JERUSALEM — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that thousands of housing units that Israel is building on captured land were harming peace talks with the Palestinians. She also said she could not understand why Israel was still blocking three Fulbright grantees from leaving Gaza.
With Palestinian frustrations rising — and demographers predicting an eventual Palestinian majority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan — just saying no is not a viable option for Israel. The responsibility of the United States, as Israel’s most vital ally, is to keep that uncomfortable reality firmly in Israel’s sight.
The Times warns demographics will rear their head sometime in the future, thus bringing a shift to historical population levels. It doesn’t mention that the local, Arab population in Palestine always vastly outnumbered the Yishuv — until 1948, mass explusion, and the advent of exclusion laws. 1967 helped too. But colonization is a stinging word, and rather than look back on that, the editorial board wants to warn Americans of this surprising, novel, and "uncomfortable" reality ahead.
Maybe Times readers just don’t care for history, or the Times doesn’t want them to.
Photo: Galilee, October 1948, Palestinians fleeing to Lebanon.
2008 will be the 50th anniversary of iraq’s revolution, which ended the british hashemite monarchy. if we are to believe david brooks and how he frames iraq’s violent past, then maybe this will be a big moment. undoubtedly it will be commemorated, though how who knows. of course mr. brooks history of iraq, provided in an op-ed 11/00, was a polemic, a quick look at an essay based on british documents and the following summary:
"And his is a Gibbonesque tale of horror. There is the endless Shiite-Sunni fighting. There is a massacre of the Assyrians, which is celebrated rapturously in downtown Baghdad. Children are gunned down from airplanes. Tribal wars flare and families are destroyed. A Sunni writer insults the Shiites and the subsequent rioters murder students and policemen. A former prime minister is found on the street by a mob, killed, and his body is reduced to pulp as cars run him over in joyous retribution."
while dismissing a base, unspecified view of iraq as historically violent, the reasons for bringing up history are still there. americans were the first foreign invaders and occupiers of iraq since the british; perhaps george h w bush didn’t order tanks all the way to baghdad because he didn’t want that weight on the us. perhaps george bush sr had a head for history. i could be wrong, but even if that thought crossed his mind only for a moment, that’s more than we can expect from his son. the baseless rhetoric and public talk that america rode into iraq and that continues to propel the war expects little from americans.
americans need not know a history of the modern middle east, shaped by imperialism, zionism, and increasingly since the end of the second world war, american foreign policy. the settlement program begun by israel after the june war in 1967, and supported continuously by every American president since, is only part of the picture on the ground. in the 1980s, america supported Israel’s invasion of lebanon; through the 1990s and into 2000, a perhaps hopeful peace process failed in israel/palestine, not simply because arafat rejected barak’s "generous offer" but because of the flaws of that ungenerous offer. newspapers might have described it generous, but a look at the definitive maps — which no papers provided at the time — revealed the american support for israel confining palestinians to three cantons in the west bank, dissected by israeli roads and settlement blocs. palestine would have been the gaza strip and a broken west bank, behind a expanding, meandering wall, the ‘67 borders constantly being redrawn by settlements.
immediate military aid for israel throughout the second intifida, when the ratio of palestinian and israeli death was near 10 to 1, and the bush administration’s support of increased israeli aggression and settlement expansion under sharon did not disappear as factors on the ground when america began its war on terror. they did not go away when america invaded iraq. when we ask why so much of the middle east is not ‘moderate’ to our liking, why iraqis — thank you mr. brooks — have a historical penchant for being violent, greedy, and against the common good — well, that is when we need to ask other questions. why the american view is so essentialist, casting ‘moderate’ against ‘rogue’ and ‘terror’ against ’security’ in such a way that precludes any real consideration of the place and the increasingly american presence in the region, whether directly in iraq or indirectly along the separation wall, in the grid of new west bank settlements, or in the empty space of a bulldozed palestinian home.
if in 2008 violence in iraq has subsided and the american-catered government can pacify the country, then perhaps the celebration of 1958 will take on a glow of actual progress. if in 2008 we are where we are today, which is fairly close, just worse, than where we were in 2005 and 2004, then 1958 will likely be remembered another way.
if the dates and details actually impress themselves on us, perhaps the totality of american history in the middle east, from the 1950s to the present, will tell us to finally scale back our involvement, to change course, to not push all the way to baghdad, and to try and actually broker even resolution in israel and palestine. maybe when we see the iraqi revolution of 1958 in 2008, we will takes the significance of the moment, which was the collapse of the british system there, and apply it preemptively on the course of american foreign policy.
David Brooks is a bad historian
Today I read a David Brooks editorial on the "Views" page of the International Herald Tribune. What’s haunting Iraq, Brooks argues, is not only the fact of foreign invasion and occupation but "the same old Iraqi demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise for the common good, even in the face of self-immolation."
How does Brooks, famous for his Bobos in Paradise, make such a sweep? This is meant to be a history op-ed, demonstrating the columnist’s sudden interest in one history book to prove a current policy point. Brooks gives us a paragraph of Iraqi history, his personal citation of an Iraqi history essay written by Elie Kedourise, "a Baghdad born-Jew:"
Brooks is a bad historian. I shouldn’t be surprised - he is a major columnist, here to espouse some intriguing line that falls between right and left, hopping dynamically back and forth as the news cycle turns, making good on his name as a contrarian conservative thinker. He wants us to appreciate the historical research behind what amounts to a "stay the course" editorial."And his is a Gibbonesqu tale of horror. There is endless Shiite-Sunni fighting. There is a massacre of the Assyrians ,which is celebrated rapturously in downtown Baghdad. Children are gunned down from airplanes. Tribal wars flare and families are destroyed. A Sunni writer insults the Shiites and the subsequent rioters murder students and policemen. A former prime minister is found on the street by a mob, killed, and his body is reduced to pulp as cars run him over in joyous retribution."
But history is not all trajectory for columnists to cite at their convenience either to justify American foreign policy or to suggest a more "muscular U.S. military presence" in Iraq. His is a poor, loaded summation of Iraq’s British history. If David Brooks cared about its recent history, he would study up on the effects of the destruction of Fallujah in 2004 on general Iraqi regard for America. As much one can rightly call Iraq’s general history violent and a fine example of what went wrong after World War I, "Iraq" and "Iraqis" are not intrinsically greedy and blood-lusting. Historians don’t try and make points like that.
If David Brooks were actually interested in illuminating the history of Iraq for the op-ed page, he would have identified "a former prime minister… found on the street by a mob" as Nuri Al-Said, who revolved in and out of influence throughout Iraq’s first 30 or so years until the revolution in 1958. No, the mob that killed that former prime minister was not simply out one day killing people, like all days in Iraq it seems as Brooks wants us to believe; they were taking to the streets because it was the revolution to remove the king and his parliament, a fairly singular moment in Iraq’s history. Al-Said, who was prime minister fourteen times between the 1930 and 1950s, represents the volatility of Iraqi government throughout that time, without a doubt, when a progression of coups and counter-coups, either by the military or the parliamentary figures ostensibily outside the military, consistently changed the cast in the government. His death does relate the extent of violence in 1958, and most of all the level of anti-British imperial sentiment, but I wouldn’t connect that with "children…gunned down from airplanes" in a general argument on Iraqis penchant for violence, blood lust, and greed. After all, one might wonder whose airplanes gunned down children. Well, the only air force in Iraq in the period Brooks cites was the RAF, and routine air raids were the preferred British tactic to keep the country under control.
The state of Iraq was formed in 1921, though Brooks feels no need to make this small point, likely because it’s a rebuttal to his own supposedly convincing citation of a British official in 1923 that the Shias "have no motive for refraining from sacrificing the interests of Iraq to those which they conceive to be their own." In 1923 the concept of "Iraq" was two years old. How can Brooks reach back into history, quote a British official, and then conclude, wholesale, that here is our evidence that Shias have always been against "the interests of Iraq"? Iraq was barely a state in 1923, drawn-up at the Cairo Conference in 1921 and imposed by the British government on three former Ottoman provinces — Basra, Baghdad, Mosul — with distinct ethnic differences, histories, and rivalries. The only way one can reach a conclusion that Shias in 1923 can be described as "sacrificing the interests of Iraq" is in this quote by a British official, which was all the research that Brooks wanted to do, since that was the only point he wanted to make all along. He’ll assume we don’t question the absurdity, and the historical sloppiness, in arguing that yes, Shias were sacrificing the interests of Iraq, and therefore all Iraqis, by rebelling against the imposed state two years after its creation.
Since June, I’ve been running War Post, a research blog that seeks to present "Iraq: 90 years apart" mainly through the letters and narratives of the soldiers fighting there. The letters of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force of 1914-1918 are compared with letters, emails, and blogs from our current war. The work is meant to be an archive of soldiers’ experience, framed by my own commentary as a college student majoring in history and blogging about war during wartime. I don’t try and suggest trans-historical truths about Iraq, focusing more on the brutal contrasts of Indian soldiers starving to death in a siege in Kut in 1916 and American soldiers burning a dead cow on the side of the street since it might be an IED. Conclusions like "Shias have always sacrificed the interests of Iraq" or that "Iraq, historically, is unwilling to to compromise for the common good" are the points of syndicated columnists who are given a pass on distorting history since, hopefully, their readers wouldn’t know otherwise.
But it’s not a surprise — David Brooks is a bad historian, but I know I don’t expect David Brooks to be a historian. He’s paid to write in line with his image as a nuanced, measured New York conservative, never mind the fact that this op-ed in the end offers the same advice for Iraq you’d find in the Wall Street Journal or on Fox News — a more "muscular" US presence.
What tips the whole thing over, though (and this is a shame because it’s the IHT), is the editorial by David Harris of the American Jewish Committee, who argues that Israel cannot "stand on the sidelines" in Gaza and therefore should try and remove Hamas. Nevermind the pathological bent of this op-ed — Israel is anywhere but on the sidelines in Gaza, killing 22 42 Palestinians there this week, including two women protesting outside a mosque, and they have killed hundreds since the early summer. Nevermind the selective view of Hamas, quoting only from a stump rally while ignoring any of the signs of Hamas’ actual moderation since assuming power (yes, Hamas has shown signs of moderation, even if all the American media will print about Palestine is that Haniya said three times in a row that they would never recognize Israel).
Again, the main problem is history, and the sad state of American papers and popular discourse that has no problem propping up political positions with bad history.
"As a result of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s bold decision, the Palestinian residents of Gaza were given self-rule for the first time in their history over the entire Strip. Not even under Egyptian control, from 1948 to 1967, until Israel entered Gaza in a war of self-defense, did Gazans enjoy a modicum of autonomy."
The June War was a resounding success for Israel, but calling it a defensive war in an echo of every "defensive" war in the Occupied Territories or in Lebanon obviously says more about Mr. Harris’ motives and uses for history than anything accurate about Palestine. Menachem Begin said of the Six Day War (in an address in 1982, the same year as Israel’s invasion Lebanon, under Begin): "The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."
Anger at Middle East commentary in the New York Times as I’m in Cairo is no surprise; one doesn’t have to go all the way to Egypt to see how the Times selects its Mid East authorities, and how much of a balance Arthur Sulzberger’s paper cares to strike between Israel and the Palestinians. It’s the feigned history in op-eds like Brooks’, and a lesser extent Harris’, that are most troubling. While terms like "defensive war" can be argued in a historical framework for far too long, the more general concern is this: that the Times op-ed editors likely assume that their readers, whether in New York or around the world reading the Herald Tribune, don’t know history either and will be quick to appreciate Mr. Brooks work today on the history of Iraq.
Magical Green Travel in the Gulf, Fares Very Moderate
Illuminating copy in the caption, and very biographical: "Away from town, not everything depends on oil."
The New York Times thinks you should go to Dubai. I was sold on the idea in earlier spreads in the New Yorker and in Vanity Fair, really, but look! - we can be eco-tourists in Dubai, in reaches of desert where "not everything depends on oil." !!!!!!
Go, traveler, to Dubai, for the docile, earth-kind Orientalist fantasias of a not-very-hot-at-all-for-the-desert-really desert vacation. And one that is eco-friendly, in-sha’allah.
