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This article was downloaded by: [University of Connecticut]On: 08 October 2014, At: 10:53Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,London W1T 3JH, UK
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Past or Present Middle East?Ritchie Ovendale aa University of Wales , AberystwythPublished online: 01 Dec 2010.
To cite this article: Ritchie Ovendale (1998) Past or Present Middle East?, TheInternational History Review, 20:3, 618-632, DOI: 10.1080/07075332.1998.9640837
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Review Article:
Past or Present Middle East?
J. N. LOCKMAN. Scattered Tracks on the Lawrence Trail: Twelve Essays on T. E. Lawrence. Whitmore Lake, Mich.: Falcon Books, 1996. Pp. xxii, 208. $24.00 (us); ANITA ENGLE. The Nili Spies. London: Frank Cass, 1997; dist. Portland, Oreg.: ISBS. Pp. x, 244. $36.00 (us); YOAV GELBER. Jewish-Transjordanian Relations, 1921-48. London: Frank Cass, 1997; dist. Pordand, Oreg.: ISBS. Pp. 320. $37.50 (us); MICHAEL J. COHEN. Fighting World War Three from the Middle East: Allied Contingency Plans, 1945-1954. London: Frank Cass, 1997; dist. Portland, Oreg.: ISBS. Pp. xv, 349. $24.00 (us), paper; P. J. VATIKIOTIS. The Middle East: From the End of Empire to the End of the Cold War. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Pp. xi, 284. $65.00 (us); YEZID SXYIGK. Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. xliv, 953. £70.00; HAROLD M. CUBERT. ThePFLP's Changing Role in the Middle East. London: Frank Cass, 1997; dist. Pordand, Oreg.: ISBS. Pp. xiii, 235. $47.50 (us); MAJID KHADDURI and EDMUND GHAREEB. War in the Gulf, 1990-91: The Iraq-Kuwait Conflict and Its Implications. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. x, 299. $39-95 (CDN); KEMAL KIRISCI and GARETH M. WINROW.
The Kurdish Question and Turkey: An Example of a Trans-state Ethnic Conflict. London: Frank Cass, 1997; dist. Portland, Oreg.: ISBS. Pp. xvi, 237. $45.00 (us); ZEEV MAOZ, ed. Regional Security in the Middle East: Past, Present, and Future. London: Frank Cass, 1997; dist. Pordand, Oreg.: ISBS. Pp. 208. $42.50 (us); EFRAIM KARSH, ed. Between War and Peace: Dilemmas of Israeli Security. London: Frank Cass, 1996; dist. Portland, Oreg.: ISBS. Pp. 298. $37.50 (us); AHARON LEVRAN. Israeli Strategy after Desert Storm: Lessons of the Second Gulf War. London: Frank Cass, 1997; dist. Pordand, Oreg.: ISBS. Pp. ix, 169. $47.50 (us).
MUCH RECENT HISTORY of the Middle East has been written to explain the present predicament, correct historical wrongs, or to use so-called 'lessons'
from the past to prescribe policies for both local governments and the great powers. It is an engaged literature, mosdy written by scholars who come from die Middle East, which often tells one more about the audiors, die time at which they were writing, and die countries diey come from than about the events described.
The International History Review, XX. 3: September 1998, pp. 507-788. CN ISSN 0707-5332 © The International History Review. All International Rights Reserved.
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The modern Middle East emerged out of Britain's Eastern Campaign during the First World War. Thus, the partition of the Middle East among the great powers after the war was arranged less to suit the inhabitants than to ensure that disagreements should not stand in the way of the alliances necessary to fight another war against Germany or Russia. The most famous British figure to emerge from the partition was T. E. Lawrence, who persuaded the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, to repay the personal debts he owed to the men who had helped him during the march on Damascus by placing them on Middle Eastern dirones.1
A recent addition to the Lawrence industry is J. N. Lockman's re-examination of the Deraa incident in which Lawrence depicts himself as being flogged by a Turkish bey, but which some biographers have alleged that he organized himself as an expiation for feelings of guilt and fraud over betraying the Arabs by concealing his knowledge of the Sykes-Picot agreement; and others that it did not take place at all.2 Despite scrutinizing die evidence minutely, Lockman reaches no conclusion, which will disappoint readers of his devastating expose of the fabricated diary of Richard Meinertzhagen, in charge of General Edmund Allenby's intelligence section in Egypt, who had some sort of relationship with Lawrence and may have converted him to the Zionist cause.3
The recent reissue of Anita Engle's account of Aaron and Sarah Aaronsohn, Jewish setders in Palestine who spied for the British during die First World War, reopens the debate about whether the 'SA' mentioned in the poem at the beginning of Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom refers to Sarah. The work is a reminder not only of why Zionist and Israeli works - in the words of Peter Calvocoressi - 'ignored or belitded' (p. x) die Aaronsohn's activities, but also of why they are neglected in British histories of the First World War.
The book derives from an article Engle published in die New Statesman in 1956, which Calvocoressi persuaded her to expand. When Engle moved from Canada to Israel in 1949, she became curious about Sarah Aaronsohn, who had led a spy ring for the British against the Ottomans, had worked with Lawrence, and with whom he had fallen in love. Nobody knew much about her or her history, 'for die fog of secrecy which surrounds the Aaronsohn family is almost as impenetrable as that which obscures Lawrence of Arabia' (p. 16).
The Nili spies, five or six of them, of whom die Aaronsohns were two, feared
1 See R. Ovendale, The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Wars (2nd ed., London, 1992), pp. 43-63. 2J. Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography ofT. E. Lawrence (London, 1989), pp. 459-61, accepts the version of the Deraa incident given by Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (London, 1962) and explains Lawrence's knowledge of the Sykes-Picot agreement as the reason for his spreading the revolt into Syria, so as to provide an Arab occupation as a fait accompli (pp. 1035-6), and his subsequent feelings of guilt and fraud. L. James, The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (London, 1990), denied access to the official papers, insists that Lawrence made up the story of rape at Deraa. 3 J. N. Lockman, Meinertzhagen s Dairy Ruse: False Entries on T. E. Lawrence (Grand Rapids, 1995).
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that the Yishuv, die Jewish community in Palestine, would suffer genocide similar to the Armenians unless the British, acting from Egypt, could prevent it. But although they supplied the British with military intelligence, they misunderstood British priorities in the Middle East. After the landing in Gallipoli in 1915, they hoped that the British would concentrate on Palestine; instead, the British turned away to the Western Front. Only after die Ottomans' discovery of die spy ring, which precipitated Sarah's suicide, did the British advance into Palestine, the result of intelligence from Nili about die wells at Beersheba that led to its capture.
Aaronsohn was resented by the British at Cairo, who relied on Arab helpers as well as Jews, and by most other Jews, particularly Zionists in the Yishuv, who preferred to avoid involvement in great-power rivalries. This helps to explain die elimination of the Nili spies from Zionist historiography. Not only is Engle's book a vivid and moving account of the Aaronsohns, but it also offers important insights into die conversion to Zionism of die officials controlling Britain's Middle Eastern policy. William Ormsby-Gore and Sir Mark Sykes were enlightened while in Cairo by Aaron Aaronsohn's 'clear policy, and his deep love for die Jewish people in Palestine' (p. 124). Both men were later disillusioned with Zionism, but only after they had helped the movement to achieve important goals, in particular the establishment of die British mandate over Palestine.1
Engle reminds readers diat Lawrence, too, 'later became an avowed Zionist and worked closely with Aaron at die Paris Peace Conference' (p. 232). She demonstrates conclusively, however, that his 'conversion' had nothing to do with an alleged love for Sarah whom he probably never met - it probably owes more to his relationship with Meinertzhagen - and traces the origin of die myth diat he dedicated Seven Pillars to her to die fabrication of a sixteen-year-old girl in a California hotel a year after Lawrence's deadi. Despite the excellent work of Bruce Westrate,2
the details of the relationships between die few men and women who controlled British, Zionist, and Arab policy and who were vulnerable to persuasion, lobbying, and blackmail, remain obscure.
The setdement that followed die First World War vasdy increased the size of Britain's informal empire. For the next diirty years, British paramountcy in the Middle East rested on a relationship with the 'pashas', the leaders chosen by Lawrence, radier than die 'peasants' whom Ernest Bevin, as foreign secretary after the Second World War, favoured in dieory but not in practice.
The most important such relationship was with Abdullah, emir of Transjordan from 1921 to 1946, and thereafter king of Transjordan (Jordan in 1949), after his annexation of West Jerusalem and die West Bank during the first Arab-Israeli War of 1948-9. During the rise of Menachem Begin and the Likud in Israel (from die
1 B. Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917-29 (Oxford, 1979), p. 55. 2 B. Westrate, The Arab Bureau: British Policy in the Middle East, 1916-20 (University Park, Pa., 1992).
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June 1967 War until Begin's election as prime minister in May 1977), who claimed that Judaea and Samaria belonged to Eretz Israel, Jordan was claimed as part of Arab Palestine, and the history of the establishment of die British mandate over Transjordan and its separation from die mandate over Palestine was re-examined to justify an unfounded historical claim that the mandated area of Transjordan was envisaged as 'Arab Palestine'. When graffiti scrawled on walls all over London repeated the claim, in October 1982 the research department of die foreign office issued a note which showed that, from as early as mid-1915, Britain 'distinguished clearly between Palestine and Transjordan though the reasons for this changed somewhat in the light of circumstances'.1 Avi Shlaim asserts, nonetheless, that Britain 'became an accomplice in die Hashemite-Zionist collusion to frustrate the United Nations partition resolution of 29 November 1947 and to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state'.2
Although the apparent acceptance by Israel of the peace process has nullified die claim diat Jordan is the Palestinian state, in a study of the relationship between the Hashemite dynasty and die Jewish National Home going back to 1921, Yoav Gelber criticizes the authors of previous studies of Jewish-Transjordanian relations for their 'incomplete and casual examination of die Jewish sources, which are no less important than British records', and for focusing on 'the Jewish Agency's agreement widi Abdullah in the summer of 1946 and its outcomes'. He argues diat 'entente was the culmination of a process' begun in 1921 (p. 1). Owing to die emir's personal ambition, which brought him into conflict widi most of the Arab countries, he needed an outside patron. Britain, die obvious choice, was too shrewd to back Abdullah's 'excessive aspirations' (p. 4), which would have jeopardized its bargain with France over Syria and later its pre-eminent status in the Arab world. As a result, Abdullah turned to die Zionists, who saw Transjordan as dieir natural hinterland and hoped by an agreement with Abdullah to overcome Britain's reservations about Jewish expansion across die Jordan river. Mutual economic interests laid the basis in die early 1930s for a rapprochement diat developed into an alliance: 'Abdullah gradually emerged, in view of Palestine's non-conciliatory attitude, as die National Home's preferred neighbour and subsequendy, die favourite partner for partition' (p. 5). Zionist attempts to infiltrate Transjordan were accelerated in August 1931 widi die appointment of Chaim Arlosoroff as head of the Jewish Agency's political department, who both wanted 'to exploit die economic difficulties in Transjordan to make it accessible to Jewish colonization, and to promote political bonds widi die local leadership' (p. 37).
Owing to die impossibility of coming to terms with die Palestinian Arabs, die Zionists proposed a 'leasehold option' in Transjordan: payments to Abdullah in
1J. P. Bannerman, 'Palestine and Transjordan: 1914-23', note 23/1982 from the research dept. of the foreign office, Oct. 1982. 2 A. Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (Oxford, 1988), p. 1.
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return for the lease of land in the Jordan Valley in the hope that economic penetration would lead to political control. The British, wary, tried to discourage a rapprochement that provoked vehement opposition among the Arabs. Although the Zionist archives reveal that the Jewish Agency, as well as the British, paid a subsidy to Abdullah to help him to keep order in Transjordan during the Arab rebellion in Palestine in 1936, British records do not tell us whether the government of Palestine knew about the collusion between the other two. Later, in September 1937, when even the Zionists had reservations about the proposed partition of Palestine, Abdullah remained its only advocate.
Abdullah was as alarmed as die Zionists by the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden's, speech in 1941 in which he reiterated Britain's support for an Arab federation. After Abdullah's attempt in 1941 to take advantage of the Syrian crisis was thwarted by the intervention of the Arab League, he sided with the Zionists. Although he joined the Arab coalition that invaded Palestine in May 1948 to save the Palestinians from total destruction, he had an 'ulterior motive ... the annexation of Arab Palestine' (p. 287), and he kept to his agreement with the Jewish Agency: his troops did not cross the borders of the Zionist state as they had been defined by the United Nations' resolution of 29 November 1947. The book helps to explain why some Israelis, especially from the time of Begin's election in May 1977 until the initiation of the peace process with the meeting of the peace conference in Madrid between 30 October and 1 November 1990, considered the Jordan option (die argument that the modern state of Jordan in effect constituted Arab Palestine) as a means of solving the Palestinian question.1
Although the first Arab-Israeli War led to the creation of Israel, Uri Baier shows that not until the 1950s did Israel tilt towards an alliance with the West.2 The prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, suggested to die British commander-in-chief Middle East land forces, General Brian Robertson, in February 1951 that there should be the 'closest possible collaboration' between Israel and Britain. By this Ben-Gurion meant that 'in an emergency Israel should act "as i P she were part of the British Commonwealdi and should be regarded by Great Britain in exacdy die same way'.3 Aldiough die prime minister, Winston Churchill, supported the idea of Israel's joining the Commonwealth and Israel reiterated it at the rime of die Anglo-American invasion of Jordan and Lebanon in 1958, Britain knew that an alliance with Israel would jeopardize Britain's friendly relations with the Arab states.4 At the time when Britain retained die responsibility for die defence of die
1 See E. Karsh, 'The Collusion That Never Was', in Fabricating Israeli History: The 'New Historians' (London, 1997), pp. 69-107, for a critique of Shlaim's work. 2 U. Bauer, Between East and West: Israel's Foreign Policy Orientation, ^48-56 (Cambridge, 1990). 3 R. Ovendale, Britain, the United States, and the Transfer of Power in tht Middle East, 1945-62 (London, 1996), p. 41. 4 Ibid., pp. 98-103,118-20; 208-11; D. Little, 'A Puppet in Search of a Puppeteer? The United States, King Hussein, and Jordan, 1953-70', International History Review, xvii (1995), 512-44.
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Past or Present Middle East? 623
Middle East during the cold war and even in the event of war breaking out, and when defence of the Middle East was one of the three pillars of British defence policy, along with defence of the United Kingdom and the sea lanes, it tried to share the burden with the Dominions, particularly Australia and South Africa.1
Thus, Britain, for strategic reasons, felt that it could not alienate the Arab world by cultivating a close relationship with Israel. As Herbert Morrison, Bevin's successor as foreign secretary, told the Israelis in April 1951: the development of a relationship between Israel and Britain should be a gradual process 'taking account of the realities of the existing situation and our respective world interests'.2
In a study of Allied contingency planning for World War Three, Michael J. Cohen challenges John Kent's claim that the cold war became merely 'a useful means of justifying a British presence in the Middle East'.3 This view 'is to gainsay the very evident gravity with which post-war leaders, both civil and military, regarded the Soviet threat' (p. 85). In his account of Robertson's visit to Israel, Cohen claims that Ben-Gurion, in proposing that Israel should join the Commonwealth, 'aimed for nothing less than British recognition of a privileged position for Israel in the Middle East'; he was no longer prepared to play ' "second fiddle"' to the Arabs (p. 218). The British, however, remained paternalist: they 'never apparently comprehended that the states of the Middle East had priorities that could be legitimately different from tiiose of the Allies' (p. 327).
Cohen wishes his readers to learn from the book the lesson 'that, at any given moment in today's world, each and every nation with an army of any significant size is, and unfortunately must be engaged in contingency planning for a possible conflict with any number of potential enemies' (p. xv). For Cohen, history is written to show how 'lessons' from the past apply to the present and the future. So it is for P. J. Vatikiotis, who has published a second collection of essays4 in response 'to new trends, important events or sea changes in die Middle East, Mediterranean and European political scene' (p. vii), and as a personal attempt to understand the New World Order. His methodology, he tells us, has shifted from 'a formal quasi-social scientific and historical idiom in my earlier efforts to a more political philosophical - and personal - one, emphasizing the importance of a closer acquaintance with the persons and conditions associated with epochal events and meaningful changes' (p. vii).
The book opens with a collection of essays on Arab politics largely written at
1 See R. Ovendale, The English-Speaking Alliance: Britain, the United States, the Dominions, and the Cold War, 1945-51 (London, 1985), pp. 89-144; G. R. Berridge, South Africa, the Colonial Powers, and 'African Defence': The Rise and Fall of the White Entente (London, 1992), pp. 24-54. 2 Ovendale, Transfer of Power, p. 41. 3 See J. Kent, British Imperial Strategy and the Origins of the Cold War, 1944-9 (London, 1993) and 'The Egyptian Base and die Defence of the Middle East, 1945-54', in Emergencies and Disorder in the European Empires after 1945, ed. R. Holland (London, 1994), pp. 45-65. 4 For the first collection, see P. J. Vatikiotis, Arab and Regional Politics in the Middle East (London, 1984).
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the time of the events they analyse. Although one or two are useful - for example, one on the perceptions of the October War by the Egyptian and Arab press - most merely lead to the conclusion, in the aftermath of the Gulf War of 1990-1, that: 'One might say generally that the empire of Alexander and his successors hellenized the elites in the Middle East; the Roman Empire romanized them; but the modern European quasi-empire in this century merely confused the Middle East elites. Despite the Gulf Crisis and its consequences, there is a residue of continuity' (pp. 59-60). Vatikiotis opines that, as the real reason for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait 'seems to be the challenge of Western culture and civilization', the 'defeat' of Saddam Hussein has strengthened the appeal of this concept for Arabs and Muslims: 'Rather than a defeat for all the forces enumerated above, the crisis turned into a victory' (p. 61).
There is an essay on Jordan's regional role in die 1990s, and another on Syria as a new Middle Eastern power published in 1985. Almost half die book is devoted to ten essays on the relationship between state and society in Egypt and the self-definition by die Egyptians of dieir identity. Vatikiotis recalls in 1987 that 'in the period from i960 to 1962, not because of any esoteric knowledge or flash of extraordinary inspiration, I argued that the adoption of an Arab identity by Egyptians at that time was peculiarly artificial.' The Egyptians, after the June War of 1967, faced a crisis of identity seen in the difference of opinion that existed in Egypt between 'an "Arab" and an "Egyptian" faction' (p. 113). And in an essay first published in 1986, Vatikiotis considers the position of Egypt caught after 1967 between Arabism and Islam in the aftermath of what he claims to be a consensus among scholars 'that Arab nationalism as an ideological premise of politics and policy in die Arab countries was devalued' (p. 145). Lasdy, Egypt's problem is refined in an article from 1993 on the Islamic threat, which offers the useful reminder that in the 1940s 'the Muslim Brethren [Brotherhood], the largest religio-political mass movement by any reckoning in diis century, demanding the return of Islam to the centre of political life in Egypt, challenged, albeit unsuccessfully, die legitimacy of die then reigning monarch and his attempted palace-led popular autocracy, as well as the rule of the secular political parties under a European-style Constitution.' Only the measures taken by Gamal Abdel Nasser's military regime in the 1950s and mid-1960s undermined the Brotherhood's popularity. Vatikiotis points to its ofFspring dien challenging 'die legitimacy of die Mubarak regime which rules a formally secular Egyptian polity and a presumably Western-influenced society' (p. 181). The collection concludes with Vatikiotis's reflections on the peace process and to the desirability of developing 'national-secular over religious-sectarian jurisdiction' (p. 260).
Despite die extensive research in British and American archives which suggests the opposite,1 both general histories of Israel published in the last ten years, and
1 See M. J. Cohen, Palestine and the Great Powers, 1945-8 (Princeton, 1982); B. Hofinan, The Failure
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television programmes, underplay the role of Zionist terrorism in securing the British withdrawal from the Palestine mandate and the establishment of the State of Israel. Such accounts are designed to show that the Zionists used gradualist tactics - the constitutional tactics of working on key governments and pressure groups, advocated by Chaim Weizmann - as revisionists like Shlaim suggest, and by implication that the best way for the Palestinians to achieve their goal of a state is by employing similar tactics.1 Detailed studies published recendy of die leading Palestinian guerrilla (terrorist) organizations have revealed die extent to which die Palestinians have achieved dieir objectives by die alternative means of terrorism.
To coincide with the fiftiedi anniversary of the establishment of Israel, Yezid Sayigh has published the first scholarly study of the Palestinian national movement that grew out of what the Palestinians call the alnakbah, die Catastrophe - the loss of land and displacement of populations resulting from the first Arab-Israeli war. He argues that die armed struggle 'provided the political impulse and organizational dynamic in the evolution of Palestinian national identity and in the formation of parastatal institutions and a bureaucratic elite, the nucleus of government' (p. vii). Extensively researched in die Palestine Liberation Organization's archives - Yasser Arafat gave Sayigh unrestricted access to his military archive -die author has also interviewed many of die participants.
Sayigh shows tiiat, as political circumstances prevented the formation in the 1950s of any national Palestinian organization across existing state frontiers, young activists formed unions at work and social clubs. The League of Palestinian Students in Cairo provided the incipient national leadership which focused around Al Fatah, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, until the June 1967 (Six Day) War led in February 1969 to Al Fatah's formal assumption of leadership: ' "Arab sequestration" was over, in die view of Fateh particularly, as die defeat of the Arab armies "allowed the Palestinian people to grasp its cause in its own hands for the first time since 1948"' (p. 173). The revolutionary phase lasted until the October War of 1973; from dien until die war in Lebanon in 1982, diere existed 'The State in Exile'. The start of interim self-government in Gaza and Jericho in May 1994 finally marked 'the transformation of die PLO from a national movement in exile to a governmental apparatus on its own soil' and a fundamental shift in die nature and form of Palestinian politics (p. 663).
This marathon work offers not only intricate details of the Palestinian movements but also extensive coverage of the international setting in which they
of British Military Strategy within Palestine, 1939-47 (Ramat Gan, 1983); M. Jones, Failure in Palestine: British and United States Policy after the Second World War (London, 1986); R. Ovendale, Britain, the United States, and the End of the Palestine Mandate, 1942-8 (Woodbridge, 1989); D. A. Charters, The British Army and Jewish Insurgency in Palestine, 1945-7 (London, 1989); S. Zadka, Blood in Zion: How the Jewish Guerrillas Drove the British out of Palestine (London, 1995). 1 See R. Ovendale, 'Guides to the Current Middle East Predicament', Digest of Middle East Studies, vii (Spring 1998), 17-27.
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operated. Principally a study of the various bureaucracies in confronting the role played by terrorism in the emergence of the Palestinian National Movement, it is complemented by Harold M. Cubert's history of a Marxist faction within the Palestinian National Movement committed to armed struggle. Cubert explains the ideological and historical origins of both Palestinian and Arab nationalism in the Arab Nationalists' Movement (ANM), the predecessor of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and itself originating in a literary society affiliated with the American University of Beirut, whose members in the late 1940s included two Palestinian refugees, George Habash and Wadi Haddad. After the Arab defeat in the first Arab-Israeli war, the society 'expanded its horizons to include discussion of the "necessity for revolution, armed action and coups d'etaf' (pp. 42-3).
During the twenty-year transformation of the PFLP from a pan-Arabist organization into a Marxist one, various groups broke away, in particular the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). Cubert offers a lucid acount of the divisions between organizations such as the PFLP-GC which targeted Christian, Muslim, and secular Palestinians, and Hamas which aimed to set up an Islamic state on the territory controlled by Israel. After the 1967 war, Al Fatah and the secular trend represented by the PFLP turned about, replacing the assumption that Arab unity would lead to the recovery of Palestine with the assumption that the destruction of Israel and its replacement by a Palestinian state would itself promote Arab unity.
In comparing the PFLP with Al Fatah, the dominant faction within the PLO, Cubert concludes that whereas Al Fatah was willing to compromise with the Western powers after die end of the cold war, and so changed itself from an underground movement into an internationally recognized quasi-government, the PFLP, rigidly ideological, remained isolated in Damascus and increasingly fell under Syrian control.
As well as the background to the peace process, much recent writing on the Middle East deals with the aftermath of the Gulf War and the effect of the end of die cold war on the strategic position of Israel.1 The conflict between Iraq and Kuwait which culminated in the Gulf War of 1990-1 led to a spate of works inclined to characterize Saddam Hussein as a villainous dictator and the coalition that fought him as an heroic alliance. This literature has often had a hidden agenda: its implicit concern has been the continued existence of die State of Israel at die time of the ending of the cold war, and it has done little to explain why Saddam Hussein became a hero to so many ordinary Arabs and why the United Nations was prepared to enforce resolutions against Iraq but not against Israel.2
1 See R. Ovendale, 'Opponents, Outsiders, and the "Unique" Case of Israel', Digest of Middle East Studies, vi (Summer 1997), 46-50. 2 For a survey of this literature, see L. C. Brown, 'Shield and Storm in the Desert', International History Review, xvi (1994), 92-110 and R. Ovendale, The Longman Companion to the Middle East since
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Majid Khadduri and Edmund Ghareeb follow in die footsteps of Mohamed Heikal's challenge to the conventional Western view,1 and unlike many other scholars, they pay less attention to military strategy and more to the political and legal aspects of the dispute. In their detailed analysis of Iraq's historical claims to Kuwait, they follow the distinction made by Muslim scholars between sabab (reason) and 'Ma: 'The latter is defined as the immediate factor that precipitates an action; the former is the remote factor which creates or initiates an act before it becomes an enormous and more complicated issue' (p. 5). In their examination of 'ilia, Khadduri and Ghareeb offer three explanations of the Iraqi leadership's decision to invade Kuwait: first, the financial burden of the rearmament programme launched out of fear of another war with Iran and the difficulties of meeting the charges caused by Kuwait's opposition to fixed oil quotas, which brought down the price of crude oil; second, fears of a second attack by Israel on Iraqi military plants and of the success of Israel's lobbyists in Congress in influen-:ing the United States to restrain Iraq from becoming a threat to its neighbours (its programme for the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction could undermine Israel's qualitative military superiority over the Arab world); and third, disap-oointment that, despite US support during die war with Iran, the moment the war ;nded Washington was not ready to take Baghdad into its confidence.
Khadduri and Ghareeb explain that to Iraq and its supporters 'the Western sowers were prompted to enforce the UN sanctions by sheer self-interest' (pp. 253-4). It is t n e coincidence between the United Nations' primary aims -embodied in Resolution 660 of the Security Council, passed on 2 August 1990, :ondemning Iraq's invasion and stating that unless Iraq withdrew immediately and inconditionally, sanctions and military force would be used - and the national ielf-interests of the Western powers that has led to the depiction of the Gulf War jy both Western realists and idealists as a just war.2 Khadduri and Ghareeb offer a :onvincing corrective.
One of the side effects of die Gulf War was the revival of die Kurdish question, >wing to the exodus of refugees from northern Iraq, some into Turkey, others into ireas designated as 'safe havens' by the United Nations. The movement has had nternational ramifications as well as creating difficulties for Turkey, faced with slamism within its own borders at a time when it was seeking entry into the European Community. Kemal Kirijci and Garedi M. Winrow have written a pion-:ering history of the effects of the Kurdish question on Turkey,
The first sixty-five pages are mainly given to possible definitions of states, ninorities, and self-determination, of interest to political scientists and logical
914 (2nd ed., London, 1998), pp. 365-6. M. Heikal, Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War (London, 1992).
! SeeJ. Piscatori, 'Religion and Realpolitik: Islamic Responses to the Gulf War', in Islamic Funda-nentalisms and the Gulf Crisis, ed. J. Piscatori (Chicago, 1991), pp. 1-27; J. T. Johnson and G. Weigal, fust War and the Gulf War (Washington, 1991).
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positivists rather than to historians. These are followed by a history of the origins of the Kurdish question from the end of the nineteenth century, of the dissemination of the Kurds within the Ottoman Empire and Persia, and of the events following the signing of the armistice of Mudros in October 1918 that allowed the alhes to occupy areas within the Ottoman Empire and, by the treaty of Sevres of August 1920, provided local autonomy for specified Kurdish areas and the possibility of independence. The priorities of the great powers are illustrated by the fate of the Kurds who found themselves living in the French mandate of Syria, as a consequence of France being 'more concerned to protect its interests in Syria and prevent British ascendancy in the Middle East' (p. 74).
The Kurds were not united, despite the rise of Kurdish nationalism between 1923 and 1938, and by 1939, Turkey had gained sufficient control over the Kurdish peopled areas that, during the first contested election, held in 1950, there was little evidence of Kurdish nationalism: 'many Kurds by this time appeared to have been assimilated and the tribal leaders co-opted into the Turkish political system' (p. 105). An increase in the awareness of a Kurdish identity developed later in the 1950s and 1960s, followed in the late 1970s by the emergence of Kurdish leftists with Marxist-Leninist sympathies who evolved into the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party). The new constitution of 1982 effectively declared the demand for recognition of a Kurdish identity illegal in Turkey.
The Kurdish refugees who arrived in the aftermath of the Gulf War complicated Turkey's relations with Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Western governments became increasingly concerned about Turkey's human rights' record at a time of escalating clashes between the Turkish security forces and the PKK. During the 1991 crisis, the Turkish military were instructed to keep the Kurdish refugees out of Turkey at all costs, short of firing at them. As the military failed in this, a growing number of refugees poured into an area where the local population was sympathetic to their plight, at a time when Turkey faced international criticism for refusing to offer asylum. Although the Turkish president, Turgut Ozal, played a central role in suggesting the idea of a safe haven, with the emergence of a quasi-Kurdish state in northern Iraq, Turkish leaders began to fear that the establishment of a Kurdish state and the break-up of Iraq could precipitate major interstate rivalry in the region.
Since the publication of the book, Kurdish refugees have created problems for Italy and the European Community generally, and some commentators have felt that the Turkish government is prepared to use the Kurdish 'refugee' question as a tool either to force Turkish entry to the European Community, or to make the European states themselves face the consequences of their preaching.
Israel's similar concerns about its security in the aftermath of the Gulf War are the subject of a collection of essays edited by Zeev Maoz, of which six analyse challenges to the peace process that the authors claim have led to the collapse of former devices such as regional security, concession of territory, and arms control.
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Moaz himself, having explained the concept of regional security, attempts to establish patterns in Middle East regional security, collective security structures, and the dimensions of regional security. Much of his material is intended to illustrate the observation that 'the Arab-Israeli peace process creates a false impression that regional security in the Middle East may well be improving' (p. 23). Another essay employing similar methodologies deals with 'War and Peace as Rational Choice in the Middle East' and proffers mathematical formulas to estimate the probability of violent conflict (p. 92), as well as graphs illustrating die 'Decision-making situation involving choice between certain and uncertain responses'. Other topics include 'Great Powers and Regional Peacemaking: Patterns in the Middle East and Beyond', 'Confidence and Security Building Measures in the Middle East', as well as the Middle East peace process and regional security. This, clearly, is a prescriptive work. As die editor remarks in the introduction, die essays provide a 'glimpse into the risks and opportunities' 'and some real practical ideas' on how these risks can be minimized. It is a specialist work for a reader with an extensive background in the methodologies of social science, and reflects die editor's involvement in national security studies for the Israeli Defence Forces.
Similar problems are addressed from a different mediodological standpoint in a book of essays edited by Efraim Karsh, who claims diat Israeh historiography has been 'subjected to a sustained assault by a cohort of self-styled "new historians'" who single out Israeh security as a ' "central myth" to be debunked' - what they claim to be the distorted '"Zionist narrative" of Israeli history in general, and of die Arab-Israeli conflict in particular' - historians who 'portray Zionism as the "original sin" underlying the region's violent history'. For Karsh, 'this fashionable fad is totally misconceived'. He insists diat 'die Palestinian tragedy was not an inevitable outcome of the Zionist dream but primarily a self-inflicted disaster by their own extremist and short-sighted leadership which consistently rejected all compromise solutions'. Furthermore, Karsh states diat die Palestinians and Arabs '<&> bear responsibility for die extermination of Jews in Nazi Europe ... because their outright hostility to Jewish return to dieir ancestral homeland cowed the British audiorities into imposing severe restrictions in Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine, bodi prior to the Second World War ... and during its course, when the scope of the European Jewish tragedy was becoming increasingly evident' (pp. 1-2).
Scholarship in Israel during die 1980s and 1990s has increasingly reflected what has come to be known as 'historical revisionism': interpretations of the past are challenged, revised, and even debunked in an assault on die heroic view of Israel's past which can probably be traced back to die sceptical generation of die 1960s. They bred a generation of historians to challenge die existing Israeh interpretations of die first Arab-Israeli war as a struggle of the few against die many, and of peace-loving Zionists against an intransigent hostile Arab enemy, as well as die
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supposed myth that over half a million Arabs voluntarily fled from Palestine in 1948, rather than having been expelled from Israel by force. Much of the revision took place against the background of the October War of 1973, the 'disastrous' Israeli incursions into Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Palestinian uprising (the intifada).1 Karsh has specifically attacked Avi Shlaim, Benny Morris, and Ilan Pappe by alleging that the historical facts tell a very different story from theirs about the creation of Israel.2
These essays are more wide-ranging. The first group consider the 'challenge of peace', the choice Israel had to make over land for peace, whether a Palestinian state is politically possible, and the prospects for Israel's economic and military security. As Dov S. Zakheim explains, one crucial component is the 'immigration of nearly a million Jews to Israel since the doors of the Soviet Union first came ajar in the late-ig8os' (p. 27), immigrants who added vitality to the Zionist state, took jobs previously filled by Palestinians, and, according to the sephologists, were responsible for the election of Benjamin Netanyahu to manage the peace process.3
They ended the depopulation of Israel evident in the 1980s as many Israelis left to settle in the United States.
The immigration, which helped to reverse a demographic trend in which the Arabs within Israel's borders were predicted to outnumber the Jews within a decade or so, resembled the foundation of the state itself and its setdement in the 1950s by Jews largely from the Middle East: it was sponsored by Americans, this time with government money rather than private tax-free contributions. Interestingly, Efraim Inbar, in 'Israel's Security in a New International Environment', points to 'present (reasonable) Israeli fears about a gradual elimination of American economic assistance' (p. 39).
Although most scholars see the Jordanian option as having passed already, Hussein Sirriyeh, speculating whether a Palestinian state is politically possible, states that in preparation for 'the advent of an independent Palestinian entity the so-called Jordanian option will have to be, at some stage, ruled out' (pp. 52-3). Note Sirreyeh's use of the term 'entity' rather than 'state'; he later speculates that, after the end of the transitional period, 'it is possible to envisage die establishment of some form of Palestinian statehood, but with limited sovereignty and a degree of dependency on Israel and certain Arab states' (p. 57).
The essays on Israel's nuclear capacity, especially the ones by Karsh himself and Martin Navias, imply that it has benefited the Middle East. They endorse the conclusion of Avner Cohen that 'it is the perception of Israel as a fully-fledged
1 See R. Ovendale, 'Revisionism and Israeli History', Digest of Middle East Studies, v (Summer 1996), 20-5. 2 Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History; see also the reply by B. Morris, 'Review Essay: Refabricating 1948', Journal of Palestine Studies, xxvii (1998), 81-95. 3 See the pioneering study by C.Jones, Soviet Jewish Aliyah, ig8g-g2: Impact and Implications for Israel and the Middle East (London, 1996).
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nuclear power that has helped convince the Palestinians to moderate their maximum demands so as to open the door for a deal with Israel' (p. 87). They hesitate, however, to endorse the case made by Seymour Hersh: 'Whether or not Israel was actually on the verge of going nuclear during the initial stages of the 1973 War, when her army seemed to be on the verge of collapse, is difficult to say. That this is widely believed to have been the case, however, has further reinforced Israel's image as a nuclear power that would not be destroyed by military means, at least not without taking her enemies down with her.'1
Of particular interest are the essays that examine the relationship between water and peace. Hillel I. Shuvel again points to the significance of the Russian Jews: 'The Palestinians are concerned that Israel, due to development requirements resulting from the mass immigration of Jews from Russia and other countries, will use more and more water from the mountain aquifer depriving the Palestinians of their fair share' (p. 223). In many ways, the essays imply that, just as in the 1920s and 1930s the Arab-Israeli conflict hinged on numbers and land, the outcome of the peace process now hinges on water as well. One million Russian Jewish immigrants alter the balance between supply and demand.
Israel's security predicament is also examined by Aharon Levran in an analysis of three strategic features of the Gulf War of particular significance to Israel: the surface-to-surface missile (SSM) attacks on Israel; the technological prowess revealed by the war in the air; and the role of intelligence. In making recommendations about Israel's future strategy, he also considers why Saddam Hussein did not use chemical weapons and why Israel did not respond to the SSM attacks on its civilian population.
Levran claims that the United States prevented Israel from attacking Iraq's infrastructure: 'Before the war broke out Israel had been planning to eliminate, or at least neutralize, the Iraqi SSM threat by means of its offensive option -specifically by using its air force in conjunction with ground units' (p. 5). As air power and advanced military technology were decisive in securing the victory over Iraq, Israel must now focus simultaneously on the two options of offensive capability and active defence. The major lesson for Israel of the Gulf War is that 'if, under certain circumstances, an Arab ruler should wish to achieve a specific vital aim, even at the high price of starting a war, then Israel's deterrent will not necessarily function' (p. 94).
Levran draws three lessons: possession by Israel of sophisticated weapons could prevent a full-scale Arab-Israeli war; Israel should develop or acquire the powerful electronic warfare systems which have proved effective in disrupting the operations of an enemy; and Israel should retain the Golan Heights as a base for its missiles. The presence of Israeli forces on the heights has deterred Syria from risking a war that could endanger Damascus, only fifty kilometres away, and will
1 S. M. Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel, America, and the Bomb (London, 1991), p. 86.
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also deter it from launching SSM attacks on Israel, as die Israeli Defence Force would be able to bombard Damascus with artillery shells. He concludes: 'This highly important territory creates an optimal balance of forces, which, in turn, will deter war and missile launchings. Keeping the Golan Heights is therefore an important lesson from the Second Gulf War' (p. 153). Levran's readers might do well to read an earlier work on strategy by Yigal Allon, which draws similar lessons from die conduct of the June 1967 War.1
As most of these works reflect dieir audiors' insistence on applying lessons from die past to the present and die future and on treating die function of 'history' as helping officials to determine present and future policy, it is worth recalling Eden's decisions in 1956 during die Suez crisis. The origins of die crisis lie partly in die myths, current in the West in die 1950s, diat Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement had been misguided and diat history can repeat itself- diat historical analogy can be used to determine policy. Eden, as he recorded in his memoirs, viewed the events of the 1950s dirough die spectacles of die 1930s. His historical analogies were reinforced by the permanent under-secretary at the foreign office, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, who had been first secretary at Berlin between 1933 and 1938 and disliked the appeasement policy practised by his ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson. Thus, Nasser's nationalization of die Suez Canal was said not only to direaten Britain's economically vital supplies of oil from die Middle East, but led Eden and Kirkpatrick to compare him to Mussolini: he should be stopped before he went further.2 That material recendy released by the Eisenhower Library, togedier widi revelations about Harold Macmillan's role in die crisis, has led to die reassessment of Eden,3 but not of die demonstration he gave of die dangers inherent in allowing historical analogy to determine foreign policy.
Major Tippit tells Mr Kasim in Paul Scott's The Day of the Scorpion: 'I'm a historian really. The present does not interest me. The future even less. Only through art and the contemplation of the past can man live with man.' Many scholars who write about die modern Middle East ignore Tippit's precepts. Many of their works are prescriptive, reflecting dieir own preoccupations and diose of the countries in which diey live at the time diey are writing. They illuminate the present more than die past. It would be unfortunate if diey were used eidier to formulate government policy or to form die collective memory of a particular society.
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
1 Y. Allon, Masach shel Choi (Kibbutz Hameuchad, i960). 2 Kew, Public Record Office, Cabinet Records 128/30 pt. 2, fos. 525-8; Ovendale, Origins of the Arab-Israeli Wars, pp. 182-3; J. Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, 1939-53 (London, 1985), pp. 753-4. 3 See Ovendale, Transfer of Power, pp. 140-77.
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