The End of Middle East History

by Richard Bulliet

Released: 28 Sep 2009

I recently completed forty years teaching the history of the Middle East. Inspired by a middle-of-the-night sense of clairvoyance after my penultimate class, I devoted my final lecture to recounting the history of the Middle East in the twenty-first century as seen looking backward from the year 2099. By that date, I foresaw, the idea of a coherent geographical area called the Middle East, an area which had come into being in the maelstrom of three world wars, two hot and one cold, had become obsolete. Hence, its history could be laid out as a closed episode in the global flow of events. The following essay recounts how the history of the Middle East ended.

Central to my hindsight was the untying of the Israel-Palestine knot, a process that took place over a span of years when the Jews and Arabs of Israel/Palestine gradually started to look more to the future than to the past. Both the “two-state solution,” which so many Palestinians had seen as permanent subjection to the Israeli boot, and the “one-state solution,” which so many Jews had seen as an Arab demographic time-bomb destined to explode the Zionist dream, lost momentum when it became obvious that neither side would ever be ready to surrender. In their place both sides began to consider the idea of a bicommunal State of Israel.

Despite its fifteen-year civil war, brought on primarily by military weakness and external meddling and intervention, Lebanon was taken a conceptual model. In 1943, with post-war independence from French colonial rule an almost tangible dream, Lebanon’s leaders had crafted a way of managing the sometimes murderous, sectarian strife that had troubled their society for more than two centuries. The Maronites, the most populous Christian sect, surrendered their ardently held aspiration to remain separate from the Arab world as protégés of France. The Sunnis, the most populous Muslim sect, forswore their equally ardent nationalist aspiration to unite Arab Lebanon with its larger Syrian neighbor. Instead, the Lebanese agreed that their land should be a separate and independent Arab country with a strictly defined governmental balance in which the Christians would retain, at least formally, their majority status.

Based on the fact that the Maronite community had been the most numerous in the census of 1932, the presidency of the republic was accorded in perpetuity to a Maronite Christian. The second largest community, the Sunnis, gained the prime ministry, in perpetuity. The post of Speaker of the National Assembly went to the third largest community, the Shi‘ites, the deputy speakership to the Greek Orthodox Christians, and so forth through the major governing offices. As for the National Assembly, the leaders agreed that Christian members should always outnumber Muslims in a ratio of 6 to 5. Elections were to be communally unified so that Christians would vote for Muslim candidates along with representatives of their own communities on combined slates, and vice versa. It was further agreed that the census figures of 1932 would not be up-dated, at least for the purpose of apportioning power, even though they were bound to change because of differing emigration patterns and birth rates.

Lebanon’s leaders had not been alone in thinking constitutionally along communal lines. A few years earlier when the northern Syrian province of Hatay had been in the process of being transferred to Turkish sovereignty, an assembly with fixed demographically based representations of Turks, Alawites, Arabs, Armenians, and others had been visualized.

In my look backward from 2099, Israel’s Jews and the Palestinian Arabs living in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip finally saw the futility of trying to resolve past injustices and retaliate for past acts of bloodshed and began to think about the state that might come into being through a bicommunal constitution: a State of Israel that would not only be politically accepted by the Arab world, but would also have the region’s most dynamic economy and unmatchable military superiority.

What they came up with -- needless to say, after years of wrangling and anguishing internal debate -- was the following:

The Jews gave up defining Israel as the homeland of all the world’s Jews in return for a constitutionally fixed majority role in a bicommunal state. Whatever might happen in terms of immigration or birthrate differentials, Israel’s Jews would never be inundated or outvoted by the country’s Arab citizens. In that respect, Israel would retain a preponderantly Jewish government. But Israel would no longer be defined as a Jewish state. The painful relinquishing of this fundamental identity came as the force of the Zionist dream of Israel as a refuge for a world Jewish community plagued by European anti-Semitism diminished. With rancor against Israel’s uncompromising attitude toward the Palestinians constituting the core of anti-Semitic feelings around the world, escape to Israel no longer meant what it had meant in the 1930s. Jews as such were statistically more likely to be killed or injured by deliberate violence in their own state of Israel than in any other country. In Europe and the United States in particular, the universal post-Holocaust affirmation that Judeo-Christian values formed the basis of Western civilization had greatly attenuated traditions of anti-Semitism that stretched back for many centuries.

For their part, the Palestinians made the equally wrenching decision to give up the idea of eradicating Jewish political strength and along with it the hope of attaining sovereign control over an Arab Palestinian state large enough and viable enough to satisfy their aspiration for independence and national pride. Despite, or in the thinking of some because of, the inevitability of the Arab population of Israel and the occupied territories eventually outnumbering the Jewish population, they realized not only that the Jews would never give up what they had achieved during the decades of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, but also that without those Jewish achievements, an independent Palestine would scarcely be viable.

After each side had put aside its maximal aspirations, the two parties decided to balance, in token form, their ideological obligations to their respective diasporas. The Law of Return that guaranteed citizenship to Jews immigrating to Israel from the diaspora was paired with a Right of Return for Palestinians living in exile since 1948. On the assumption that every new citizen accepted under the Law of Return came with a family, or intended to start one, it was agreed that for every Jewish immigrant granted Israeli citizenship, the descendants of one Palestinian nuclear family from the 1948 diaspora would be offered an opportunity to return and settle in some part of the now combined territories of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

Haggling over the precise communal balance in a bicommunal constitution required a lot of diplomatic hand holding by sympathetic parties, but this helped guarantee that the final agreement had broad international acceptance. Eventually, leaders of the Israeli Jewish community and the Palestinian Arab community agreed on the following governmental structure:

The largely ceremonial presidency of the bicommunal State of Israel would forever go to an Arab. Unlike the Lebanese precedent, where the most populous community gained the presidency, this assignment of office was mainly symbolic. Leaders from both sides agreed that an Arab presidency would confirm Israel’s place in the Middle East and the Arab world and abolish the old shibboleth about Israel being a European “colonial-settler state.” Though the name Israel was retained in recognition of the Jewish governmental majority, it was no longer defined as a Jewish state.

The office of prime minister, the effective head of government, was fixed as a Jewish position since it was constitutionally guaranteed that the Knesset would have a permanently guaranteed majority of Jewish members at a ratio of 6 to 5, based roughly on each community’s share of the population in 2030. The remaining cabinet ministries were divided half and half. The Minister of Defense was assigned to a Jew because it was recognized that it would take years of painstaking step-by-step progress in training, confidence building, and popular recognition that peace was indeed at hand to move toward an agreed upon goal of integrating Jews and Arabs in the Israel Defense Force. The foreign ministry, on the other hand, initially went to the Arabs since the job of convincing the surrounding Arab countries of the value of the new state structure and thereby ending a century of animosity was seen as the greatest diplomatic task at hand. In the constitution as it was finally adopted, however, the communal assignment of cabinet portfolios below the premiership was not specified beyond the provision that every cabinet would have to include equal numbers of Jewish and Arab members and be approved by two-thirds of the Knesset.

As for elections, as in Lebanon, members of the parliament were to be elected by districts in ratios appropriate to the communal preponderance in each district. All voters would be offered ballots with mixed Arab-Jewish slates of names identified by party, or by party alliances in which Jewish parties would share slates with Arab parties.

With Jerusalem the undivided capital of the bicommunal republic and the pre-1967 boundaries rendered obsolete by the unification of the territories, controversies concerning Jewish settlements and the sharing of land, water, and resources subsided. A bicommunal commission was established to dismantle long-standing discriminatory practices and institutions. Six months after the new constitution went into effect, the barrier built to curb Palestinian violence was taken down. The rate of progress in working out the bicommunal structure and eliminating deeply engrained structures of inequality was too slow for some, and too fast for others. But progress was made, and a new state of affairs in the Middle East was slowly recognized by the time of the centennial of the Six Day War in 2067.

As the idea of a bicommunal state progressed over the years from fanciful notion, to real possibility, to constitutional reality, the potential consequences of such a development became a preoccupation not just for the Palestinians and the Jews, but for every country, party, and movement that had a history of involvement with the Israel-Palestine dilemma.

Not surprisingly, the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council were the first Arab countries to embrace the new concept. Palestinian resistance to Israel had never been the consuming passion there that it had been for the so-called frontline Arab states. Kuwait’s expulsion of its Palestinian community in 1991 on charges of collaboration with Saddam Hussein’s brutal occupation had made this crystal clear. The Gulf region’s comparative isolation from the Israel-Palestine cockpit helped the GCC recognize the great and mutual advantages to be gained by combining Gulf petroleum resources and capital with Israel’s industrial and business know-how and scientific expertise. Arab businesses based in Israel, many of them emerging first as subsidiaries of Jewish companies, easily formed commercial ties with companies and government agencies in Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman, though Saudi Arabia was a bit slower to respond to the new opportunities.

What turned the tide with respect to the Saudis was the American reaction to the growing pace of Arab-Jewish cooperation in Israel. Despite several decades of earnest political declarations, hand-wringing by pundits, and periodic spikes in oil prices, the United States had proven incapable of stifling its thirst for Persian Gulf oil. Yet friction arising from the stationing of American military forces in Qatar, Bahrain, and Iraq on what seemed destined, in the eyes of both Americans and America’s detractors, to become a permanent basis grew steadily worse. Despite repeated presidential disclaimers of any imperialist intent in prolonging the military presence that began with the first Gulf war of 1991, the United States came increasingly to be seen, both at home and abroad, as an unwelcome colonial presence in the region. Nevertheless, the halting but generally peaceful course of governmental institution building in Iraq seemed to preclude a complete American withdrawal. In the eyes of Washington policy-makers, training and counterterrorism units continued to be needed within that country, and American control of Iraqi and Gulf airspace still seemed indispensable.

The idea of replacing American military units with Israeli units was greeted at first as an absurdity. But as the formation of effective Arab military units with Arab officers within the Israel Defense Force became a reality, the realization spread that a first-class Israeli Arab military force with Arab officers in local command could substitute for the increasingly unwelcome Americans. Israeli Arab colonels and generals quickly showed that they could interact efficiently with both indigenous Gulf commanders and a shrinking core of American advisors. Israel’s nuclear umbrella and state-of-the-art mastery of Gulf airspace, all implemented in close collaboration with the GCC military commands, finally allowed the Americans to go home. Moreover, the power to forestall the ambitions of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) shifted from American to Arab hands, albeit with the United States maintaining its commitment to keep the IDF supplied with the latest weapons systems.

The emerging Dubai-Jerusalem axis overturned many of the assumptions that had driven Arab politics in the days of the Arab-Israel conflict. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, the erstwhile frontline states, were barred by Israel’s new constitution from forming political linkages with the reconceived bicommunal state. At the same time, they lost their claim to financial support from their oil-rich Arab cousins based on confronting, or confronting in the past, the Zionist entity.

Meanwhile, economic stagnation and the deficits in human resource development first noted in turn-of-the-century United Nations reports had deepened with the passage of time. So had regime suppression of popular discontent over national decline and neo-Mamluk authoritarianism. This oppression had long been buttressed by American assumptions that Arab-Israel peace hinged on the cooperation of Israel’s neighbors. The United States had consistently expressed only token support for political liberalization, and this had made hatred of the United States as the evil facilitator of Arab totalitarianism a fundamental tenet of Islamic extremist ideology.

However, as the Palestinians and the Israeli Jews inched toward their historic settlement, the United States came to realize that it no longer needed to guarantee the survival of militaristic rule in the neighboring countries. Political instability in Syria, Egypt, Jordan, or Lebanon would no longer threaten what domestic American political forces had long deemed a vital American interest: the security of Israel. The new Israel that was in the making would be more than capable of taking care of itself. So American policy-makers began to distance themselves from the neo-Mamluk autocrats and push for open elections.

Recognizing that without an unwelcome and discriminatory Jewish state to excite popular passions and coerce the United States into rubber-stamping its oppressive policies, the nascent Asad and Mubarak dynasties in Syria and Egypt and the genuine Hashimite dynasty in Jordan succumbed to the tide of history. While keeping a measure of authority in the hands of the military and the president or king, they cautiously introduced pluralist electoral reforms. This led to parliamentary pluralities for Islamist parties, and those parties promptly demonstrated that they were not yet ready to govern. Parliaments were accordingly dissolved by the central authorities. But after several cycles of government malfeasance and fresh elections, the Islamist parties began to learn the ropes. It took some twenty years for open parliamentary systems to stabilize, but internal discontent subsided much sooner as Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians responded positively to life in a freer society. For the first time since the heyday of Arab revolutionary regimes in the 1960s, people in the central Arab states regained some hope for the future. King Hussein of Jordan was often cited as a model for his short-lived attempt to allow Islamists to participate in his country’s electoral system in the early 1990s. Ironically, however, considering the abject failure of the Bush administration’s fantasy of catalyzing region-wide democratic change by means of military invasion, the Arab world found a better model in the post-American political evolution of the Iraqi republic, where parties that had originally formed around religious ideologies gradually gained sophistication in the arts of winning elections and governing equitably. Iraq’s experience became an informal roadmap for a general dismantling of neo-Mamluk autocracy.

Since the political problems that had sparked Lebanon’s civil war had been caused by external interference rather than domestic authoritarianism, Lebanon capitalized rather easily on the emergence of the new Israel. Lebanese bankers were happy to lend their expertise to forging Israel-Arab commercial linkages. Hizbullah lost its rationale of protecting the Shi‘ite south from Israeli invasion and turned in its guns. But by the time this happened it had already established itself as one of the country’s most sophisticated political parties. Syrian interference in Lebanon’s affairs became a distant memory as concern with internal political development became that country’s primary preoccupation. No longer in need of Syrian and Iranian military support, Hizbullah helped the Syrians get over their Lebanese obsession.

The new bicommunal Israel, in tandem with the economically cooperating states of the GCC, transformed the eastern Arab world. Powerful, dynamic, and constitutionally balanced, it became the state that every other state wanted to befriend rather than attack. And this spelled the end of the ill-starred Iranian notion of playing a power role in the Arab world.

Richard Bulliet is Professor of History at Columbia University and author of Islam: The View from the Edge and The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization.

Copyright © 2009 Richard Bulliet – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 September 2009
Word count: 2,855
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