Israel and the Arabs

Backdrop to Tragedy: The Struggle for Palestine.
by William R. Polk, David M. Stamler, and Edmund Asfour.
Beacon. 399 pp. $4.95.

Israel and the Middle East.
by Harry B. Ellis.
Ronald. 260 pp. $4.00.

Multitudes in the Valley: Church and Crisis in the Middle East.
by Denis Baly.
Seabury. 307 pp. $5.00.

A Short History of the Middle East: From the Rise of Islam to Modern Times.
by George E. Kirk.
4th edition. 308 pp. $5.00.

Three of the four books under review focus on the Arab-Israel dispute. All three rest on a premise which no thoughtful person would contest: the frictions and barriers that divide Israel from its Arab neighbors antedate the expiry in mid-May 1948 of the British Mandate for Palestine. All three, moreover, contend—explicitly or implicitly—that the Arab-Israel dispute, or what some still call the Palestine problem, is the prime unsettling force in the Middle East. They go on to suggest—actually or virtually—that if this dispute, however defined, were once resolved—or, as it is phrased in one of the volumes, if we only learn “how to live with and control the situation as we now see it”—everything Middle Eastern will begin to fall into place and the Middle East story will move assuredly to a happy ending.

Aside from this oversimplification, or overemphasis of a problem which, though certainly torturing enough, is not the only one that racks the Middle East or even the truly central one, the three works share little else in common. Each uses different methods and appeals to different audiences. Israel and the Middle East is slanted toward journalism and Multitudes in the Valley toward theology, while Backdrop to Tragedy might be classed as academic popularization. To start with Mr. Baly, Multitudes in the Valley, to the non-Christian layman at least, presents many obstacles. It is basically a sermon on the Arab-Israel problem in international politics. It summons devout Christians to reflect on their religious obligations to take a constructive lead in helping Arabs and Israelis to accommodate their differences. Yet within such an unlikely context, Denis Baly contrives to develop in simple language a vigorous, and often persuasive, plea. He begs not for patience and understanding alone but for viewing the Arab-Israel contest as a whole and evaluating on its own merits each of the many issues entailed.

Baly manifests an intimacy with the subject gained from two decades of experience as a British missionary in Israel and Jordan and their mandated antecedents. Nowhere, it is true, does he subject the USSR and its involvement to detailed scrutiny. But otherwise he shows a sympathetic appreciation of the attitudes of the major contestants, yet does not flinch from exploring with refreshing frankness topics that might embarrass sensitive Arabs and Israelis, Britons and Frenchmen, and even Americans. The book comes as close as a theological tract can to a realistic appraisal of the emotional and psychological forces that hold sway in and over the Arab-Israel zone. To deaden the pain that his criticism might induce in thin-skinned partisans, the author tends to tell them what they would like to hear while simultaneously pricking their pride. The technique is well illustrated in his assertion that Israel “is a country with a generous heart, and a pulsating life, but very little soul.” He rejects the Arab claim that the Palestine Jews alone created the Arab refugee problem. But after insisting that the British and the Arabs themselves must share the blame, he measures the extent of Israel’s responsibility. Although Baly is himself an advocate of non-intervention, he nevertheless finds that all three Western allies acted selfishly at the time of the Sinai-Suez crisis of 1956, the United States no less in refusing to commit force than Britain and France in committing it.

The bi-millennial persecution of the Jews, which combined with their “continuing consciousness of the promises of God” tended through the ages to make them visionaries, argues Baly, has in the mid-20th century transformed Israeli politicians into practitioners of the impossible in contrast to the prevailing devotion in Western politics to “the science of the possible.” Israel’s “most virulent critics” are warned not to forget that the new state has “achieved so much, which the rest of the world often declared visionary.” The Israelis themselves, however, are also cautioned not to fall victim of their own propaganda, particularly as it relates to the absorptive capacity of their modest tract of real estate.

In the light of the Iraqi coup d’état of July 1958, the author’s admonition written more than a year earlier takes on new meaning. “Changes in the political structure [of Arab lands] are bound to take place,” he observed, “and we cannot lay it down that they shall not take the revolutionary pattern set by Egypt. We must therefore not try to maintain in power an existing government because we are afraid of what would take its place, or overthrow a government because we do not like it. We must recognize now that new Middle Eastern dictators will almost certainly arise (Iraq seems a likely place as soon as Nuri es-Sa’id is gone) and there will be much that is politically abhorrent to us.” So far so good. But when he goes on to advise that “We shall have every temptation to intervene, but on no account must we do so. We may, however, quite legitimately give warning that we shall oppose any form of outside interference” he does not explain how we might effectively “oppose . . . outside interference” by means other than intervention. Indeed, one of the obvious weaknesses of the Baly thesis is the implied advocacy of a passive policy for the West. Yet, characteristically, he admits that “paralysis or . . . pietism . . . would be a great mistake.” Baly’s analysis of the religious background of Muslim thinking is surprisingly anemic for a student of comparative religion. His weakness is William R. Polk’s strength, for it is Polk who contributed to Backdrop to Tragedy the section on the Arabs and Palestine and the data on Islam and the Islamic interest. Polk generally demonstrates an easy familiarity with Islamic institutions, Arab history, and Arabic literature, in which he steeped himself in four years of apprenticeship—financed by the Rockefeller Foundation—at Baghdad and Oxford. Nor does he disappoint the expectation of fresh insights into the working of the Arab mind, the behavior of the individual in Arab society, and the intensity of Arab feeling against Zionism and against the British Mandate.

Yet Polk seems more at home in history than in contemporary politics. No clear picture is drawn of the mechanics of such movements as Palestine Arab nationalism, or the rising interest in Palestine among the nearby Arab states, or the growth of Arab unity nationalism. This emerges most clearly from his treatment of the causes of the Arab refugee problem. One of the most revealing phenomena of mid-May 1948 was the absence from Palestine at the time of every member of the Arab Higher Committee (the officially recognized directorate of the community’s political affairs), and in fact of almost all Arabs entertaining pretensions to community leadership. No one who studies the Arab refugee question impartially will try to minimize the fear that the slaughter of the Arabs residing at Dayr Yasin spread through Palestine Arab ranks in the final weeks of the Mandate. But surely the lack among the Palestine Arabs of political leadership, the consequent dearth of political plans, and the miscarriage of their military plans—no less than the swift dismantling by the Mandatory power of the central governmental machinery—had already given rise in the Arab community to conditions of chaos which Dayr Yasin merely compounded. But none of these factors other than Dayr Yasin is even mentioned.

In writing Backdrop to Tragedy Polk was joined by David M. Stamler, an English-born student of modern Hebrew literature and of Zionism, and Edmund Asfour, a Palestine-born economist specializing on the Middle East. The central idea of uniting the efforts of an American, a Zionist, and an Arab nationalist to reexamine the Palestine problem in depth was unique and daring. But the book fails to live up to its promise. The difficulty springs from faulty conception of procedure and purpose. Scrambled authorship throughout might have yielded unity and coherence. This is amply attested by the use of the method in the long opening section on the historical background and the short statement of conclusions. Instead, the individually written sections that form the bulk of the book, by repeating the subject matter, impede the flow of analysis and, at times, blur the issues. Furthermore, if it is germane to evaluate the role of the European powers in the historical background as the authors have done, it is no less so for the period after 1948. For who will deny that the issues raised by the unabating Arab-Israel tension have become entangled irretrievably with issues that plague the relations among the major powers? Yet this phase of the Arab-Israel quarrel is nowhere systematically probed. There is, finally, gross unevenness in the quality of authorship. Stamler’s handling of Zionism, the emergence of Israel, and the state’s travail in its first decade rarely rises above the pedestrian, while his discussion of politics falls well below. Yet he is, like Polk, dispassionate. This is more than may be said of Asfour, who dwells on the economic framework of the Palestine problem as seen by an Arab, which means that he employs his knowledge of economics primarily in the pursuit of refuting Zionist and Israel claims.

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In a class quite different from either of the two preceding works is Israel and the Middle East. The roving Middle East correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor for three years in the early 1950’s and now its assistant overseas news editor, Harry B. Ellis, distilled his experiences in a book on the Arabs. Ellis returned to the area in 1956, this time concentrating on Israel. His latest volume would appear designed to redress the balance. It is not a question of emotional balance, I must hasten to add, for Ellis as a professional observer of high competence tends to see unfolding events in the larger perspective without commitment to any cause but that of honest and fearless journalism. His present book on Israel in its regional setting, as one might anticipate, is honest and fearless—as far as it goes. But it does not go very far. The major reason is simple enough. The book is not wholly a product of journalism. Indeed half the space is taken up with history, with information culled from reading that the author did to supplement what he saw. But he seems to have done his homework rather hastily and to have chosen his sources poorly. For supporting evidence on the rise and fall of the Palestine Mandate, for example, he leans almost wholly on an apologetic British Information Services pamphlet issued at the time the United Kingdom was laying down its authority. I fail to see what this kind of superficial research can offer even to the newspaper reader who has followed only the shooting and the shouting along the inflamed Arab-Israel frontier in the past decade. Ellis might have been better advised to use all his space for recording and assessing his direct observations.

The last book, George E. Kirk’s A Short History of the Middle East, may be swiftly dismissed, for this is a reprinting of the fourth edition (1955) with a few paragraphs added to cover the 1956 Suez crisis. Of particular interest in the present context is the fact that more than half the volume is devoted to the Middle East after 1918, and more than a third of this space is given to the Palestine dispute. Kirk uses the space more to controvert Zionist arguments than to analyze the dispute itself, paying almost no attention to the internal affairs of the Palestine Arabs whose cause he largely endorsed. Because the author was bound in his task of revision by the structure and contents of the book when it first appeared in 1948, it no longer meets the needs of the situation. Now that Britain has been toppled in the Middle East from its political and military eminence, not only have revolutionary nationalist forces been unleashed in the Arab East with a vengeance, but the Soviet Union and the United States have been brought into direct rivalry. Instead of grappling with these new—and, for the West, most unpleasant—realities, Mr. Kirk in his concluding paragraphs seeks escape into pietism. Nothing could be more out of character with the rest of the work.

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