Source of book: Borrowed from the library
I was 13 when Saddam Hussein’s army invaded Kuwait, and a
newlywed on 9-11. An uncle nicknamed my brother after Seyyed Abolhassan
Banisadr - I can’t find the person that my nickname came from but it was some
other guy from that era.I think it is safe to say that the modern troubles of
the Middle East have been laced through the
formative years of my life and beyond.
Furthermore, I was raised in American Evangelicalism - with
a foray into some
crazy
Fundie
stuff. Among the weird stuff in the water I drank was a lot of theorizing about
the Middle East, which, frankly, the older I
get and the more I read -
the crazier and
more frightening it seems. Particularly now that the US President
appears to be taking his foreign policy from the wingnuts pushing this
nonsense. (More about that later…)
Anyway, this book has been on my list for a while. A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the
Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East is widely
regarded as THE work on the history behind the modern Middle East, and one that
is crucial to understanding the dynamics at play now, and how they relate back
to historical decisions made during and after World War One.
This book thoroughly delivers on that promise, and more. It
isn’t an easy read, though. It checks in at nearly 700 pages of small print,
contains a high level of detail backed up by exhaustive research, and is
intended for a reader who already knows a good deal about the background. It
really helps to have a working knowledge of World War One (I did okay on this
part, thanks to stuff I have read by Churchill and others), British politics of
the era (thanks to William Manchester’s biography of Churchill for this one),
French politics of the era (um, I had a lot to learn here), and American
politics of the era (I could have been better.) Oh, and also a basic awareness
of the different sects of Islam, the history of colonialism, the geography of
the Middle East, and the ability to keep track of dozens of people and their
relationships. It’s not easy. Fromkin assumes a very educated reader, not a
neophyte. Fortunately, you can learn
from the book without this background knowledge, but it will be harder to get
through. I recommend it anyway.
The bottom line is this: decisions made by the Allied powers
during and after World War One had dramatic effects on the region. A couple of
bad decisions by Britain led
to the Ottoman Empire joining the Axis, rather
than the Allies. Once the war was started, Britain
and Russia (and to a lesser
degree, France and the United States), made decisions to divide up the Middle East as the spoils of war. In doing so, they
combined gross ignorance of the people, politics, and religion of the area with
astounding hubris and arrogance and too little foresight to see the end of
Empire and Colonialism in the near future. This had, predictably, bad
consequences in the short and especially the long term. One hundred years
later, the world is still paying the price for what was done.
It was fascinating to see that so many of the rivalries from
the early 20th Century are still in play. Scratch that, it is fascinating to
see how many rivalries from the 11th through 19th Centuries are still very much
in play. Just a couple of cases in point: (1) the battle between Russia (then the USSR,
and now Russia again…) and
the Allies (mostly Britain
back then, but now the United
States) over the region, and (2) The
Sunni/Shiite wars. In the case of Britain,
many fateful mistakes were made because Britain
was determined to keep Russia
from controlling the land route to India. This seems beside the point
now, with most shipping going by ship, Iran
and Afghanistan
somewhere between basket cases and openly hostile and...India isn’t
part of the Empire anymore anyway.
I could go on with more detail, but Fromkin does it better.
I should be clear that this book, while it does have a point of view and an
agenda, it is far from one-sided. To the extent he can, Fromkin tells the story
in a neutral manner, drawing on primary sources for as much as he can. This
means that most of his sources are, in fact, British - they kept better records
of correspondence - and he is thus able to make his case mostly by giving the
Allies enough rope to hang themselves. Fromkin isn’t a storyteller, really. He
doesn’t build excitement, and don’t expect a good yarn. This is a book of
serious, researched, fair and balanced non-fiction, not pop-history. I would
compare it to
G.
M. Trevelyan, not
Simon
Winchester.
I took quite a few notes, because there is so much in this
book. These are not meant to cover everything, just some specifics that I
really thought encapsulated whole sections of the book. Let’s start with this
one:
The West and the Middle
East have misunderstood each other throughout most of the
twentieth century; and much of that misunderstanding can be traced back to Lord
Kitchener’s initiatives in the early years of the First World War. The
peculiarities of his character, the deficiencies of his understanding of the
Moslem world, the misinformation regularly supplied to him by his lieutenants in
Cairo and Khartoum, and his choice of Arab politicians with whom to deal have
colored the course of political events ever since.
For example, our Gulf Wars have been, in rather large part,
a meddling in the rivalry between the House of Saud and the House of Hussein -
both of which were major players in this book in large part because of British
decisions. And also, as the book extensively documents, the Western failure to
understand the locus of politics and religion - and the rivalries - in the Islamic
world has led to grave mistakes both then and now.
I should point out that the mistakes weren’t just on the
Allies’ side. (Although the comedy of errors surrounding the Dardanelles -
which Churchill took the fall for, despite being absolutely correct - it should
have been a combined sea and land attack, and the decision to overrule
Churchill cost roughly 200,000 additional casualties - is quite the lesson in
what not to do…) The Ottomans violated Vizzini’s cardinal rule: “You fell
victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is ‘
never get involved in a land war in Asia…’” They chose to invade the southern provinces
of the Russian empire...in the winter. Ouch. And there was an
overture AND an
epic
book written about that mistake and everything.
The primary mistakes the Allies made weren’t military,
however, even if the military ones were pretty bad. Soon after it became
apparent that the Allies could likely at least defeat the Ottomans eventually
(although the outcome with Germany
was in doubt much longer), a British committee was convened to decide how to
divide up the Middle East. Leaving aside the
retrospective hilarity (dark as it is) that the Brits just assumed that it was
their right to grab a new set of colonies as the spoils of war even as they
threw millions of young men into the meat grinder of the trenches and borrowed
their economy into near-oblivion, consider this: the committee was a bunch of
rich boys educated in the “Classical” model of the English private schools.
(Insert joke about Brexit here…) As such, their knowledge of the Middle East was based on ancient Greek and Roman works -
they even used outdated, vague Greek terms for regions, with no actual
knowledge of boundaries as they existed in 20th Century. Which is in large part
why we have countries like Iraq
today - it was the ignorant fantasy of where “Mesopotamia”
was. And thus were many boundaries drawn and countries invented out of the
whole cloth.
One of these mistakes, of course, was the ongoing debacle of
Jewish and Arab Palestine. Even the name is wrong - it was a transliteration of
“land of the Philistines,” which wasn’t what anyone who lived there called it. (Ditto for the term “Middle East,” which was invented by an American naval
officer and popularized by Sir Mark Sykes, a central figure in this story.)
And, to put a finer point on it, there was hardly an upwelling of support for
the idea of creating one or two new states in the area. There were plenty of
Jewish settlors, of course, dating back mostly to the pogroms in Russia against
the Jews in the late 1800s. But the region was ruled reasonably well by the
Ottomans before the war, Jews and Arabs living together more or less well. The
Zionist idea was a fairly small fringe movement even within Palestine. In the US, far less than one percent were
associated even loosely with Zionist movements. This isn’t a mystery. For the
last 2000 years, the struggle of Jewish people has been rejection by the
countries of their residence. The eviction from England, of course, but the general
view the Jews were not “real” [Germans, Englishmen, Americans, etc...fill in
the blank.] So, for many Jews, a push for a new nation of their own seemed to
reinforce the “you will never be one of us” problem they already had, and thus
was an obstacle to acceptance and assimilation in their home countries. (It
isn’t a coincidence that some factions of the Nazi party heartily supported
Zionism - it was a less bloody way of getting rid of the Jews.) A few
influential Zionists, however, got the ear of Balfour, who essentially promised
a Jewish state and made it part of British policy. This worried the local
Arabs, because the desert seemed (to them) incapable of physically supporting a
few million more people - particularly if they all arrived quickly. We are
still paying the price for this decision. As the author puts it, citing the
views of the local Arabs and British officers actually serving in Palestine:
As they saw it, London’s policy of Zionism might have been
expressly designed to stir up trouble, and must have been devised by far-off
officials who did not have to live with and deal with local conditions.
Rather more than the Jewish Diaspora, however, it was
certain Christian religious sects (more about them later) who tied the
establishment of a Jewish homeland, not to any concrete benefit to Jews, but to
an apocalyptic eschatology: the establishment of the Jewish homeland would
trigger Armageddon, the bloodbath to end the world.
Whatever you think about the creation of Israel, it is
difficult to argue that it was done in a way that gave it any chance of
succeeding peacefully. It was forced on the inhabitants by Britain, who
didn’t bother to consult or work with the actual people living there, forced a
settlement that few wanted, then essentially withdrew their armies due to
homeland political pressure, and left matters to be resolved by endless war. It
makes one wonder what might have been if Europe (and America)
had spent more time addressing their
own
antisemitism (which would reach its horrible zenith a couple decades later
with the Holocaust), and left the Middle East
to itself without interference.
It wasn’t just this issue, though, that was sparked by the
war. The pressure on the Ottoman Empire
produced, as threats tend to, a vicious reaction against ethnic and religious
minorities. Just as the Nazis would later claim that it was the Jews’ fault
that they lost the war, the “Young Turks” who came to power in Turkey blamed the Armenian Christian population
for allegedly conspiring with Russia
to defeat Turkey.
The Armenian Genocide is a tragedy that has been undersold, probably because
the raw numbers weren’t as high as the Holocaust, and there weren’t horrifying
pictures circulated throughout the West. But it still killed at least half of
the Armenian population, and displaced the rest. This was yet another example
of how the horrors of war - and the battle between Britain and Russia to claim
the Middle East as colonial spoils - stirred up ancient feuds and led to
instability which has persisted ever since.
While Britain
was really the driving force behind most of the key decisions, the US played an
interesting role on a few fronts. First of all, Woodrow Wilson had a strikingly
different vision for the Middle East than the
Brits. Wilson’s brainchild was the League of Nations - the forerunner of the United Nations
- a good idea that has often been incompetently implemented - and undermined by
those wishing to disregard the idea that other people groups have rights too.
Some of Wilson’s
other goals (as set forth in his Fourteen Points) were interesting. As
globalists in our own time, he sought to reduce tariffs, seek free trade, use
diplomacy and transparency whenever possible, build economic relationships
rather than seek war, and so on. But perhaps most to the point, Wilson believed that the peoples of the Middle
East should not be divided up as spoils of war, but decisions
should be made for the benefit of those peoples.
2. That peoples and provinces are not
to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were chattels
or pawns in a game, even the great game, now for ever discredited of the
balance of power; but that
3. Every territorial settlement
involved in this war must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the
populations concerned, and not as a part of any mere adjustment or compromise
of claims amongst rival states...
As it would turn out, Wilson
would be out of office when the war ended, and his legacy largely undermined by
Warren Harding. Most notable in this context is the fact that Harding was
thoroughly corrupt (probably the most corrupt US president until Donald Trump),
and wholly owned by certain oil interests. (His most famous scandal was
Teapot Dome -
where valuable oil rights (including near where I live) were sold for pennies
to Harding’s cronies, who made billions as a result.) Thus, the end of World
War One was the beginning of the United States’
involvement in the Middle East primarily to
secure access to oil - which would become the backbone of American
transportation within a decade or two.
Another concept that intrigued me was that of Nationalism.
Historically, Nationalism was in many ways a reaction to centuries of religious
warfare. In its more benign formulation, it was an attempt to defuse religious
tensions by the idea of the State, a polity which combined people of similar
nature (perhaps religion, language, ethnicity, geography, or some other common
trait) and allowed them to thrive in their own special way. In aspiration,
Nationalism was intended to both allow individual nations to thrive, and to
grant them self-determination and freedom from oppression, but also to
encourage them to live in peace with their neighbors. Obviously, this hasn’t
worked out the same way in practice as in theory.
The dark side is obvious enough: the intolerance of groups
different from the majority. Jews took the brunt of this in Europe,
to be sure. In our own time, “Nationalism” in America means White Nationalism -
and the persecution and exclusion of those the white majority deem to be “not
real Americans.”
Another issue that really seems relevant today is that of
the internal dynamics of Islam as found in the Middle East.
All the major (and likely the minor) religions are hardly the monolithic and
centralized groups they are often portrayed as being. Even the Roman Catholic
Church, with its centralized leadership structure, has different flavors around
the world, and to expect an American Catholic to be the same as a Filipino
Catholic, or an Argentinian Catholic is an error. And most religions are even
more fragmented than that. (See for example the literally thousands of
Protestant sects…) In context here is the seeming paradox that Middle Eastern
Islam is both more powerful as an organizing force than national identity AND
deeply divided and at war with itself. The failure to take this into account
was a major reason the Brits failed in their attempt to find a universally
accepted religious and political leader in the Middle East.
And also the source of much of the United States’ embarrassing
blunders in the past few decades. The Sunni - Shiite divide is the most
obvious, of course, and one which has bedeviled US policy in the region throughout
my lifetime, despite the brighter minds trying to address it. Take a look at
this quote from the book (written in 1989 about events in the 1910s) regarding
what was to become the nation of Iraq. That nation, of course, was
cobbled together from diverse groups, and its boundaries were based, not on
rational ethnic or political divisions, but by a combination of factors, chief
of which were the relationship to the road to India and the location of key oil
reserves. Doesn’t this sound relevant today?
It was evident that London either was not aware of, or had given
no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces. The antipathy
between the minority of Moslems who were Sunnis and the majority who were
Shi’ites, the rivalries of tribes and clans, the historic and geographic
divisions of the provinces, and the commercial predominance of the Jewish
community in the city of Baghdad made it difficult to achieve a single unified government
that was at the same time representative, effective, and widely supported.
And this, from later in the book:
A fundamental problem, as
[administrator Arnold] Wilson saw it, was that the almost two million Shi’ite
Moslems in Mesopotamia would not accept domination by the minority Sunni Moslem
community, yet “no form of Government has yet been envisaged, which does not
involve Sunni domination.
No shit. We still
don’t have that single unified government, for those very reasons (although
Saddam Hussein came close using brutal force.) But it was and is worse than
that.
Because of the British (and later American) determination to
rule the region through force if necessary, the most radical and fanatical
elements of Islam were able to portray the conflict as a holy war, and set
themselves as the alternative to Western hegemony and oppression. (That’s how
the
Islamic
Revolution in Iran took place - and that is just one example.) The author
notes that Ibn Saud - the ancestor of the rulers of Saudi Arabia today - was a genius
at discerning how the energies of the Wahhabis - the severely puritanical and
fundamentalist sect of Islam - could be harnessed for his own political ends.
This is very much in play today. Sadly, a broad swath of American politics is
unwilling to accept the obvious: that our policies have given power to the
radicals.
One final question of ethnic and linguistic identity
interested me. Recently, I read
The Possessed by Elif Batuman, which
opened my eyes to something easily obscured by the political realities of the
late 20th Century. Much of what I generically thought of as the USSR - or later as the “Stans” - those difficult
to pronounce and spell countries like Uzbekistan,
Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan -
were actually part of a larger and ancient realm of the Turkish and Turkic
languages. As this book points out, “Turkish-speaking Central Asia is one of
the largest continuous language areas in the world - larger than the Great
Russian area and almost as large as the English or Spanish-speaking area in America.” This
was obscured by the conquest of these areas by Russia in the 19th and 19th
Centuries, but that reality and the Russian urge toward colonialism today drive
much of the politics in that region as well.
To sum up a lot of what happened and what resulted, I want
to go through a few ideas which dominated the second half of the book, which
covered the process of winding down the war and addressing the aftermath.
Perhaps no character more exemplifies British hubris and
delusionalism than T. E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia. He had his fingers
in a lot of the events in this book, not as an official, necessarily, but as
the “expert” those in power relied on for insight into the region and its
people. This was not a positive. As the book puts it:
Lawrence
possessed many virtues but honesty was not among them: he had passed off his
fantasies as the truth.
The problem wasn’t that there wasn’t truth in there, but
that truth, fiction, and outright fantasy were amalgamated and thus impossible
to separate. And those with the real power did a poor job of doing so. Wilson,
Lloyd George, and Clemenceau had little if any personal knowledge of the area,
and relied all too much on the advice of people like Lawrence, who were either ignorant, or
unreliable themselves. As Arthur Balfour would later say, having observed the
meetings of the heads of state: These three all-powerful, all-ignorant men,
sitting there and carving up continents, with only a child to lead them.” It is
no wonder that the settlement of Europe would lead to another catastrophic war
in less than two decades, and that the “settlement” of the Middle
East has lead to 100 years of violence and unrest.
There is a fantasy at the heart of this, which affected Britain then, and still affects the United States,
particularly a certain political party therein.
The principal British fantasy about the
Middle East - that it wanted to be governed by Britain, or with her assistance -
ran up against a stone wall of reality.
The US
keeps thinking this too, and keeps getting blindsided when it turns out that in
fact the Middle East does NOT see us as
liberators, but as oppressors, meddling where we are not wanted, and stirring
up trouble. (I will point out that Russia
is in the same category - and much of the violence has been exacerbated by the
sale of modern arms by both the US
and Russia
to the various sides, enabling them to kill more and more of each other. Both
pairs of hands are thoroughly bloody.)
In speaking of the series of revolts against British rule
which took place in the aftermath of World War One, the author nails it. Many
of those in power believed there was some malevolent foreign conspiracy
(presumably from Russia
- or the Jews) that gave rise to these uprisings.
In fact there was an outside force
linked to every one of the outbreaks of violence in the Middle
East, but it was the one force whose presence remained
invisible to British officialdom. It was Britain herself. In a region of the
globe whose inhabitants were known especially to dislike foreigners, and in a
predominantly Moslem world which could abide being ruled by almost anybody
except non-Moslems, a foreign Christian country out to have expected to
encounter hostility when it attempted to impose its own rule. The shadows that
accompanied the British rulers wherever they went in the Middle
East were in fact their own.
Substitute “United
States” for “British” and you have the
modern situation.
Although I generally loathe Warren Harding (see above), I
have to admit, he is spot on in one quote this book cites. After the war, the
Greeks and the Turks got into it, and there were calls for the US to get
involved - and these were typically religiously motivated. As Harding put it:
“Frankly, it is difficult for me to be
consistently patient with our good friends of the Church who are properly and
earnestly zealous in promoting peace until it comes to making warfare on
someone of the contending religion.”
A final thought to conclude this post:
The Middle East became what it is today
both because the European powers undertook to re-shape it and because Britain and France failed to ensure that the
dynasties, the states, and the political system that they established would
permanently endure. During and after the First World War, Britain and her Allies destroyed the old order
in the region irrevocably; they smashed Turkish rule of the Arabic-speaking Middle East beyond repair. To take its place, they
created countries, nominated rulers, delineated frontiers, and introduced a
state system of the sort that exists everywhere else; but they did not quell
all significant local opposition to those decisions.
As a result the events of 1914-22,
while bringing to an end Europe’s Middle Eastern Question, gave birth to a
Middle Eastern Question in the Middle East
itself.
Fromkin concludes with a sobering analogy. As he sees it,
the fall of the Ottoman Empire has a lot in common with the fall of the Roman Empire. The collapse of the old order led to an
extended period where the former subjects of the Empire had to work out for
themselves a new order and a new political system. That process can reasonably
be said to have taken 1500 years. (The end of World War Two led to the longest
extended era of peace in Europe since the fall of Rome.) One can hope that the process might be
quicker in the Middle East - but Fromkin is
not so sure.
After finishing this book, I have to wonder how the foreign
policy events of my lifetime might have been different had those in power taken
to heart the lessons of history. As it occurred 100 years ago, so today those
making the decisions relied, not on those with actual knowledge of the
complexities, but on the Lawrence of Arabia and Mark Sykes sorts, who in the
latter case was unaware of his blind spots, and the former of which was mostly
a craven self-promoter. People like Fromkin gave warnings that the US was about to
enter a series of unwinnable wars, and that has proven to be the case. Since
2001, we have had 18 years of continuous warfare, and we have gone from Saddam
to ISIS in Iraq, and have had to
essentially
admit defeat in Afghanistan (like the Russians 30 years ago…) In the
process, we have given viciously racist demagogues opportunity to stir up
Islamophobia and hate here at home, making life worse for the 3.3 million
Muslims living peacefully in the US. As a young man (
My
salad days, when I was green in judgment: cold in blood, to say as I said then!)
I supported the invasions of Iraq
and Afghanistan
- but I am willing to admit I was wrong, and that little positive - and much
negative - has been the result. The same might be said of the partition of the Ottoman Empire. One hundred years of conflict has
resulted from momentary bad judgment and worse motives. Would that we had
learned from the mistakes of the past.
***
We are still fighting
the same colonialist battles:
Venezuela
is a current events example of the way that global politics continue to be a
series of proxy wars between Russia
and the dominant Western power. As soon as a botched election gave way to
unrest, it was uncanny how quickly the US
and Russia
jumped in to back the competing factions. If I had some say in this, I would
push for a global moratorium on arms sales. Since the end of World War Two, the
US wars have all been meddling in what are essentially regional civil wars -
and it seems increasingly obvious that our motives aren’t all that different in
reality from those of the openly colonialist British Empire.
***
The
Fundamentalist/Evangelical Debacle:
Perhaps the best summary of the problems inherent in the
Evangelical way of looking at the Middle East
is from Mark Noll’s fantastic book,
The
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. In describing how Dispensationalist
eschatology led Evangelicals into either antisemitism or Zionism (or often both
- as was the experience of my childhood), Noll notes the cause:
In both cases, however the stance
toward the Jews arose from prophetic interpretation much more than from
contemporary analysis or more general theological reflection on nations,
international justice, or the recent history of the Middle
East.
In my experience, most Evangelicals have absolutely no use
for history, justice, empathy, or wisdom in their view on Israel and the Middle East.
The only thing that matters is that (in their bizarre theological
interpretation of apocalyptic passages in the bible) is that Israel must exist
in order to trigger the End Times™, and thus, support for everything Israel
does - every atrocity - must be supported. In the hope that Armageddon™ comes,
and God is able to slaughter humanity so that the
blood is as high as a horse’s
head for 180 miles. Oh, and lest you think that this is in any way pro-Jew,
remember that all the armies of the world converge to fight over Palestine, and
the infidel Jews are slaughtered along with them. The only survivors will
presumably be the True Christians™ who finally get to see the unbeliving
(atheist, non-Christian, and LGBTQ) filth purged from the planet.
No, this is in no way a “Love Your Neighbor” moment. It is a
revenge fantasy, and comes from the same dark place in the soul that white
Evangelicalism’s ongoing xenophobic tantrum is coming from. The hate of those
outside of the tribe runs very deep indeed.
I mention this because, as far as I can see, Fundamentalist
and White Nationalist asshat
Robert Jeffress
appears to be driving the Trump Administration’s policies regarding the nation
of Israel.
And that, to me and others outside the Fundie bubble, is a terrifying thought.
Lawrence of Arabia was bad enough. Jeffress would be happy to trigger the end
of the world.
By the way, while I looked up the links, I didn’t have to
research any of the teaching: I was raised in this nonsense, along with the
theories of a global
Jewish/Masonic
conspiracy. Which leads me to:
***
Opposition to
specific actions of Israel
is not antisemitic.
This is the big stick dragged out by those with Zionist
leanings to bludgeon those who shine a light on Israel’s ongoing human rights
abuses. (I find it interesting that those who do so are overwhelmingly...not
Jewish.) As Fromkin points out, Zionism and European antisemitism had a lot in
common. Zionism was viewed as a possible solution to the “Jewish Problem,” much
the same way that many Northerners believed that the solution to the problem of
slavery wasn’t equality, but deportation of African Americans “back” to Africa. In our modern times too, those who most loudly
defend the abuses of the present Israeli government are usually those who also
loundly crow about an alleged Jewish Communist conspiracy led by, say, George
Soros.
Antisemitism and Zionism are quite compatible in the minds
of a lot of people - including Fundies.
But to point out the obvious: opposition to Jim Crow in the
1940s didn’t make one un-American. Opposition to Hitler didn’t make one a racist
against Germans. And opposition to morally loathsome actions by the Israeli
government doesn’t make on antisemitic. Rather, it reflects a commitment to
universal human rights, justice, and an understanding of the past and our
less-than-honorable role in it.
***
More Fundie nonsense:
I can’t forget to mention this. In addition to the problems
posed by irresponsible eschatology, Evangelical interpretation of the causes of
the current conflict are also informed, not by history or knowledge, but by theological dogma.
Specifically, Evangelicals generally believe (and I was
taught) that the cause of unrest in the Middle East
was that divine decree stated that there would be ceaseless fighting. Why?
Well, it goes back to the belief that the stories about the
Patriarchs are not only literally true in every respect, but that specific
modern people groups are literally descended from the handful of people
involved, and that these sibling rivalries dictate endless war. I should point
out, however, that there are serious problems of internal inconsistency in
addition to those of
historicity.
Fundies (and this is most Evangelicals in my experience)
believe that the Genesis stories are literally true in every respect, and that
the claims that the various nations in and around the Middle East (particularly
Palestine)
descended from certain individuals is completely true. And that furthermore,
the various blessings and curses put on the individuals has trickled down more
than 3000 years to dictate present events.
Here are the origins, for those who didn’t grow up Fundie:
Canaanites: These
came from Noah’s grandson Canaan. This is
interesting too, because of a certain
bawdy incident which
scholars generally acknowledge to be intended as a justification of the
conquest of Canaan by Israel.
In our own times, however, it was taken as a justification of the enslavement
of African Americans, and later by the Mormon church for exclusion of African
Americans. In the Fundie view, the Canaanites should have been wiped out by the
Israelites as god commanded. Thus, any conflict with their descendents is due
to the fact that a genocide was incomplete. Ponder the ethical bankruptcy of
that position for a bit…
Arabs: These are
believed to be the descendents of
Ishmael, Abraham’s son
produced by his rape of Sarah’s servant Hagar. (With Sarah’s encouragement…)
Jewish and Muslim tradition have generally accepted this. The idea that they
would fight forever and to the death is more of a Fundie Christian
interpretation, however.
Edomites:
Descendents of Jacob’s (Israel’s)
brother Esau. This was arguably the most epic sibling rivalry in Genesis. And
of course their descendents still fight, right? Even though Jacob and Esau
reconciled…
Moabites/Ammonites:
The product of another
sordid
sexual episode. Lot got drunk after his
wife was turned to a pillar of salt (geez, who wouldn’t?) and they had sex with
him so they could have children. (
I
wrote about this story and others here, if you want to read about it…)
Well, the Moabites and Ammonites weren’t thrilled about the Israelites treating
them like the Germans treated Belgium,
and objected to a big army marching across their land on the way to slaughter
the Canaanites. As a result, they were cursed. (Again, scholars believe this
was a justification created for the subjection of the Moabites and Ammonites by
Israel
later in history.)
So, those are your major groups. Which rather discounts a
bunch of other groups in the area,
including, well, most everyone else. The point is that Fundies believe that Israel
essentially has the right to make war against its neighbors - and even
exterminate them - because of their interpretation of Genesis and Exodus.
Even those who do not, though, still believe (and I was
taught) that we will never see peace in the Middle East
because it is Isaac and Ishmael still fighting. And that the cause of the
fighting isn’t in any way connected to what Britain and the Allies did in the
1910s and 20s. Rather, it is inevitable, and there is nothing we can do about
it. Well, other than sell arms to Israel so it can slaughter the damn
Arabs, I guess.
This is yet another example of what Mark Noll is talking
about. It is foreign policy based, not on concepts of justice, morality, human
rights, knowledge of history, or any of that modern rot. It is instead based on
questionable dogma arrived at through (as Noll puts it) irresponsible hermeneutics. And it is that insanity which is
driving US foreign policy in
the Middle East right now.
