Can There Be Lasting Peace In the Middle East?

...Even when the Middle East was studied, it was as the locale for the history of the Bible. The focus was on understanding the Bible more than on understanding the peoples of the Middle East.

...Many political decisions concerning Arabs consequently have been made in a vacuum of any real understanding of the culture and history of Arabs or of Islam, and that which is known is skewed, more often than not, by Eurocentric thinking, national self-interest, political opportunism, and superficial media analysis. Therefore, this section of the text will backtrack first to the period of Arab ascendancy during medieval times, then to the pre-Islamic era, and finally--noting the influences of preceding periods--it will focus on the current cultural and political situation of Arabs and of Islam in the Middle East.

In medieval times, the Arabs conquered most of the then civilized world in the name of Islam - a religion that today still claims no fewer than a billion adherents in some forty nations worldwide.

...The government of Lloyd George had adopted the Balfour Declaration because he believed it was morally correct to support the justice of the Jewish cause, but also, because Zionism was in Britain’s own interests.

...The clamor of many Arab leaders, who rejected Feisal’s diplomacy and opposed Zionism, caused British officials to back down. These officials were “Arabists” of the British War Office who had dreamed of a vast pro-British Arab federation, extending from South Africa to India. It was not the small Arab population in Palestine that interested them. “But Palestine itself, as the land bridge between Cairo on the one hand and Damascus and Baghdad on the other, was an indispensable link in their chain” (Netanyahu, 53).

When reports reached Lord Balfour, he cabled insistence that the Balfour Declaration be implemented. The response was contempt. The military governor of Jaffa, Lieutenant-Colonel J. E. Hubbard, not only funded the first Arab political organizations to undermine Zionism, but also condoned Arab rioting against the Jews. Anti-Semitism was rife in the administration.

...A few defended Zionism. They believed that it was in the interest of Britain to help the Jews build a solid Western base in the heart of the Middle East--which paradoxically would help stabilize the Arab domains around it:

No one argued this more forcefully than Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, the British chief of intelligence in the Middle East who had used brilliant deception techniques to help drive the Turks out of Palestine in 1917.

...In March 1920, Meinertzhagen discovered that Storrs, governor of Jerusalem, and Richard Waters-Taylor, his chief-of-staff, had met with Feisal to organize “anti-Jew riots to impress on the Administration the unpopularity of the Zionist policy” (Netanyahu, 57). Jewish police were taken off duty and security forces were nowhere to be found. The Arab mob beat, raped, and looted for three days. Six Jews were killed and 211 wounded. Vladimir Jabotinsky was arrested for forming a Jewish self-defense force. Rioters demanded incorporation of Palestine into Syria and an end to Jewish immigration. Meinertzhagen’s protest and subsequent testimony before the still-sympathetic Foreign Office so shocked London that it dismissed those responsible and dismantled their authority.

Meanwhile, the French, nursing no illusions about Arab “cooperation,” invaded Damascus, foiling British plans for Syria. Lord Herbert Samuel, well-meaning but weak, pardoned Husseini, and under pressure from Anti-Zionists in his administration, was duped into appointing Husseini Grand Mufti for life.

...As Hitler was chewing up Europe, just before World War II in 1939, Chamberlain, in a White Paper, announced an end to the Jewish National Homeland and, setting up a blockade, promised the Arabs that he would control immigration into Palestine within five years. His appeasement of the Arabs was repaid two years later by the Mufti, who relocated to Berlin, met with Hitler, and proposing a “fascist” Arab state for Palestine, agitated for the destruction of world Jewry.

In Palestine the British continued to turn back ships carrying Jews trying to flee Germany and certain death, while “illegal” Jewish immigration was aided by the Jewish underground. In 1942, the Nazi Conference at Wannsee decided on total genocide for Jews. When the death camps were liberated in 1945, and it was discovered that six million Jews had perished, Britain was still blockading Palestine. When secret archives were finally accessed, “...those archives revealed that the Allies had been receiving accurate and comprehensive information about what was going on in Birkenau, Chelmno, and Dachau in early 1944, a year and a half before the ovens were put out of commission by Germany’s collapse. Had the Allies acted on this information, untold numbers of Jews could have been saved. But they knew and did nothing” (Netanyahu, 359).

Finally, in 1947, Britain withdrew from Palestine and turned it over to the United Nations. The United Nations announced a partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Jews accepted partition, but Arabs rejected it outright. Israel declared independence and was invaded by Arabic armies from five countries. Although Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordanian forces occupied Judea, Samaria, and the Eastern half of Jerusalem --destroying all Jewish settlements--Israel won the war and its independence.

At long last the Jews had achieved political autonomy. The state of Israel has always been a democratic nation, the only one in the Middle East. Still today, anti-Semitism in its various guises throws blockades of numerous kinds between Israel and survival. While seldom even recognizing the staggering abuses of human rights in Arab nations, or their long history of despotism, the West constantly focuses on Israeli behavior as unbecoming for a democracy. What in the West, many fail to consider is that Israel is a democracy at war, and its behavior compares favorably with that of any democracy under the same circumstances.