The first highly organized aristocrat peasant societies originated in the Tigris Euphrates valley in Iraq and the Nile valley in Egypt. However, most of the Middle East is too arid and infertile for peasant farmers to produce large food surpluses. The desert lands became the home of the Bedouin tribal Arabs and evolved into a mixed tribal aristocrat form of society.
From the 15th century through the 19th century, most of the Middle East was ruled by the Turkish Ottoman Empire. After the Ottomans were defeated in World War I, most of the area became part of the British and French Empires. The Arabic countries as we know them today and Iran did not become independent nations until after World War II.
The basic culture and way of life in the Middle East was relatively unaffected by either the Ottomans or the European imperialists. Most of the region retained its characteristic tribal aristocrat form of society until the 1960s when the oil boom began to transform the traditional societies.
We have already seen that the change from aristocrat peasant society to modern democrat market society is a very long, violent, and difficult transformation. It appears that the change from tribal and aristocrat tribal forms of society to democrat market society is just as difficult and violent. The Middle East is now in the most difficult part of this transformation. The inevitable result is a large number of wars, rebellions, and periods of anarchy.
The overall revolutionary experience in the Arab world and other parts of the Middle East is not that much different from what it has been in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The revolution typically proceeds in an erratic fashion. There is often a pattern of two steps forward and one step backward. Intense waves of violence are often followed by periods of calm and stability. The massive political and economic transformation that is taking place is still a long way from completion. There is no way to predict how much violence is yet to come, but it is certainly far from being over.
The oil boom in the Middle East is very much of a mixed blessing in terms of this modern transformation. On the one hand, it has brought in a tremendous amount of money, which has been used to jump-start the market economy of the region. On the other hand, this gigantic amount of easy money has reduced the requirement for the people to learn how to produce wealth the old fashioned way. Economic necessity has forced most countries to learn how to create wealth by farming, manufacturing, and the delivery of services. This requirement is not nearly as strong in much of the Middle East, where wealth gushes out of the ground. The reduced level of economic necessity has lead to a greater emphasis on other factors such as religion and traditional animosities.
This short explanation of history is no place for an in-depth analysis of the problems of revolution in the Middle East, but recent events have forced me to try to explain how so much of the Arab world has come into such dramatic conflict with the United States. There are two primary reasons for this conflict. One is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and the other is American political and military intervention in the region.
The Holocaust of the Jews during World War II is the kind of experience that no population can endure without taking extreme measures to ensure that it will never happen again. After the war, the remaining Jewish population universally insisted that they must have their own state where they could rely on themselves to guarantee their own security. This is very understandable and most of the world, including the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union, were in agreement.
The only obvious place for this state was their ancestral homeland of Palestine, where a moderate number of Jews had slowly been infiltrating since the end of the 19th century. The problem is that Palestine was already occupied by Palestinians, who are not Jews and had been living there for thousands of years. The Palestinians were a small population of peasant-farmers. For centuries they had been ruled by the Ottomans and more recently by the British.
In the most successful campaign of terrorism known to history, the Jews forced the British to leave and established their own state. This provoked an immediate war with neighboring Arab states, which was won by the Israelis. Most of the Palestinians then fled their homes and sought refuge in areas controlled by Arab forces in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Jordan River. The Israelis claim that the Palestinians left of their own free will and therefore have no right to return. This is a difficult claim to establish. Refugees have been fleeing from the violence of war for thousands of years. Nearly all of them eventually return home. There is also evidence that the Jewish terrorist group, Irgun, slaughtered the residents of at least two villages for the specific purpose of forcing the Palestinians out of the new state of Israel.
These events happened over fifty years ago, but they created an open sore in the Middle East, which has been festering and growing worse ever since. At the time of the expulsion there were less than one million Palestinians, who were mostly uneducated peasants. They were relatively easy to push around and ignore. Today there are more than four million Palestinians. They have been toughened and hardened by life in the refugee camps. They are educated and intensely aware of all the injustices that have happened to them. The experience has convinced them that they too must have a state of their own.
The question of who has a right to live in Palestine is not just a dispute between Israelis and Palestinians. The surrounding Arab countries have been involved from the very beginning, and they have every right to be involved. If some group came along and threw the Canadians out of Canada and they were living in refugee camps in the United States, it is certain that the U.S. would get involved and make every effort to help restore them to their homeland. The Arab countries feel just as strongly about this as Americans would.
So far there have been four Arab-Israeli wars: 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. As far as the majority of Arabs are concerned, these were battles, and the war will continue until justice for the Palestinian people has been achieved. There is also another reason for the continuation of warfare. War has always been a part of the revolutionary transformation of society.
In America, the French and Indian war prepared the 13 colonies for independence. A great deal of social, economic, and political progress came out of the Revolutionary War. The War of 1812 and the Indian Wars continued this trend. The Mexican-American War helped unify the nation for a time and continued the process of change and development. Prior to the Civil War, the United States was still primarily an agricultural country. During the war and afterwards, we quickly became an industrial nation. World War I brought more social and economic change. World War II led directly to the development of democratic market society. Europe used warfare even more prolifically in its transformation from aristocrat peasant society through oligarchic society to democratic market society.
The Middle East is following the same path. War has been used to pull young men out of the peasant villages, educate them, discipline them, train them to use modern equipment, and instill a sense of patriotism and national pride. All of these factors dramatically increase the speed of social transformation. Wars are not started specifically for this purpose, but they have this effect. The Jews had no way of knowing that their presence in the Middle East would help propel the region into the modern world through the violence of warfare, but that is part of what is happening.
The United States claims to have an evenhanded policy in the Arab-Israeli conflict, but that is obviously not the case. America has given over a hundred billion dollars to Israel in the last three decades, which has been used to buy large quantities of the world’s best weapons and to support a major arms industry in Israel. The Palestinians have received a few hundred million that was mostly needed to buy food for the refugee camps.
A majority of the Arab people believe that the United States deliberately maintains Israel in order to have a strong ally in the region for the primary purpose of watching over it’s oil supplies. This is not true. There are a number of other more important reasons. It is true that a large number of Americans have at times thought along these lines. This is very insulting to the Arab people. It is their oil, not ours. It only becomes ours after we purchase it from them. Buying oil is, and must remain, a purely commercial transaction. Political alliances and military power have no legitimate place in any commercial transaction. What would Americans think if some powerful Arab country were to help an alliance of Indian tribes to take over Kansas in order to watch over their food supplies?
This brings us to the whole question of American political involvement in the Middle East. Since the end of World War II, the United States has made a major effort to maintain peace and stability in the world, or at least that was the general intention. When the British imperialists retreated from the Middle East, they tried to leave it in the hands of monarchs who would be friendly to the West. The Americans believed that the best way to ensure stability was to help these monarchs stay in power.
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