LOVE AND HATE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Geyer, Georgie Anne
LOVE AND HATE IN THE MIDDLE EAST GEORGIE ANNE GEYER Despite the close political and military ties between the Soviet and Arab worlds, most Arab intellectuals abhor the lack of intellectual...
...The plight of American diplomats in the Middle East is noteworthy...
...You can't imagine how they were...
...It's a little like living in sin without the benefit of clergy," an...
...Few who have really studied the area were optimistic...
...Many of them seemed to me envious of press correspondents and in particular of our contacts with the Palestinians, because the situation had got to a point where almost no one would talk to them...
...As they grapple in their blindness, they comprehend even less of each other...
...Nasser has been sorely blamed for the "Nazi agents" he brought to Cairo after World War II—but Miles Copeland, the American intelligence agent who with the CIA's Ker-mit Roosevelt was perhaps the American closest to Nasser at that time, has told how it was the United States that pushed these German agents off on Nasser...
...This, John Foster Dulles, the big-stick man of the 1950s, which were the key years for our relations with the underdeveloped world, could not—would not —do...
...It is not just Israel now but Egyptian land that is being held...
...Had we given them this recognition it would have drained much of the psychic poison out of their relations with Israel and kept Russian hegemony away...
...This was followed by Dulles's announcement on July 20, 1956, that the United States would not lend Egypt the previously promised $200 million for the construction of the Aswan dam...
...Being an American diplomat there is one of the hardest jobs in the world...
...There is a feeling that the Western world has turned a blind eye to the massive injustice the Arabs feel was perpetrated in Palestine," said Walid Khalidi, professor of political science at the American University of Beirut...
...Since 1967, seven Arab countries broke relations with the United States, so the American diplomats in these countries are hidden in peculiar "American-interests sections" of other embassies...
...Before 1967, Israel was a bother, but it was something we could live with...
...Few seemed to be secure enough as men to be objective as diplomats...
...Love us just a little," they seemed to be saying...
...You are forcing us to choose between this ideology and that, and we don't want to do this...
...and finally the 1967 war, when U Thant removed the U.N...
...In the military schools, these Russians decided who passed and who did not...
...As I traveled through and lived in the Middle East, I came to realize, initially to my surprise, that, as one of the few remaining American diplomats put it, not only every cultured Egyptian but "almost every single leader of the Palestinian movement was trained in an American university...
...force that was acting as a buffer between Egypt and Israel, thus allowing Israel to strike first in response to Arab armies massing menacingly on her borders...
...A policeman led him out of the angry crowd, but not before he saw a cart going by with the bodies of five dead Egyptian soldiers from the fighting in Sinai...
...Sixth Fleet formerly reigned supreme, was backing up all the other military activity...
...This was followed by the Israeli-French-British invasion of Suez, the U.N...
...This is the "desert-bloom complex...
...Here, as in so many areas, we made the crucial error of believing everything would be all right if we only gave technical aid...
...We just want to be ourselves, and we can't be because of this...
...American diplomats who were in Cairo at the time of Nasser's rise recall that one of the acts that most infuriated him, after his debut as Third World leader at the Bandung Conference in 1956, was when American embassy personnel in Cairo referred to the Conference as the "Darktown Strutters' Ball...
...Pride dominates Arab culture...
...But to me one of the many great tragedies of the Middle East today is the way in which Arab intellectuals—all Western educated and oriented—have been spun • around ideologically to find themselves facing the Orient they have always fled from instead of the Occident they have always craved...
...It was not an obsessive diplomacy, like the American diplomacy in Vietnam—it was a cool, calculated diplomacy, backed by military might and real interests...
...that is why, so much of the time, so little of what goes on in this tinderbox makes any sense...
...One does not have to excuse the pathological hysteria of the Arab governments to see that many of the things we did to them were humanly intolerable...
...In the late Fifties, step by miserable step, relations fell painfully apart...
...It seems clear today that the United States could have helped keep the Arab world in the Western camp and at the same time made Israel much more secure than it is today...
...The Soviets set aside the fact that their own Communist Party members were imprisoned by the Nas-serites—they were looking at the bigger picture in the long run...
...And it had totally destroyed whatever Western influence was still left in the area that the West had not destroyed itself...
...On another level, the pious Moslem of the traditional faith is a withdrawn, inward-looking man, stern with himself and private in converse with his God...
...ceasefire, which resulted in increasing Arab terrorism against Israel...
...Much of this feeling was expressed in the words of a Syrian chauffeur in Damascus, who lamented, "There are ninety million of us and we have oil...
...Implicit in that complaint was the feeling that even ninety to one, with fountains of bubbling oil thrown in, the West did not think the Arabs were worth anything...
...You are telling us, 'You deserve nothing, you are nobody.' There [Israel] is technology and here [the Arab world] is nothing...
...Rather, he looked at Israel pragmatically, in terms of his own personal ends...
...Copeland says the Egyptians made little use of them and mistrusted them and paid them far less than other advisers...
...It was the sudden switch—made more poignant and bitter by the feeling among the Arabs that they had been deserted and rejected by a West they revered—that led to the frustration and the fanaticism...
...It is a war between the Arabs and the West —or, if you want to be metaphysical, between the Arabs and their own tormented vision of themselves...
...Copyright © 1972 by Georgie Anne Geyer For a biographical sketch of Georgie Anne Geyer, please turn to Office Memo on the inside front cover...
...It was a tit-for-tat progression worthy of five-year-olds but not of grown men...
...The United States created a foreign entity in my homeland after my people were forced out," fedayeen (Arab commando) leader Yasser Arafat said...
...Russian pilots had come close to clashing with Israeli pilots...
...We did not understand that what the poor, rising peoples want is recognition, and aid only when it is symbolic of that recognition of their general use and value in the world...
...Some of them grieve over the persecution of Russian intellectuals, just as they sorrow over the increasingly closed sound box their own searchings must be bound by...
...On a human level, yes, they are...
...As William Polk has written of the abundant Arab defeats: "The governments of the Arabs who created Islam, who conquered half the world, whose caliphate shone with the bright glow of civilization while Europe slept in the ignorance of the Dark Ages and whose vast corpus of literature and rich language were admired all over the world, were spotlighted as impotent, backward, corrupt bombasts...
...All of this leads directly to another Arab complex which is involved with this rationale...
...Deep inside themselves, there is an unconscious gut realization that everything good and modern and free in their lives came from the West, while from the East came the Mongols and superstition...
...Even gestures would help, if they were continuous...
...Moslem people are very religious...
...In the period of the mid-Fifties, relations between the United States and Egypt were fairly good...
...While I was in Cairo, for instance, an American tourist out for a walk was stopped by a group of poor Egyptians who began to shout and spit at him...
...loss of the Arab countries, to peevish men who thought it was just as well to be rid of them...
...While it was still the rule and not the exception that Americans were treated with friendliness and generosity in the Arab world, and particularly in Egypt, I could not but wonder how long this would last...
...But what about the Arab absurdities that turned the civilized world off the Arab world...
...But it is too easy to look at all the obvious examples of Russian-Arab incompatibility...
...In the Moslem world, incompatibility is no grounds for divorce, but barrenness is—and it is their relations with the West that the Arabs see as having been barren...
...the level of a great nation showing respect for a budding new nation and being willing, in its greatness and strength, to show a little patience...
...And he was certainly pro-American...
...And one of the hardest jobs for a journalist is finding an American diplomat...
...Imperialist" answers...
...The devastatingly quick Israeli victory in the 1967 war traumatized the Arabs, who only a week before had been ghoulishly eloquent with earth-shaking threats of destruction...
...History shows quite clearly that Nasser was not temperamentally anti-Jewish or anti-Israel...
...Where along the way did we, the Americans, do things wrong...
...LOVE AND HATE IN THE MIDDLE EAST GEORGIE ANNE GEYER Despite the close political and military ties between the Soviet and Arab worlds, most Arab intellectuals abhor the lack of intellectual freedom in Russia and find most Russians too heavy a people to really like...
...It's such an awful thing," the young man named Soleiman, music editor of Al Ahram, expressed to me one day...
...The United States gives us nothing, not even a gesture...
...They also felt that the 1967 war, after which most of the Arab states broke relations with the United States for its support of Israel, was the turning point...
...Now, no...
...From the mid-1950s to 1970, Russia invested $5 billion in economic and military aid in the area, $2.6 billion of which went to Egypt (compared to American grants of $795 million, loans of $583 million, and military equipment grants of $88 million to all Arab states since 1945...
...Few were men who understood that big, secure countries can and should do magnanimous things that little, insecure, tormented countries simply cannot do...
...Most important, was there at any point a chance of avoiding this outcome without selling out Israel to destruction...
...official in one Arab country says...
...we have a conflict of two epochs, of two dialectics, of two ways of looking at man...
...Of course the Russians were unhappy with their clients' lack of military prowess—they certainly did not want a repeat of 1967...
...The way the Egyptians were toward the West —they were absolutely crazy for it...
...Unless we understand all this, we miss the entire core of the reality of the conflict...
...I encountered few who looked fairly and non-emotionally at what our interests were in this vast area...
...What the Jews brought to Israel that was offensive to the Arabs was not their Jewishness...
...We are being pushed into something we don't want...
...They were agents who had cooperated with us and we needed a secure niche for them where they could fade away after the war...
...Dulles wanted to talk to the Arabs only about the "Communist menace"—when the Arabs' interests were in ridding themselves of colonialism and regaining some of their long-lost dignity...
...Some American Arabists like William Polk, the knowledgeable director of the Adlai Stevenson Institute in Chicago, fear that the growing trends would eventually lead to total and anti-American militarization of the Arab world and to societies which "will be politicized and revolutionized along the Algerian if not along the Vietnamese or Cuban models...
...it is too misleading to suppose these things are really important...
...Their pride has been destroyed, and the webs of their pride are as thin as those that spiders weave...
...He distrusts the Godlessness of the Communists and is temperamentally turned away by their arrogant assumptions that the world can and should be transformed in their image...
...it is too simplistic to look at the Russian club in Cairo with its sign over the door proclaiming "Russian-Arab Friendship" and to note that no Arab ever goes in...
...On July 26, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal...
...What struck me as saddest about all this was that none of it had to happen...
...The Soviet Union immediately recognized the state of Israel after its creation in 1948, but by 1956 it had set about singlemindedly to increase its hold on the Arab world...
...it was their Westernization and their ability to succeed, and it is this that affronts and infuriates and drives the Arabs...
...American who acts as the senior U.S...
...They had jet bases in Syria and Iraq as well, and their constantly expanding fleet in the Mediterranean, where the U.S...
...This generation was "Cubanized...
...By 1971, there were at least 10,000 Russians in Egypt alone...
...It's something more than we can bear...
...They are impatient with and infuriated by them as they are with most underdeveloped peoples...
...Let us look briefly at Russian expansion in the Arab world, if only to get some of the confusing facts straight...
...At times, I had to ask myself: Were we, in our well-justified horror at ourselves for the unspeakable fate of the Jews under Hitler, now promulgating out of our unquenchable guilt a second wrong which could cause still another conflagration...
...Here, as in most of the world, American diplomats tend to swing between two equally unacceptable ends of the pendulum—between those identifying too totally and too emotionally with the Arabs and those despising them too fully...
...You can compare Israel to the East India Company from which England was able to expand and dominate all of India...
...It is not Israel that the Arabs hate so much, and far less the Jews because they are "Jews," but the fact that the Arabs believe the West, acting on its own guilt, "imposed" Israel on them and then abandoned them in admiration for Israel...
...the Arabs were the most pro-Western of peoples, and Nasser was, until the late Fifties, the most pro-Western of leaders...
...It is not in tune with what we are...
...this impression was strengthened even more in the months to come...
...Over and over to me, Arab leaders pleaded that the United States simply "equalize" the situation somewhat—make some "gesture" toward them, as they feel the French and British have done recently...
...Others saw the young Arabs turning away from the West and toward the East because of "moral revulsion with Western policies...
...The utter moral indifference of the West on this issue acted as a great emotional incentive in accentuating the leftward radical trend...
...Why this consuming hatred for this tiny state of Israel in their midst...
...But how, I kept asking myself, did things get to this point...
...It was locked in a total, cold rejection of the West and all it stood for...
...I feel that if this is power, then I don't want power, I don't want to be strong...
...At base, it is a question of temperamental incompatibility—they simply do not get along...
...But since they have to be in these "funny lands" for some reason, they create their own little Russia, complete with Soviet PXs and their own blocks of buildings...
...The American diplomats encompass every type, from well-educated Arabists greatly bereaved over the U.S...
...The Arab intellectuals and leaders are Westernized and crave the Western good life...
...And so they're doubly bitter about American support of Israel...
...At heart, it was a question of how to deal with national humiliation...
...Sometimes it makes us crazy...
...The problem, rather, was on another level completely...
...The Arabs cannot bear to hear about how Israel "made the desert bloom," because it touches such deep chords of insecurity concerning Arab technological inferiority...
...Approximately 6,000 of these were military advisers who had penetrated all the way down to the battalion level...
...Why do you stand behind one million Jews...
...There were going to be many more carts...
...The Russians had indeed installed SAM-3 missiles along the Suez Canal and there were Russians—and only Russians—manning them, as well as flying certain planes...
...It is a point I came to only slowly, and then with surprise, as I traveled through the Arab world...
...When the United States turned down Egypt's requests for military aid, Nasser announced in September, 1955, that Czechoslovakia would supply the arms...
...Then to have the powerful turn against us...
...The politicians of this group had simple answers...
...The Russians had moved carefully and intelligently, losing only a handful of men, craftily expanding their influence in a gigantic area which controlled many of the waterways and much of the oil of the world...
...But on a political level they are not...
...At least the British now say that there is an 'Arab side' and this makes a great deal of difference...
...But if these traumatized attitudes dominated the thinking of the middle generation, I was soon to find that they clearly did not dominate the thinking of the younger ones...
...It soon struck me that the war "between the Arabs and the Israelis" is not a war between Arabs and Israelis at all...
...The Russians, in turn, find the Arabs dirty, unpredictable, neglectful of their children, dishonest, cowardly, and unable to work together...
...The idea that those who "made the desert bloom" somehow have a greater right to the land—that with advanced technology there accrues also a moral right—is abhorrent and absolutely unacceptable to them...
...After just a few weeks in the Middle East, I could say without the slightest doubt that the Russians and the Arabs come near to despising each other...
...Why the martial bombast...
...There are many answers, but they can all be distilled into one important point usually missed...
...We have not a collision of two peoples and certainly not two religions, or even—though this is closer—two rights...
...It is just impossible now to deal with the United States," Omar el Hadj Musa, minister of national guidance in the Sudan, told me...
...This is why everything in the Middle East is so oblique and apparently unfathomable...
Vol. 36 • April 1972 • No. 4
