Arabs and Israelis: A Dialogue.
by Saul Friedlander and Mahmoud Hussein.
Moderated by Jean Lacouture. Holmes & Meier. 221 pp. $12.95.
It was in 1939, I think, that the Arabs for the first time officially refused to talk with the Jewish Palestinians. Their intransigence began, at any rate, years before there were Arab refugees, or occupied territories, or even an independent Israel. What did exist at that time was the claim of Jewish entitlement to basic rights in Palestine and a Jewish demand for self-determination, equality, and freedom from Arab rule. These were ideas so unexpected and so shocking to the Arab mind that, apparently, no compromise with them could be imagined and no discussion was thought possible.
Since then, the Arab policy of non-communication has become fixed in the public awareness and any conversation between an Arab and an Israeli can be viewed as something of a happening in and of itself. So it is that, concerning this recent conversation (which has already been published in France and in Israel and is now translated into English), primary significance is seen in the fact that a “genuine dialogue” took place at all. “For the first time they have agreed to meet, to speak together,” exclaims France’s Le Figaro about the book. “In the course of its pages myths crumble, preconceptions fall apart.” Strictly speaking, neither of these statements happens to be true. Nonetheless, Le Figaro’s sentiment does reflect the air of the book. That a few men sat and talked together for three days is presented as such an earthshaking event that, at the very least, something somewhere must surely have crumbled and fallen apart.
The characters in this drama are not easily identifiable as spokesmen for their governments or for specific political groups. They are only, in a general sort of way, held to be representative of certain sensibilities and points of view. The Israeli, Saul Friedlander, is described as a “liberal in the Anglo-Saxon tradition” and representative of the “liberal current of thought of Israel’s politico-intellectual class.” He is “in favor of more active attempts to achieve a form of peace that combines justice with security.” Friedlander, then, is what is now known as a dove. He was born in Prague in 1932 and is a professor of history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Graduate Institute of International Relations in Geneva.
Mahmoud Hussein is harder to bring into focus. The name, it turns out, is a pseudonym for not one but two Arabs whom, however, we hear speaking in only a single undifferentiated voice throughout the book. Their real names are Bahgat Elnadi and Adel Rifaat. They are Egyptians, recently turned thirty, and Communists since adolescence, who have “divided their lives among militant activism, prison (in Egypt), and exile.” They are settled in Paris. Rifaat, while claiming to be a dedicated Marxist, is a Jewish convert to Islam, though the book does not mention it. Mahmoud Hussein’s voice, we are told, is the voice of the Arab avant-garde and “an echo of the popular voice . . . typical of the style of reasoning” heard in Cairo and Damascus.
The man who brought the three together around the tape recorder, and who serves as moderator, is Jean Lacouture, who has been a Cairo correspondent for France-Soir and a foreign correspondent for Le Monde. He had long wished to set up a meeting of this sort, Lacouture writes, and he hoped “more than anything else to show that a lively exchange of views is more fertile than a fight to the death.”
Despite this hope, Lacouture expected that he would be called upon often to “cool off the atmosphere or even to stop fights.” That such intervention turned out to be unnecessary pleased him very much. The argument, indeed, does not appear to have been very heated, let alone bloody. And it ended, also, not with a bang. There was a last, lengthy statement from Hussein. Then Friedlander, asked for his concluding remarks, responded simply that he had nothing more to add. At this point Lacouture brings the curtain down with a flourish. “How can I convey the significance of that silence?” he asks. It “proved to us all that our meeting had not been in vain.” But Friedlander, in an afterword, goes on to interpret his own silence. What he had really meant, he says, was that there seemed no further point in repeating arguments which had already been gone over several times and he was in fact expressing disappointment at the failure to establish a genuine dialogue or to achieve real understanding.
It would appear, then, that the “fertility” of the meeting was finally questionable, and it is difficult in the reading to uncover any promising seeds of fruitfulness. There is in fact little movement, first to last, and the speakers exit pretty much as they entered. They leave behind no hint of a mutually acceptable accommodation, nor have they added much to the prevailing public knowledge. What the book does do, however, is to present a view of the ideological battlefield and of the arguments lined up on either side by these particular types of protagonists. From this standpoint, the debate is worth examination.
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We find, at the outset, that the discussion proceeds from some significant assumptions which appear to be held on both sides. One of these assumptions is that there was no important conflict between Arabs and Jews—indeed, no pertinent Arab-Jewish history at ail—before modern Zionism. The opening remarks on “The Past,” therefore, go back to a point roughly around 1945. That young Maoists can date the world from the day they were born is not surprising. What is odd is that a history professor should let them get away with it. In any event, ignoring the last two thousand years of the history of the Jewish people in the Middle East and in Palestine gives Hussein the freedom to launch the customary assault upon Israel as a foreign body in an Arab world and a country without “authenticity.” To all this, Friedlander responds only with some gentle probing. Were Arab perceptions, perhaps, not quite as Hussein described them? Might something more be said about Egyptian attitudes? Just a few small corrections of fact.
Friedlander makes no attempt to stand up to these first hard-hitting charges against Israel, though they are of course the heart of the matter. Certainly he does nothing so shrill as to suggest that the “original sin” may have been the thirteen centuries of Arab oppression of the Jewish people within as well as outside its homeland. Insofar as silence denotes acquiescence, Friedlander concedes the intruder status in the Middle East into which Hussein has cast Israel and the Israelis. It is a vital point, and round one obviously goes to the Arabs.
A second underlying assumption of the debate is that the only significant imperialism in the Middle East has been European. One of Hussein’s major contentions, from which several others flow, is that Arab problems stem uniquely from European imperialism and that the Arabs’ primary need therefore is to cast out all Western influence. This tells only a small part of the story, of course. For all but one century or so of the past twelve or thirteen centuries, the prevailing empires in the Middle East have been Arab, Egyptian, and Turkish. Under these Muslim imperialisms, the Jews also were a subject people, they also were exploited, and in addition they suffered from the extra burdens and humiliations of official religious discrimination and local fanaticism.
Nor were the Jews in the Muslim countries, and the Jews similarly afflicted in Christian countries, able except in meager numbers to take refuge in their own homeland. Muslim imperialist policies had consigned Palestine to a backwater of empire, badly protected, left to raiding nomads and avaricious administrators and economic and physical decay. For their own imperialist reasons, for example, the Mamluk rulers of the 14th-century Egyptian empire deliberately destroyed the harbors and the fertile coastal plains of Palestine and made that area the desert that it remained until the 20th century.
On the subject of imperialism, incidentally, Lacouture adds an interesting comment. “Personally,” he says at one point, “my argument for the legitimacy of the State of Israel is largely based on this resistance to a colonial force. It is this struggle for liberation, rather than the struggle of Judah Maccabee, that justifies Israel’s existence in my mind.” Lacouture’s words hang somewhat in midair, and it seems that he is referring to the struggle against the English. What is significant, however, is that for him, as for so many others today, a national-liberation movement requires an oppressive imperialism nearby to give it legitimacy. The many centuries of Arab, Egyptian, and Ottoman imperialism and the accompanying oppression of the Jewish people in and out of Palestine would therefore seem to have some usefulness as an argument in support of Israel’s claims. Friedlander gives no attention to this history, nor does he challenge the most sweeping Arab implications about European imperialism and its impact upon the various peoples in the Middle East. It is another major strategic advance for Hussein, and one from which he is able to mount attack after attack upon Israel as merely the servant and symbol of the West in the oppression of the Arab.
Finally, both Friedlander and Hussein ignore altogether the many hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who since 1940 have fled from Arab countries. These indigenous Middle Eastern peoples, who can with full semantic propriety be called Jewish Arabs, today make up a majority of the Jewish Israelis. To all our speakers, they are invisible.
It is therefore possible for Friedlander to assert that “for the Israeli man in the street the Arabs . . . were somewhat mythical figures before the 1967 war.” It is therefore possible for Lacouture to say that in the last few years the Arabs have “accepted the permanent presence of the Jewish people in the Middle East. In some sense, this was a step forward. . . .” It is therefore possible for Hussein to talk about a “fresh and progressive attitude” among Arabs which gives the Jews “a place in Palestine as a distinct community for the first time.” And later Hussein is able to advance as “new” and “innovative” the idea of a Palestine made up of “a Jewish community, a Muslim community, and even a distinct Christian community.”
Hussein is in fact describing the organization of the old Muslim empires. Within them, and in Palestine, the Jews were always recognized as distinct communities with some limited degrees of autonomy. Indeed, from the point of view of Middle Eastern history, Israel can be viewed as a coming together of these historic Jewish communities into one self-governing whole. However, it must be remembered that these millets, as they were called, suffered consistently from the exploitation and discrimination and threats of an assertive Arab majority. Hussein’s new and innovative idea, therefore, is in reality merely a return to the old Arab imperialism. The Arabs will agree, he offers, to recognize the Israelis as a millet if the Israelis will submit once again to the political limitations and the economic restrictions and even to the “cultural adaptations” which an Arab majority will see fit to impose. “Our starting point,” states Hussein imperiously, “is not what is acceptable to Israel, but what is required by the Arabs.” This may be questionable Marxism—but it is certainly orthodox Islam. Has Hussein never heard of the Covenants of Omar? What is even more to the point, has Friedlander never heard of the Covenants of Omar? He doesn’t mention them, either.
Friedlander’s defense of Israel comes from other quarters. He asks, first of all, for understanding of “the constant, living bond between the Jewish people and the land of Israel.” He speaks of the Jewish religion, and Jewish prayers, and “an aspiration that is literally almost two thousand years old.”
It would be interesting to know why Friedlander thought that these two young Arabs—either as Marxists or as Muslims—could be expected to be responsive to Jewish religious sensibilities. One would think that the record would lead to quite the opposite conclusion. Marxism and Islam, as religions, and each in its own way, have asserted a dogmatic and historic precedence over Judaism and, in fact, a moral imperative to triumph over it. Since Friedlander makes plain that he had hoped to establish some common base of understanding with the Arabs, one must wonder why he chose this approach. It failed, of course.
Friedlander also strives for recognition by Hussein of the problems of Israeli security and the preservation of Israeli independence. To this he can get no response which is not ultimately negative. Hussein will only discuss rights, and these only, he says again and again, in the context of the Middle East and its traditions. In this context he clearly does not believe that Israel has a right to independence. He insists upon “the need to replace the old language with a new one, to speak of natural and inalienable rights instead of the balance of power and systems of security. . . . The Arab peoples reason in terms of fundamental rights,” he repeats.
Therefore, if Friedlander has not vigorously and effectively defended the fundamental, natural, inalienable, and historic rights of the Jewish people in the Middle East, if he has not forcefully attacked the Arabs for their historic as well as more recent denial of those rights, upon what ground does he stand in demanding Arab recognition of the security of the State? Yet he rests his case simply, at the end as in the beginning, upon a brief statement of the religious bond alone.
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For the rest, the book contains much dispute about such matters as who did what in 1967, and who thought what in 1973, and who said what in 1920. There is much lengthy discourse about politicians and people, terrorism and borders, Zionism, Jerusalem, and plans for peace. Only in some lesser sense can one call the book a dialogue; the contacts of perception and purpose are tangential at best.
The two young Arabs are altogether self-righteous and arrogant, given to torrents of numbing radical rhetoric and such a passion of theory and dogma that the real world fades into abstraction and all compromise becomes heresy. They speak in the name of an Arab people whom they paint larger than life with humiliations, agitations, frustrations, and a feverish intensity of needs and demands and revolutionary visions. All other peoples are blocked from view, and the Israelis become shadows and symbols, virtually without a reality of their own.
Friedlander, outnumbered and out-talked, is tolerant, didactic, defensive, and finally weary. He has no appetite for ideological battle. His goal is to achieve some degree of pragmatic understanding, but without really digging into the root assumptions of Arab theory and mythology. Above all, he does not wish to present the Arabs with a bill from the Jewish past. Apparently he does not wish to make them feel guilty. Thus, for example, he discusses the Holocaust, but makes no mention of any Arab massacres or persecutions of the Jewish people. In particular, he says nothing about the sad centuries of Jewish poverty and impotence and exploitation under Arab domination in Palestine. He is apologetic, and therefore defenseless, and in this he demonstrates all too well the ideological weakness of that “liberal current of thought” which he represents.
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