“Resurgent” Arabs?
The Sphinx Awakes
By Gerald Sparrow
Pitman Publishing Corporation, New York, for Robert Hale, Ltd., London. 217 pp. $4.50.

One notes with approval, early in the first chapter of Gerald Sparrow’s book, that its author was once a judge—a British judge at that, with international experience, chiefly in Siam. Just the sort of chap, one feels, to hack a clean path through the undergrowth of partisanship and passion presently infesting Middle Eastern affairs and give us a sane, honest, judicious summing-up. Sixty pages later one is thanking one’s stars that one’s life and property were never at stake in any court presided over by Judge Sparrow. His conception of justice appears oddly . . . well, un-British, to say the least, however well it may have gone down in Siam.

Prior to 1940, he tells us, there were no more than fifty thousand Jews in Palestine. But somehow, eight years later, this ruthless little community succeeded in expelling the great majority of Palestine’s Arabs and set about systematically persecuting the 175,000 who remained. In organizing this persecution the Israel government “slavishly followed” the “Nazi pattern.”

Half an hour’s research would, of course, have enabled Mr. Sparrow to unearth evidence to suggest that the propaganda of ex-Mufti’s Arab Higher Committee and the Arab League (which urged Arabs to leave their homes “so as to facilitate the advance of the victorious Arab armies”) played at least as big a part in the creation of the Arab refugee problem as the sum total of “Jewish” excesses. This discovery would not have impelled him to exonerate Menachem Beigin’s Irgun Zvai Leumi for the outrage it committed at Deir Yassin; but it might have helped him set the whole problem in the sort of perspective a competent judge would wish to establish.

Blurbs will be blurbs, of course; but Mr. Sparrow’s is a collector’s piece. His shallow, one-sided chapter on Arab-Israel relations, which devotes seven of its eleven pages to Israel’s persecution of her Arab minority, is singled out for attention as “perhaps the most startling exposure of the origins and realities of the Arab-Israel dispute published.” It is indeed a startling exposure—but of Mr. Sparrow’s pretensions. “The theme of the book,” we are told, “is the resurgent movement of the Arab states the world over . . .” The world over, presumably, because the unfortunate Mr. Sparrow is under the impression that Pakistan and Persia are “Arab states”; but what is meant by the phrase “resurgent movement,” or what the socio-economic roots of such a movement might be, is nowhere made clear.

_____________

Even on the fairly straightforward subject of inter-Arab relations, Judge Sparrow is pathetic. Take, for example, the Egyptian-Iraqi feud which has divided the Arab League for the last nine years. It has its roots in geography, history, and religion as well as 20th-century power politics: a fascinating volume could be written about it alone. But all Mr. Sparrow sees is total Egyptian-Iraqi harmony, since both Egypt and Iraq are Arabic-speaking and “Mohammedan.” The nearest he gets to political analysis or even straight reportage on the subject is this: “So Major Salah Salem, Colonel Nasser’s Ambassador at Large, talks to King Feisal of Iraq and to his Prime Minister in the friendliest terms, noting how similar Egypt and Iraq are, how common their aims, how identical their ideals.” That is all. Major Salem’s Sarsank talks with the Iraqi leaders were, of course, quite remarkable—though Judge Sparrow clearly hasn’t a glimmering or understanding why. Precisely because he had adopted a conciliatory attitude toward Iraqi aspirations, the dancing major was disowned by Colonel Abdel Nasser and fired. Iraqi Premier Nuri es-Said, on the other hand, whose contempt for everything Egyptian is well known throughout the Middle East, took a tape recording of Major Salem’s indiscretions and had it played to a gathering of fence-sitting Jordanian politicians to show them “what your Egyptian friends are really worth.” Having raised the subject, Judge Sparrow ought at least, in all honesty, to have given a balanced outline of the facts. But facts are not his forte.

_____________

Moreover, his ignorance of the basic factual background to Arab affairs is complicated by an extraordinary woolliness of expression which invests even routine statements with ambiguity. “The rate of exchange,” he writes, “is a little less than the official 100 piastres to the pound.” Since the only kind of pound mentioned so far has been the Egyptian pound, which consists of 100 piastres, the average reader will be left with the impression that the Egyptians no longer have confidence in their own currency. On reflection, one can only assume that Mr. Sparrow means the pound sterling, which is worth about six cents less than the Egyptian pound at par. Similar imprecision gives the impression that the Arab League consists of a “triumvirate” of Egypt, Syria, and Saudi-Arabia, though even Mr. Sparrow must know better than this. At one point Gamal Abdel Nasser is Ataturk-ish, but a few pages later we find him an apostle of Pan-Islam. Once or twice he is admitted to be a dictator, but his constitution is described as “democratic in the true sense of the term”—providing for “a form of direct and practical democracy with out losing its essence, which is the actual participation of the citizens in running the affairs of their country.” Again: “The Constitution is of a socialistic nature in which every Egyptian characteristic is clearly manifested.” One wonders if Mr. Sparrow himself knew what he meant when he wrote this.

In one respect, though, Mr. Sparrow’s account of the Nasser constitution is the most valuable section of his book. Much of it appears to have been copied, more or less verbatim, from official junta handouts. Even the casual reader will recognize in it the same off-color blend of naivety and cynicism which ran through the constitutional conceits of such heroes of the “New Egypt” as Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini; and he will be reminded that Gamal Abdel Nasser’s dupes and admirers in the West are the same kind of folk who admired or were duped by this grisly trio. “Well, say what you like, but he does make the trains run on time.” “After all, the constitution’s democratic enough.” “Admittedly, they’re only paper safeguards as yet, but the intention’s there.” As for the thousands of mere human beings interned, robbed, tortured, and murdered in the name of efficiency, punctual trains, national regeneration, and/or “democracy in the true sense of the term”—well, to make an omelet one must obviously break a few eggs. The naive never learn until it’s too late; and the cynical, of course, don’t want to.

_____________