The relationship between Israel and Jordan doesn’t fit the familiar template of the Arab-Israeli conflict. While it is certainly possible to write a history of Israeli-Jordanian interaction as a series of wars separated by periods of cold peace, that requires ignoring far too much of the past, and the present. In his later years, King Hussein frequently remarked on the peculiar intimacy of Israel and its Arab neighbors. The bulk of Jordan’s people live on the highlands above the Jordan River Valley, scant miles from the most inhabited areas of Israel, and they can literally gaze out over Israel and the West Bank when they watch the setting sun. In turn, many in Israel can look at the Jordanians every morning, stare at them from the beach resorts of the Dead Sea and from the Red Sea city of Eilat, which is separated from the Jordanian city of Aqaba by nothing more than a heavily fortified fence. Hussein took the ancient notion of the People of the Book very seriously. The kinship of race, history, and a shared God infused his sense of the region, as it still does for his son Abdullah.
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Even at its worst moments, the Jordanian-Israeli relationship has rarely been colored by
religious
animosity. The Hashemites take great pride in their lineage as descendants of Muhammad, but they have never supported the agenda of the fundamentalists. They have a conservative, hierarchical approach to government, which is more in the mold of classical Muslim states. Islam is central to their personal identity much as Christianity is central to British monarchs and politicians, and to American
presidents. But Islam is not a political force per se, and the Jordanians have resisted calls to turn their country into a polity where the
ulama
have ultimate authority.
As for Israel and Judaism, some of the post-1967 Israeli settlers were motivated by zealous notions of a biblical re-creation of greater Israel. But the Israeli state has remained, in spite of the rise of Jewish fundamentalism, more secular than not. Some of the Palestinians who became Jordanian citizens turned toward Islamic fundamentalism in their opposition to Israeli policies on the West Bank. But the leaders of both countries have never used religion as an excuse to fight one another. To the contrary. The Jordanian royal family’s sense of kinship with Israel derives from a basic belief that Jews and Arabs and Jews and Muslims are woven from the same cloth and are children of the same creator.
But because of the fraught nature of the larger Arab-Israeli conflict, the positive aspects of the Jordanian-Israeli entente have been downplayed by Israelis and Jordanians alike. Instead, war and extremism have dominated the Arab-Israeli agenda, and the nuance and moderation that have marked relations between Jordan and Israel have been pushed aside and neglected as a model for the present and the future.
LEBANON
LEBANON IS ANOTHER
ambiguous story that can serve almost any vision of relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Though its history is indelibly colored by the disastrous civil war that rent the country from 1975 until the mid-1990s (not to mention the more recent Israeli-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006), for more than a century Lebanon seemed to be a shining example of Muslim-Christian coexistence. The Maronites occupied a central place in the political and economic life of the region, and they had been crucial in the independence struggle against France. They were not the only Christian sect, but they outnumbered the Greek Orthodox, the Greek Catholics, and the Armenian Orthodox. The Muslims were themselves sectarian, with a large group of Sunnis, a growing population of Shi’a, and a concentrated Druze community. Beirut was a cosmopolitan city, with a powerful Maronite contingent but with other groups well represented. It was also
a commercial hub that looked more toward Europe than to the Arab world.
Outside of Beirut, each major group dominated a particular region, with the Maronites in the mountainous center, the Shi’ites mostly in the south, and the Sunnis along the coast and in the urban areas. Each of these communities was in turn led by a few powerful clans who could trace their lineage back centuries. The clan lords had fought one another in the past, but under the auspices of the Ottomans and the French, they had come to a modus vivendi. That balance was occasionally disrupted, as in 1858-60 and in 1958, usually after one group or another sought to change the status quo. These civil wars, lethal while they lasted, were always inconclusive, and were resolved by only slight changes to a system that gave each group sufficient autonomy and security.
The modern cornerstone of that system was an accord known as the “National Pact.” In 1943, recognizing that no one group was powerful enough to dominate the whole country, the leading Maronite family and one of the influential Sunni clans made a deal. They agreed that the president of Lebanon would be Maronite, the prime minister would be Sunni, and the head of the chamber of deputies would be a Shi’ite. It was, according to one of its architects, “the fusion of two tendencies into one ideology: complete and final independence without resorting to the protection of the West or to a unity or federation with the East.”
In the 1950s, the rise of Egypt’s Gamal Abd al-Nasser and the pan-Arab ideology of Nasserism put pressure on conservative regimes throughout the Arab world. Nasser had led a military coup that overthrew the Egyptian king, and that put the other Arab monarchies on notice. The Hashemites reacted by looking to the United States for support. Jordan and Iraq also made common cause with the aloof Saudis, who gravitated toward their onetime Hashemite adversaries in the face of the anti-royalist threat of Nasserism. Lebanon and Syria became pawns in this struggle, and when Syria tilted toward Egypt, the Maronites of Lebanon appealed to the United States. The balance between the sects in Lebanon was stable but susceptible to external disruptions. After the king of Iraq was overthrown and killed in 1958, and after King Hussein in Jordan narrowly avoided a coup, the Maronite president of Lebanon asked the United States to send troops to prevent incursions of Nasserist forces from Syria. Concerned that another pro-Western
regime was in jeopardy, President Eisenhower agreed. Within weeks, in the summer of 1958, more than ten thousand U.S. marines landed on the beaches of Beirut, where they found surprised sunbathers who were not aware that the country was in danger.
After this brief interruption, balance was restored, and Lebanon prospered in the 1960s. Beirut enjoyed halcyon days as a global entrepôt, filled with wealthy bankers and traders, and blessed with an enviable night life that welcomed the jet set no less than the French Riviera. The American University in Beirut attracted students from around the world and established itself as a premier research college. As Nasserism crested and then diminished, Lebanon looked forward to a period of calm, but that was not to be. The influx of Palestinian refugees after both the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars was one factor; changing demographics were another. The Shi’ites were becoming a larger portion of the population, yet their share of influence was still limited by the National Pact, which had been drawn up when they were a distant third in numbers. The civil war that erupted in 1975 was in fact multiple wars between ever-shifting factions who made and broke alliances at a dizzying pace. By the 1980s, Israel, Syria, and Iran intervened, and the influence of each remained pronounced even after the fighting ceased in the 1990s. Israeli presence in the south, Syrian control of the interior and the Bekaa Valley, and Iran’s support for Hezbollah hobbled the country and precluded any lasting stability.
Before 1975, the peace in Lebanon had been maintained through a combination of clan politics and a free-market economy in Beirut. The traditional leaders had managed the affairs of their own community, much as the
millets
under the Ottoman Empire had, and the national government served as a town square for the notables to air disputes. But the country never developed a cohesive national identity, or a strong military, and when groups of Palestinian refugees began to use parts of Lebanon to stage operations against Israel and against various parties in Lebanon that they disliked, the equilibrium disintegrated into the civil war that lasted in one form or another for more than two decades.
Which of these stories best captures Lebanon? The decades of peace and harmony between Christians and Muslims, or the civil war that saw not only Christians fighting Muslims, but Sunnis fighting Shi’ites, pro-Syrian groups fighting Palestinians, and the Druze fighting just about
everyone and Maronites most of all. Which is the “real” Lebanon—a failed experiment of what was known as “confessional democracy,” which honored the rights of each religious community, or a successful example of coexistence and toleration destroyed not by problems from within but by troubles in the surrounding region? And which of these stories will be seen in the future as the “real Lebanon”? A history of the United States in 1862 might have displayed skepticism about the American experiment and how it had finally foundered on the shoals of slavery. In the 1960s, Lebanon was celebrated as a beacon of toleration and openness. After 1975, it was the subject of eulogies for shattered dreams and lost generations. But as the civil war recedes into the distance, the memory of a stable past comes back into focus. Even with the Israeli bombardment of Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, whether Lebanon will once again be taken as a model for how different religious communities can coexist will depend not on what has happened in the past but on what happens now and in the future.
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ANOTHER STORY
WE ARE ALL
, to varying degrees, captives of our culture. With few exceptions, the current image of relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews is negative, and the belief that conflict has been ever present is deeply entrenched. Yet if the stories told in these pages say anything, it is that there is another perspective. Throughout history, there has been active cooperation. There has been tolerance, and there has been indifference. The only way to describe the arc of fourteen hundred years as primarily a history of conflict is to forget and ignore not only the stories told here, but countless others that have been lost to history because no one thought that they merited recording.
This is not just a problem of how we see the past. When future generations look back at the second half of the twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty-first, they will have at their disposal an unparalleled amount of information. Yet unless they try to find other stories, they too will be left with the impression that these years—our present— were defined by a war between civilizations and by ever-increasing hostility between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. They will say that our time
was marked by escalating violence, acts of terrorism, suicide bombings, and by fear that some group would obtain and use a weapon of mass destruction in the name of God. These future generations will be forgiven if they too look to the distant past and retell the familiar tales of hatred between the faiths that began with Muhammad and the Jews and continued episodically over the centuries.
Today, Muslims, Christians, and Jews are equal offenders in their relentless focus on conflict. Each tends to paint the past as a series of indignities suffered at the hands of the other two. Westerners, whether or not they adhere to an organized religion, are disposed to view Muslim societies as backward and intent on war and violence. And most inhabitants of the Muslim world tend to believe that the West bears ill will toward Islam and Muslims and wants not peace or coexistence but economic and cultural domination.
Indeed, in the past few decades, polemics about the coming war between Islam and the West have proliferated, as have what one clever critic dubbed “travel narratives from Hell.” These are primarily penned by Western writers addressing a Western audience who explore the Muslim world and come back with reports of gloom and doom. We are told of new madrassas (schools) from Nigeria to Pakistan to Indonesia being funded by Saudi extremists preaching hate. We are told of generations that celebrate violence against Israel, against corrupt governments, against Europe and the United States. We are told of Muslim rage on every street, and of angry young men and women who watch helplessly as the modern world passes them by, their faces pressed to the glass gazing on possibilities that they can never obtain, while their own worlds decay and their traditions succumb to Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.
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There are, of course, books and articles that reject this framework and posit a different reading of Islam and of the past, that suggest the compatibility of Islam and democracy and Islam and the West, but it is fair to say that these have not gained the same level of influence as their more shrill counterparts.
8
The history of conflict is not untrue. It is incomplete. By the same token, the reality of religious extremism in the modern world cannot and should not be downplayed. There are radicals who will dedicate their lives to inflicting pain and death on those who do not agree with their vision. And there is a still-simmering Arab-Israeli conflict that remains a source of pain and anger for all involved. Nonetheless, there
are other stories that garner less attention but are no less part of the tapestry.
Take the Arabian American Oil Company, known as Aramco. It began as an arrangement between Standard Oil of California (which in time became Chevron), Texaco, and King Ibn Saud. The Saudi monarch had been wooed by both Europeans and Americans, but he ultimately felt most comfortable with the Americans, either because they charmed him or because they weren’t the British. Aramco, with the involvement of Standard Oil of New Jersey (later called Exxon) and of New York (later called Mobil), remained the dominant Western oil company in Saudi Arabia for decades. In the 1970s, the Saudis began to purchase it, and within a few years, Saudi Aramco controlled not only half of Texaco and more than a thousand gas stations in the United States and Europe, but as much as one-quarter of all the proven oil reserves in the world.