Book Review: Arabian Plights

The premise of this book is that the best way to resolve the problems of the Middle East is by removing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an issue.

Conflict in the Middle East resonates in the Western world more profoundly than conflict in any other region. This is because three of the great world religions emanate from the region. When walking the alleys of Jerusalem’s old city, it is hard for anyone not to be caught up with the significance of the place and its people.

Peter Rodgers relies on a bewildering array of statistics to show that the Middle East is corrupt, undemocratic, uneducated, unsustainable and broken.

One of the central themes of his book is that United States foreign policy in the Middle East, in the pursuit of securing oil supplies, along with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, allows undemocratic Arab states to subjugate their people and keep them in medieval conditions.

There is a strong focus on America’s role in Iraq. I empathise with the view that we have all been diminished by our complicity in America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. However, the mess has been made and all of us must contribute to bettering the plight of ordinary Iraqis. That is the moral obligation of America, Britain and Australia.

There is no doubt that America has had to compromise its agenda of democracy and human rights to secure its national interest in the Middle East. The Western world is complicit in this compromise.

Oil has become the lubricant for maintaining autocratic regimes and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is however too simplistic to weigh down America with the obligation to profoundly change the cultural paradigms of the Middle East when its national interest (and ours) is reliant upon the flow of oil from the Middle East.

However, I am struck by the pessimism of the leading Western commentators on the Middle East (including Robert Fisk and Thomas Friedman). They seem to be suffering, and I include Rodgers in this, from post traumatic stress disorder. I don’t doubt that sustained exposure to the violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine conditions one to a certain view. But it seems to have predisposed them to a view that all the people of the Middle East are disastrously affected by their regimes and conflict all of the time. This is simply not true. I have always been amazed and humbled at the resilience of the people in the Middle East to live their lives as best as they can, despite their rulers and the conflict raging around them.

Unfortunately, very little of this book is devoted to analysing and resolving the complex issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rather, most of the book is made up of describing the current political and social situation of the other Arab nations in the Middle East with a dark hypothetical view of what might occur in the future if the current paradigm continues.

Rodgers does not, in any useful way, examine how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be solved other than by demanding that Israel (with pressure from America) compromise more than it already has to achieve peace with the Palestinians.

Whilst this approach is attractive to pro-Palestinian interest groups, what is ignored was the lost opportunity for a genuine concord between the Israelis and the Palestinians from the Camp David talks in 2000. Ehud Barak, then Prime Minister of Israel, offered substantial concessions (the greatest made by an Israeli politician to date) to Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians. Arafat’s refusal to make an agreement with Israel in those circumstances has made any future negotiations difficult and intractable as the Israelis, understandably, feel that they have no genuine partner in peace negotiations. The passing of Arafat; the incapacitation of Ariel Sharon; and the election of Hamas have not advanced the peace process.

The elephant in the room of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, which is glossed over by Rodgers, is the “right of return”. By this, I mean that both Fatah and Hamas have consistently demanded that those Palestinian refugees currently in camps outside of Palestine be allowed to return. In 2003, the number of Palestinian refugees, on United Nations rolls, in camps outside of the Palestinian Territories was in excess of two million and growing. Given the plethora of statistics Rodgers cites in his chapter, “a demographic gulf“, it would have been instructive for him to analyse the demographic effect on Israel of millions of Palestinians returning to Gaza and the West Bank. Not addressing this issue diminishes the impact of his book.

The chapter on “whose Islam is it?” is a useful analysis of the tensions within Islam. It is not possible to understand the dynamics of the Middle East in any real way without an understanding of the schism between Sunni and Shia and how that has manifested itself today in Islamic fundamentalism.

Rodgers’ chapter on the effect of the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the wider Middle East is relevant as it underlines a deep-rooted psychological reluctance among Arabs to view their own troubled circumstances as being caused by something more than the existence of Israel.

This is not a book for the first time reader on the Middle East. It relies on an assumed knowledge of the history and politics of the Middle East, particularly post-World War II. Read alone, it feeds the prevalent conspiracy theories as to why the United States pursues its foreign policy in the Middle East as it does and, by doing so, unnecessarily demonises the influence of America and Israel in the region without balance.

Rodgers’ views on the hypothetical future of the Middle East are dark and disturbing and are not to be lightly put to the side.

What strength this book has is in provoking discussion about what might happen in the Middle East if we (we being the Western world) do not contribute to changing the current paradigm. In that respect, it is an important, if flawed, contribution to the debate.

My real problem with this book, and the pessimism of other Middle Eastern commentators, is that, if they are to be believed, there is no hope. Whilst acknowledging the difficult path ahead, I am more optimistic. That is not to say the future is not without risks. What we should not expect is a mirror image of our own society but one that reflects the cultures, religion and pragmatic reality of the Middle East4

David Thomae

Footnotes

1. A short bio (on the publisher’s web site) (on the publisher’s web site) of this former Australian ambassador to Israel may be found here.
2. The web site of this independent Australian publisher is here.
3. David is at the Queensland Bar. He has served as a military observer with the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation in Israel, Lebanon and Syria.
4. The book is reasonably priced with a recommended retail price of $29.95.