The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)

by Mehran Kamrava

  66. The new civil code exemplified the less sweeping nature of state-sponsored social change in Iran as compared to Turkey; it continued to retain a number of sharia features, especially with regard to inheritance and family relations.

  67. Akhavi, Religion and Politics, p. 38.

  68. This restriction, which had the ironic effect of making many women prisoners in their own homes, was lifted in 1941.

  69. Wilber, Riza Shah Pahlavi, p. 185.

  70. Katouzian, Political Economy of Modern Iran, pp. 116–17.

  71. Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, pp. 162–63.

  72. Wilber, Riza Shah Pahlavi, p. 244.

  73. Two of these financial experts were William Morgan Shuster and Arthur C. Millspaugh, who later published their memoirs. See William M. Shuster, The Strangling of Persia (New York: Greenwood, 1939), and Arthur C. Millspaugh, The American Task in Persia (New York: Century, 1925).

  74. Wilber estimates the total number of Germans in Iran at this time, including their dependents, at around 1,200 to 2,000. Wilber, Riza Shah Pahlavi, p. 201.

  75. Frederick Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 143–44.

  76. For such accounts, see Leslie McLoughlin, Ibn Saud: Founder of a Kingdom (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); Mohammed Almana, Arabia Unified: A Portrait of Ibn Saud (London: Hutchinson Benham, 1980); and Gary Troeller, The Birth of Saudi Arabia: Britain and the Rise of the House of Saʿud (London: Frank Cass, 1976).

  77. Almana, a sympathetic chronicler, records at least twenty-two battles fought by Abdel Aziz (b. 1880) between 1900 and his death in 1953. For details, see Almana, Arabia Unified, pp. 271–73.

  78. Troeller, Birth of Saudi Arabia, pp. 83–91.

  79. Almana, Arabia Unified, p. 218.

  80. Ibid., p. 226.

  81. Troeller, Birth of Saudi Arabia, p. 241.

  82. Anthony Cave Brown, Oil, God, and Gold: The Story of Aramco and the Saudi Kings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 139.

  83. “ARAMCO’s operations in the oil town,” writes the political scientist Robert Vitalis, “rested on a set of exclusionary practices and norms that were themselves legacies of earlier mining booms and market formation in the American West and Southwest. This was a system of privilege and inequality, which we know as Jim Crow in the United States, as Apartheid in South Africa, and as racism more generally.” The company, Vitalis goes on to argue, forbade Saudi employees to live with their families and deported those American employees who sought to have contacts with nearby Arab families. Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. xiii.

  84. Brown, Oil, God, and Gold, p. 150.

  85. Ralph Braibanti, “Saudi Arabia in the Context of Political Development Theory,” in King Faisal and the Modernization of Saudi Arabia, ed. Willard Beling (London: Croom Helm, 1980), p. 35.

  3. THE AGE OF NATIONALISM

  1. There are numerous anthologies on nationalism. Two of the more recent and significant ones are John Hutchinson and Anthony Smith, eds., Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). A representative definition of nationalism in the current literature is offered by Guibernau: “By ‘nationalism’ I mean the sentiment of belonging to a community whose members identify with a set of symbols, beliefs and ways of life, and have the will to decide upon their common political destiny.” Montserrat Guibernau, Nationalisms: The Nation-State and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 47.

  2. Eley and Suny, Becoming National.

  3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), p. 46.

  4. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 40.

  5. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 354. For more on issues related to the construction of national identities after World War I, see Aviel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (London: Routledge, 2001).

  6. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, was so determined to secure a national home for Jews that he considered locating it in Uganda. See Howard Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), pp. 59–63.

  7. Ella Shohat, “The Invention of the Mizrahim,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29 (Autumn 1999): 8.

  8. Rashid Khalidi, “The Origins of Arab Nationalism: Introduction,” in The Origins of Arab Nationalism, ed. Rashid Khalidi et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. ix–xii.

  9. The case of the Hijaz illustrates the diverse nature of the beginnings of Arab nationalism. Whereas elsewhere Arabism rose in opposition to the centralizing policies of the Committee of Union and Progress, Hijazi nationalism was initially less a product of the confluence of an emerging nation and a state than a pragmatic tool employed by Hussein in achieving power. Mary C. Wilson, “The Hashemites, the Arab Revolt, and Arab Nationalism,” in Khalidi et al., Origins of Arab Nationalism, p. 214.

  10. Following Stephen Krasner, Fred Lawson attributes this shift to the emergence of “Westphalian sovereignty”: nationalist leaders “came to recognize the territorial boundaries of one another’s domains, and to reject as inherently illegitimate any attempt by surrounding leaderships to interfere in the internal affairs of their respective polities. . . . Nationalist leaders consciously and deliberately restricted their political ambitions to specific geographical zones, and stopped trying, or even claiming, to exercise authority over the Arab world as a whole.” Fred H. Lawson, Constructing International Relations in the Arab World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 12.

  11. An accessible collection in English of some nationalist writings of the period can be found in Sylvia Haim, ed., Arab Nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962).

  12. Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 20.

  13. Ibid.

  14. The precise significance of the haskala for the development of the modern Zionist movement is a matter of scholarly debate. See, for example, Tessler, History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, pp. 26–36; Sachar, History of Israel, pp. 8–10. More conservative Jews speak of it disparagingly, as did David Ben-Gurion, one of Zionism’s most ardent advocates and the first prime minister of Israel, who wrote that because of the haskala, “adherence to traditional forms of faith and law was shaken . . . [as] the upper strata of Jews started to use the languages of the secular rulers and began to imitate the dress, customs, and education of the Gentiles.” David Ben-Gurion, Israel: A Personal History (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1971), p. 8.

  15. In 1894, French authorities accused Captain Alfred Dreyfus of spying for Germany and court-martialed him; the charges were motivated largely by the accused’s Jewish background. After some twelve years of heightened anti-Semitism, Dreyfus was eventually found innocent of the charges. See Michael Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

  16. Extract from Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin, eds., The Israeli-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 5th ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), pp. 5–10.

  17. Ibid., p. 10.

  18. Extract from the First Zionist Congress, “The Basel Declaration,” in Laqueur and Rubin, Israeli-Arab Reader, pp. 10–11.

  19. Tessler, History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, p. 53.

  20. Sachar, History of Israel, pp. 56–57.

  21. Other incipient state institutions included the Palestine Foundation Fund, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, the Palestine Land Development Company, and
the Jewish Colonization Association, to name a few.

  22. Tessler, History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, p. 59.

  23. Samih K. Farsoun and Christina E. Zacharia, Palestine and the Pales-tinians (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 78.

  24. Tessler, History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, p. 61.

  25. Sachar, History of Israel, pp. 154–55.

  26. Tessler, History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, p. 208.

  27. For more on the ideological formation of early Zionism, see David Vital, Zionism: The Crucial Phase (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Shmuel Almog, Zionism and History: The Rise of a New Jewish Consciousness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). For a useful collection of the writings of some of the early articulators of Zionist ideology, see Arthur Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (New York: Atheneum, 1959).

  28. Quoted in Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Times Books, 1981), pp. 16–17.

  29. In an interview published in the London Sunday Times (June 15, 1969, p. 12), quoted in Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 181.

  30. Ben-Gurion, Israel, especially pp. 9–78. The closest Ben-Gurion comes to mentioning the Palestinians is through occasional generic references to “Arabs.”

  31. David Ben-Gurion, Memoirs (New York: World, 1970), p. 26.

  32. W. T. Mallison Jr., “The Balfour Declaration: An Appraisal in International Law,” in The Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971), p. 98.

  33. Quoted in Said, Question of Palestine, p. 13.

  34. For a detailed analysis of land sales in Palestine, see Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, pp. 111–17.

  35. Professor Israel Shahak’s research is quoted in Said, Question of Palestine, p. 14. Said quotes another set of statistics, this time from the London Times, claiming that in the West Bank and Gaza some 7,554 Arab houses were razed from 1967 to 1969, and another 9,000 by 1971.

  36. Sachar, History of Israel, p. 215.

  37. By some accounts, the UN Partition Plan was based on the Zionists’ own plan endorsed by the United States in August 1946. Farsoun and Zacharia, Palestine and the Palestinians, p. 111.

  38. See, for example, Shimon Peres, The New Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), p. 166.

  39. Israeli thinkers Simha Flapan and Zeev Sternhell are two cases in point. See Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), and Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), p. 33. Not surprisingly, these “new historians” are not without their detractors, one of whom is Professor Joseph Heller of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For Heller’s critique of the “new historians,” see his The Birth of Israel: Ben-Gurion and His Critics (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), pp. 295–307.

  40. Flapan, Birth of Israel, p. 33.

  41. For more on this, see the collection of essays in Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, eds., Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (New York: Verso, 1988).

  42. Farsoun and Zacharia, Palestine and the Palestinians, p. 113.

  43. Sachar, History of Israel, p. 333. Farsoun and Zacharia, in Palestine and the Palestinians, p. 114, put the number of those massacred at 245. As Sachar points out, the Zionists were not alone in committing atrocities, the Palestinians having been guilty as well on previous occasions. But the Deir Yassin massacre stands out both for its brutality and for the fear it instilled in the remaining Palestinian population.

  44. Farsoun and Zacharia, Palestine and the Palestinians, p. 114.

  45. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 147. Britain estimated the number of refugees at between 600,000 and 760,000.

  46. For the interpretations of one of Israel’s leading “new historians,” see Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

  47. Sachar, History of Israel, p. 332; Flapan, Birth of Israel, p. 85.

  48. Flapan, Birth of Israel, p. 93.

  49. Farsoun and Zacharia, Palestine and the Palestinians, pp. 132–35.

  50. Quoted in Flapan, Birth of Israel, p. 42.

  51. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), p. 49.

  52. Kimmerling and Migdal, Palestinians, p. 152.

  53. Joseph Nevo, King Abdallah and Palestine: A Territorial Ambition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 108–21.

  54. Rashid Khalidi makes a similar, though slightly different, argument. See Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, pp. 145–50.

  55. For the sake of chronological consistency, this chapter examines only the first two of these phases of Palestinian nationalism, leaving the subsequent three to be discussed in chapter 9.

  56. Bassam Tibi, Arab Nationalism: A Critical Inquiry, 2nd ed., trans. Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 106–16.

  57. For a rare and perceptive examination of these and other early Palestinian periodicals, see Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, pp. 119–44.

  58. Adnan Mohammed Abu-Ghazaleh, Arab Cultural Nationalism in Palestine during the British Mandate (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1973), p. 102. These individuals included men like Said al-Huseini, Ruhi al-Khalidi, Muhammad Hasan al-Budayri, and Khalil al-Sakakini.

  59. William Quandt, Fuad Jabber, and Ann Mosley Lesch, The Politics of Palestinian Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 25.

  60. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 145.

  61. Ibid.

  62. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, p. 190.

  63. Yehoyada Haim, Abandonment of Illusions: Zionist Political Attitudes toward Palestinian Arab Nationalism, 1936–1939 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983), p. 50.

  64. For repeated efforts by Palestinian leadership to see glory in defeat, see Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, pp. 197–98.

  65. See Bassam Tibi, Arab Nationalism: Between Islam and the Nation-State, 3rd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), pp. 116–22.

  66. P. J. Vatikiotis, Nasser and His Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), p. 49.

  67. Partly out of self-delusion and partly to placate their military officers, the Arab armies that took part in the 1948 war handed out lavish promotions to their officers, often promoting individuals without regard to their qualifications or experience.

  68. Gamal Abdel Nasser, The Philosophy of the Revolution (Buffalo, NY: Economica Books, 1959), p. 28.

  69. Ibid., pp. 36–37.

  70. Ibid., pp. 32–33.

  71. Joel Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Movement: Egypt’s Free Officers and the July Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 13.

  72. Quoted in ibid., p. 179. Upon his return to Cairo, Nasser’s train was met by throngs of cheering masses.

  73. For details of the Agrarian Reform Law, see Vatikiotis, Nasser and His Generation, pp. 205–9.

  74. R. Hrair Dekmejian, Egypt under Nasir: A Study in Political Dynamics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1971), p. 43.

  75. Fred J. Khouri, The Arab-Israeli Dilemma, 3rd ed. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985), pp. 215–16.

  76. Quoted in Vatikiotis, Nasser and His Generation, p. 275.

  77. Clement Moore Henry, Politics in North Africa: Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 38.

  78. Ibid., p. 35.

  79. Ibid., p. 36.

  80. Ibid.

 
81. C. R. Pennell, Morocco since 1830: A History (New York: NYU Press, 2000), p. 280.

  82. Lorna Hahn, North Africa, Nationalism to Nationhood (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1960), p. 280.

  83. Elbaki Hermassi, Leadership and National Development in North Africa: A Comparative Study (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 103–4.

  84. Although many Moroccans aspired to acquire baraka, few were actually perceived by others to be so blessed. “Baraka can be defined as a beneficial force derived from a divine origin yielding abundance and prosperity in the physical order. The ultimate sources of baraka are the sayings of God in the Koran and those of his Messenger, the Prophet Muhammad. By a sort of transmission, God has empowered all the descendants of the Prophet and all those who are close to God (that is, saints) with baraka.” Rahma Bourqia, “The Cultural Legacy of Power in Morocco,” in In the Shadow of the Sultan: Culture, Power, and Politics in Morocco, ed. Rahma Bourqia and Susan Gilson Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 246.

  85. Pennell, Morocco since 1830, p. 291.

  86. Henry, Politics in North Africa, p. 40.

  87. Ibid., p. 40.

  88. Hermassi, Leadership and National Development, pp. 133–34.

  89. John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 173.

  90. Henry, Politics in North Africa, p. 69.

  91. Hermassi, Leadership and National Development, p. 121.

  92. Lisa Anderson, The State and Social Formation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 175.

  93. Clement Moore Henry, Tunisia since Independence: The Dynamics of One-Party Government (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), pp. 51–56.

  94. Farsoun and Zacharia, Palestine and the Palestinians, p. 144.

  4. THE ARAB-ISRAELI WARS

  1. For a detailed account of Syrian politics in the 1940s and 1950s, see Patrick Seale, The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post-war Arab Politics 1945–1958 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).

  2. Alan R. Taylor, The Superpowers and the Middle East (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), p. 40.