Air University Review, May-June 1978

Dr. Lewis B. Ware

Many people thought that with the decisive defeat of the Arabs in the June War of 1967 the Palestinian issue had been resolved. And yet the sad truth of Arab-Jewish discord remains to haunt us today as the struggle over Palestine increases daily to even higher levels of threat and counterthreat. Professors J. C. Hurewitz, Walter Laqueur, and Kamal Salibi offer us, by way of their careful historical analyses of the problem, some explanations for this continuing imbroglio in the Middle East.

In his impressive History of Zionism,* Walter Laqueur traces the development of Zionism from an effort to preserve Jewish socioculture values in the Diaspora to a feebly articulated political doctrine for the reconstitution of Jewish national life in Palestine. The author points out that this change in Zionist goals is relatively recent, resulting from the rise of Nazism and the subsequent annihilation of European Jewry. Professor Laqueur argues that, up to the appearance of Hitler, there had been some grounds for reconciliation of both Zionist and Arab Palestinian claims, but the need to save individual Jews from certain death, by bringing them to and settling them in Palestine, effectively ended any possibility for Arab-Jewish rapprochement. Thus, the history of modern Palestine was to be inexorably linked to a series of "discordant rights locked into inflexible attitudes;"

*Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Shocken Books, 1976, $6.95), 639 pages.

The student of Middle East affairs will find this book a moderate, well-written, and well-thought-out presentation of the essential dilemma. Moreover, the instructor will discover in the chapter "Thirteen Theses on Zionism" an invaluable aid for teaching Zionism as a political ideology

J.C. Hurewitz's book, The Struggle for Palestine,* fills a gap left by Laqueur’s masterful study. Professor Hurewitz gives us an account of the Arab-Zionist conflict in terms of the everyday practical politics in mandated Palestine from 1936 to the partition plan of 1947. The student will benefit not only from Hurewitz's painstaking scholarship but also from the fact that he was a firsthand observer of the events he describes. Although originally written in 1950, this analysis is still valid for today, especially with respect to Professor Hurewitz's appreciation of Arab interests during the mandate period, The author makes a number of points about the Arabs abundantly clear: Palestinian nationalism as a force strong enough to counterbalance Zionism never matured. It suffered first from the machinations of the two great families of Jerusalem, the Husseinis and the Nashashibis, to control political events for their own selfish purposes; second, Palestinian nationalism was made weak by the political disorganization of the Palestinian peasantry oppressed by absentee landlords; and third, the Palestinian National Movement was rendered ineffective by the sad spectacle of Palestinian needs forever subordinated to the struggle of other Arab peoples to free themselves from European colonialism.

*J.C. Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine (New York: Books, 1976, $6.95), 404 pages.

This last point is even more poignantly made by Professor Kamal Salibi's study of the recent Lebanese civil war. In his book, Crossroads to Civil War,* Salibi implies that had Palestinian nationalism not been stillborn at a time when it could have successfully opposed an unformed and as yet directionless Zionism, the need to subvert other Arab regimes in order to establish a base against a now firmly established Zionist state might not have been necessary. This, Salibi admits, is only one aspect of a basically internal Lebanese problem, but an important one nonetheless.

*Kamal Salibi, Crossroads to Civil War: Lebanon, 1958-1976 (Delamar, New York: Caravan Books, 1976, $15.00), 178 pages.

Professor Salibi is eminently well qualified to write the history of the Lebanese civil war. A distinguished historian of Lebanon, he was one of the captives of the conflict in Beirut. His study does much to disentangle the various warring Lebanese factions and make sense of their role and that of the Palestinians in the Lebanese tragedy. Unfortunately, the situation in Lebanon did not enable Professor Salibi to document his account properly, but this does not detract from his credibility as an insightful observer. The Lebanese problem, as Salibi indicates, is one where no Lebanese perceives the Lebanese state as legitimate. Salibi presents a picture of political bosses and their private armies who, in the absence of political legitimacy, struggle for control of truncated mountain constituencies where semideologized parties endeavor to break the stranglehold of these bosses over the populace by creating overarching national loyalties. The Palestinians attempted to win for their own purposes the allegiance of the dispossessed Muslim masses to whom the system had been particularly unresponsive. When the status quo, which remains the essential cornerstone of Lebanese political continuity, is fractured by some outside event, such as the October War of 1978, a general and usually violent redistribution of power in Lebanon occurs. It was this event on which the Palestinians hoped to capitalize in order to strengthen their hand against the Zionists. If Lebanon could have been brought to heel, Salibi argues, freedom to maintain pressure against Israel, despite Arab defections, might have been realized.

Although Salibi sees the Palestinian-Zionist struggle as a catalyst in the Lebanese crisis, he appears to lay blame on the Christian Phalangists for escalating the conflict. The Phalangists, he claims, form the backbone of right wing Lebanese "isolationism." Rather than yield the privileges accrued over time, this minority Christian party preferred to hold out stubbornly for the integrity of a status quo Lebanon by refusing to recognize the demands of the new majority for power. Ironically, the Phalange and its allies have now become the new "Zionists" of the Middle East.

Salibi's intricate study of this process is arranged chronologically and makes exciting reading. I highly recommend all three of these histories to any reader who wishes to deepen his knowledge of Middle East affairs.

Dr. Lewis B. Ware (Ph.D., Princeton University) is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History and a member of the Documentary Research Branch, Air University. He has taught and done research at the University of Tunis and in Cairo, as a Fellow of the American Research Center. Before coming to Maxwell, he was on the staff of New York University and served as a consultant to the International Research and Exchange Commission. Dr. Ware is a prizewinning amateur photographer.

 Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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