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One of the things you will almost inevitably find on the internet, almost more commonly than badly-made porn, is angry opinions about the Middle East. 'What to do about the Middle East' is one of the things you're MOST likely to find being discussed loudly and in broad, sweeping generalizations in comments sections. And I've noticed said 'debates' tend to be A) wildly misinformed about actual history and B) shockingly, depressingly eurocentric. So this is going to be my attempt to clear up what I can of the misunderstandings, and likely, will utterly fail at changing the opinion of anybody whatsoever. All that said, let's begin!
#1: The Middle East Is Not Just Israel And 'Everyone Who Isn't Israel'
This one is particularly niggling because it's a very eurocentric viewpoint, and therefore a very popular viewpoint among people who have a vested interest in portraying Israel as a western-backed 'civilizing element' taming the savage badlands full of violent lunatics. That is a very pretty, neat, convenient narrative, and like every single pretty, neat, and convenient narrative in geopolitics it is patently false.
In point of fact, long before Israel existed, and to make this point extremely clear, Israel is a MODERN nation that only came about in the 20th century, NOT a continuation of historical Jewish kingdoms in the Middle East, the Middle East was a bright spot of culture and learning during the crushing intellectual poverty of the European Middle Ages. We have Middle Eastern culture and in particular the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates to thank for rather a lot of Very Cultured Things, including modern mathematics, astronomy, and the long-term preservation of huge swaths of so-called 'classical'(read: ancient Greek and Roman) artwork, philosophy, and mythology. So critical are Middle Eastern contributions to mathematics and science that the basic numbers you can look at on your keyboard right now are called 'Arabic numerals,' which is probably because they are Arabic numerals.
All of which is essentially to point out that far from being culturally 'backwards' and in dire need of the civilizing hand of the western world, the Middle East has, historically, been a diverse, culturally affluent, highly-advanced civilization even, or ESPECIALLY, compared to Medieval European nation-states. But that narrative isn't convenient to the people who set the pick of this kind of discussion, so all this is cheerfully swept under the rug because pfft, brown people, am I right?
In point of fact, the modern Middle-East is STILL a culturally affluent, politically vibrant, and ethnically and religiously diverse landscape, far, FAR from being a homogenous, monolithic axis of Nasty Arab Buggers who hate the western world. Not only is that racist, it's also inaccurate, particularly given several traditionally-Christian states in the region, most notably my ethnic homeland, Lebanon. But even putting aside the overtly Christian states, let's not forget that tolerance of Christianity is widespread; Jordan traditionally reserves a number of cabinet posts specifically for representatives of the Christian community, for example. What I'm getting at is that when you talk about the Middle East, you are taking about a really frigging huge and diverse area: in terms of land-mass, the Middle East, by national borders of nations considered to be part of the region, would take up just over 90% of the landmass of the continental United States. And of that vast amount of land, the region considered to be 'Israel and Palestine' is less than 5%. Which brings me to my next point.
#2: The Middle East Is Actually Pretty Darn Peaceful
When you factor OUT internal civil wars and the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, who again are a VERY small segment of Middle Eastern population, you know what you DON'T actually see a lot of in the Middle East? Wars.
Okay, this is whitewashing it a little. There have been a number of violent ethnic purges in the Middle East over the past century, but 'hilariously' enough, these have been largely contained to Middle Eastern powers backed by the United States and Great Britain. Which is a neat little rhetorical dodge, isn't it? "OBVIOUSLY you're all savages. You keep killing each other with all these weapons we keep giving you and telling you to use on each other!" Between current ethnic conflicts in Turkey, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein's branch of the Ba'ath Party in Iraq, and the Iranian Shahs, the most violent and bigoted factions in Middle Eastern politics have largely been those backed, funded, and armed by the Western world.
To swing the discussion back towards the elephant in the room, this is even true of Palestine. The idea of a Palestinian state, separate from the cultural hegemony of what was then the Ottoman Empire, was an idea propagated amongst Palestinian nationalists... by British supporters during WW1. British agents actively encouraged Palestinian revolution in order to help them prosecute their war against the Ottomans, which was rapidly being divided-up piecemeal by the other great powers. Palestine, once British troops helped 'secure' it, was then promised by the British to, among other, the Palestinians, the French, themselves, and finally to the Zionist movement, who took the land to found the modern state of Israel. Which is a far less tidy narrative for everyone involved, but it's ESPECIALLY less tidy to Great Britain, which has largely avoided taking responsibility for the violent sectarian and ethnic conflicts it actively fomented.
And when I say fomented, I really do mean that. Up until WW1, Palestine and in particular Jerusalem was a hotbed of people getting along peacefully, with a population that was roughly an even split between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, all of whom got along peacefully and with striking religious tolerance. As the holy city for the three biggest monotheist faiths in the world, the Ottomans, while being a Muslim state by tradition and law, encouraged tolerance because... well, tolerance was easier than having to send in the troops and break everything up. It was not until, yes, Great Britain moved in to 'secure' this lawless frontier that things were divided-up based upon religious and ethnic lines(some of which they made up on the spot), so that British occupation forces could more easily govern things. Or, rather, 'govern things without having to actually think about the people who lived there or acknowledge their culture.'
#3: The Conflict Between Israel And Palestine Is A Modern Ethnic And Nationalist Conflict, Not An Ancient Religious One
Which, conveniently, brings me rocketing to my final point: the idea that Muslims and Jews are engaged in some kind of eternal, thousand-year-long spiritual war with one another that can only be resolved with helicopter gunships and cruise missiles is A) a thoroughly modern one, as in 'younger than the very idea of cruise missiles,' and B) really quite incredibly wrong.
I'm just gonna be blunt here. At the time the ancient Jewish kingdoms in the Middle East, the only ones who might have had some claim to the territory on grounds of traditional holding, evaporated, either via outside threats, financial insolvency, or just plain dying off for various other reasons... um... there was no such thing as 'Islam.' Islam hasn't even EXISTED for the thousands of years this narrative implies: the Prophet Mohammed died in 632 AD/CE. Even IF there was some surviving Jewish state(there wasn't) that came into conflict with the early Islamic Empire(they didn't), that COULD only be about as 'early' as the 8th Century, when the Umayyad Caliphate held sway.
And here's the funny thing: the Ummayads LOVED Jews. Not loved in the sense of 'encouraged to participate freely in governance of the land,' because this WAS still the Middle Ages and monarchical theocratic dynastic rule was still the standard, but they DID show remarkable religious tolerance for the time. Jewish subjects of the era were allowed to practice their religion freely as long as they paid a tax to do so, which is... okay, not awesome, but it's far from Western conceptions of Islam being a faith that spread itself via a doctrine of conversion by the sword. The Ummayad dynasty happened to LIKE Jews, rather a lot, because they were a guaranteed source of regular income for the state who largely kept to themselves and didn't start trouble; if anything, they had more trouble keeping their own Muslim subjects in line(which is an even MORE complicated topic).
Put succinctly, there IS no history of war between Muslims and Jews, until the 20th century. There was, quite simply, no Jewish state for Muslim states to be at war WITH. More to the point, the current conflicts between the Jewish state of Israel and other Muslim states in the Middle East are not, I reiterate, not about religion. Not even one iota.
I will not argue that these conflicts often have religious dogma used to justify them. But claiming the conflicts themselves are religiously-motivated is not only wrong, it's dangerously wrong. Nobody in the Middle East right now is fighting over whether you should fast during Yom Kippur or Ramadan, or whether or not children should be circumcised at birth, or debating things Abraham did long before the birth of Christ at gunpoint. Calling it a religious conflict is convenient and flowery and palatable to our sensibilities about historical Middle Eastern conflict, because the typical Western perspective of the Middle East is still grounded in mentalities formed back when the Crusaders were duking it out with the Saracens, but it simply isn't true. What spurs these conflicts now is that Israel wants more land, and the people currently living on that land would like to keep it. That's not a 'thousand-year war between faiths.' That's a fifty to sixty-year almost-war over accounting, real estate, and who owes taxes to whom.
The portrayal of Israeli/Palestinian ethnic conflict as one that is 'ancient' is a portrayal largely propagated by people who stand to benefit from their constituents not thinking about things all that much. And if you're someone who would like to see this conflict ended with one side beating the other, that's very tidy and neat and justifiable. But the very portrayal of this conflict as ancient and intractable belies the reality that it is modern, caused largely by the interference of the Western world, and has come, even as recently as the mid-90s, achingly close to resolution. When we talk about 'peace in the Middle East,' that's typically a punchline about hopelessness. But it's easy to forget that in the long view, this is a young conflict perpetrated by young combatants, ones who haven't yet had the time to grow weary of war or come to an understanding.
This kind of conflict seems interminable when you're watching it happen, but to treat it as hopeless out-of-the-gate is to TRULY give up on the idea of resolving it. And that resolution, when it comes, is only going to come when we acknowledge the idea of the Middle East not as a backwards wasteland full of greedy oil barons and corrupt theocracies, but as an equal to the Western world. Only when our history is allowed to be valid will that history forget the pains of conflict.
#1: The Middle East Is Not Just Israel And 'Everyone Who Isn't Israel'
This one is particularly niggling because it's a very eurocentric viewpoint, and therefore a very popular viewpoint among people who have a vested interest in portraying Israel as a western-backed 'civilizing element' taming the savage badlands full of violent lunatics. That is a very pretty, neat, convenient narrative, and like every single pretty, neat, and convenient narrative in geopolitics it is patently false.
In point of fact, long before Israel existed, and to make this point extremely clear, Israel is a MODERN nation that only came about in the 20th century, NOT a continuation of historical Jewish kingdoms in the Middle East, the Middle East was a bright spot of culture and learning during the crushing intellectual poverty of the European Middle Ages. We have Middle Eastern culture and in particular the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates to thank for rather a lot of Very Cultured Things, including modern mathematics, astronomy, and the long-term preservation of huge swaths of so-called 'classical'(read: ancient Greek and Roman) artwork, philosophy, and mythology. So critical are Middle Eastern contributions to mathematics and science that the basic numbers you can look at on your keyboard right now are called 'Arabic numerals,' which is probably because they are Arabic numerals.
All of which is essentially to point out that far from being culturally 'backwards' and in dire need of the civilizing hand of the western world, the Middle East has, historically, been a diverse, culturally affluent, highly-advanced civilization even, or ESPECIALLY, compared to Medieval European nation-states. But that narrative isn't convenient to the people who set the pick of this kind of discussion, so all this is cheerfully swept under the rug because pfft, brown people, am I right?
In point of fact, the modern Middle-East is STILL a culturally affluent, politically vibrant, and ethnically and religiously diverse landscape, far, FAR from being a homogenous, monolithic axis of Nasty Arab Buggers who hate the western world. Not only is that racist, it's also inaccurate, particularly given several traditionally-Christian states in the region, most notably my ethnic homeland, Lebanon. But even putting aside the overtly Christian states, let's not forget that tolerance of Christianity is widespread; Jordan traditionally reserves a number of cabinet posts specifically for representatives of the Christian community, for example. What I'm getting at is that when you talk about the Middle East, you are taking about a really frigging huge and diverse area: in terms of land-mass, the Middle East, by national borders of nations considered to be part of the region, would take up just over 90% of the landmass of the continental United States. And of that vast amount of land, the region considered to be 'Israel and Palestine' is less than 5%. Which brings me to my next point.
#2: The Middle East Is Actually Pretty Darn Peaceful
When you factor OUT internal civil wars and the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, who again are a VERY small segment of Middle Eastern population, you know what you DON'T actually see a lot of in the Middle East? Wars.
Okay, this is whitewashing it a little. There have been a number of violent ethnic purges in the Middle East over the past century, but 'hilariously' enough, these have been largely contained to Middle Eastern powers backed by the United States and Great Britain. Which is a neat little rhetorical dodge, isn't it? "OBVIOUSLY you're all savages. You keep killing each other with all these weapons we keep giving you and telling you to use on each other!" Between current ethnic conflicts in Turkey, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein's branch of the Ba'ath Party in Iraq, and the Iranian Shahs, the most violent and bigoted factions in Middle Eastern politics have largely been those backed, funded, and armed by the Western world.
To swing the discussion back towards the elephant in the room, this is even true of Palestine. The idea of a Palestinian state, separate from the cultural hegemony of what was then the Ottoman Empire, was an idea propagated amongst Palestinian nationalists... by British supporters during WW1. British agents actively encouraged Palestinian revolution in order to help them prosecute their war against the Ottomans, which was rapidly being divided-up piecemeal by the other great powers. Palestine, once British troops helped 'secure' it, was then promised by the British to, among other, the Palestinians, the French, themselves, and finally to the Zionist movement, who took the land to found the modern state of Israel. Which is a far less tidy narrative for everyone involved, but it's ESPECIALLY less tidy to Great Britain, which has largely avoided taking responsibility for the violent sectarian and ethnic conflicts it actively fomented.
And when I say fomented, I really do mean that. Up until WW1, Palestine and in particular Jerusalem was a hotbed of people getting along peacefully, with a population that was roughly an even split between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, all of whom got along peacefully and with striking religious tolerance. As the holy city for the three biggest monotheist faiths in the world, the Ottomans, while being a Muslim state by tradition and law, encouraged tolerance because... well, tolerance was easier than having to send in the troops and break everything up. It was not until, yes, Great Britain moved in to 'secure' this lawless frontier that things were divided-up based upon religious and ethnic lines(some of which they made up on the spot), so that British occupation forces could more easily govern things. Or, rather, 'govern things without having to actually think about the people who lived there or acknowledge their culture.'
#3: The Conflict Between Israel And Palestine Is A Modern Ethnic And Nationalist Conflict, Not An Ancient Religious One
Which, conveniently, brings me rocketing to my final point: the idea that Muslims and Jews are engaged in some kind of eternal, thousand-year-long spiritual war with one another that can only be resolved with helicopter gunships and cruise missiles is A) a thoroughly modern one, as in 'younger than the very idea of cruise missiles,' and B) really quite incredibly wrong.
I'm just gonna be blunt here. At the time the ancient Jewish kingdoms in the Middle East, the only ones who might have had some claim to the territory on grounds of traditional holding, evaporated, either via outside threats, financial insolvency, or just plain dying off for various other reasons... um... there was no such thing as 'Islam.' Islam hasn't even EXISTED for the thousands of years this narrative implies: the Prophet Mohammed died in 632 AD/CE. Even IF there was some surviving Jewish state(there wasn't) that came into conflict with the early Islamic Empire(they didn't), that COULD only be about as 'early' as the 8th Century, when the Umayyad Caliphate held sway.
And here's the funny thing: the Ummayads LOVED Jews. Not loved in the sense of 'encouraged to participate freely in governance of the land,' because this WAS still the Middle Ages and monarchical theocratic dynastic rule was still the standard, but they DID show remarkable religious tolerance for the time. Jewish subjects of the era were allowed to practice their religion freely as long as they paid a tax to do so, which is... okay, not awesome, but it's far from Western conceptions of Islam being a faith that spread itself via a doctrine of conversion by the sword. The Ummayad dynasty happened to LIKE Jews, rather a lot, because they were a guaranteed source of regular income for the state who largely kept to themselves and didn't start trouble; if anything, they had more trouble keeping their own Muslim subjects in line(which is an even MORE complicated topic).
Put succinctly, there IS no history of war between Muslims and Jews, until the 20th century. There was, quite simply, no Jewish state for Muslim states to be at war WITH. More to the point, the current conflicts between the Jewish state of Israel and other Muslim states in the Middle East are not, I reiterate, not about religion. Not even one iota.
I will not argue that these conflicts often have religious dogma used to justify them. But claiming the conflicts themselves are religiously-motivated is not only wrong, it's dangerously wrong. Nobody in the Middle East right now is fighting over whether you should fast during Yom Kippur or Ramadan, or whether or not children should be circumcised at birth, or debating things Abraham did long before the birth of Christ at gunpoint. Calling it a religious conflict is convenient and flowery and palatable to our sensibilities about historical Middle Eastern conflict, because the typical Western perspective of the Middle East is still grounded in mentalities formed back when the Crusaders were duking it out with the Saracens, but it simply isn't true. What spurs these conflicts now is that Israel wants more land, and the people currently living on that land would like to keep it. That's not a 'thousand-year war between faiths.' That's a fifty to sixty-year almost-war over accounting, real estate, and who owes taxes to whom.
The portrayal of Israeli/Palestinian ethnic conflict as one that is 'ancient' is a portrayal largely propagated by people who stand to benefit from their constituents not thinking about things all that much. And if you're someone who would like to see this conflict ended with one side beating the other, that's very tidy and neat and justifiable. But the very portrayal of this conflict as ancient and intractable belies the reality that it is modern, caused largely by the interference of the Western world, and has come, even as recently as the mid-90s, achingly close to resolution. When we talk about 'peace in the Middle East,' that's typically a punchline about hopelessness. But it's easy to forget that in the long view, this is a young conflict perpetrated by young combatants, ones who haven't yet had the time to grow weary of war or come to an understanding.
This kind of conflict seems interminable when you're watching it happen, but to treat it as hopeless out-of-the-gate is to TRULY give up on the idea of resolving it. And that resolution, when it comes, is only going to come when we acknowledge the idea of the Middle East not as a backwards wasteland full of greedy oil barons and corrupt theocracies, but as an equal to the Western world. Only when our history is allowed to be valid will that history forget the pains of conflict.
