by REZA BEHNAM
The question often asked but rarely explored or answered is why the Arab Middle East has remained quiet and on the sidelines as their fellow Arabs in Palestine and Lebanon are being slaughtered. Although they wield enormous economic clout that could be used to end the genocide, they have chosen instead to be butlers to the United States and Israel.
When I observe Arab rulers who look to the United States to maintain power, I am reminded of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act I, Scene 2), when Cassius counsels his fellow senators, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
For decades, Arab regimes have been subservient to the United States, not due to fate, but because of their choices, which have often been few.
The why of their decisions to serve foreign masters are many. Among them are the drawing of manufactured boundaries by the victorious imperial powers after World War I (1914-18); the imposition of foreign state systems, and the occupation and exploitation of Arab land.
Because most of the Arab states were newly contrived by the imperial powers, their political cultures tended to be the same. Political power centers maintained by a ruler or ruling groups thrived, while political communities (umma) did not. The rulers, chosen by the colonizers to administer the nascent states, became the new oppressors of their own people.
The carved up Middle East became a flea market for the victorious British and French. They became the colonial draftsmen of the Arab future, crushing Arab national aspirations and creating a legacy of turbulence and instability that haunts the region to this day.
Under the Mandate System—an internationally-sanctioned form of colonialism established in 1919 by the League of Nations to administer Ottoman territories—Syria and Lebanon were colonized by the French, while Iraq, Jordan and Palestine by the British.
These territorial divisions, drawn to serve imperial interests, took no account of regional ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity. While the mandate powers preached self-determination, they undermined its practice, believing that the Arabs were incapable of self-government.
The British goal of transforming the Arab world into a superior version of British India was reflected in a famous line from T.E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia,” in 1919, “My own ambition” he said, “is that the Arabs should be our first brown dominion, and not our last brown colony.”
Former Arab client states of the British, who would become American clients after World War II, with borders imposed on them, had no substantial unifying political culture on which to build viable institutions.
In addition, their hopes for change and unity were overshadowed by another foreign colonizer on their doorstep; one determined to steal Arab land to create “Greater Israel”—“River to River” from the river Euphrates in Iraq to the river Nile in Egypt and all the land in between.
The case of Palestine was unlike the other post-war mandates. Support for European Zionism became official British policy with the 1917 Balfour Declaration —Britain’s commitment to help establish a Jewish national home in Palestine in the heart of the Islamic world.
Soon after the British unloaded the Palestine quagmire in the newly created United Nations and the General Assembly voted to partition Palestine in 1947, both sides prepared for war.
The Arab states, many of which had just gained independence, entered the war against Israel weakened and fragmented. Their humiliating defeat in 1948 and massive loss of all of historic Palestine in the 1967 War dealt a serious blow to pan-Arab prospects and convinced Palestinian nationalists to act independent of their fellow Arabs.
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