The Arab delegation at the Wye Plantation conference represented formally only the Palestinian Arabs. Emotionally most Arabs in the Middle East support Palestine Liberation Front chairman Yasser Arafat’s leadership, or at least his long struggle for Palestinian statehood as a cause they ardently back. Some extremist Arab groups disown him and his entire P.L.O. for negotiating with the Israel government instead of fighting it. The most vocal and virulent among them are either fanatically religious or nationalist terrorists who look on all contacts with Israel as sinful, as treasonable, or both. They insist that all means, including ruthless violence of any kind, are justified to achieve the ultimate aim - putting an end to a non-Arab, non-Muslim state on what they regard as Arab soil.

The Arabs, collectively speaking, are not “anti-Jewish” or “anti-semitic” in a racial or ethnic sense. Like the Jews, they think of themselves as descendents of “Ibrahim”, Arabic for Abraham, the Biblical patriarch. Foremost, religion divides the two nations. If Jews in Israel would collectively embrace Islam, the territorial conflict would end. The Koran refers to Abraham as one of humanity’s early prophets who brought into the world the belief in one God, eternal, almighty, invisible. Muslims have accepted Muhammad as the “Ultimate Prophet” and Islam as Allah’s final message to mankind, replacing all previous divine revelations to Noah Abraham, Moses, Jesus Christ. Hence only Islam is now the only true religion, not for the Arabs alone, but should be for all of mankind. The canonic formula says: “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Messenger.” The two parts of the sentence belong inseparably together.

Almost all Arabs, not only those of Palestine, regard the existence of a non-Muslim state among them as a humiliating, intolerable affront. The fact that the area of Israel accounts for a fraction of one per cent of Arab-inhabited their territory is irrelevant. The presence of the Christian state set up by the the Crusaders 700 years ago was unacceptable too, although they had no political or imperial aims beyond holding the sacred sites of their faith. The Muslims fought them nearly 200 years to end their presence in the Holy Land. In our century the Arab majority has on and off harrassed and sometimes persecuted the Christian minorities living among them, until they emigrated in large numbers: Maronites and other Catholics in Lebanon, Greek Orthodox, Assyrians in Iraq (after large-scale massacres in the mid-thirties), Copts from Egypt, in Sudan etc. The almost entirely Christian Middle East before Muhammad, is now well on the way of becoming entirely Muslim.

The mentality of the Arabs today - not only those of Palestine - cannot be understood without an explanation of their collective discontent and resentment of the West, especially the U.S., in our time. Their vocal discontent is the more surprising in view of the unique gift nature has bestowed on them: the planet’s most prolific oil wells, the largest proven oil reserves still in the ground and the immense wealth that goes with them. No other nation enjoys such a large toil-free, unearnt income. So why the resentment?

After the death of Muhammad in 632, at the age of 62, the new faith he had preached released in the tribesmen of Arabia a powerful burst of aggressive energy. A basic dogma of Islam is that all that happens in this world has been predetermined by Allah, including the fate of every living creature even before birth. Certain that nothing would happen to true believers unless it had been Allah’s eternal, unalterable and inescapable foreordained will, the Arabians set out to make the world safe for Islam, overran one country after another in Asia, North Africa and even Spain. In about 150 years they carved out the largest empire in history, became a rich superpower and gradually converted most of their subjects to Islam. Conflicting claims for succession to Muhammad’s leaderhip, the “khalifate”. and violent struggles for supreme spiritual and political power in the Islamic empire cost the original Arabian masters their hegemony. After about 200 years of imperial Arab grandeur the Turks, recent converts to Islam too, took power away from them, leaving them subjects instead of masters, with a strong sense of impotence and frustration. The memory of spiritual and temporal dominance sank deeply into their historic consciousness. And remained there ever since. The prolific and brilliant literature of Islam’s early triumphs is keeping alive in educated Arabs a lively sense of past splendour and present humiliation.

Another root, and perhaps cause, of Arab discontent today is intellectual stagnation. It began early this century and gained momentum after World War II. An American political journalist, Joseph G. Harrison, foreign desk editor of the Christian Science Monitor, described the situation in that paper (April 9, 1954) under the headline “The Riddle of Arab Unrest”:

“... While it takes no great degree of insight to recognize that the Middle East today is an area in which the former way of life is falling apart without a satisfactory substitute having yet made its appearance, it is more difficult to draw positive conclusions as to the cause of this deterioration. Perhaps all that can be said in a limited amount of space is that it has become abundantly apparent that the intellectual foundations of Arab life have been found almost wholly wanting in this period of grave crisis.

Faced with the necessity of quickly and decisively evolving a new social, economic and political pattern, the educated classes of the Middle East have so far shown themselves almost totally inadequate to the task. Accustomed to believe that their way of life was inherently superior to that faced with the necessity of quickly and decisively evolving a new social, economic and political pattern, they have been unable to grasp the fact that this way of life has failed them..... Refusing to acknowledge where they themselves have failed, they have fallen into the pitfall of blaming others, in this case the West.”

The Christian Science Monitor diagnosis of half a century ago is still valid today. We agree that it was then “more difficult to draw positive conclusions as to the cause of deterioration”. Today the stagnation in the Middle East is plain to see when we compare it with the phenomenal development in South East Asian countries since then. It is true that little has changed in the past fifty years in intellectual self-assessment in the region (in which non-Arab, Muslim Iran must now be included). Arab society is handicapped by a lack of intellectual zest and critical search, and whatever insight into its problems exists remains limited to a few reflective intellectuals. But what is missing is a plausible explanation on, or even reference to, the patent scientific, technological and industrial lag in the 22 Arab states which are members of the Arab League.

So what is the cause of this stagnation ? (We prefer that term to “deterioration”). Was it religion, the common faith, that has shunted the rich and unquestionable intellectual gifts of the Arab nation and its enormous financial resources away from the spirit of scientific enquiry, from technological and industrial pursuits that has spurred so much growth elsewhere, and turned them towards a more spiritual, contemplative, passive style of life and thought? That was indeed the reflected view of a non-political observer, very distant in time and space from contemporary disputes. The reader will find a perceptive diagnosis of this riddle in a short report elsewhere on this site on the German poet and thinker J.W. Goethe 200 years ago. (See Table of Contents). On the subject of Islam he noted “the dark cloak which religion has thrown over the mind of the Arabs and has prevented the growth of a free spirit.” Whatever ethnic psychology and sociology can today contribute to explaining these complex issues it is obvious that the techno-scientific lag of the Arabs behind the industrial world is another powerful cause of their collective frustration and anti-western resentment. It is this lag that calls for a fuller explanation, and we shall return to this important subject which affects the attitude of the Arabs to any kind of political negotiations with the West and their future reactions to the outcome, if any. As we see it, the negotiations will prove futile. Not only will the regional conflict between the Arabs and Israelis remain unresolved. It will become a pilot plant for a new clash between East and West.

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