A Durable Peace (20 page)

Because the explicit rallying point of Pan-Arabism is its desire to overcome borders, any government that is Pan-Arabist is
convinced that the entire Middle East, or at least a significant part of it, belongs to it—and it alone. This explains Nasser’s
1962 invasion of Yemen (which had been a crucial toehold on the Arabian Peninsula for the Pan-Arabists before it came to serve
the same function for the Communists), and Saddam’s wars to liberate the “Arab lands” in Iran and later in Kuwait. It likewise
explains Syria’s “friendship treaty” with Lebanon of May 1991, which effectively grants control of all of Lebanon to Syria.
The most famous Syrian attempt to overrun Jordan was that of September 1970. When Israel issued a warning to Syria that it
would intervene on Jordan’s behalf, it saved Jordan’s existence as an independent state.

Yet despite its passionate rejection of all current political divisions, the most obvious failing of Pan-Arab nationalism
has been its inability to overcome the very Western-defined borders that its adherents believe have shackled and shamed the
Arab nation. As though consciously acting out Lawrence’s prediction, Pan-Arab nationalism has never been able to offer a method
for determining the ruler of the proposed unified Arab state. There is no lack of claimants to the throne. The official national
map of Libya, for example, shows Qaddafi with outstretched arms embracing the entire Arab world. Pan-Arabists in Egypt, Syria,
and Iraq have each always sought to make the future Arab superpower
theirs
. Ironically, the divisions among the Pan-Arab nationalist governments of the various states have proven to be one of the greatest
obstacles to unification. Thus it is that the bile spilled between Assad of Syria and Saddam of Iraq has been among the most
bitter in the Arab world, for their fight was over which of these two potential centers
of the new empire—to which
both
were committed—will consume the other.

In the last two decades, full-blown Pan-Arabism in the style of Nasser has been somewhat on the wane and is being replaced
with the more limited aspirations of rulers to dominate first a single region of the Arab world, such as North Africa, the
Gulf, or the Fertile Crescent. Since no leader has emerged to succeed Nasser as the clear champion of the Arab masses, and
since the various contenders to the title have only managed to stalemate one another, enthusiasm for Pan-Arab nationalism
has been dampened. But should a leader again arise with enough power to dangle a promise of unity before the Arab world, Pan-Arab
nationalism would be instantly rekindled—as is evident from the heady response of Arabs across the Middle East in the first
days after Saddam’s conquest of Kuwait.

The thirst for Arab unity amid disunity remains unquenched. If Pan-Arab nationalism is not up to satisfying it, another force
awaits in the wings. For the weakening of Pan-Arabism in recent years has been countervailed (not accidentally, I believe)
by an almost universal resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism. Nothing could stir the caldron more. Sometimes working together
with Pan-Arabism (as in Libya) but more often at odds with it (as in Iran, Egypt, and Syria), Islamic fundamentalism is a
force somewhat more familiar in the West than Pan-Arabism, thanks to the attention-riveting activities of the Islamic revolution
in Iran, especially after its disciples held hostage the entire American embassy in Teheran. Perhaps because images of this
extraordinary event were broadcast directly into American living rooms every night for over a year, Westerners seem to be
more willing to understand that fundamentalist Islam is unreasonable, dangerous, and odious. Westerners take its claim that
it aims to consume Israel and the West seriously, whereas they dismissed the similar claims of Pan-Arab nationalists as “posturing”
or “saber rattling.” This difference also explains Western readiness to regard the Hamas (the Palestinian
Islamic fundamentalist movement) as a genuine menace to Israel and an obstacle to peace, whereas the Palestinian Authority,
which systematically violates its commitments, continues to be treated as a force for genteel moderation and is seldom if
ever even lightly reprimanded for excesses against human rights and peace.

The celebrated goal of Islamic fundamentalism is to secure the worldwide victory of Islam by defeating the non-Moslem infidels
through
jihad
, or holy war. But in practice the immediate targets of the contemporary jihad are not the non-Moslem governments, which are
usually too powerful to be attacked in the first instance, but Moslem ones. Fundamentalists thus seek the overthrow of all
“heretic” governments in some forty Moslem states and the elimination of these states altogether in favor of a unified Islamic
dominion. (The sequence of these two projected developments varies depending on whether it is a practical or a utopian fundamentalist
who is speaking.) Its immediate targets are therefore the secularizing rulers of the Arab states, including the soldiers controlling
the Pan-Arab nationalist regimes. These regimes have proven to be particularly hostile to Islamic fundamentalism, arresting,
torturing, and murdering Islamic activists in the tens of thousands. Ten years in Nasser’s jails drove the leading Islamic
theoretician, Sayyid Qutb, to reject Pan-Arab nationalism. Before his execution in 1966 he wrote:

[Jihad] is solely geared to protect the religion of Allah and his Law and to save the Realm of Islam and no other territory….
Any land that combats the faith, hampers Moslems from practicing their religion, or does not apply Islamic Law, becomes ipso
facto part of the Realm of War. It should be combated even if one’s own kith and kin, national group, capital and commerce
are to be found there.
²⁵

The same idea was expounded by ’Ab al-Salam Faraj, the ideologue of the Islamic group that murdered Anwar Sadat in 1981 (Faraj,
too, was executed):

There are some who say that the jihad effort should concentrate nowadays upon the liberation of Jerusalem. It is true that
the liberation of the Holy Land is a legal precept binding on every Moslem…. but let us emphasize that the fight against the
enemy nearest to you has precedence over the enemy farther away. All the more so since the former is not only corrupted but
a lackey of imperialism as well.… In all Moslem countries the enemy has the reins of power. The enemy is the present rulers.
It is hence a most imperative obligation to fight these rulers.
²⁶

Although the goal of Islamic fundamentalism to subjugate the entire world to Islam may appear to be rather distant, when the
call for it is joined with traditionalism and the promise of heaven, it makes for a combination of remarkable potency. The
startling appeals of the most radical Islamic fundamentalists for “greater democracy in the Arab world” indicate how confident
they are of being able to carry the great mass of the Arab population with them in an election. In some cases, they are clearly
correct. The Algerian military’s 1992 imposition of martial law preempted election results that would have granted Islamic
fundamentalists control of Algeria.

Here, too, ideology is the key to making sense of events. Iran’s war with Iraq, while defensive at first, was later prosecuted
as a war to liberate “the holy places,” which are located in Saudi Arabia and Israel, both occupied by the infidel. (Saudi
Arabia’s cruel, literal enforcement of Koranic punishments ought to qualify it as an Islamic fundamentalist state, but the
ruling Wahabi sect nevertheless is perceived as heretical in the eyes of many other Moslems who consider its practices to
be a rejection of received Islamic law.) This strain in Arab thought also explains Qaddafi’s incessant meddling in the black
countries of Africa, as well as his undying enmity toward America, which is regarded less as a Christian nemesis than as a
“Great Satan” (to use Khomeini’s phrase) that seeks to tempt the people of the world away from the path of God with promiscuity
and VCRs. The removal of this “cancerous” influence
from the Middle East was the purpose of overthrowing the pro-Western Shah, as well as countless acts of fundamentalist violence.
Fear of Islamic revolution caused the Saudi massacre of four hundred fundamentalist pilgrims in Mecca in 1987, and the Syrian
destruction of the rebellious city of Hama in 1982.

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

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

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

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

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