The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (27 page)

While the foreign policy of the Turkish republic, sustained and consistent over a long period of time, rested on the consensus of the Turkish political class, the Western alignment of the shah was seen as a personal policy imposed on him by his Western puppet masters. Successive political changes, even upheavals, in Turkey left foreign policy much the same, but the revolution in Iran brought a total reversal.

In the early years of the Islamic republic, Islam, not Iran, was the avowed basis of identification and loyalty. The aim of foreign policy, as of all other state policies, was the renewal of Islam and the revival of Islamic power and greatness through the spread of the Islamic revolution and the restoration of the Islamic faith and law. The primary and ultimate enemy of this program was identified as America-the protector and manipulator of the shah and his cohorts and, more important, the new leader of the old enemy, the West.

The term used to denounce America-the great Satan-is revealing of how the American threat was perceived by the leaders of the Islamic revolution. In the Qur'an, as in other writings, Satan is the great adversary, the enemy of God and of humankind. But in the last chapter of the Qur'an, in the best-known and most frequently cited reference to Satan, the believer is urged to seek refuge in God from "the mischief of the insidious Whisperer, who whispers in people's hearts" (Qur'an 114: 4-5). It is the Tempter, not the Adversary, that Khomeini feared in America, the seduction and enticement of the American way of life rather than the hostility of American power. The danger of Western enticement, gharbzadegi, which has been variously translated as "Westosis" or "Westoxica- tion," has long been a favorite theme of Iranian writers.

The Iranian revolution, like others before it, has gone through the successive phases set out in paradigmatic form by the French. The monarchy was violently overthrown, but in Iran the monarch escaped death, by exile. Others were less fortunate, and the mullahs imposed a reign of terror that far exceeded that of their French predecessors. The ideologues and pragmatists fought out their classical battles, and the Iraqis, with royalist support, gave them their war of intervention and their victory at Valmy. Later, thanks in large measure to Western, especially American, help, the Iraqis were able to halt the at first triumphant Iranian counterattack and to wring a kind of victory from a long-drawn-out war of exhaustion. For the time being at least, the Islamic revolution was contained, and the revolutionaries, in both their domestic and their international activities, became less like Jacobins and more like Bolsheviks. The exultant and sometimes passionate response that the revolution aroused all over the Muslim world faded and gave way either to apathy or, after an interval, to a renewed search for radical solutions.

Inside Iran, a new generation of leaders, hardened by eight years of war with neighboring Iraq, began to think more of Iran and less of Islam and to devise external as well as internal policies more concerned with the survival and strengthening of the Iranian state and with what they perceived to be the national interests of the Iranian realm. To create an Iranian national foreign policy, the rulers of Iran had to overcome many difficulties: the resistance of small but powerful and entrenched groups still wedded to the idea of universal Islamic revolution and unwilling to see it confined to one country; the well-grounded suspicion of all their neighbors and of more distant states whose goodwill they needed; and the moral and material obstacles to establishing, or even attempting to establish, friendly relations with those whom they had for so long regarded and denounced as forces of evil incarnate.

In contrast to Turkey and Iran, the Arab states were all comparatively new to independence, and their political elites for a long time were dominated by the struggle to attain it. Then there were the problems of how to exercise it, a task involving a difficult readjustment of attitudes and ideas. It was not easy to turn from the vast and ill-defined aims of nationalist opposition to the limited and practical calculations of national government. It also was difficult to accept the idea that complaints against oppression and other evils should now be addressed to compatriots and coreligionists.

The foreign policies of the Arab states have been concerned with three things: their relations with Israel, with one another, and with the outside world. On the first point, for a long time they agreed that Israel should be destroyed, though not on how this should be accomplished. In time, this position was modified, and the Arab official demand was no longer for the immediate destruction of Israel, but for its reduction to the frontiers laid down in the 1947 partition proposals-according to some, a first step toward its ultimate disappearance. Since Israel clearly would not submit voluntarily to such a truncation and since the Arab states alone were unable to enforce it, this amounted in effect to a demand for an imposed settlement by the great powers-a kind of compulsory surgery on the conference table, in which perhaps Soviet arms would wield the knife while Western diplomacy administered the anaesthetic. This was never a very likely contingency and became even less so after the 1967 war, which left Israel in possession of the whole of mandatary Palestine west of the Jordan River as well as significant areas of Egyptian and Syrian territory. The formal Arab demand was now for Israel's withdrawal from the territories acquired in 1967that is, to the cease-fire lines agreed to in 1948 and 1949. As in the previous phase, it was by no means clear whether this was an initial or a final demand and whether compliance would be followed by Arab recognition of the state of Israel and by a normalization of relations.

For a number of years, recognition has indeed seemed very unlikely. At a summit conference that met in Khartoum on 1 September 1967, the Arab leaders announced that they had agreed there was to be "no recognition, no negotiation, no peace." This was the formal position of all Arab governments until 1978, when Egypt entered into negotiations with Israel that eventually led to a peace treaty. It remained the position of the rest of the Arab world until the beginning of the American-sponsored peace negotiations in 1991. An even more explicitly uncompromising attitude was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization, which, refusing to recognize the legitimacy of Israel, demanded the dismantling of the Jewish state and its replacement by an Arab Palestinian state. This was the unwavering PLO position until 1988 when its leader, Yasir `Arafat, in a speech in Geneva, for the first time talked of the possibility of coexistence between Jewish and Arab states in the former mandated territory.

The emergence of the Palestinians as an independent factor and the appearance of the Palestine Liberation Organization as a major player in both regional and international affairs are among the most important consequences of the 1967 war. Between 1948 and 1967, the Arab states, and particularly the three directly involved in Palestinian affairs, saw themselves as the upholders of the Palestinian cause and discouraged any attempt by the Palestinian leadership to represent their own cause. Of the three states, the least involved was Syria, which at the time of the armistice held only the little town of al-Hamma on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The most involved was Jordan, which held the West Bank territories and the eastern part of Jerusalem. The Gaza strip, small in area but with a swollen refugee population, was held by Egypt.

The Egyptians did not annex the Gaza strip, but administered it as part of Palestine and even experimented, briefly and unsuccessfully, with an "All-Palestine Government" based in Gaza. The Jordanian government pursued an entirely different policy. Abolishing the boundary established in 1922 by British administrative action, between Cis-Jordanian and Trans-Jordanian Palestine, Jordan formally annexed the West Bank and east Jerusalem. These became part of the Jordanian kingdom, the capital of which remained in Amman. The Jordanian nationality law of 4 February 1954 conferred Jordanian citizenship on all who held Palestinian citizenship before 15 May 1948 and had resided in the Jordanian kingdom between 20 December 1949 and 16 February 1954, "except Jews." It also offered Jordanian citizenship to any Arab Palestinian refugee and his descendants, wherever born, who requested this in writing and renounced any other citizenship that they might hold. This annexation was not recognized by other Arab states, whose leaders claimed that it was tantamount to a renunciation of Palestinian rights. Apart from those in Jordan, only those Palestinians who found refuge in Western countries were able to acquire citizenship by naturalization and, later, by birth. Inevitably, conflicts of interest among the Arab states impeded their conduct of the Arab cause, and even the PLO, founded in 1964, began its career as an instrument of these rivalries.

The war of 1967 changed the situation dramatically. The Gaza strip, the West Bank and east Jerusalem, and al-Hamma all were conquered by the Israelis, who were now in possession of all the territory of mandatary Palestine west of the Jordan River. The Arab states had failed signally to promote the Palestine cause by war and other state actions. The Palestinians, no longer under the rule of Arab states in Palestine or under their aegis in international fora, embarked on an independent line of action of their own. This consisted in part of a skilled, and for a while successful, diplomatic offensive, which by the late 1980s left the PLO in diplomatic relations with more countries than was the state of Israel, and in part of a campaign of armed violence that its defenders called resistance or guerrilla warfare and its critics called terrorism.

These activities achieved considerable propaganda and political success in the 1970s and early 1980s, but accomplished little or nothing on the ground in Palestine. The use of armed violence against places, installations, and individuals with no connection with Israel, and the resulting loss of life, tarnished even the previous propaganda successes. When in 1982 the Israelis invaded Lebanon, for the declared purpose of evicting the PLO from the bases that it had established in that country, there was remarkably little opposition or protest in the international community, or even in the Arab states. The PLO was further weakened by the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union and by the defeat of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, for whom its leaders had incautiously declared their support. In the inter-Arab struggle that preceded, accompanied, and followed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the PLO became identified with one side and therefore lost much of the support and goodwill that it had previously enjoyed with the other. It remained to be seen whether it could still play a useful role in the peace negotiations that became possible in the new configuration of forces in the Middle East and in the world.

The emergence of Israel in 1948-or rather, the failure of the Arab armies to prevent it-was a climactic event in the history of the Middle East, comparable in many ways with the landing of the Greeks in Izmir in 1919. It was bad enough to be dominated by the Franks, but they were after all the invincible masters of the world, who-on both occasions-had just defeated their enemies in a great war. It was a very different matter, and an intolerable humiliation, to submit to the Greeks or Jews, to local dhimmis whom the Muslims had long been accustomed to despise as inferiors. The Franks, moreover, would, sooner or later, go back whence they came. But the Greek Great Idea-megale idea-of a revived Byzantine empire and the Zionist idea of a revived Jewish state were clearly intended to be permanent. The same sense of outrage colored the Kemalist reaction against the Greeks and the Arab reaction against Israel. Some of the difference in the subsequent development of Turkey and the Arab states may be ascribed to the fact that the Turks won their war, whereas the Arabs lost theirs.

Within a few years, all the rulers who had sent their armies to defeat in Palestine had fallen, several of them by assassination. In March 1949, the Syrian chief of staff, Colonel Husni Za im, overthrew the Syrian government by a coup d'etat and established a military regime with himself as president. It was the first of a series of military revolutions and convulsions, which, in many countries and with increasing violence, swept away the regimes of the kings, the pashas, and the conservative landowners and unleashed new forces.

In 1945, when the war ended, Great Britain seemed firmly established as the dominant power in the Middle East, with overwhelming military force and political influence. The Arab League, so it seemed, was its instrument for the political integration of the region, and the Middle East Supply Centre was its economic counterpart. Germany and Italy had been eliminated by defeat; France had been in effect evicted; America was not yet willing, Russia was not yet able, to play a role. Even the nationalist leaders were for the moment silent, anxiously aware of the might of the victors and, for many, of their own suspect associations with the vanquished. It was not a moment to press demands.

Within ten years of the end of the war, the imposing structure of British power in the Middle East had been undermined, weakened, and destroyed; the British positions of strength, under attack from every side, were one by one abandoned or lost. The Middle East ceased to be an area of British predominance, and it also ceased to be an area of predominantly Western influence.

A number of causes contributed to this contraction and withdrawal of British power. One of the first was the transfer of power in India in 1947. It was as the paramount power in India that Britain first became actively involved in the affairs of the Middle East. The ending of that paramountcy greatly reduced both the need and the means for British action in the area. Another cause was the failure to solve the Palestine problem and the abdication of the Palestine mandate, a confession of weakness and irresolution that could not fail to stimulate and encourage further demands and attacks from every side. Some observers would add the inability of the makers of policy to recognize, understand, and allow for the new forces that were rising in the Arab world and elsewhere and that would sweep away the supports of British influence and power.