The Middle East

ATLANTIC

January 1948

on the World today

THE United Nations’ handling of the Palestine question was one of the most heartening international developments since the war. The Special Committee, an impartially appointed instrument of world opinion, removed the most important aspects of the problem from the realm of controversy. Unanimously it recommended termination of the British Mandate and independence for Palestine. By a majority of seven to three it presented a plan for partition far removed in spirit and in detail from the “federation” scheme advanced last year by the British Cabinet. It also recommended that during the transition period the Mandatory Power be responsible for the admission of 150,000 immigrants into the proposed Jewish state and abolish the restrictions on land sales to Jews in that area.

Attempts to delay the UN Assembly’s vote on the partition plan were frustrated by U.S.-Russian insistence on a decision, and the plan was carried thirty-three to thirteen, with ten abstentions. The only non-Moslem countries which voted against partition were Greece and Cuba.

The UN plan found the United States and Soviet Russia substantially in agreement for the first time on a major issue—an electrifying development that gave a sorely needed lift to the world organization. Furthermore, Gromyko’s and Tsarapkin’s surprise declarations in support of a Jewish state - made in the face of Arab threats to the West of a bolt into the Soviet camp — undercut the Arab League game of playing the powers off against each other and placed the whole Middle East situation in a more realistic perspective.

The outstanding stumbling block to a solution was Britain’s refusal, despite its decision to evacuate Palestine, to coöperate in a settlement not acceptable to Arabs and Jews alike. This attitude came strangely from a government which had submitted the problem to the UN on the very ground that all possibilities of Arab-Jewish agreement had been exhausted; and which, furthermore, had shown no compunction about using force to impose the pro-Arab White Paper at great cost to itself in lives and money.

The United States and Russia achieved a compromise which asked no more of the Mandatory than to maintain order until evacuation and give to Arabs and Jews an equal opportunity to prepare for safeguarding their independence.

Will the Arabs go to war?

That there will be violence in Palestine is certain. But how much? Arab reluctance to make sacrifices to combat Zionism is a matter of record. Despite the tempest of speechmaking that greeted the 1936 Palestine riots, little was done to assist the insurgents, who at no time numbered more than 3000. The current Arab boycott of Zionist products has been so flagrantly violated that not long ago the Iraqui premier declared that only in Iraq was the boycott effective. It is no secret in the Middle East capitals that the Arab League meeting in Beirut, summoned in October to plan warfare against a Jewish state, degenerated into a contest between the Mufti and King Abdullah of TransJordan for control of Palestine.

The long-standing feud between the Mufti and Abdullah —referred to as “Rabbi Abdullah” in the Mufti’s Berlin broadcasts — is characteristic of the fissures within the Arab League. Abdullah for his part nurses a long-standing quarrel with Ibn Saud, who expelled Abdullah’s father, King Husain, from the Hejaz in 1924.

on the Middle East

Trans-Jordan and Iraq form a close partnership within the League by reason of family ties: the boy king of Iraq is Abdullah’s grandnephew and the regent is his nephew. The two Hashemite (of the family of Husain) countries, while retaining separate rulers, plan to abolish customs barriers and to adopt a common currency and passport system as first steps toward a more ambitious program of federation — the so-called Greater Syria plan, one of the most explosive issues within the Arab world.

The plan is vehemently opposed by most Syrian politicians, who see their jobs endangered, and by the Christian majority in the Lebanon, which is fearful of being engulfed in a Moslem confederation. The latter have never forgotten the massacre of Assyrian Christians in Iraq after the First World War, and feel that their security is linked with that of the other large non-Moslem minority in the Arab world.

King Farouk of Egypt is a stanch upholder of the status quo, under which his country is the richest, the most populous, and the most highly industrialized of the Arab states. He and Ibn Saud heartily agree that Hashemite ambitions must be held in check, but their own relations are strained. In the eyes of Ibn Saud, leader of the Wahabites, the puritans of Islam, Farouk is a westernized young upstart who has the presumption to challenge his claim to Arab leadership.

The intensity of Arab rivalries makes it improbable that the Arab leaders will succeed in forging a military coalition. It is still less probable, should they go to war, that they could overcome the Hagana or Jewish Defense Force. Even as an illegal formation, the Hagana — estimated to be 70,000 to 80,000 strong—is a well-trained, well-equipped fighting force, officered by men who fought in the British Army, some with the Commandos. As the army of an independent Jewish state, its manpower could be appreciably enlarged and its equipment fortified by Palestine industry, which turned out considerable quantities of war material for the British.

Second-rate Arab Army

All the Arab armies together total approximately 135,000 men, a high proportion of whom must be kept at home to maintain order among the discontented masses and — in ihe case of Syria and Iraq— to cope with mutinous tribesmen. And this figure cannot be greatly strengthened by conscription. Eighty per cent of Egyptian recruits are rejected as physically unfit, and the health of the masses is, if anything, lower elsewhere.

The only first-class fighting units in the Arab world are the Trans-Jordan Arab Legion and the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force, both of which obey British orders; their involvement would be tantamount to British intervention. The Iraqui Army, strongest of the purely Arab forces, demonstrated its ineptitude both in Rashid Ali’s pro-Axis revolt and in its incapacity to subdue Kurdish rebellions without British assistance. It was Lawrence of Arabia who said of the Arabs’ fighting prowess in Seven Pillars of Wisdom: “One company of Turks firmly entrenched in open country could have defied the entire army of them.”

So it would be today. Testifying before the AngloAmerican Committee, General D’Arcy, then Commander-in-Chief in Palestine, declared that the Hagana could hold the country against all the Arab states for years. One reservation is necessary. Britain is at present helping to train and equip most of the Arab armies. Were such assistance allowed to continue after the Arabs went to war, the Hagana would be placed at a hopeless disadvantage.

Misery for the poor

A Palestine settlement will in the long run compel the Arab rulers to devote more attention to the plight of the barefoot Arab. Poverty and disease make the life of the Arab peasant or worker a condition little removed from walking death. A random sampling of social statistics tells an appalling story. In Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, nearly 90 per cent of the peasantry are wasting away from bilharzia. Malaria kills 50,000 annually in Iraq. The incidence of pellagra and trachoma is staggeringly high. Limbs are everywhere disfigured by what a perverted nationalism variously terms the Nile boil, the Bagdad boil, and the Aleppo Button.

Life expectancy in Iraq is 27 years; one child in two dies before the age of five. In Egypt, the most advanced of the Arab states, the death rate is higher than in India; in rural areas there is but one doctor to every 10,000 inhabitants. In the whole of Trans-Jordan, three times the size of Palestine, there are twenty-four physicians and five dentists. Everywhere dirt, ignorance, and official apathy and corruption invite epidemic disease; Egypt’s cholera epidemic, now in its fourth month, is still spreading. During a previous anti-plague campaign it cost the Egyptian government $50 to kill a rat.

One half of one per cent of the population owns one third of the land. Under an antiquated system of land tenure, the Arab peasantry is chronically in debt to usurers and absentee landlords; interest rates frequently range from 50 to 200 per cent. The average annual income of an Iraqui peasant family before the war was $35. Children six years old are employed in the cotton-gin plant of the Banque Misr of Egypt for a daily wage of fifteen cents. The Syrian agricultural worker is paid even less. Iraq, once the seat of a flowering civilization, now cultivates only 20 per cent of its arable land; Syria only 35 per cent. Slavery is recognized by law in Saudi Arabia and the Yemen, which was recently admitted to the UN.

Nothing remotely resembling democratic political conditions obtains in any the Arab countries. Arab politics is an affair of personalities and family loyalties. When a former Egyptian premier was accused of packing the administration with his near relatives, he replied: “How can I run a government unless I have men I can trust in the key positions?”

Censorship powers enable the Arab governments to suspend or suppress by ministerial fiat new spapers critical of the administration. The Syrian Ministry of the Interior may dissolve any political party, group, or club that appears to act contrary to “the basic principles of the republican constitution.”

Subsidies for the rich

In the past decade, hundreds of millions of dollars have poured into the Arab world in the form of British subsidies, interest-free loans, oil royalties and expenditures by the oil companies, and wartime payments for goods and services purchased at highly inflated prices. Most of this wealth has been dissipated in regal display and the enrichment of the moneyed classes. Some of it now goes to support the Arab League, which can afford to vote the Mufti an allowance of $400,000.

These resources, if devoted to education, irrigation projects, and social services, could have transformed the face of the Arab world. The agricultural research section of the American Near East Foundation— a fine example of disinterested endeavor among the Arabs — offers impressive evidence of how much can be accomplished with how little: an expenditure of $600 on experiments to combat tomato disease in the Lebanon saved a crop worth two millions.

One of the great barriers to progress in the Arab world has been the relative absence of a socially conscious middle class. In the Lebanon, where French and American educators have long been active, 70 per cent of the population are literate, but elsewhere illiteracy ranges from 70 per cent in Syria to 90 per cent in Iraq, and more than that in the Arabian quadrilateral. There is no university in Iraq and only one newspaper in the Yemen, a country the size of Kansas with 31/2 million people.

Rising clamor for reform

Thus between the ruling Arab oligarchy and the inarticulate masses there exists only a thin layer of struggling professional men, underpaid white-collar workers (most of them in the bureaucracy), and excitable students. Many of the members of this group, proud of being effendis (gentlemen) and conscious of their dependence on patronage for advancement, have in the past identified their interests with those of the pashas, and so have failed to constitute a progressive force in politics. Since the war, however, there has been a growing change in the out look of the Arab middle-class intelligentsia — the most significant development in the Arab world since the time of Lawrence.

The young effendis in Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, and Bagdad are beginning to translate volatile clamor for reform into insistent pressure. Despite the repressive policies now in force under the guise of combating Communism, leftist journals and reform movements are sprouting faster than they can be suppressed.

The unanimity and vigor with which rival opposition parties protested the Lebanese and Iraqui elections are symptoms of a new temper among articulate Arabs. They cannot be swindled much longer with artificial excuses for postponing improvement of social conditions and obstructing the march of civilization. The proposed Jewish state will have the effect of quickening the civilizing process. In the course of time, it is bound to stimulate progressive Arabs with the example of an advanced technology, democratic institutions, and a sense of the dignity of human life unknown to the Arab oligarchy.

The Arab’s greatest champion, T. E. Lawrence, once wrote: “I am decidedly in favor of Zionism. Indeed, I look on the Jews as the natural importers of that Western leaven which is so necessary for the countries of the Near East. The success of their scheme will involve inevitably the raising of the present Arab population to their own material level, only a little after themselves in point of time, and the consequences might be of the highest importance for the future of the Arab world.”