O to delay the sober day that broke
And, breaking, killed our dreams. Thus did our slumber end;
night turned its back on us – dear night, our friend . . .
Night, and the Knight.
No dream, however noble, could survive so many cold dawnings – the collapse of the UAR and the UAS, the Yemen war, and now this comprehensive defeat. And yet the pan-Arab ideal, like its great champion, was to have a zombie-like existence in the service of the next generation of would-be idols. On Nasser’s actual death in 1970 the young and oil-rich Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi, who in the previous year had dethroned the British-installed king of Libya, offered Egypt $500 million for the Leader’s body. It might seem that inflation had set in since King Sa’ud’s alleged offer of a measly $2 million for Nasser’s head, but al-Qadhdhafi’s intention was to build a shrine in Libya for Arabdom’s greatest secular saint. Pan-Arabism might have been down the pan, but al-Qadhdhafi claimed Nasser had designated him his successor as the ‘trustee’ of the movement. The new young Knight of Dreams, as he saw himself, would turn in time into an aged Knight of Nightmares; but for the moment he looked like a groovy new model of Nasser, a youthful Mick Jagger to the old matinée idol.
In Cairo, even after the Catastrophe, a Qasr al-’Urubah or ‘Palace of Arabness’ would be opened in the suburb of Heliopolis for the reception of Arab delegations. Poets, however – those inveterate truth-speakers – knew that ’urubah was no dream-palace but a collection of warring camps:
Fall and scatter
Like dry leaves, you tribes of ’urubah.
Fight among yourselves
And feud
And kill yourselves,
You second edition
Of the biography of Andalus the Conquered.
Again, the accordion chronology, squeezing together the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. But the fighting and feuding are not poetic licence: in the so-called Black September of 1970, blood flowed in the streets of Amman as the Hashimite king of Jordan fought a civil war with his radically politicized Palestinian guest-population.
THE PILGRIMAGE OF OIL
The 1967 war, however, was itself to have a second edition. In the war of 1973, Arabs would have a new weapon more powerful than words, more devastating than MiGs or Mirages. The new weapon was oil, and to wield it Arabs would act together – ‘for once’, said Muhammad Hasanayn Haykal, ghostwriter to the late President Nasser. The Age of Hope was not dead, yet.
In October 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a simultaneous assault on Israel, the Egyptians crossing the Suez Canal and the Syrians attacking in the occupied Golan. The suddenness of the assault won it initial success, but the Israelis drove it back and the USA and USSR intervened to stop the fighting. There were no real winners or losers; but Arab honour had been restored, in part. More important, however, than the immediate raid and its repulsion were its indirect yet massive and long-term effects on the world economy. As well as the two-pronged military attack, Arab oil exporters had cut production and threatened to keep it down as long as Israel remained, in flagrant breach of international law and UN resolutions, in the Arab territories it had occupied in 1967. For a time, also, Saudi Arabia went further and suspended all oil exports to the United States and to the Netherlands, which it considered to be the most pro-Israeli state in Europe. By the end of the year, oil prices had risen by more than 50 per cent, from a 1972 price of less than $2 per barrel to nearly $3. This was only the beginning. The apparent ease of the initial rise suggested that prices could go higher still: OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, saw that – to put it bluntly – they had been getting a bum deal from the world’s wealthy buyers, and set out to see just how high they could go. The result was that by 1974 a barrel of oil cost $10.41. By this stage the economic pips were squeaking in the consumer countries, my school homework and Monty Python were interrupted by power cuts, and OPEC took off the pressure; but they were now squeezing more than five times more cash out of their customers than they had been just two years before. This was to have an indelible effect, not only on the world economy but also on the world ‘order’, and not least on that of its Arabic-speaking part. As recently as 1967, a commentator could remark of the oil-producing Arab states that ‘even those that have money are simply backwaters too small to exert much influence’. All that had now changed. The Arab petrocrats of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and elsewhere suddenly had a lot more money, and money could buy them out of the backwaters and into the mainstream.
Moneyed Arabs suddenly became mobile, and internationally visible. Veils, headscarves and hubble-bubbles appeared on London’s Edgware Road; the Saudi oil minister Ahmad Zaki Yamani held forth, impish and bearded, on TV screens. Images of jet-setting bedouins were touched by caricature – oil shaykhs stuffing the cleavages of belly-dancers on Cairo’s Pyramids Road with hundred-dollar bills, Harrods or Saks Fifth Avenue opening out of hours for the convenience of petro-potentates leading their hawk-masked harems. But other images gave Arabs, or some of them, a more solid presence abroad than they had ever had. From being the object of enmity in the Crusades, of myth in later ages, and most recently either a cinematic romance (thanks to David Lean and Omar Sharif) or a dashed nuisance (hijacking canals and, latterly, airliners), Arabs were now people in foreign eyes – perhaps even a people – with a proper history and culture, as events like London’s 1976 World of Islam Festival demonstrated. Nasser had not been The Last Arab. Arabs were back on the world stage, and with a bigger role than they had played for over a thousand years.
At home, and almost overnight, the oilier parts of Arabia became a building site. Petroleum installations, palaces, government offices, schools, housing mushroomed. Foreigners went to work in ‘Saudi’ – which, innocent of the pharyngeal twang of the Arabic name, they pronounced to rhyme with ‘Howdy!’, or even ‘Lordy!’ – when they wanted to pay off the mortage. Within the wider Arabic world, too, oil meant mobility and mutual rediscovery. From its more populous and better-educated lands, labourers, clerks, teachers and other workers flocked to the oil-rich peninsula. It all stirred up a new sense of shared arabness, as if the great diaspora of the seventh century had at last gone into reverse. For most Arabs, it was the first time – apart from, for a few, in the sacralized setting of the Mecca pilgrimage – that they had got to meet their distant cousins in the flesh since that great early parting. The oil migrations were thus a kind of secular hajj, in which the oil wells of Dhahran took the place of the holy well of Zamzam, and the whole point was to lay up treasures upon earth.
The pilgrimage of oil involved huge numbers: in the 1975 census, 1.23 million North Yemenis were abroad, nearly all of them in the neighbouring oil states, mainly Saudi Arabia. That was 19 per cent of the total population; but it was probably nearer half of the adult male population, who were the only ones who went abroad to work. If there was a greater sense of solidarity, therefore, it was that of men on campaign, in the oil field rather than the battlefield. Families were left fatherless for years on end; but the migrants remitted money home, and eventually came themselves, sporting sparkly watches and, often, the title of ‘hājj’ from the sacred pilgrimage too. Recalling his father, a pre-oil migrant to Argentina who had returned home to Syria and to his old job as a weaver of goat-hair tents, the sculptor and writer Asim al-Basha said,
My father would express his amazement at the ‘riches’ that building workers in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states could acquire in just a few years. He would compare the results of their labours with those of his twenty-eight long years spent at the end of the earth.
To a degree, oil money lubricated grating economic disparities, both between the diverse parts of the Arabic world and, as remittances went via local agents to the family in the village, between governments and governed, town and country. By the end of the 1970s, ‘the Arab world [was] more closely linked socioeconomically . . . than at any time in its modern history’, probably, in fact, since early Abbasid times, more tha
n 1,100 years before.
At the same time, as with Egyptian movies, the more Arabs saw of each other the more they realized how diverse they were. Many, too, found that sudden riches had not done much to promote ideas of equality and cousinly love. The Mecca pilgrimage, with its Gandhiesque uniform of unsewn white cloth, imposes at least a simulacrum of equality. Oil pilgrims, however, were a new version of the ancient tribal mawlas or halifs, the affiliated clients or allies. In the countries where they worked, they often had no independent personal status; rather, they had to attach themselves to a kafil, a ‘sponsor’ or ‘guarantor’, either an individual or a company, and since the arrangement was temporary, they probably had fewer rights than the old tribal affiliates and allies. This hurt, and in particular because many of the migrants came from what they themselves saw as more civilized societies. Another Syrian could say of building work in the Gulf, ‘Why should we go and lay tile by tile by tile, just so that camels can stand around on them?’ His compatriot, the poet Nizar Qabbani, was pessimistic about the levelling effect of oil:
The Arab world stores its oil
In its bollocks . . . and your Lord is the Gracious Bestower!
While the people, whether Before Petroleum or Anno Petrolei,
Are drained dry just the same, beasts bled by their masters.
Sometimes the anger boiled over:
If I had a whip in my hand
I’d strip those desert emperors of the robes of civilization
. . .
I’d grind into the dust their patent-leather shoes
And gold watches . . .
And give them back their camel’s milk . . .
It is all de haut en bas; or, more precisely, as it was a heated continuation of the old dialogue between civilized peoples and uncivilized tribes, de hadar en badw.
THE DARK PEARL
The 1973 war filled many Arab hearts with pride and, in the longer term, at least some Arab pockets with cash. And yet it was followed by capitulation. In the new sober dawn after the Catastrophe, it had been a realistic war rather than a rhetorical one. Since 1967 and the death of pan-Arabism, hot-heads may still have raved about driving the Zionists into the sea, but Anwar al-Sadat was more modest in his strategic aims:
For Sadat, the war of 1973 had not been fought to achieve military victory, but in order to give a shock to the superpowers, so that they would take the lead in negotiating some settlement of the problems between Israel and the Arabs.
The problem was that the hint went unheeded. So in 1977 al-Sadat himself went to Jerusalem for direct talks. The visit was more shocking than the war: it was a breaking of the ranks, of the rules – for even if they were at each other tooth and claw behind it, Arabs tried to present at least a facade of unity in the face of Zionism. But Egypt had a long habit of going its own unaccountable way. If Nasser had been the smiling sun-god who had shone abroad and then set, then al-Sadat was a creature of the shadowed side of Egypt: a sphinx, an enigma.
The Jerusalem visit led to the American-hosted summit at Camp David in the following year, in which Egypt got Sinai back from the Israelis. However, the central question about the future of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip was disastrously fudged. The Israelis spoke vaguely of the eventual self-rule of the regions, but would not be tied to details. The Americans had got the all-important handshake for the cameras; now, like Rome’s special representative in Palestine, Pontius Pilate, they could wash their own hands of the mucky business.
Al-Sadat’s treaty with Israel was ‘a cold peace’, and it sent shivers of disgust through the Arabic world. Nizar Qabbani wrote, despairing of the future,
They’ve given us the Pill
That stops our history having children . . .
Egypt was cold-shouldered by its fellow Arab states. Even the Arab League roused itself from its clubbish torpor and removed itself from Cairo to Tunis. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1959, and other groups continuing the armed struggle on behalf of the Palestinians, reaped popularity at home and upped their profile abroad. The Egyptians were left to simmer in their own treachery.
Al-Sadat’s assassination in 1981 at the hands of newly active Islamic militants – even though it might well have sent another sort of shiver through the Arabic world – probably atoned for some of Egypt’s sins. Time also did its own healing. But as bad as Camp David, or worse, was to come in 1993 with the Oslo Accords between the Palestinians and Israel, in which the latter finally condescended to grant ‘autonomy’ to the occupied territories of Palestine. The Israelis duly withdrew, leaving limited local rule in Palestinian hands. The vital questions, however – Israeli settlements in the West Bank, borders, return of refugees, Jerusalem – were put off again. The question of settlements has been the most contentious of all. ‘Under the Oslo Agreements,’ explained Raja Shehadeh – who as a Palestinian lawyer knows much about land disputes – the PLO, now representing the Palestinian people,
agreed to keep an area equal to about a third of the West Bank, referred to as Area C, outside the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority . . . Israel presented this to its public as tacit recognition by the PLO that the land, most of which Israel had already registered in the same Land Authority where Israeli state land is registered, would remain with Israel. This gave the settlement project a great boost.
The Oslo Accords were thus ‘the worst surrender document in our history’. On this point, if nothing else, moderate Palestinians and extremist Israelis saw eye to angry eye. For Yigal Amir, an Israeli of Yemeni background, Prime Minister Rabin’s concession to the Palestinians of even the most parochial rule was surrender of the most treacherous sort, and in 1995 Amir shot Rabin dead. A flash of symmetry, across the long hall of mirrors that is history, with the sacrifice of al-Sadat.
Accords, agreements always imply some surrender by both sides. That the greater surrender was that of the Palestinians has only become evident with time. Today, more than twenty years after Oslo and forty years on from Camp David, the occupied territories have become the besieged territories. The Gaza Strip is the third most densely populated territory on earth, after Singapore and Hong Kong. Access is rigorously controlled from without, and for most inhabitants – or inmates – to leave is impossible; tunnelling out is one of the easier options. Gaza is thus a concentration camp in its most literal meaning, and on an industrial scale. The West Bank, meanwhile, where it is not disfigured and dismembered by the Israelis’ Separation Wall, is blotched with an ever-spreading rash of Israeli settlements. The autonomy of the Palestinian authorities there is that of a living head that may be able to think autonomously, but whose body is the object of amputations and infestations: a paralytic who is free to feel pain but not to do anything about it.
The pain radiates out from Palestine across the Arabic world. As long as Israel remains such an aggressive and provocative neighbour, it is a gift for Arab dictators. The ‘Zionist Entity’, that intrusive grit, has grown into a black pearl of great price, an almost transcendental foe whose existence is the subject of endless rhetoric and the occasional symbolic act. Saddam Husayn, for example, letting off Scud missiles at Israel early in 1991, reaped the adulation of many Arabs. His bombastic barrages caused some material damage and, directly, the deaths of two Israelis (others died from heart attacks and similar causes); the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis slaughtered by Saddam at home were forgiven, if noticed, by the Man in the Suq. In Syria the Asads, father and son, have been happy to confront Israel – which occupies the Golan, the ancestral camping-grounds of the Ghassanid kings – with fighting words while, as we shall see, they have turned their heavy weapons on their opponents at home: weapons of mass destruction camouflaged by words of mass distraction. In my adoptive land, the head of the rebels’ Revolutionary Council has said that the school curriculum needs rewriting, ‘because it was planned by America and Israel’, which no doubt comes as a surprise to former Yemeni ministers of education. More recently, adding to the pick-
’n’-mix bag of bogeymen, the rebel-appointed minister of education has also said that the curriculum was planned by the so-called Islamic State.
It is all a strange, dark symbiosis: the continued presence of an aggressive Israel, behaving with grotesque injustice towards the people of the territories it occupies in the face of international law, merely prolongs the life of Tyrannosaurus rex arabicus – also aggressive, also unjust, and towards his own countrymen.
‘Death to America! Death to Israel!’ the little children chant, down in the square below my house. But do the people who teach them that rallying-cry know that if those two foes ever actually died, so too would they themselves? The still greater irony, Catch-22 cubed, is that only if the dinosaurs die out and Arabs become truly free will they be able to confront Israeli injustice from a position of real strength, moral not military, and that all such moves to freedom are in themselves branded by the dictators as an Israeli plot. ‘The Arab Spring’, as we shall see, would thus be successfully billed by the forces of reaction as ‘the Zionist Arab Spring’.
It is all a great conundrum, but also part of a great continuum: that of alien empires shaping Arab identity and history since the days of Assyria and Babylon. The difference is that the Israeli mini-empire, the dark pearl, the dagger twisting in the map, has been doing the shaping from the inside. Then again, so too has the black and liquid wealth that lies beneath the Arabs’ ‘Island’, and most copiously under the infertile parenthesis between the northern and southern fertile crescents. It has redressed the ancient imbalance of felicity between Arabias Deserta and Felix; but it has also fuelled new levels of avarice and new forms of rule, especially since that leap in revenues in 1973, in which tribal shaykhs have become monarchs as absolute as any in human history.
In the early 1980s, a decade or so after the death of Nasser and pan-Arabism, it seemed that, between them, dictators and monarchs of one shade or another had the Arabic world tied up. There were exceptions: a fragmented and imploding Lebanon; a South Yemen where Islamic jurisprudence had been ditched for Marxist dialectic and tribalism re-expressed as Stalinist/Maoist factionalism. But, as so often, the region as a whole seemed to be suspended in a multiple cat’s cradle of tensions, in which the power-holders could by its very nature never join hands.
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