A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin

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.  

Oh, and don’t forget the literalist interpretation of where Israel’s borders should be: basically most of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and some of Iraq would be encompassed. So a few Gaza or West Bank settlements are well inside the borders...

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.