When during the last few days somehow partition suddenly became inevitable and votes veered round to it, owing to the pressure of some of the big powers, it was realised that the Indian solution was probably the best and an attempt was made in the last 48 hours to bring forward the Indian solution, not by us but by those who had wanted a unitary State. It was then too late. There were procedural difficulties and many of the persons who might have accepted this solution had already pledged themselves to partition. And so ultimately partition was decided upon by a two-thirds majority, with a large number abstaining from voting, with the result that there is trouble in the Middle East now and the possibility of a great deal of trouble in the future.6 More than two decades, two wars and continuous skirmishes later, the almost forgotten Indian proposal of 1947, may be more than the document of a missed chance, it could still become the basis of a reopened debate towards a just and permanent solution of the conflict. However, the immediate result of the Arab defeat in the United Nations as well as in the ensuing armed struggle in Palestine was the recognition by Arab leaders that to rely solely on the promises and assurances of the West led nowhere and that connections with the Socialist Bloc may be expedient. The period between the wars of 1956 and 1967 brought an enlargement of the international politicking in the area that had only a limited influence on the problem of Palestine proper or the situation of the Palestinians. In the aftermath of the June War, some new factors emerged which widened the scope of the Palestine problem. Before the war Israel could point to the legality of her boundaries and most of her actions, evoking the ancient phrase of International Law "pacta sunt servanda." After the administrative and political incorporation of the Jordanian part of Jerusalem into Israel and the enduring military occupation of neighboring territory made Israeli arguments switch to the equally ancient "rebus sic stantibus," causing some embarrassment in the ranks of her supporters. Another development may, in the long run, turn out to be of an even greater impact on the fate of Palestine - the emergence of the Palestinians as a political entity. For a score of years they had been dispersed, wards of a scant international charity, legally the object of various Special Agencies of the United Nations, politically a pawn in the diverse interests of Arab politics, soon after the 1967 war a new

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leadership of the Palestinians began to emerge which demand to be heard when Palestine is being discussed. And as in other regions of the world where people decided to take an aotive part in the shaping of their own fate, they are, as of now, decried as being simply terrorist bands, outlaws who make the task of peacekeeping extremely difficult. But even in its first year of operation, al-Fatah has aroused inter national attention and helped to focus the vague concept of "trouble in the Middle East" on Palestine proper. For the Western as well as for the Socialist Bloc these stirrings among the Palestinians seem to threaten an additional factor to be reckoned with. At least the West seems to be united against "the terrorists," while the Socialist Camp carries their already obvious split right into the Middle East crisis: China recognises revolutionary potential in the Palestinians, the Soviet Union seems to view them rather as a hindrance to her maneuvering in the region. It has to be seen whether the official attitude of the non-Arabic and non-Muslim countries of the Third World will be influenced by the new situation in Palestine, but is very likely that the idea of the Palestinians to take their fate in their own hands will evoke sympathies and, perhaps, gain support for their cause by individuals and groups. As we have seen earlier, in the accepted categories of a tripartite world Palestine is divided between one First World state and several parts which are now within the territory of her Third World neighbors. An united Palestine would most likely belong to the Third World - a dreaded prospect for those who like to describe Israel as "the outpost of the West in the Third World," a phrase which has very unpleasant associations in the minds of people in the Third World. One often conveniently forgotten fact is the diversity of the Third World, its peoples, cultures and religions are as diverse as its stages of economic and political development. And above all, the Third World is less bound to the economic and political frameworks in which the two other "worlds" seem to be frozen, rather it partly owes its existence to a conscious attempt to avoid being pressed into either of them. Any new approach by the big powers would have to be preceded by the insight that imposed solutions in any part of the Third World will not eliminate troubles but draw more people into even greater ones. That would mean a general recognition that the disinherited races are no more open to coercion than to tutelage and that they insist on being heard when the fate of one group among them is decided. An whether such an insight can be expected, remains an open question.

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NOTES 1. Quoted in Alfred Sauvy, Le tiers monde. Paris, P.U.F. 1956, p. 37. 2. Jawaharlal Nehru, India's Foreign Policy. Delhi, Govt. P.D. 1961, p. 180. 3. J. Lacouture & J. Baumier, Le Poids du Tiers Monde, Paris, Arthaus, 1962, p. 11. 4. Alfred Sauvy began to use the expression Tiers Monde as an analogy to the French Tiers Etat of 1789. Cf. J. Lacouture and J. Baumier, Op. Cit. pp. 3 ff. 5. From the United Nations Statistical Yearbook, 1965, Tables 2 and 19. 6. J. Nehru, Op. cit. p. 26.

13

MICHAEL GILSENAN

Through a Glass Darkly: Images of the Middle Eastern Conflict

That understanding possible without an axiom

between individuals

some mediating

for scientific

psychology.

sence of a system of signs, linguistic only the most primitive is possible

type of

is im-

expression

is

In the abor

other,

communication

... L e v VYGOTSKY

My focus here is on one particular aspect of the Arab-Israeli conflict, that of communication and understanding (taking these terms in their widest sense). There is no attempt to deal with problems of "right" and "wrong". Indeed I have made a deliberate effort to avoid value judgements as far as possible. Of course the idea of complete objectivity is a myth, and in a confrontation so inextricably linked with human suffering too much detachment is as distorting as too little. For my very limited present purposes however, I have not struggled with the larger questions of justice and humanity but have kept to a discussion of interpretation and meaning in the tortuous and confused dialogue that history has imposed on the peoples and nations caught up in the Middle Eastern tragedy. The "most primitive type of communication" I take to be force, of the use of which the events of June 1967 are only the most dramatic recent example. What we need to ask is why force has been resorted to so often and with such swiftness over the past twenty years while other more sophisticated systems of communication have either not been utilized or have broken down. What factors have inhibited the develop-

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ment of some significant areas of even basic comprehension? How can we explain the absolute mutual exclusiveness of the moral and political views of both sides; or the failure to find any common ground for the interpretation of events; or the apparently unbreakable circularity of a situation where all causes are effects and all effects causes, action breeding reaction in an endless spiralling series in which sporadic explosions only serve to wind the spiral ever tighter? But at once we have to go further than the idea of a simple "binary opposition", because there are of course three sides to the dialogue, joining Israel and the Arabs with the West in a triangle of incomprehension. The West, chiefly Britain and America, has been closely linked with the conflict since its inception and has always played a key part in its successive stages. Each group is therefore faced with the necessity of communicating with two others: Israel with the West and the Arabs, the Arabs with Israel and the West, and the West with Israel and the Arabs. The level of this communication however is markedly higher in the West — Israel relation, so there are qualitative distinctions to be considered. Let us look at this latter side of the triangle first since it is in many ways the least complicated but has important implications for our grasp of the other two. Its chief characterising feature is what may be called a general similarity of interpretational scheme. I mean by this that not only is there in the limited literal sense a common language or languages but there is a broadly shared set of meanings within a common moral context. There is, in Vygotsky's phrase, a shared "system of signs" which permits the parties to "exchange meanings" with a reasonable assurance that distortion in either direction is at a minimum. That this should be so at the most public level is due in part to the fact that on the Israeli side the elite largely responsible for the transmission of messages is drawn mostly from Western society and or participates in that idiom or universe of ethical and political discourse. Added to this is the unique place which the Jewish communities for hundreds of years and the idea and reality of Israel during this century, have held in Western history. This is not to imply, of course, that ease of communication will lead or in any way must lead to agreement on specific issues. There may be and are quite important disagreements over a wide range of topics, but the chances that they will be born of semantic confusion are slender and the areas of disagreement are generally clear. This is in great contrast to the other two sets of relations, which are

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characterised more by the way in which the groups talk past instead of to their supposed partners in the exchange of messages. What distinguishes the West - Arab, and the Arab - Israel sides of our triangle, is precisely the lack of both the common system of signs and the shared context within which those signs can be interpreted. In these two relations it is not the case that there are merely specific problems of ideology and politics which might be resolved by reason or mediation if only this or that side would face "reality". The very nature of the reality is in question. We begin to enter a realm of absolutes, of "total" interpretations of the situation whose very totality makes for mutual exclusiveness; a realm moreover where no word is neutral, no phrase but has a translation or redefinition into another code of meaning. The symbols are complex and linked one to another in complex patterns which I cannot try to explain within the confines of this essay, even supposing a full explanation to be possible. I shall restrict myself to what seem to be the main themes or clusters that run through each group's basic frame of reference. Put in its simplest terms in the Arab-Israeli relation there is neither identity nor similarity of referential context. That this is so is due to the lack of virtually any point of contact at the most fundamental levels of experience and the premises historically derived from that experience. Nor is it a paradox to say there is no point of contact, when the Arab and Israeli people are joined in intense oonflict. The intensity of the struggle is both increased by the opposed visions of what Palestine is, and at the same time increases the gulf separating these visions in a constant self-renewing, self-reinforcing process. Thus a body of historical "facts", which for the sake of argument we may take to be objectively ascertainable, is seen by those involved refracted in very different prisms of meaning. The same event gives rise to utterly different explanations and interpretations, each of which for the direct protagonists completely negate the other since each is invested with a total and inviolable validity. For the one side Israel is the supreme fulfillment of a long tradition of millenial hope. This tradition lies at the root of the Jewish consciousness of the past, is woven into the history and culture of the Jewish community, and seems finally and miraculously to have culminated in the achievement of Zion. Professor Norman Cohn has referred to the waves of millenarian expectation that arose during the

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massacres of the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries in Europe and produced sudden migrations to Palestine. But the theme goes back much farther than this to the agony of the Psalmist by the waters of Babylon and finds expression in the prayer, now given a new significance: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning." Elements of nineteenth century nationalist ideology and the contemporary and multi-faceted growth of an "Israeli identity" have been added to this profoundly religious force and aided its outworking in modern political terms but they have not replaced the source of its inspiration which remains in Revelation and its promise to and the notion of the Chosen People. Now to the inheritance of exclusiveness, of a separateness both sought and inflicted, is added the sense of a moral, cultural and technological achievement that places Israel firmly in the company of advanced and modernized nations. Her right to existence is grounded in religion, in historical ties, in the claims of liberal humanism and of progress. To this tradition and this claim the West is firmly connected, not only by centuries of injustice that reached an apogee under Nazism, but by the major part played by Western support for Zionism. But how does the reality of the State of Israel appear to the Arabs and how are the same events that to led to her foundation in 1948 interpreted in their perspective? The mirror of the Arab experience reverses the image. Absolute justice becomes absolute injustice, the return of the dispersed becomes the expulsion of a new dispersal, the right to existence becomes the denial of existence, homecoming makes exile and re-entry to the Promised Land is transformed into colonialism and exodus. Each "fact" has its diametrically opposed significances. The structure of these significances build up with remorseless logic in complete opposition, almost one might say constituting solipsistic universes. Given this degree of polarisation any consistent form of communication except force becomes literally impossible because every message and action has a double and irreconcilable meaning. Each group regards as non-negotiable exactly those issues on which the other would consider negotiation. For the Arabs to recognize Israel is or them to grant what they most dispute, and for Israel to readmit the refugees on an equal basis of citizenship is to face the future of de-Zionisation of the nation and hence the disappearance of its raison d'etre. The smallest questions lead inexorably back to the most fun-

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damental. In their victorious realization of Zion the Israelis have triumphantly shown men's capacity to recreate the past in a new form in the present, to force time back on itself. Ironically enough in so doing they have devalued History and the mere passage of time as sources of legitimacy. The Arabs, with this object lesson in the persistence of a vision and a goal over centuries before them, can draw their own lessons on the irrelevance of the status quo to a determined people. What the sometime dispersed Israelis were just over twenty years ago, the Palestinians now feel themselves to be. For the Arab then the immigrant is a coloniser, the terrorist a freedom fighter. The land, a sacred symbol as much as material reality in the Middle East, has been usurped. And moreover this usurpation has been accomplished in their eyes by the external forces of colonialism. It is here that we find a major part of the reasons for the incompatibility of reference between the Arabs and the West on the other side of our triangle. On Palestine the Arabs speak with the moral and political vocabulary of those whom Frantz Fanon bitterly labelled "les damnées de la terre." They are part of a "Third World" which has a shared way of viewing certain political events from which we are largely barred by our own ideology and history as the other term in the colonial relationship. So that however genuine our concern, and however tortured our own sense of guilt (vide Sartre's introduction to Fanon's book) the "empathetic leap" that quite transcends intellectual and humanitarian liberal awareness is beyond our reach. Here is the dilemma. The capacity to "put ourselves in the Arabs place" is on the one hand impossible, save perhaps at the risk of severe psychological disequilibrium, yet on the other hand is demanded by the force and momentum of a process we initiated and which we seek to comprehend. In the other direction, the Arab view of the West is permeated by that ambivalence of attitudes characteristic of the colonised. The pendulum swings violently between emulation and rejection, between the demands which the aims of technological and economic advancement make in the way of partial dependence on the "modernised" and the powerful ressentiment which the asymmetry of the relation and its colonial origins entails. For the Arabs the West has been both "destructive and regenerative". In some ways a source and model for change it has also drawn boundaries for its imperial convenience, created and supported diversiveness, and exploited local economic assets through its government and business interests. Above all it is inalienably asso-

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dated with what are seen as the forces of world Zionism conspiring to perpetuate a colonial, Western enclave in the Arab Eastern Mediterranean. Pride in the unspecific past combines with an acute sense of a present whose humiliations and dangers are thought to proceed in large measures from the alliance of these external and hostile agencies. Suspicion rooted in the experiences of half a century engender the bitter claims of British and American military interference in 1967 (claims which President Nasser has since interestingly enough described as a "misunderstanding"). With a view of the world which, as with most peoples, has themselves as centre, the Arabs regard the West with distrust and uncertainty. To the political we must add a more particularly moral dimension. It springs from different notions which for each group have assumed a tragic universalism but which are again mutually opposed. Out of our grim historical record of prejudice and persecution of Jewish communities and the strong religious element in that record, there has gradually emerged the figure of the Jew as the epitome of suffering humanity. This image derives further profound symbolic and psychological power from the Christian theodicy of suffering, a theodicy, it should be noted, which is of far less significance in "orthodox" Islam. Now there are many closely woven strands in this theme and it has a central place in a tragic vision that is intertwined with the great motifs of guilt and evil in our culture and civilisation. But this vision is not that of the Arabs, and in the nature of historical and existential circumstance cannot be so. Our ultimate archetype of the persecuted suffering is not only seen by them as a particular and limited rather than universal symbol, but has even been transmuted into its opposite. For by another of the many savage ironies that pervade the conflict, the sufferer has become in Arab eyes the inflicter of suffering. This transformation of roles necessarily gives the Arabs a perspective on "the Jew" diamtrically opposed to our own. Between Israel and the Arabs therefore, the essence of the perspectives is so radically other as to preclude the possibility of dialogue. They comprehend by the same actions different complexes of meaning. In both sets of relations the failure to understand the language in which the other group speaks is due to deep, structural factors rather than to misjudged politics, however important these may be in a secondary sense. A great deal of the apportionment of praise and blame and the allocation of fault has glossed over this latent division with facile ver-

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diets of right and wrong that entirely ignore the underlying existential realities and reduce the conflict to the level of simple partisan interpretation. The

Stereotype

The opposition is I think therefore to be seen as intrinsic to the systems of relevance, which in turn derive from the historical process. A whole series of foci of non-communication follow from this basic fact for which countless illustrations could be produced. One of the principal secondary problems arising from and reinforcing mutual incomprehension is the use of stereotypes in the conceptualisations each makes of the other. It is a commonplace that all people have their stereotypes of significant others, the "they" as opposed to the "we" (significant in however limited and seldom occurring a context); commonplace too that hese images reveal more of those who hold them than of their supposed objects. Rousseau on the Noble Savage or Senator Joseph McCarthy on the Communists tell us remarkably little about either Savages or Communists. But the elaboration of these ideas in a particular society at a particular time does illiminate some realm of thought and ideology within that society itself. In the world of everyday life of course we constantly make and employ typifications in that "reciprocity of mutual expectations" celebrated by the sociologists. We assume that, until circumstances give us further notice, not only will individual X act in generally patterned ways in different settings, but other individuals grouped under labels such as "friend" will perform in a fairly predictable manner. This sort of typification, at a far more sophisticated level than stated here, is of the stuff of social life. The formation and maintenance of stereotypes on the other hand, though not always clearly separated from this normal process, has certain distinguishing characteristics which set it apart. There is first and perhaps of greatest importance a quality of invariability to the stereotype. It tends to a fixed form that is unresponsive to the constant changes which take place in every field of social action and thought. It is to a great extent ahistorical and perpetuated without regard to objectively ascertainable conditions in the subject; it takes on a meaning and life of its own outside the specific set of circumstances from which it may be said to have arisen. This very detachment

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from the particular can infuse it with remarkable continuity over considerable periods of time. The stereotype is not subjected to rational examination or adjustment by those who hold it, but is, as it were, self-validating. Situations in which it is employed tend to reinforce it because, in a circular manner, it structures the way in which people view and respond to those situations and may thus radically affect action. Individuals and groups are seen as acting in accordance with the stereotype others have formed of them, as for example, in the psychology of the coloniser - colonised relationship. The stereotype in one kind of situation is a way of viewing others so as to deprive those others of their particular identity, of human changeability, of individualism and a unique history. The possible variations are endless, but they all substitute for the subtlety of the portrait the crude, bold lines of the caricature the link of which to reality need not, or in fact should not, be investigated. Unlike everyday typification the stereotype inhibits and obstructs any significant degree of critical thought or communication whether personal, group or national; it blocks and offers a refuge from thought and feeling, and places action in regard to those stereotyped on another moral and ethical plane. I do not want to pursue this question of the definition and characteristics of the stereotype any further. It is a topic bound up with so many others, prejudice being the most obvious, and with a complexity of its own which would take us too far afield and its development is a problem for sociological inquiry. But I raise the issue because the triangle West-Israel-Arabs offers some highly illuminating examples of stereotypical thinking and attitudes which tell us much about all three parties. At the most general level a look at the images of "the Jew" and "the Arab" in our own society, and the strange mutations and ambiguities which recent history has wrought in them, would be uncomfortably self-instructive. Similarly it would be important to draw out the stereotypes which Jews and Arabs have of each other. But let us limit ourselves here to one particular aspect of this mode of thought. The history of Western - Middle East relations is crowded with strange shapes and demons that began to multiply in the early Middle Ages. Professor Norman Daniel has examined many of them in great detail in his book Islam and the West: the Making of an Image, and Professor R. W. Southern in a brilliant series of lectures has drawn attention to certain important themes in the mediaeval European view

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of the world of Islam. Some notions are now merely quaint if grotesque, though they then added another thread to the tapestry of ignorance and fear. It was earnestly noted that the Muslims abhor swineflesh because the Prophet was eaten alive by pigs (perhaps no more perverted than ideas of a somewhat more contemporary relevance that all blacks have a distinctive odour and you never meet a poor Jew). Other quasi-myths, such as that of the Antichrist from the East threatening the world of Christendom, were more subtle and more central. In more recent times different figures have emerged: the noble hawkeyed Bedouin of the great tradition of British travellers in the Middle East desert nomads, pure of race, proud of bearing, a natural chivalric aristocracy distinguished by an unrelenting code of honour; and as a complementary contrast, the snivelling town Arab, filthy of dress, beggar of money and despicable of morals, all in equal opposite measure to the virtues of his superior cousin. In Egypt, this inferior creature was the "gyppo" or wog as seen by the thousands of servicement in the British forces of occupation whose shoes he shined, whose laundry he washed and for whom he procured. Both are, in a very special sense, "based on experience" and the fact of this connection, however attenuated and distorted, makes it all the more difficult to break through the stereotype. In contrast to the mediaeval images, which were often grounded in a minimum of direct relations and fed on this element of mysteriousness, the stereotypical Bedouin and gyppo are born of personal contact set in a particular structural matrix of interest. The figure of "Colonel Nasser" is the most recent link in this chain of irrationality. I use the label "Colonel Nasser" because, at least in Britain, it is the appellation under which the image usually appears. The prefixed "Colonel" carries a load of pejorative association: it emphasises the "military dictatorship" theme, is insulting in a rather unsubtle way, makes a link with the rash of army revolts by junior officers throughout the Third World, reduces the President's status by depriving him of the title of his office, and has the further interesting characteristic of being a now completely inaccurate mode of referral. Now there is more here than merely terminology. It is a minor illustration of that distance from the fact, that separation from or distortion of historical circumstance which I have suggested is a mark of stereotypical thought. And this style of thought is not limited to those whose level of education might be considered to bar them from examining just how far this or that image is or is not an accurate reflection of reality.

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On the contrary, it is found in varying degrees throughout any given group or population and affects the view of history of those who think of themselves as an integral part of the intellectual community. In the case of President Nasser why should this be so? Why is it that perhaps the leading weekly journal in Britain, the Economist, ran a cover before the crisis showing a grinning Nasser in close-up profile with the heading "So he's at it again," and following on with an analysis of the situation cast almost entirely in the same individualist terms? What account for the impeccably intellectual New Republic's editorial statement that "the Middle East has a disease, and Nasser is the virus?" We are faced with the curious phenomenon of leading journals on both sides of the Atlantic known for their sophistication, reacting in intensely emotional, personal terms to a crisis whose complexity is notorious and the roots of which are deeply embedded in the most difficult questions of right and justice. Why is it that they produce a kind of analysis more easily associated with Carlyle or Disraeli than with mid-twentieth century discussion? And this is not to mention a whole series of articles, comments, and programmes which appeared in the newspapers or on the radio and television emphasising the responsibility of Nasser for the tension and casting him, often in decidedly yellow press tones, as the evil genius of the piece. Suddenly it seemed that we were back in the realm where history is made by single individuals who alone determine the directions it shall take regardless of other political, economic and social forces. Before and throughout the June war the main theme was the power of this one man, an extraordinary dominance of "Nasser" that at times reached a pitch of intensity such as to remind one of the old fears of the Antichrist from the East. Whereas Russia, America, Britain and Israel performed this or that action, it was always "Nasser" who responded: "Nasser" threatened Israel, "Nasser" stood across the Straits of Tiran, "Nasser" blocked the Gulf of Aqaba, "Nasser" would destroy the Jews, "Nasser" would appeal to Russia and spurn the West. As day after day of this kind of liturgical repetition went by from even the usually most detached of sources one had the strong impression of a collective neurosis springing up. Private conversations similarly produced in those from who one might have expected a broader perspective an obsessive concentration on this one figure. Little was heard of the force and setting of Arab nationalism, of Palestinian sentiment, of the actions of the Israelis and the dynamics of internal Arab politics, or of

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great power policy: everything was subordinated to a crude and facile concern with the capacities of this demonic archetype. Comparisons with the dictators of the thirties, already explicitly made by Sir Anthony Eden in his memoirs and constantly conjured up elsewhere, returned in a cartoon in the conservative British Daily Mail of a hybrid animal with the Egyptian President's face and evocatively labelled "Nazite". I think it probably fair to say that, at least in England, no other foreign politican has incurred such odium in all quarters since the Hitler of the war period. But it seemed perfectly clear on any reasonable analysis of the problem that such a view was a gross misreading and perversion of the role of one who occupies a positive not to say from one perspective a somewhat conservative place in contemporary Arab history that on no level made comparisons with Nazism applicable. Yet over and above the genuine criticism that could be made of the President's actions within the total context of the complex Middle East situation there rose this shrill note of hysteria. The powerful, tyrannical, evil figure was "at it again". This was the main thematic structure of the stereotype. We have still to explain its genesis and emotional strength. When a collective representation of this extreme virulence and significance develops we must ask what functions it serves for those who subscribe to it. When those who commonly discuss conflicts in general situational terms and with due regard to a range of significant factors - the play of economic, political and ideological forces in Vietnam for example - dramatically adopt a simplistic, personalised approach to the Middle East in crisis then an arational element has surely entered the situation. There were particular causes operating in Britain. One man, Nasser, more than any other figure, incarnates the destruction of Empire and the humiliation that followed Suez in the realisation of the loss of world power. That one of the much despised Egyptians was associated with this defeat added to the angry resentment. No one reading the British press and political pronouncements during late 1956 will be in any doubt as to die obsessive quality of reactions to the U.A.R. President. With some courageous exceptions such as the then leader of the Labour party, Hugh Gaitskell, the stereotype ruled understanding. The sentiment thus generated and reinforced by that fiasco lingered on and resurfaced in 1967 in the feeling given expression by Sir Alec Douglas Home, among others, when he claimed in a letter to the Londen Times that we could now see the Suez attack to have been justified. The

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spectre of Communist menace, first stirred by the curiously notorious Czech arms deal, arose again in Russia's championing of the Arabs. More profound reasons, I suspect however, account for the dominance of the "Nasser" stereotype in so much Western thinking, and more profound functions are served by it. In a very important sense it shows how much the real crisis was in ourselves, and only triggered by events in the Middle East. What "Nasser" seemed above all to represent in June 1967 was a threat to the very existence of the State of Israel, the haven of the Jewish people. The crisis was discussed in those terms and he became the symbol of that awful possibility. At that point what was happened in us was quite as significant as what thought to be about to happen in the Middle East. For there was suddenly summoned before us the spectacle of our own past and our own hideous failure crystallished in the fate of European Jewry between 1933-45. The central trauma of our own twentieth century experience, all our feelings of collective responsibility and guilt, were abruptly and starkly recalled to consciousness. Once again we had to face the memory, and some anticipated the repetition, of that process which had put in question all our most basic premises, and had shown that at the very core and essence of scientific, rational, humanitarian Western civilisation there lay an equal and opposite polar capacity for an absolute evil for which no terms can be found. For every precious belief in progress, every assumption that we represented the topmost branch of the tree of social evolution, was negated by the concentration camps. We were shown that at the heart of Western being, chaos still threatened order. When, having paid derisory compensation and even clumsily assisted in the physical removal of the sources of our intense and inescapable feelings of guilt to a place where they might theoretically live in peace, having put them beyond the terrible possibility that what had happened once in the heart of Europe might happen there again at our hands, and having thus made the past bearable for ourselves, we had to confront that past once more, our reactions were predictably extreme. Our whole cultural personality was for a second time at risk, and the agent of the threat could be identified as "Nasser". The all-too-clear glass of historical events was darkened, made opaque by the obscuring image of a present stereotype. Before the memories of our capacities, perhaps only dormant, for the attempted destruction of a people, we retreated into myth.

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We sought refuge in this stereotype of evil because we had been forced to contemplate a replaying of the horror in which we had taken the active role. The neurotic vituperation and the concentration on this Nazite figure was for the sake of our own collective health. We, like others, cannot bear too much reality, we need a sanctuary. And that sanctuary was an image onto which we projected and externalised all that we most feared in ourselves and the guilt with which our actions had burdened us. Nasser became, to adapt Ambrose Bierce's terse definition of a ghost, the outward and visible form of an inward fear. He embodied outside us what we could not bear within in an attempt at a kind of mass abreaction process, a reliving of the trauma in another and curing form. Israel ensures for us the illusion of expiation and this illusion was so necessary that the chances of its destruction drew out all our emotional concern in one figure. With the dramatic annihilation of the threat the intensity of the myth abated, and one can trace a gradual return to a more reasoned discussion of the Middle East. It is still true that Nasser evokes strong reactions. The distinguished historian Professor Bernard Lewis has recently looked forward to a time when: " . . . perhaps men of good will may find it possible to be pro-Israel without being anti-Arab, and to be pro-Arab without endorsing the clowns and tyrants who have degraded and dishonoured a great and gifted people." (Encounter, February 1968) The lack of parallel balance in the sentence is illuminating, and the identity of the clowns and tyrants clear. Many share his view, though overall the fervour has subsided. But the stereotype functions most obviously and specifically in moments of vivid crisis and one may expect its re-emergence from concealment in due time. The Middle Eastern conflict therefore makes more demands, emotional and intellectual, than we are accustomed to meet. Images subtly distorted by the clouded mirrors of myth and the refractions of experience confuse the mind. Rhetoric substitutes for dialogue. Stereotypes multiply, their links to reality shifting and uncertain, their obstruction of communication constant. Yet the demand must be met. Unless the immediate and personal can be transcended by what Samuel Johnson called "the tyranny of reflection," unless a broader, truer historical consciousness is achieve all the "political solutions and accommodations" that can be devised will not halt the spiral of violence. There are those on all sides of the triangle who continue to resist stereotypical thinking and who face the problem in all its critical

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complexity. Even during the crisis they maintained their balance and discussed the issues without recourse to caricature and in an attempt to break through into an understanding of the central preoccupations of each other. But there is still a predominating Manichaean vision, a notion of absolute good and absolute evil that characterizes the main protagonists and in a less intense way ourselves. There is still at another level the problem of definition, which Stokely Carmichael has starkly put for the American situation: One man's riot is another man's rebellion. Interpretations of the same event are mutually exclusive. That this is so, I have suggested, is due to the fact that there is inherent in the tragedy a structural and almost insuperable obstacle to communication. And though communication per se guarantees nothing, its absence makes inevitable a continuance of the retreat from reality.

HERBERT MASON

14

Alternatives to Fear

In Lawrence Durrell's novel Mountolive, the third in his Alexandria Quartet sequence, the Copt Nessim whispers to his wife Justine his secret hopes and plans for a Coptic renascence through association with Zionist ambitions in Palestine: "If only the Jews can win their freedom, we can all be at ease. It is the only hope for u s . . . the dispossessed foreigners.' He uttered the words with a slight twist of bitterness." This passage came to my mind recently during a conversation with a Polish friend in New York. The subject of our conversation was the war in Vietnam with numerous references to colonialism, Communism, the European and the American middle class, the revival of fascism, recovering the lost, and so on. My friend is a man in his late fifties, an essayist who had had a promising career in government shattered first by the Nazis and second by the Communists. Perhaps at one time a relaxed family man, he is now a tense, essentially fearful solitary living in New York City, holding down a fairly insignificant job. His children, now in their late twenties and early thirties, are scattered throughout Europe, "adopted" by different families. His wife has been dead a long time, long before he came to America. His religious faith (Catholic) is the most important force in his life, and his experience in survival has given a desperate edge to its character, so that fear, understandably, is more prominent in his conversation than trust. In his "politics", as a naturalized American, he supports stringently our most conservative positions. For him, our involvement in Vietnam is "a great turning back of the wave of aggression against our Western values and way of life," and "everyone the world over", especially those who have known

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dispossession, "should see in the American turning back their only hope." His position is an extreme one, but it is an extremity reached by grief and loneliness and a fearful yearning to reverse what he had lost. It is also an extremity in which he contradicted his belief in the efficacy of spiritual means to achieve human goals, and in which he contradicted his faith itself. "The middle class may be spiritually dead but not yet materially . . . We still have that power to use!" His words were accompanied by a profound "twist of bitterness". Perhaps as a last resort the position of a military "turning back" is always a dangerous possibility for those whose fears have been translated into grief by experience and whose shattered hopes have not been put back together again by "religion". An Israeli friend of mine who visited me in Cambridge recently is equally devout in his faith but shows also that his fear has not been ended by "religion". He too has been dispossessed, forced into solitude; and though he has found a "home" in Israel, he has based his "politics" on positions of fear. Like a Brahmin Indian I knew who was studying Political Science at Harvard, the Israeli supported our involvement in Vietnam, even though he could argue persuasively that it was "perhaps morally untenable." He said that if America were to refuse such involvements, it would "spell trouble for Israel" (or in the Brahmin case, for India). He went on to say, "Americans do not like to get involved. The war in Vietnam is at least involvement." He also advocates a policy of greater militarization against "Israel's enemies". Both men belong to an international brotherhood of experienced grief that neither one wants to belong to and that will never bring fraternity or peace to them. They are men who, albeit in a minor way, support causes that are ongoing and that bring the kind of suffering to others that they themselves have experienced. There are only three ways to confront them in an effort to change their minds - virtually unchangeable because of their griefs. One way is the non-violent militancy of a Gandhi, a King or a César Chavez, each of whom represents a confrontation with persons or with groups whose attachments he challenges in the name of justice. A person challenged by a King feels his conscience partially stolen and he moves to recover what he feels he has lost. But a King or a Chavez views his own militancy introspectively first: as a purification of himself, as a rooting out of his own attachments. In a sense, a King is unreachable even by the worst brutality, so that his spiritual power is very great: he

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can make his opponent desperate to the point of despair. Non-violence is an awesome responsibility. The second way is that of violent revolution, the way of a Che Guevara, an Ahmad Ben Bella or several of the Arab Palestinian liberation leaders. Just as much introspection is required of these men if the revolution is not to be merely destructive. But in a peculiar way less responsibility is felt by this revolutionary for the opponent's person, for very often he sees only the more superficial side of the opponent. The third way is real only on a particular and personal level, that of friendship. If one is a friend, one is tied to another unless one wants to break the friendship and thereby to make the person more totally solitary and more frightened. This way has no political significance, and often what knowledge of human nature one derives from the experience of friendship has no relevance to decisions that have to be made in war rooms or at conference tables. But it is the only one of the three ways in which one can actually see the fears of another lessened. One can become involved in friendship; one can give to another person in such a way as to make him feel less lost. One can be hospitable; one can touch deeply with gestures. Unfortunately, despite one's deepest invocations to groups and nations to a peace rooted in such gestures, one's arena of usefulness is very small and meaningful only to an individual. But what a difference it can make to someone if one has made him feel simply human in a friendless world, a world that he has come to know terror in and in which he has come to distrust and contradict his own deeper sources of belief and hope, in part, for want of friendship at crucial moments in his life. One therefore has a calling, no matter how generalized the crisis becomes, to be nothing more than a friend to a person in agony, or, at the very least, to refuse to renounce another human being. And in this response introspection is as important as it is in the other two, and the possibility of hurting another is in this instance even greater because the involvement is of the deepest kind. What I have seen in a number of friends is a nationalism rooted in fear and playing upon injury. Nationalisms are very cruel in the way they use human suffering to gain their ends. Like "religion", they offer "hope", but, ultimately, they cannot touch a person as deeply as he needs to be touched; and one wonders if they can ever do more than make structures of his grief. In each generation there is a vigilance that is called for, not one that special senate committees or secret

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patriotic societies can understand. It is the vigilance in oneself against attachment to loss. One must renew oneself repeatedly away from one's sense of loss so that one can have the capacity for real friendship; otherwise one can reside only in a melancholy brotherhood in which suspicion is the only gesture one can ever make or have made to one. Humanity cries out for an end to his gestureless solitude, but his cries are only echoed by small voices he cannot hear. Palestine has been for many centuries the most historically natural object of such anguished cries. It was there that the idea of looking beyond death for one's attachments first took form, and there that hope in resurrection replaced acceptance of fate as the matrix of the religious consciousness. Many persons have dreamed of dying in Palestine, of making it the goal of one's most serious pilgrimage, after a life of inevitable contradictions and perhaps disappointments. For some, arrival comes paradoxically from not arriving. Tolstoi's pilgrim arrived spiritually, but not phiysically, when he stopped en route to help another human being in need. All people must ask themselves what is the nature of their attachment to this place. To the majority of Arab Palestinians today Palestine means simply home. They are the most recently dispossessed in need of human recognition. The majority of Jews have come there from elsewhere and regard it as something more: as a nation, as a religious fulfillment, as a final reversal of history and of historical injustice against them. To fix on comparative justice as the only question raised by this crisis, however, is to think in half-truths rather than in true absolutes. When justice becomes the only point of reference between human beings, one has lost one's sense of what another human being is and what one's own humanity is. That is the real agony of this crisis: the protagonistic loss of one's own sense of humanity through preoccupation with justice. Any utterance one makes in the name of peace therefore should be an appeal to that sense of humanity and not a call to God to support one justice against the other; and that call should first be made within oneself so that one can first recognize fully one's own humanness and can then make the gestures possible to others on a basis of what one knows and senses. Otherwise we are in a cycle of accepting fate once more, having renounced our hope in resurrection. What the young and the future call out for is an end, in this century of griefs, to those attachments that cannot bring back our dead. They cry out for almost forgotten human gestures.