Until the advent of Hitler in 1933 the Arab Middle East lay stagnant and all but forgotten by the Western world. With the rise of Nazism in Germany two significant events occurred to disturb it: the influx of Jews into Palestine, and the sudden appearance of a new aggressive Arab nationalism which, based on young urban Arabs, was in part spontaneous and in part subsidized by Germany. At the most crucial moment in the history of the British Empire sons of “loyal” middle-class Arabs discarded traditional English manners and sports and emerged on the Middle Eastern scene as anti-British youth movements and Fascist shirt organizations.
The second event was clearly the more significant, and British officialdom in the Levant was not slow in attributing this rising Arab hostility to the first, increased Jewish immigration. As usual it failed (or did not want) to understand the deeper issues involved.
Britain’s colonial administrators had been able to control the Arab world in the past through the old and proven methods of baksheesh and by pitting rival rulers and politicians against each other. Now they suddenly found themselves in an Arab world seething with revolt. The Empire’s political structure in the Levant rested on the assumption that (a) the Arabs were “grateful” to Great Britain and hence “loyal” and (b) that the mere sight of a British officer in uniform striding haughtily down a Cairo street to Shepheard’s Hotel was enough to overawe the Arab. At a critical moment this assumption turned out to be partly if not wholly fictitious. Practically overnight the Lawrence of Arabia legend so dear to the dull but romantic colonial mind dissolved into mist.
The guardians of the Empire were at first puzzled and hurt at this Arab ingratitude. But it did not take them long to “discover” that the Jews of Palestine were the real stumbling block in the way of Anglo-Arab understanding; that Arab hostility towards the British and the rise of pro-Axis (and subsequently of pro-Russian) groups in Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Egypt was due entirely to Zionism. With unprecedented zeal they set out to appease the Arabs at the expense of the Jews.
It is this type of thinking which today guides the policies of the British Foreign Office. As the popular saying goes, a house may change owners but the janitor usually remains the same. The Tories have been defeated and Britain has a genuine Labor government, but the colonial janitors still rule supreme in the Middle East.
Arab-Jewish relations in the past have been good as well as bad. But in view of Ernest Bevin’s unfortunate statement that “all nations are frightened of racial developments within their States and the Jews therefore present a difficult problem,” it should be noted that during the entire war period there was hardly a single incident significant enough to mar Arab-Jewish relations. These were certainly better, let us say in Haifa or Jerusalem, than Anglo-Arab relations were:
- in Syria, where pro-Vichy Arabs marched on Palestine only to be driven off by Jewish partisans at the frontier town of Metulah after—as I can testify from firsthand knowledge—the British garrison had already evacuated the area;
- in Iraq, where the anti-British coup d’état of Raschid Ali nearly wrecked Allied strategy in the Middle East;
- in Egypt, where the British had to intern Prime Minister Ali Mahar to prevent him from betraying Allied strategic secrets to the Italians and where they subsequently placed King Farouk under house arrest;
- in Palestine, where the Grand Mufti, religious head of the Moslems and perennial recipient of British baksheesh and honors, turned out to be a Nazi agent who subsequently escaped to Germany.
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The Middle East, long a storm-center of big power politics, remains today one of the postwar areas of unsettled international disputes, conflicting political ideologies and national resurgence. The main conflict, at present, is between Soviet Russia and Great Britain. Considerably weakened by World War II, England is desperately seeking to hold on to her Arabian oil properties and to secure the Empire’s life line through the Suez Canal. This policy would resist the efforts of any great power to secure a foothold on the shores of any sea communicating with the eastern Mediterranean. On the other side, Soviet Russia, conscious of British weakness, seeks control of the entire eastern Mediterranean area and eventually of India which it has always regarded as the backbone of the British Empire.
The formation of the Russian-inspired “revolutionary” government in Iranian Azerbaijan, which incidentally presented the Anglo-Americans with another Russian fait accompli, was a step in the same direction. The discord in Iran, of course, is due to the competition for the rich Persian oil resources. But it is doubtful whether for the sake of oil alone Stalin, who knows with what tenderness this commodity is regarded by the oil companies of Great Britain and the United States, would at this time step on the toes of his partners in the Big Three. With the acquisition of Poland and Rumania, and the discovery of oil in the Ukraine (in addition to the Baku oil fields and other old oil regions) Russia possesses fuel resources more than sufficient to cover her own consumption needs and that of the countries within her “sphere of influence.” As a clue to Moscow’s haste in forming a “democratic” regime in Azerbaijan we must note that Iran is an important—if not the most important—springboard into Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Palestine, as well as a key to India.
By becoming a party to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, the United States, too, has now plunged into the boiling Levantine cauldron. America’s primary interest in the Middle East, to quote Senator Ralph O. Brewster of Maine, is the estimated 100,000,000,000 barrels of petroleum in the subsoil of Arabia. The United States, therefore, is for the moment seeking to avoid any settlement that would seem to threaten war in the Middle East or curtail our commercial prospects. This, incidentally, explains our present diplomacy in the Levant, which is as uneven and confused as some of our diplomats are inept.
It is to counteract the expanding Soviet influence in the Middle East and to direct the growing wave of Arab nationalism into safe channels that the British were instrumental in organizing the Arab League. “The creation of the Arab League,” writes the London Times, “is a great achievement of British policy and a welcome step towards the general political and economic rapprochement of the countries of the Middle East.” But this is wishful thinking rather than political realism. For, as the Times adds, “the speed of this process and the extent of common interests, or even community of outlook between the Arab States, can easily be overestimated.”
Conceived by the late Lord Moyne, the Arab League is neither a symbol nor a barometer of nationalist sentiment in the Arab countries. It is little more than an exclusive club of rich, British-subsidized Arab politicians, who fear their own people and resent the bit of progress that Jews have brought to the Middle East. The truth is that unless drastic economic and social reforms are introduced in the Arab countries soon, not even the Arab League will be able to cure Britain’s Levantine headaches.
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In the struggle for the control of the eastern Mediterranean, Russia has many assets which neither Great Britain nor France nor even the United States possesses. Moscow as yet has no record of oppression or oil imperialism to live down. Its Middle East past so far is clean. In addition to the hosts of Russian agents who are now busily undermining British prestige in the Arab world, Russia has also given evidence that it knows how to exploit the nationalist and religious sentiments of the Moslem populations. It is interesting to note, for instance, that while American Communists appear to be vociferous supporters of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine, Arab Communists still quote Stalin to the effect that “Zionism is the movement of the reactionary Jewish bourgeoisie and its hangers-on.”
The rigid precepts of the religion of Islam still play a vital role in the political and national self-consciousness of the Arabs. Social changes are slowly and imperceptibly taking place in the Middle East, but thus far they affect primarily small groups of intellectuals and sections of the urban population. In the more advanced countries like Egypt, the progressive Arab youth is gradually divorcing itself from the restrictive aspects of Islamism. However, the very intellectual or middle-class Arab, articulately or as a sentiment, clings to the ethical and religious traditions which he inherited. While the exigencies of daily life pull him towards the West, tradition pulls him back. To bridge this gap and to fill the vacuum, progressive Arab educators and thinkers are searching for a synthesis—a reconciliation of the Koran with those Western and revolutionary ideas which are penetrating the Middle East. “Socialist” Russia, which has now emerged also as the exponent and defender of Islam (just as the American Communists are now the exponents of Zionism and Jeffersonian democracy), seems outwardly to provide such a synthesis. With the emergence of Soviet Russia as the strongest military power on the European continent, many factions in the Middle East (including some Zionists) are now looking to Moscow for the encouragement of their hopes. Moscow’s trump card is the great poverty and misery of the Arab people.
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In the modern world, Arab society remains based on medieval agriculture, with the fellaheen (nine-tenths of the population) living on the most primitive subsistence level, without security of tenure; hopelessly and permanently indebted to a small, rapacious landlord-usurer class. In the decades of undisputed British rule in the Middle East, not only were no comprehensive land and social reforms introduced, but the Colonial Office deliberately left Arab feudalism unchanged. Modern Egypt, the most “advanced” of the Arab countries, offers a typical example.
More than 40 per cent of Egypt’s arable soil is owned by about 12,000 big land—owners, while close to 4,000,000 fellaheen and their families hold less than an acre each and must work on shares or as day laborers to eke out an existence. The weight of Egypt’s entire social pyramid rests on the back of the fellah and his family. In addition to 12,000 landowners he must support 2000,00 bureaucrats, cotton merchants, village usurers, not to mention big mortgage banks, while his annual income, according to official statistics, is less than one hundred dollars. As a result, each year more sons of fellaheen abandon the land and drift into the crowded cities where they join the parade of ragged and hungry humanity.
In every Arab city—in Cairo as well as in Damascus or Baghdad—there are today thousands of young Arabs, ignorant, half-educated or totally illiterate (more than 70 per cent of Egypt’s population are illiterate), yet wanting their place in the sun. Until the defeat of Germany they swelled the membership of the Fascist shirt organizations; today they flock to the “Friends of Soviet Russia” societies.
The fellah’s awakening has been slow indeed but there has been an awakening. It is reflected, however dimly, in the growing interest of the students and intellectuals in the fellaheen from whom so many came. Gradually, too, it seeps into Egyptian literature. “I house you, clothe you, feed you,” complains the Egyptian worker in Bairam el-Tunsy’s poem, “and then you treat me so! On the day of my death there will be no money for my coffin, and, you, for my last journey, will even grudge me a sigh.”
Death is a recurring theme in Arab folklore, literature and conversation. Death is something that is real and near to every fellah. Starvation, polluted drinking water taken directly from the Nile or the irrigation canals (in all the decades it never occurred to anyone to make it possible for the fellah to drink pure water), lack of the most rudimentary principles of physical hygiene are taking daily a terrible toll in Arab lives. Infant mortality is 63 per thousand live births. Most of the adult population is afflicted by the countless diseases which infest the Arab countries. (The Arabs of Palestine, where the Jews have introduced modern sanitary conditions and hospitals, are. a notable exception.) Trachoma and malaria are rampant. Sixteen Arabs per thousand are totally blind. In 1937 of a little over sixteen million Egyptians, 247,615 were either totally blind or blind in one eye. I shall never forget the debate in Parliament in 1944 when an opposition deputy charged that 60 per cent of the population in Upper Egypt were ill with malaria. Prime Minister Nahas Pasha, leader of the Wafd, “People’s Nationalist” party, was insulted. “No,” he replied, “only 200 per cent are ill.”
Egypt, unfortunately, has been known in the West by two symbols: Shepheard’s Hotel and the sheikh. The former is a cosy little European island cut off from all that is Egypt by the cliffs of caste. Its fabulous terrace, happy hunting-ground of the Mediterranean haute monde and subject of countless columns by romantic foreign correspondents, is forever populated by Egypt’s “society”—fat, befezzed, perspiring pashas and their well-groomed, glittering Greek and French concubines whose regular days begin at Groppi’s cafe and end on Shepheard’s terrace. The sheikh, again, is about as representative of modern Egypt as the Sphinx or the fashionable Garden City section of Cairo where most of the foreign embassies are located.
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To get a complete picture of the confused political, social and economic conditions in the Middle East, Americans will have to learn to decipher the news behind the headlines, to read between the lines of the laconic cables of our hard-working correspondents who are forever harassed by official and unofficial propaganda. The long blood-curdling stories of anti-Zionist and in general anti-Jewish riots in the Middle East are a case in point.
It was, I must admit, with sorrow but not without a sense of irony that I read the accounts in our press of “anti-Zionist” demonstrations that took placae in November 1945 in Cairo and Alexandria. The agents of the Arab League who instigated these riots were certainly motivated by anti-Zionist designs. But no one who has lived in the Middle East for any length of time would believe even for a moment that the young Arabs, including the students of el-Azhar University, were conscious of strong anti-Zionist sentiments. The riots on Cairo’s Malika Farida Square or in the Kasr-el-Nil section had familiar precedents. I can think of two which occurred on the day I left Cairo.
I was sitting on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel engaged in driving off myriads of pestiferous Egyptian flies. It was an unusually hot and sultry afternoon even for Cairo. The stench emanating from the parched and un-swept streets reached all the way to the terrace, which was completely deserted except for a few restless Americans. Even Egypt’s glamorous “society” retired to the shade and boredom of their nooks.
At a table next to me two Americans wearing broad-brimmed hats and chewing fat cigars were discussing the latest baseball scores. Each one hugged a tall drink—an Egyptian alcoholic concoction which resembles a mint julep and is known among thirsty correspondents as “suffering bastard.” Both were obviously oil prospectors, who have since become a familiar sight on the terraces of all the internationally-known hotels in the Middle East.
Suddenly Shari Ibrahim Pasha came to life. From nowhere several hundred young ragged Arabs wearing dirty gallabiyas invaded the street, brandishing sticks, throwing stones at stores and shouting slogans in gutteral Arabic. The whole thing lasted less than a minute. By the time the lone Egyptian policeman, who had obviously been asleep, appeared on the scene, the demonstraters were gone, leaving behind them a few gaping holes in department store windows. The cop waved his hands in despair and went back to sleep.
“What are they shouting about?” one of my compatriots asked me.
“Long live the king,” I replied. “They are supporters of King Farouk who is now engaged in a palace feud with his Prime Minister, Nahas Pasha.”
I had hardly finished my explanation when another ragged cavalcade rushed by shouting “Long live Nahas Pasha.”
“What fools!” interjected the other American. “Why should they bother about their greasy politicians? Why don’t they kick them in the pants altogether?”
I tried to explain that each of the demonstrators received two piasters (about eight cents) for an hour’s work, which in a country where the average daily earnings were about five piasters, was not an inconsiderable sum. Had there been an opportunity to do a little looting on the side, their efforts on behalf of the King or Prime Minister would have been lucrative indeed. As a matter of fact, for a hundred piasters I could have gathered at any moment fifty young Egyptians to brandish sticks and shout “Long live Leon Dennen!”
My compatriots were obviously disturbed. Unlike the French and British, whom decades of colonial rule have taught to live in the midst of “native” misery without even noticing it, Americans are generally appalled by the poverty and sub-human suffering of the Arab people. His naivete, human warmth and outspoken sympathy make the American, for the moment, loved by the submerged people of the Middle East. But behind this “idealism” there is the eternal hunt for new business, new markets. Somewhere in their subconscious, I am convinced, my compatriots were aware of the industrial potential of the Arab countries and of the vast amount of cheap labor that goes begging in the Middle East. How were they to know—in their dream-world on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel—that, like all imperialists, they were courting trouble?
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I don’t wish to be misunderstood: there is, of course, more behind the recurring riots in the Middle East than meets the naked eye. As they grow in size and intensity and become more difficult to control they herald the first rumblings—a faint echo as yet—of a growing restlessness in the Arab world. Over and above the mercenary element, the Egyptian riots of last November were, I believe, less anti-Zionist in character than anti-British, anti-French and anti-effendi. They were, in a word, the writing on the wall.
Modern Arab nationalism, which is both anti-imperialist and anti-feudalist, has hitherto been regarded in the West as little more than a propaganda device of fanatic propagandists in Cairo, Damascus or Jerusalem. To be sure, this Arab nationalism, which bears but a remote resemblance to the Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamic movements of the past—movements which the landlords of the Arab League now seek to revive—is a relatively new phenomenon and as yet difficult to appraise. The political and social development of the Middle East was retarded for centuries by the heavy hand of the Ottoman Empire, and following World War I, by the various big powers which periodically exerted influence in different parts of the Eastern Mediterranean area. To this day various Arab regions have widely different levels of culture, economic conditions, and political consciousness, as well as differing capacities for that religious fervor which has, in the past, been an explosive force throughout Islam. Moreover, the perennial conflicts between the various Arab dynasties and political cliques—frequently encouraged by foreign powers—have blocked the road to real Arab unity and social emancipation. But it would be futile to assume that the impact of World War II has left Arab consciousness undisturbed. The political, social, and economic emancipation in the Middle East is still in a nebulous stage. But it is gradually becoming a concrete reality.
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New voices are now beginning to be heard in the Middle East. Wherever I went I sought and met groups of liberals, socialists and even Trotskyists who seek a modicum of human decency for the Arabs. They are not as numerous as the Communists, whose ranks have now been augmented by the members of the former Fascist shirt organizations, but it would be an error to dismiss them lightly. Many of them look upon the Jews in Palestine as pioneers of civilization in the Middle East. Few, if any, are anti-Zionist.
One of these new voices is my friend Albert Cossery, young Egyptian author of a slender volume of short stories, The Man God Forgot. To my knowledge his is the first genuine and successful attempt by a “ native” to explore the subterranean world of the Chaktours and Mahmouds—the world of landless fellaheen, tinkers, beggars and drug-addicts who are all too numerous in the Middle East. Like all pioneers, literary or political, Cossery, who has considerable literary talent, is as yet unsung and unhonored in his own country. But he epitomizes the fact that from the Persian Gulf to the Nile the soul of the Moslem world is in travail and the Arabs will not for long remain a passive element in the schemes of pashas and great powers.
In view of the actual conditions prevailing in the Middle East, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry is about as realistic an instrument of policy on Palestine as the compromise by the proverbial wit and pauper of Arab folklore, Goha, who once dreamed that a rich pasha, who had promised him ten acres of land, had given him only nine. Upon awakening Goha at once decided on a compromise: he went back to bed and exclaimed to the enemy of his dream, “Let’s be friends; I’ll take the nine acres.”
Palestine is only one factor in Arab politics, and its importance has been for obvious reasons overstated. If we widen the picture to include the Arab world as a whole then this little country (to quote the London Times) “shrinks to a bare two per cent of the total area inhabited by the Arabs.”
Of course, the difficulties to be overcome before achieving a solution of the Arab-Jewish problem cannot be overestimated. For the moment, the political obstacles in the way of an Arab-Jewish rapprochement seem insurmountable indeed. However, in setting up the Committee of Inquiry, Truman, Attlee, and Bevin, it seems to me, effected a typical Goha compromise. For it satisfies neither Arab nor Jew, and it only evades and obscures the more vital issues that trouble the Middle East. But Middle East politics has always abounded in pitfalls and a scapegoat is as useful in the Middle East today as it was in Czarist Russia and Nazi Germany.
“If there were no Jews in the Middle East,” a liberal Egyptian statesman told me some months ago in Cairo, “the Arab League and the British would have to invent them.”
