A Durable Peace (18 page)

It is little consolation that most of the movements for “democracy” in the Arab world, such as in Algeria and Jordan, are
dominated by Moslem fundamentalists seeking not to break down and distribute the government’s absolute monopoly of power but
to transfer that power—to themselves. With opponents such as these, it is difficult to judge which is more oppressive, the
people’s current rulers or their would-be liberators. The difficulty is greatest in Lebanon, where a kaleidoscope of armed
gangs of various persuasions have for two decades competed for the right to brutalize the country. This nightmare out of Hobbes
has finally been ended only through the imposition of an even more ruthless Pax Syriana—a “peace” extorted through the application
of limitless fear. Remove the Syrian boot, and the internecine violence will be unleashed again.

Like Arab aggression across borders, domestic violence within the Arab states is also applied to non-Arabs. A powerful Arab
nationalism regards the area from Morocco to the Persian Gulf as belonging exclusively to Arabs, despite the presence of numerous
other peoples and religious minorities throughout the area—Berbers, Kurds, Copts and other Christian denominations, Druze,
Jews, Circassians, Assyrians, blacks, and others—constituting a substantial proportion of the overall population. And while
the presence of these non-Arab or non-Moslem peoples is usually tolerated by Arab governments, they are accepted only in a
state of
subjugation, never as equals. Those who have refused to agree to this arrangement have been suppressed, often mercilessly.

In 1933, the Iraqi authorities massacred the ancient Assyrian Christian community and incited the Arab population to murder
and plunder the survivors. Thousands fled the country.
¹²
On December 15, 1945, the Kurds of Iraq declared an independent republic that was immediately aborted by the Iraqi army.
¹³
The Kurdish quest for independence began anew in 1961 and was savagely suppressed. Tens of thousands of Kurds were killed
and 200,000 were left homeless, but this was not the end of Kurdish suffering. In the 1970s, Saddam drove another 200,000
Kurdish refugees into Iran.
¹⁴
Hundreds of thousands more have been forcibly resettled in barren regions outside their homeland, a method perfected by Saddam’s
precursor and hero Nebuchadnezzar as a means of destroying peoples. (Saddam likes to have his bust juxtaposed with that of
the famous Babylonian conqueror.) The Kurds were promised at Versailles that they would at least be granted autonomy, but
Kurdistan was subsequently incorporated into Arab Iraq because of Britain’s desire to maintain control over the oil of the
Kurdish region of Mosul. The continued absence of any international interest in keeping the Versailles promise has given Saddam
free rein in his efforts to “Arabize” the Kurdish areas. Still, Kurdish attempts to achieve independence continue to this
day. One recent attempt was crushed by Iraq after it lost the Gulf War.

Other minorities have not fared much better. Syria massacred its Christian community in the 1920s and drove tens of thousands
of Armenians out of Syria after World War II. Under the Syro-French agreement of 1936 the Druze were promised autonomy in
the Jebel Druze (Mount Druze) region of Syria, where they constitute a majority, but their efforts to assert this autonomy
have likewise been ruthlessly crushed.
¹⁵
Nasser’s Egypt expelled its Greek Christian community in the 1950s and continued to encourage public violence against the
Coptic Christian community for years thereafter. Even more tragic has been the fate of the
Christian blacks in the southern part of the Sudan. Sudan’s Arab government has waged a series of campaigns of forced conversion,
starvation, and chattel enslavement against them since 1956. Conservative estimates put the number killed during the height
of this campaign in the 1970s at 500,000, but other sources say the toll is actually in the millions. Hundreds of thousands
have fled to neighboring countries, despite efforts by the Arabs to trap them in the Sudan.

Thus, the penchant for violence of many Arab rulers has led to the continual prosecution of wars against Arabs and non-Arabs
abroad, and the continual persecution of Arabs and non-Arabs at home. With such a record, it is hardly a surprise that these
rulers have been paid back with a fusillade of assassination efforts, a considerable number of them successful. Listed chronologically,
this gallery of victims is a who’s who of leaders in the Arab world, as one can see from the table below.

Partial Chronology of Arab Violence Against Arab Rulers

For the sake of brevity, I have omitted the countless assassinations and attempted assassinations of lesser ministers, opposition
leaders, intellectuals, journalists, diplomats, and minor officials. Nor have I focused in detail on the smaller Arab countries,
which unhappily have not escaped this phenomenon. One scholar examined political life in the string of tiny despotisms that
make up the United Arab Emirates on the Persian Gulf and published his findings in 1977:

Sheikh Zayid of Abu Dhabi had overthrown his brother Shakhbut in 1966; Rashid of Dubai had deposed his uncles in 1932; Ahmed
of Umm-al-Qaywayn had shot an uncle who had just murdered his father; Saqr of Ras-al-Khayma had expelled his uncle in 1948;
and, in a more recent coup, 1972, Sheikh Sultan of Sharja assumed power after his brother Khalid had been shot by his cousin
and the former ruler, Saqr ibn Sultan. In Abu Dhabi, the core state of the federation, 8 of the 15 emirs of the Al bu Falah
dynasty of the Bani Yas tribe, which had ruled uninterruptedly since the 1760s, have been assassinated.
¹⁶

While it may be true that the frequency of such assassinations in the Arab world has declined in the last decade, this is
primarily because the regimes have consolidated their domination over their populations (as in Syria and Iraq) and have drastically
improved their capacity to wipe away all traces of internal opposition.

A disturbing aspect of the continual bloodletting in Arab political
conflicts is that many of its practitioners accept no limits to their violence, either in the means they choose to pursue
it or in the victims they select as its targets. At least three of the exceedingly rare uses of gas warfare since World War
I have been by Arab states. Nasser used gas in Yemen in the early 1960s; more recently, Saddam repeatedly gassed both the
Iranian army in Baghdad’s war against Teheran and the Kurdish civilians in his own country. (In the only gas attack against
the Kurds for which figures are available, two thousand people died.)
¹⁷
During the Iran-Iraq War, both sides incessantly bombed the neutral shipping of many countries. And in the Gulf War, Saddam’s
flooding of the seas with crude oil and his positioning of military matériel at archaeological sites served notice that not
even nature and history were out of bounds.
¹⁸

But against the West, the use of such brazen violence has been the exception, not the rule. The radical Arab regimes have
understood that the West is simply too powerful, and that frontal assaults on Western interests or nationals may therefore
be too dangerous. As a result, these regimes have resorted to the much safer technique of terrorism. Terrorist warfare has
allowed Arab regimes to attack Western targets while denying any responsibility for these attacks. Sovereign Arab states such
as Syria, Iraq, and Libya have provided arms, embassies, intelligence services, and money to various terror organizations
operating against the West and other objects of their animosity, thereby transforming terrorism that had been a local peculiarity
of Middle Eastern politics into an international malignancy. For international terrorism is the quintessential Middle Eastern
export, and its techniques everywhere are those of the Arab regimes and organizations that invented it. The hijacking and
bombing of aircraft, the bombing of embassies, the murder of diplomats, and the taking of hostages by Arab terrorists have
since been adopted by non-Arab terror organizations the world over. Indeed, before a determined policy under the leadership
of the United States curtailed its operations, Arab terrorism’s sphere of operations had grown to include the
entire world outside the Communist bloc. Its victims, both Arab and non-Arab, were as likely to be attacked on the streets
of London and Paris, of Bangkok and Karachi.

Its attacks on the West notwithstanding, Arab terrorism has also exacted a terrible toll on the Arabs themselves. It has probably
killed more people in Lebanon alone than in the entire non-Arab world combined. In 1984, Muhsen Muhammad, editor of the Egyptian
daily
Al-Gumhuria,
lamented the penchant of Arab terrorists for choosing Arab targets:

The number of terrorist organizations in the Arab and Moslem world has grown. These are organizations which kill Arabs and
Moslems everywhere…. some of these were created by governments [specifically for the purpose of] killing [Arab] opponents,
adversaries, emigres, and refugees in all countries of the world.
¹⁹

True, not every Arab state is Syria or Libya. Although some Arab regimes are truly predatory, others are more often prey.
Still, this does not alter the picture before us, a picture that is unpleasant to contemplate, but that must be understood
if one is to form any reasonable opinion about the politics of the Middle East. Violence is ubiquitous in the political life
of nearly all the Arab countries. It is the primary method of dealing with opponents, both foreign and domestic, both Arab
and non-Arab.

So far, I have not mentioned the Arab-Israeli dispute. There is a simple reason for this: Virtually none of the above conflicts
and none of the violence they have produced has anything to do with Israel. Yet it is undeniable that almost every discussion
on the subject of “achieving peace in the Middle East” begins and ends with Israel and the Palestinians, as a consequence
of a deliberate campaign to divert attention from the true sources of perennial turmoil in the Middle East. As we have seen,
this is achieved by implanting belief in a false center of this maelstrom: the Palestinian Problem.

Nowhere have the efforts to bury the true character of the Middle East been more intense than in the United States. When I
first came there as Israel’s ambassador in late 1984, I discovered that every year the UN devotes not one but
two
full sessions of the General Assembly, each lasting close to a week, to promoting the Theory of Palestinian Centrality. In
the first session, called “The Question of Palestine,” country after country, Arab and non-Arab, lines up to excoriate Israel
for its various alleged crimes against the Palestinians and demands that Israel comply with its ideas of a just solution to
the Palestinian Problem. These ideas often range from Israel’s gradual dismemberment to its immediate dissolution.