New Illusions About Arabs

...Miss Utley's book, in short, is of so evanescent a nature, consisting as it does of a compendious roundup of various choleric though confused nuances of propaganda, that it is of interest chiefly as an illustration of the tortuous evolution of personal politics in our labyrinthine era...

...The Middle East is undoubtedly a maelstrom of cross-currents nowadays...

...Like so many whose minds have been changed so much, Miss Utley is actually suffering from an excess of bile...

...But the great problem, obviously, is: What does it mean to treat the Arabs right...

...Actually, almost everything said about Israel is based on atrocity stories told Miss Utley by extravagantly biased informants, who obviously include various representatives of the bitterly anti-Israel American Council for Judaism...

...All issues are discussed on the level of public statements, newspaper correspondents, random remarks, etc.—the usual paraphernalia of the superficial journalist...

...In addition—though I know it's bad form to mention such things— there is a curious, thin thread of plain, old-fashioned anti-Semitism running through the book, which because of Miss Utley's sophisticated background comes out in odd ways: The Jews have "forfeited" their claim to the Holy Land...

...the CP is not outlawed...

...This is coupled with a hypersenti-mentality which it is endearing to encounter coming from an old political hand...

...To anyone at all familiar with Middle Eastern affairs, it is a case of arresting simplicity, dinned into the ears of the American public for many years now by the propagandists, paid and unpaid, of the Arab League...

...What she has done, in fact, is best judged on just this emotional level alone: She has found a new hero in Nasser...

...but if she is, she must be muddled beyond words...

...A glance at the bibliography, which, though exceedingly skimpy for such a complex area, is overwhelmingly biased on the Arab "side," shows unmistakably that Miss Utley is making out a case...

...Nowadays everyone is against feudalism and Miss Utley is, too...

...The State of Israel—which covers 1/400 of Arabic-speaking territory and has 1.5 million people as against their 50 million...

...Put briefly, it is to the effect that, unless the United States "treats the Arabs right," they'll all turn Red...

...The fact is that this book is propaganda and nothing else...

...It is, for instance, not Nasser's fault that he couldn't institute a genuine land reform—but surely it would help to indicate why...

...Before the last war, Miss Utley acquired a considerable international reputation as one of the most talented British Communist propagandists, but underwent a violent revulsion and emerged as a characteristically dedicated anti-Communist...

...The astonishing thing is that for a woman who has spent so much of her life in politics she seems to lack the smallest interest in basic social change...

...Lichtheim is either Israeli or even Zionist, and since Lichtheim's article as quoted appears to parallel the august Economist, one can only regard Miss Utley's classical method of lumping all things together as evidence of the usual intellectual quirk that anyone remotely familiar with the atmospheric ramifications of anti-Semitism will have no trouble identifying...

...Her discussion of the Arab claims against the Allies in the First World War has much the same simple-mindedness of approach: Without the Arab entry into the First World War, "Turkey and her German allies might not have been defeated...

...Since she takes all pro-Nasser propaganda at face value, she assumes that Nasser's movement is somehow the embodiment of all the revolutionary ideals she has been frustrated in by everyone else...

...Miss Utley certainly sounds sincere...

...The Jews are equated with the Nazis by quoting Toynbee's celebrated passage...

...an analysis might help...

...They are all as independent as small states can be...

...Since neither Commentary nor Mr...

...Furthermore, Miss Utley generously assigns to the Communists all Israeli parties which have ever expressed sympathy for the Soviet Union—and, for that matter, the Socialist Mapai, which believe in a state-planned economy...

...they have just as many delegates at the United Nations as anyone else...

...She praises Chiang for "having bested Stalin" in 1927, because he saved the country for twenty years...

...But Miss Utley contents herself with a sort of smooth prose propped up on random quotations from statements, oral and written, by various "spokesmen" of this and that, all directed at the outermost periphery of the irrelevant or the polemical...

...The Jews are somehow Communist after all, since in Israel (just as in France and America, alas...

...Or for the mismanagement of the Nile...

...for her Arab informant, whoever he was, to have told her this with a straight face compels one's admiration...

...they have two-thirds of the oil reserves of the world, from which many of them derive fabulous incomes...

...Are the Americans, or the Jews for that matter, responsible for Saud's squandering hundreds of millions on family palaces and limousines...

...If this thesis were to be contemplated with the chilly eyes of a Real-politiker, quite independently of whatever moral issues might be involved, it would sound at least plausible...

...She simultaneously denounces the United States, France, Britain and others for not comprehending the Arab cause, just as she is irritated with the Arab leaders for not understanding, as she has come to understand, how evil the Soviet regime is...

...But should Miss Utley not recall from her past reading that, in this case at least, the enemy is surely at home...

...It is also, I should imagine, rather ineffective propaganda: Miss Utley tells us on occasion—and proves it—that she knows nothing at all about the area beyond what she has learned from some exiguous reading and a few weeks in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt...

...She did not, however, at once turn on all Communists indiscriminately, but for some time managed to find in the exotic Chinese many of the virtues she had been so disappointed to find lacking in the Russians...

...Her illusion, that is to say, faded only gradually, like the smile of the Cheshire cat, and by the time it had vanished altogether it had, alas, taken with it almost her entire political physiognomy...

...The unspoiled Holy Land view is charming, unlike coarse Jewish industrialism (vide Beirut...

...Even the most fanatical devotee of the Lawrence myth would never have thought of such a thing...

...Miss Utley has no comprehensive, penetrating, long-range schemes to suggest: no method for showering the area with gigantic capital investment programs aimed at making all the underdeveloped countries there passionately devoted to private enterprise...

...Of course, on the other hand, the Israelis have strong fascist leanings, too...

...An occasional slip on Miss Utley's part drives home the point: Both Commentary magazine and George Lichtheim, a British journalist whose articles have appeared in it, are referred to casually as Israelis...

...There is an abundance of remarks like "World War I was the great opportunity missed by the West to bring China and the Arab world into our orbit by enabling their peoples to progress under Western influence but free from Western domination...

...This notion of why nations go to war is bound to intrigue many: Coupled with Miss Utley's indignation at all the broken promises made by powers at war, it has a sort of elusive charm...

...In many ways, it would be more charitable to assume that she is being a conscientious propagandist...

...The book is warped at the outset by Miss Utley's far greater knowledge of China than of the Middle East (which, to be sure, says almost nothing) . The mere equating on any level whatsoever of the Chinese and the Arabs is a call for high blood pressure, and simply reminds one that Miss Utley is, after all, still steeped in the old atmosphere of the old quarrels, in whatever direction she may be groping at the moment...

...On any other level, it would be difficult to know what to make of her latest book...

...Actually, within the framework of this type of thinking—national promises, pledges, principles of democracy, sincere idealism, etc.—what is so bad about the situation of the Arab states today...

...For if there is anything at all remarkable about her present book it is its almost total absence of any genuine political interest—in the sense of analysis or, indeed, of understanding of any kind beyond that called for by the vigorous propaganda campaign that has been swirling around the Middle East for some time and in this country has reached a pitch of special intensity since the discovery of oil and the establishment of Israel...

...Unlike Judaism, Islam recognized Jesus as a Prophet...

...Miss Utley's book is a quasi-factual but essentially tendentious pamphlet, revolving around a lengthy excursion into what she considers the Chinese parallel to the situation of the Arabs today and a brief "background" to the Suez campaign...

...This simply leads her to accept the most superficial adulation of Nasser without ever attempting to see what his real problems are and how he is trying to solve them...

...They have, to be sure, a great many real social problems: disease, poverty, exploitation, illiteracy, etc...

...they cover an area the size of the United States...

...writer on the Middle East, "Foreign Affairs" If Spinoza is right, and we are not supposed to laugh or weep but simply to understand, Miss Freda Utley is still entitled to our attention...

...Miss Utley's writing, submerged in a view of the world whose dominant motif is that of betrayal, and expressed in a mixture of Rotarian cliches and sectarian bile, is a contribution not to political journalism but to political pathology...

...it reaches its denouement in a still lengthier consideration of the problems posed by the existence of Israel...

...What is—objectively—their problem...