A Crisis is Born

...From Europe they had brought their own traditions of communal selfgovernment as embodied in a variety of Jewish charitable, educational and political institutions...

...Similar divisions, both religious and ethnic, exist in Syria and Lebanon...

...By presenting the colonial policies of these European powers in highly unflattering terms, the author may be trying to suggest that the involvement of the West in Middle Eastern affairs was the "original sin" that won for it the undying enmity of the Arab world...

...For the Arabs, it was all or nothing...

...Keay ends his narrative with the joint British-French-Israeli invasion of Suez in 1956 and its aftermath, only tacking on an Epilogue linking the story to the present...

...Second was the pledge to the Hashemite Sharif Hussein of Mecca, to set up an independent kingdom for his family if he led an Arab revolt against the Turks—a military operation guided by TE...

...But narrative history with no clear theme running through it cannot, even if it is as well written as this one, illuminate "the seeds of the conflict...

...First, there was the Sykes-Picot agreement dividing the region into British (Palestine and Iraq) and French (Syria and Lebanon) spheres of influence...

...Thus, for example— as we have come to learn, willy-nilly, in recent months—Iraq has a restive Shi'ite majority, a Sunni minority and, in the north, Kurdish separatists...

...To be sure, the internal conflicts and resistance to Westernization among the local Arabs resembled those of their cousins elsewhere in the Arab world...

...Keay leaves the reader without guidance in sorting out exactly how any of the events he describes "sowed the wind...

...The British, having promised Sharif Hussein a kingdom, placed his son Abdullah on the throne of "Transjordania," later to be called Jordan, the territory of Palestine east of the Jordan River...

...Exactly what constituted those populations and how their will might be determined, however, were not clear...

...The British issued the White Paper to keep the Arab world from going over to the Nazis (Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said, "If we offend one side, let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs...

...Readers should be warned that Keay has a limited understanding of Judaism (for instance, he calls Yom Kippur a Jewish "feast"), and particularly of the American Jewish community...

...access to oil, Keay shows, was more of an excuse for involvement in the Middle East than its cause...

...All that was needed to uncover the roots of the current Middle East conundrum, he felt, was a "narrative crammed with dramatic events and eloquent personae" that "would surely contain its own commentary...

...Again, though, because Keay sticks to narrative and excludes analysis, the reader cannot know if he intends to make this argument either...

...They were apparently motivated by considerations of national honor and prestige, since the tangible benefits were far from obvious...

...But those who have followed the course of Middle East diplomacy since the Oslo Accords and the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in 1993 will recognize the persistence of old patterns...

...Third, in a move whose strategic or political utility for Great Britain remains something of a mystery, Foreign Minister Arthur James Balfour issued his historic 1917 declaration that promised world Jewry a "homeland" in Palestine...

...There follows the familiar story of Allied diplomacy during World War I, which entangled the victorious nations in a web of four contradictory policies regarding the Arab lands of the Ottomans, who unwisely chose the German side in the War and consequently lost their empire...

...Still, Sowing the Wind provides a sprightly, if superficial, review of Middle Eastern history in the 20th century...

...A perusal of his bibliography reveals that the "lot of reading" is confined to books published in English (no archival or manuscript sources), hence the heavy concentration on British colonial history in the region...

...It was the Jewish community that was unique, and Keay describes it well: "The only people in the Middle East who were actually practicing grass roots democracy were Palestine's Zionists...

...Furthermore, he claims no expertise beyond "numerous visits to the Middle East...

...WHILE Whitehall and the Quai D'Orsay would each ultimately be disappointed in their Middle East holdings, and the Zionists would have to learn to accept less than their optimum demands for a Jewish homeland, it was in the Arab world that resentment festered...

...Meanwhile, tribes emerging out of the Arabian desert, led by Ibn Saud and motivated by the fanatical Wahabi brand of Islam, ousted the old Sharif Hussein from Mecca and established the absolute supremacy of Islamic law throughout the Arabian Peninsula...

...President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, if taken seriously, undermined all such arrangements by promising "self-determination" for the local populations...

...Keay portrays Arab political ineptitude and the pervasive impulse in Arab society to scapegoat others for its own shortcomings...

...But, wedded to descriptive history, he never actually says so, nor does he suggest any alternative to the League of Nations mandates the British and French maintained there, supposedly to prepare the region for selfgovernment...

...The British and French, each in their own way, sought to maintain control over their spheres of influence either by direct rule or through friendly local regimes...

...Add to the demographic divisions the Islamic tendency to identify with extended families or clans, rather than any larger political division, plus the absence of a tradition of self-government, and the outcome is virtually preordained: In country after country, whether Syria and Lebanon under French tutelage, or Iraq and Palestine/Jordan under the British, sectarian violence, petty dictators, and corrupt monarchies emerged...

...Almost forgotten, however—and Keay deserves credit forpointfng it out—is that the Arabs of Palestine even rejected the British White Paper promulgated in 1939, on the eve of World War II...

...Both Syria and Iraq would soon see so many revolutions, coups and countercoups, all accompanied by bloodshed and chaos, that even as accomplished a narrator as John Keay is just barely able to sort them out...

...Another son, Feisal, made himself King of Syria, and when deposed by the French he had the throne of the newly created nation of Iraq given to him by the British...

...Yasir Arafat's refusal, in 2000, to strike a deal for a Palestinian state on 97 per cent of the West Bank was merely one more replay of the consistent Arab insistence, recounted over and over in Sowing the Wind, that a Jewish state shall not be accepted in the Middle East...

...With disarming candor, he admits at the outset that he speaks neither Arabic nor Hebrew and is not Muslim or Jewish...

...earlier writings and broadcasts about the Arab world, and a lot of reading...

...It is this part of Sowing the Windf hat comes closest to providing a historical explanation for the current plight of the Muslim world, and dovetails well with the recent work of such scholars as Bernard Lewis...

...The book traces Western involvement in the Middle East, beginning with the initial oil discoveries there at the start of the 20th century that turned the Arab lands from a sleepy backwater of the Ottoman Empire to a prime focus of Great Power interest...

...The book is certainly full of drama and has a large cast of fascinating—and eccentric—personalities...

...The two notorious cases were the 193 7 Peel Commission recommendation to establish a Jewish ministate (today we would call it a Bantustan),andthe 1947UN partition decision...

...KEAY GOES ON to demonstrate how, at every opportunity for dividing Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, and thus satisfying the Balfour Declaration's promise of a Jewish homeland while at the same time giving local Arabs a self-governing structure of their own, the Jews accepted partition and the Arabs said no...

...Despite coming to the subject "cold and unconf ident," Keay tells us, "I tried to convince myself that an inquisitive eye and an open mind were sufficient unto themselves...

...Finally, U.S...

...But the Palestinian Arab leaders would not accept a provision that, in the representative government to be set up within 10 years, Arabs and Jews would "share authority in government in such a way that the essential interests of each are secured...

...The Ottoman Empire's Middle Eastern lands were organized as administrative provinces, not nationalities, so the boundaries the Allies drew to mark off their respective mandates, which later became borders between nations, were entirely artificial...

...In Palestine something different was happening...

...An egregious example of the latter: He writes that the American Jewish Committee adopted the demand for a Jewish state in 1943, when in fact it walked out, in protest, of the meeting of Jewish organizations that endorsed the Zionist demand...

...Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and best known leader of the Palestinian Muslims, was a Nazi collaborator, while King Abdullah of Jordan, the politically moderate client of the British, was assassinated soon after World War II...

...This set of inconsistent pledges made in wartime, when military triumph outweighs all other considerations, proved impossible to keep in peacetime and left all parties feeling betrayed and victimized...

...Associate Director of Research, American Jewish Committee John Keay, who has written wellregarded books on India and Southeast Asia, here turns his hand to the Middle East...

...Notorious among Zionists, it called for allowing 10,000 Jews annually into Palestine for five years, and after that gave the Arabs a veto over any Jewish immigration...

...Lawrence whose legendary career, Keay shows, was indeed more legend than fact...

...He notes that the British criticized the Zionists for acting like "a state within a state," but explains that "the would-be 'state within' enjoyed a popular legitimacy of which the mandated 'state without' had long since despaired...