Ineficácia Militar Árabe

Ineficácia militar árabe

Os árabes são o povo que talvez mais consistentemente envolveu-se em conflitos armados e mais consistentemente sofreu derrotas. Nos conflitos modernos isso é uma constante. As vitórias, até o século X, devem-se muito mais ao fato de enfrentarem inimigos enfraquecidos e pelo seu conhecimento do deserto do que a qualquer outra coisa.

Um dos livros mais interessantes sobre história e estratégia militar que li nos últimos tempos busca responder esta questão. O livro é o "Arabs at War, Millitary Effectiveness, 1948-1991", Kenneth M. Pollack.

Desde a segunda guerra mundial, o Oriente Médio foi provavelmente a região mais conturbada, quase todos os conflitos com envolvimento dos árabes em alguma escala, e em todos eles a ineficácia surpreende. Alguém pode observar o histórico militar de Egito, Iraque, Arábia Saudita, Jordânia, Líbia e Síria, em combate com israelenses, europeus, americanos, persas, curdos, africanos, e até entre eles mesmos, e é sempre impressionante como atuam com ineficácia de maneira bem consistente, independente do adversário e das condições.

Dois exemplos extremos tanto em caso de vitória quanto derrota são a Síria na Guerra do Yom Kipur, e o Iraque no conflito com o Irã, e o final decisivo do conflito entre Líbia e Chade no norte do país em 1987-1988.

A ofensiva da Síria contra as forças israelenses no Golan em 1973 é comparável em disparidade à Operação Bagration pela URSS contra as tropas da Alemanha na Bielorússia durante a segunda guerra mundial. Um exército de veteranos defendendo linhas bem estabelecidas e fortificadas contra uma ofensiva massiva de surpresa com grande superioridade numérica. Os soviéticos tiveram sua maior vitória, enquanto os sírios tiveram sua pior derrota em condições de superioridade similares.

O Iraque passou praticamente uma década enfrentando o Irã com grande superioridade numérica e tecnológica, mas só conseguiu uma vitória em 1988 usando armas químicas em larga escala, matando cerca de 20,000 soldados iranianos, quase 1/5 das forças, e criando forças locais com disparidade de até 30 para 1 em relação aos iranianos.

No Chade, depois que os líbios perderam seu apoio entre os dissidentes chadianos, ainda contavam com decisiva vantagem numérica e tecnológica. Os chadianos não tinham tanques, blindados, aviões e artilharia, e não sabiam usar bem o pouco equipamento de infantaria que tinham. O único armamento pesado e transporte de que dispunham eram pick-ups Toyota com mísseis antitanque Milan fornecidos pela França na última hora, e confiavam na força aérea francesa e stingers fornecidos pelos EUA para defender-se dos líbios. Mesmo com a vantagem em todos os aspectos, os líbios sofreram uma derrota completa no norte do país. A principal base foi abandonada com muito equipamento ainda funcionando, soldados líbios morriam ao fugir pelos próprios campos minados, e a força aérea líbia tinha de destruir o próprio equipamento para evitar que fosse utilizado pelo inimigo.

Ou seja, independente do oponente e de vitória ou derrota, as forças árabes sempre atuam com muito menos eficácia do que esperado para seu número, equipamento e posição. Qual o real motivo disso?

Eu nunca havia pensado muito a fundo no assunto, e por conhecer melhor o conflito árabe-israelense, aceitava a explicação de cada guerra em particular, sem me preocupar muito nisso como característica dominante. Agora li um livro que trata especificamente do assunto, falando dos diversos conflitos e achei que valia a pena enumerar algumas das explicações que achei mais relevantes para discussão. Algumas das explicações auxiliam até a entender melhor outros conflitos.


1. O argumento mais óbvio é o treinamento das tropas. Alguns dos pontos dele são relevantes para outros argumentos. Como a maioria dos países árabes são monarquias e/ou ditaduras, a maior parte das forças armadas recebe um treinamento voltado para lidar mais com problemas internos, manifestações, tentativas de golpe e revoluções, do que uma operação militar convencional. Alguns analistas argumentam que o treinamento não é só inapropriado, mas inadequado mesmo. Na Guerra do Yom Kipur os egípcios treinaram por anos para fazer a mesma coisa, e fizeram bem feito quando era exatamente como esperava, mas não conseguiram fazer mais nada direito quando saiu dos planos.

2. Outro problema relacionado é que pelo fato da maioria desses países serem monarquias e/ou ditaduras muitos oficiais são apenas indicados, não chegando à posição por competência. Adicionalmente, por medo de um golpe de estado vindo dos militares, muitas indicações são feitas para deliberadamente gerar algum atrito e evitar uma união que levaria a isso. Esse atrito acaba indo para o campo de batalha também e elimina qualquer iniciativa. Soldados e oficiais preferem falhar do que tomar decisões por conta própria. Qualquer assunto militar é considerado segredo e oficiais são transferidos de forma imprevisível antes de poder formar alianças. Essa característica também presente na URSS acabou reforçada pelo envolvimento com os soviéticos pela maioria dos países árabes.


3. Isso gera um outro problema pois leva o conflito de classes que existe na sociedade para o campo de batalha, gerando hostilidades entreos homens . Para os homens de nível social baixo que ingressam nas forças armadas buscando oportunidades de ascenção social, um oficial indicado ao cargo representa uma ofensa. Pelo outro lado, a mesma discriminação social que haveria na sociedade civil acaba havendo entre o oficial indicado e seus homens. Isso é comum no Egito, onde há muitos relatos de oficiais que, sem nenhum laço com seus homens, simplesmente os abandonam no campo de batalha. Liderança não é considerada uma disciplina a ser aprendida, mas apenas assume-se que um oficial vindo de uma classe social superior seja um líder nato. O conflito entre oficiais também é constante por razões semelhantes, existindo uma disputa, e não há o mesmo grau de confiança que existe entre militares ocidentais.


4. A consequência mais óbvia desses três argumentos é a pouca coesão dos árabes em pequenas formações, a incapacidade de permanecer juntos e continuar a combater como grupo no calor da batalha, algo essencial na guerra moderna. Esse é o principal argumento que eu conhecia, porque é geralmente usado pelos militares israelenses. Desde a Campanha do Sinai em 1956, ficou claro para os israelenses como as unidades árabes perdiam sua coesão e deixavam cada homem por si ao sofrer ataques precisos e inesperados, algo que até ajudou a moldar a doutrina militar israelense a combater dessa forma.

5. Como muitos oficiais acabam chegando ao cargo por indicação, sem competência para tal, mesmo que permaneçam com as tropas, uma liderança tática rápida e eficiente é crucial para a eficácia nas guerras modernas, exigindo uma descentralização do comando e sub-oficiais competentes que consigam se adaptar com iniciativa e rapidamente às situações e conduzir tudo com fluidez. Isso é evidente em particular na Guerra do Yom Kippur, em que devido à surpresa adicional vê-se que tanto os Egípcios quanto Sírios lutaram com eficácia enquanto seguiam os planos originais, mas o nível despencou depois do ponto em que a reação israelense começou a ganhar momento e as decisões tinham que ser mais rápidas.


6. Outro ponto é a ineficácia dos árabes em adquirir informações sobre o inimigo e repassá-las eficientemente através da cadeia de comando. Não raro, em várias guerras, informações são deliberadamente distorcidas ou fabricadas para exagerar sucessos e ocultar falhas, principalmente por medo de represálias. Isso foi muito comum na guerra Irã-Iraque e na Guerra dos Seis Dias, chegando até mesmo ao topo da hierarquia. Difícil saber até onde foi fanfarronice e até onde foi falha de inteligência, mas por exemplo, a Jordânia chegou a lançar ataques fadados ao fracasso porque Egito anunciava que seus aviões já estavam bombardeando Tel Aviv quando na verdade foram destruídos no chão.


7. Muitos dos países árabes tem um nível educacional muito abaixo daquele dos países que lhes fornecem equipamento militar, e hoje as guerras dependem muito mais do conhecimento e manuseio eficaz dos equipamentos. Operar um tanque ou avião da segunda guerra mundial parece brincadeira de criança perto de todos os equipamentos computadorizados dos tanques e aviões modernos. Um argumento usado para explicar a ineficácia dos árabes em conflitos que dispõe de grande superioridade tecnológica, é não conhecer e explorar toda a capacidade dos equipamentos que dispõe devido às deficiências educacionais e ao treinamento inadequado. O nível de segredo e a paranóia constante que impera sobre todos os assuntos militares também impede a descentralização de manutenção e reparos de equipamentos, algo essencial nas guerras modernas.

Todos esses fatores, e outros que não foram comentados, culminam em uma esfera de ineficácia em todos os aspectos, desde o alto comando até o último soldado. Governantes impedem interação e treinamentos conjuntos entre as forças por medo de golpes, comandantes tentam microgerenciar qualquer aspecto das suas forças com medo de delegar autoridade, oficiais vêem soldados com desprezo e não se importam com eles e vice-versa.

Essas técnicas podem funcionar para manter uma ditadura, mas não para enfrentar um inimigo externo ou para sustentar uma democracia, daí a dificuldade em implantá-la nesses lugares.

The Once & Future Christendom - From death of the West to knights of the West

September 10, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative

The Once & Future Christendom

From death of the West—to knights of the West

by James P. Pinkerton

The Call of Duty—and Destiny

In one of the great epics of Western literature, the hero, confronted by numerous and powerful enemies, temporarily gives in to weakness and self-pity. “I wish,” he sighs, “none of this had happened.” The hero’s wise adviser responds, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide.” The old man continues, “There are other forces at work in this world … besides the will of evil.” Some events, he adds, are “meant” to be, “And that is an encouraging thought.”

Indeed it is. Perhaps, today, we are meant to live in these times. Perhaps right here, right now, we are meant to be tested. Maybe we are meant to have faith that other forces are at work in this world, that we are meant to rediscover our strength and our survival skills.

And so the question: can we, the people of the West, be brought to failure despite our enormous cultural and spiritual legacy? Three thousand years of history look down upon us: does this generation wish to be remembered for not having had the strength to look danger squarely in the eye? For having failed to harness our latent strength in our own defense?

With apologies to the frankenfood-fearers and polar bear-sentimentalizers, the biggest danger we face is the Clash of Civilizations, especially as we rub against the “bloody borders” of Islam.

What if, in the coming century, we lose that clash—and the source of our civilization? What if Muslims take over Europe? What if “Eurabia” indeed comes to pass? Would Islamic invaders demolish the Vatican, as the Taliban dynamited Afghanistan’s Buddhas of Bamyan in 2001? Or would they settle merely for stripping the great cathedrals of Europe of all their Christian adornment, rendering them into mosques? And what if the surviving non-Muslim population of Europe is reduced to subservient “dhimmitude”?

It could happen. Many think it will. In July 2004, Princeton historian Bernard Lewis told Germany’s Die Welt that Europe would be Islamic by the end of this century, “at the very latest.” Other observers, too, have spoken out: Melanie Phillips in Londonistan, Bruce Bawer in While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, and Mark Steyn in America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Admittedly, these writers share a mostly neoconservative perspective, but such can’t be said for Patrick Buchanan, author of the book that out-Spenglers Spengler, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.

On the other side of the great divide, militant Muslims are feeling the wind at their backs. Last November, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, leader of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, released an audiotape in which he vowed, “We will not rest from our jihad until we are under the olive trees of the Roman Empire”—which is to say, much of Europe. This August, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, traveling to Afghanistan, declared, “There is no way for salvation of mankind but rule of Islam over mankind.” To be sure, there’s no shortage of Christians who speak this way, but none of them are currently heads of state.

If demography is the author of destiny, then the danger of Europe falling within dar al-Islam is real. And in addition to the teeming Muslim lumpen already within the gates, plenty more are coming. According to United Nations data, the population of the Arab world will increase from 321 million in 2004 to 598 million in 2050. Are those swarming masses really going to hang back in Egypt and Yemen when Europe beckons? And of course, over the horizon, just past Araby, abide the Muslim multitudes of Central Asia and Africa, where tens of millions more would love to make the secular hajj to, say, Rome or Berlin.

In other words, if present trends continue, the green flag of Islam—bearing the shahada, the declaration of faith, “There is no god but God; Muhammad is the Messenger of God”—could be fluttering above Athens and Rotterdam in the lifespan of a youngster today. If so, then the glory of Europe as the hub of Greco-Roman and Christian civilization would be extinguished forever.

If this Muslimization befalls Europe, the consequences would be catastrophic for Americans as well. Although some neoconservatives, bitter at Old European “surrender monkeys,” might be quietly pleased at the prospect, the fact is that a Salafist Surge into the heart of Europe—destroying the civilization that bequeathed to us Aesop and Aristotle, Voltaire and the Victorians—would be a psychic wound that would never heal, not across the great sward of America, not even in the carpeted think-warrens of the American Enterprise Institute. A dolorous bell would toll for all of us, scattered as we might be in the European Diaspora.

So for better ideas, we might turn to J.R.R. Tolkien. The medievalist-turned-novelist, best-known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, has been admired by readers and moviegoers alike for his fantastic flights. Yet we might make special note of his underlying political, even strategic, perspective. Amid all his swords and sorcery, we perhaps have neglected Tolkien’s ultimate point: some things are worth fighting for—and other things are not worth fighting for; indeed, it is a tragic mistake even to try.

In his subtle way, Tolkien argues for a vision of individual and collective self-preservation that embraces a realistic view of human nature, including its limitations, even as it accepts difference and diversity. Moreover, Tolkien counsels robust self-defense in one’s own area—the homeland, which he calls the Shire—even as he advocates an overall modesty of heroic ambition. All in all, that’s not a bad approach for true conservatives, who appreciate the value of lumpy hodgepodge as opposed to artificially imposed universalisms.

So with Tolkien in mind, we might speak of the “Shire Strategy.” It’s simple: the Shire is ours, we want to keep it, and so we must defend it. Yet by the same principle, since others have their homelands and their rights, we should leave them alone, as long as they leave us alone. Live and let live. That’s not world-historical, merely practical. For us, after our recent spasm of universalism—the dogmatically narcissistic view that everyone, everywhere wants to be like us—it’s time for a healthy respite, moving toward an each-to-his-own particularism.

Tolkien comes to the particular through the peculiar, creating his Bosch-like wonderland of exotic beings: Elves, Orcs, Trolls, Wargs, Werewolves, Ents, Eastlings, Southrons. To audiences relentlessly tutored in the PC pieties of skin-deep multiculturalism, Tolkien offers a different sort of diversity—of genuine difference, with no pretense of similarity, let alone universal equality. In his world, it is perfectly natural that all creatures great and small—the Hobbits are indeed small, around three feet high—have their own place in the great chain of being.

So the Hobbits, low down on that chain, mind their own business. One of their aphorisms is the need to avoid “trouble too big for you.” Indeed, even Hobbits are subdivided into different breeds, each with its own traits. Frodo, for instance, is a Fallohide, not to be confused with a Harfoot or a Stoor. Tolkien wasn’t describing a clash of civilizations—he was setting forth an abundance of civilizations, each blooming and buzzing and doing its own thing.

In addition to the innate differences, Tolkien added a layer of tragic complexity: the enticement of power. Some races in Middle Earth were given Rings of Power—19 in all, symbolizing technological might but also a metaphor for hubristic overreach: “Three Rings for Elven-kings under the sky / Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone / Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die.” One notes immediately that the Hobbits, along with other categories of being, have received no rings. Again, Tolkien’s world doesn’t pretend to be fair; we get what we are given, by the design (or maybe for the amusement) of greater powers. Only one threat endangers this yeasty diversity—the flowing tide of overweening universalism, emblemized by Sauron, who seeks to conquer the whole wide world, and everyone and everything in it

Of all the men and mice in Tolkien’s bestiary, the Hobbits are his favorite. Jolly good peasants that they are, Hobbits never hunger for martial fabulation or Riefenstahlian dramatization; their nature is to accomplish their mission first and brag about it only afterward. And the Hobbits’ biggest mission, of course, is the destruction of the One Ring. In Tolkien’s tale, there aren’t 19 Rings, as thought, but actually 20, and that 20th Ring, the One Ring, or Ruling Ring, is most to be feared. Loaded as it is with Wagnerian overtones, the One Ring is Tolkien’s symbol of evil, or, more precisely, it symbolizes temptation, which leads to evil. Even the dreaded Sauron is but a slave to his ambition to acquire the One Ring—and if Sauron can get it, then all hope for freedom and difference will be lost under his world-flattening tyranny.

Happily, unique among sentient beings, the Hobbits seem relatively immune to Ringed seduction. Hobbits like to smoke and drink, but all grander forms of world-girdling intoxication are lost on these simple folk. Hobbits just want their Shire to return to normalcy.

Enter Frodo, hero Hobbit. Tolkien, who served as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers during the Great War, modeled Frodo, admiringly, after the Tommies—the grunt infantrymen—who fought alongside him. Neither a defeatist nor a militarist, Tolkien admired those men who were simultaneously stoic and heroic. In the words of medieval historian Norman Cantor, “Frodo is not physically powerful, and his judgment is sometimes erratic. He wants not to bring about the golden era but to get rid of the Ring, to place it beyond the powers of evil; not to transform the world but to bring peace and quiet to the Shire.” Because of their innate modestly, only Hobbits have the hope of resisting the sorcery of the Ring. Frodo volunteers to carry the Ring to the lip of a volcano, Mt. Doom, there to cast it down and destroy it once and for all.

And even for Frodo, the task is not easy; he’s that lonely epic hero who wishes that none of this had happened. But as the wise Gandalf tells him, it was meant to happen And so it goes: events unfold to a successful but still bittersweet conclusion.

Indeed, the greatest desire for power, Ring-lust, is felt by men, not the lesser beings. And so when our heroes are confronted by two dangers—the danger from Sauron’s encroaching army, hunting for the Ring, and the infinitely direr prospect that Sauron might gain the Ring—it is a mostly virtuous man, Boromir, who is most sorely tempted. Don’t destroy the Ring, Boromir insists; use the Ring to repel Sauron: “Take it and go forth to victory!” In other words, use the Ring to guarantee triumph. But that’s Tolkien’s point: absolute power is always tempting—and always corrupting.

The good are good only as long as they resist temptation. A wise Elf, Elrond, answers Boromir: “We cannot use the Ruling Ring … the very desire of it corrupts the heart.” That is, a good man who uses the Ring automatically becomes a bad man, who would “set himself on Sauron’s throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear.” And so the varied group convened by Elrond—Elves, Dwarves, Men, and Hobbits—agrees to an arduous plan. The Council of Elrond will fight Sauron’s army through “conventional” means, while a smaller team, the Fellowship of the Ring, chiefly Frodo, crosses into enemy territory in hopes of destroying the sinister golden band. But as Tolkien makes clear, the Ring threatens to overwhelm everyone, and everything, with temptation.

Tolkien died in 1973. During his lifetime, and ever since, critics and pundits have put their own spin on his work. He was writing, it was said, about the totalitarian temptation. About the lure of fascism. Or maybe about the Circean song of communism. Or perhaps it was all a jeremiad aimed at industrialization. Each of these was, of course, a universalism, and so each was, in its way, antithetical to the natural variegation that Tolkien so treasured.

The author himself abjured simplistic allegorical explanation, perhaps in part to keep his multiple audiences happy. In the ’60s, for instance, the Hobbits were celebrated as proto-hippies, inspiring jokes about what might be tamped into their smoking pipes; the whole oeuvre was seen as a druggy trip. But Tolkien once confided, “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” That is, Catholic in the sense that reality and history are complicated, that the world is rich in majesty and mystery, that human nature is but a poor vessel. In his world, the Shire is Christendom, and Christendom is the Shire.

Yet more than three decades after Tolkien’s death, new universalisms—new all-encompassing ideologies—have gained prominence, vexing, once again, tradition and difference throughout the world. One such universalism is capitalist globalism. In the late ’80s, Francis Fukuyama published his legendarily misguided piece “The End of History?” suggesting that the West had found The Answer. Madeleine Albright expressed similar hubris when she declared that America was “the indispensable nation.” And Thomas Friedman has since argued that everyone has to submit to “golden handcuffs,” managed by planetary financiers, even as the wondrous force of capitalism “flattens” the world. But of course, it took Paul Wolfowitz to bring Rousseau to life in another century: Uncle Sam would force people to be free. And how are these bright bold visions working out, in the wake of 9/11, in a world that includes IEDs, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al-Jazeera?

Defending—and Redefining—the Shire

Underneath his neo-medievalism, Tolkien preached realism. He wrote, “It will not do to leave a live dragon out of your plans if you live near one.” That is, the dragon, red in tooth and crescent, is lurking. It cannot be ignored.

Nor can we ignore the painful reality of a genuine fifth column in the West. This summer, Gordon Brown’s government concluded that 1 in 11 British Muslims—almost 150,000 people living in the United Kingdom—“proactively” supports terrorism, with still more rated as passive supporters. And this spring, a Pew Center survey found that 13 percent of American Muslims, as well as 26 percent aged 18-29, were bold enough to tell a pollster that suicide bombing was “sometimes” justified. These Muslim infiltrators, of course, have potential access to weapons of mass destruction.

So what to do? Call the ACLU? The United Nations?

That won’t work. Just as the Roman Empire’s dream of universal dominion once collapsed, leaving the peoples of Europe to create new institutions for their own survival, so, today, any thought that the United Nations could save us from ruin has evaporated. The Blue Helmets have fallen, and they can’t get up.

At the same time, at a level just below the UN, the vision of an ever-expanding European Union, to include all the states touching the Mediterranean, has happily collapsed. Now it seems certain that even Turkey will never be admitted. Increasingly, people see that in a world of transnational terrorism, the key issue is not figuring out a common agricultural policy that unites Denmark and Cyprus, but rather a common survival policy for Europa, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Ural Mountains.

So we must look to older models for hope and survival—models more faithful, more fighting, more fertile. A case in point is France. To be sure, on the Mars-Venus continuum, most Americans regard the French as hopelessly Venus, but they were Mars in the past. Perhaps their most virtuous Martian was Charles Martel, King of the Franks, who defeated the Muslim invaders at the Battle of Tours in AD 732. In the words of the contemporaneous chronicler, Isidore of Beja, “In the shock of the battle the men of the North seemed like a sea that cannot be moved. Firmly they stood, one close to another, forming as it were a bulwark of ice; and with great blows of their swords, they hewed down the Arabs.” The defeat of the Muslims was one of the “Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World,” according to 19th-century historian Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy, because it saved the West from destruction.

The French have remembered “Charles the Hammer” ever since, even naming warships after him. Indeed, across 2,000 years, from Vercingetorix to Charlemagne (Martel’s grandson) to Napoleon, the French have showed plenty of fight, and usually much skill. That’s why there’s still a France. And now, despite their recent failures and cupidities, the French are showing renewed determination, as in the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, a man who based his campaign on restoring border security, as well as law and order, to his beleaguered nation.

Meanwhile, as European birthrates plummet, the continent faces the prospect of demographic desiccation. Yet surely a civilization-saving alternative to imported Muslimization must be found. One option, bringing in Eastern Europeans to Western Europe, is probably less than desirable because those Eastern Europeans are needed where they are, to defend Russia and Ukraine against the New Tatars further east. A better solution would be to bring the poorer children of Europe—from countries such as Argentina—home to Europe, allowing the New World to help rescue the Old World.

But we need bigger and broader ideas as well, to replace the doddering vision of international law as the antidote to terrorism.

The Revival of Christendom

Two years ago, the Eurocrats in Brussels drafted a 300-page EU constitution that consciously omitted reference to Europe’s specifically Christian heritage. The voters of France, as well as Holland, rejected that secular document.

Maybe there’s a lesson here. The people of Europe might not be so eager, after all, to declare that they are “united in diversity.” What does that phrase mean, anyway? How about trying to find something that unites Europeans in unity? How about a revival of Christendom as a concept—as a political concept? A revival, or at least a remembrance, of Europe’s cultural heritage could be the healing force that Europe needs.

After all, it worked in the past. In the words of the 19th-century French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, the victory of Christianity marked “the end of ancient society”—and all the petty divisions that went with it. Fustel de Coulanges continues, “Man felt that he had other obligations besides that of living and dying for the city. Christianity distinguished the private from the public virtues. By giving less honor to the latter, it elevated the former; it placed God, the family, the human individual above country, the neighbor above the city.”

As history proves, a larger communion can be built on such sentiments. In the 9th century, Alcuin of York declared that the crowning of Charlemagne as the first Holy Roman Emperor would bring forth a new Imperium Christianum. Ten centuries later, Hilaire Belloc asserted, “The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.” Indeed, during those many centuries, Europe enjoyed a pretty good run. Only in the last century—the century of atheists, psychiatrists, and National Socialists—has Europe’s survivability come into question. Today, the Christian author Os Guiness puts the issue plainly: “A Europe cut off from its spiritual roots cannot survive.”

Some will smile at the thought that Christianity might be part of the solution to the problems of the Third Millennium. Admittedly, there’s an element of faith in the idea of trying to revive the idea of Christian unity. But Christendom is the Shire Strategy, applied.

To keep the peace, we must separate our civilizations. We must start with a political principle, that the West shall stay the West, while the East can do as it wishes on its side of the frontier, and only on its side. The classical political maxim cuius regio, eius religio (“whose region, his religion”) makes sense. To be sure, it has been unfashionable to talk this way in the West, but Muslims are avidly applying it as they set about martyring the remaining Christian populations of Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt. So we of the West can build walls, as needed, and as physically imposing as need be. Going further, we can finally recognize the need for an energy-independence embargo, so that we no longer finance those who wish to conquer or kill us.

For obvious reasons, strategic as well as moral, the Western political alliance must be bigger than just a few relatively friendly countries along the other side of the Atlantic. It should include, most pressingly, Russia. Vladimir Putin might think of himself as a rival, even a foe, of the United States, but he knows he faces a mortal enemy in Islam; it’s the Chechens who are killing his soldiers. So as Russia enjoys its own Christian revival, a reconciliation with mostly Christian America is possible. Immediately, America should renew the spirit of Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative speech, in which the Gipper called for including Moscow inside the protective shield. So instead of building missile-defense sites in Eastern Europe, dividing Europe from Russia, the United States should put those sites in Russia’s southern reaches, to face the real enemy, which is Iran and the rest of nuclear Islam. Even Putin has suggested this defensive placement, perhaps because down deep, he, too, understands that the Christian West should be unified, not divided.

But what of Christians elsewhere in the world? What, for example, of Latin America—which includes the likes of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez? And even more urgently, what of Africa, where Christians are suffering from many afflictions, including the inexorable Muslim advance, pushing south past the 10th parallel into the Christian populations of countries including Nigeria, Sudan, and Ethiopia? How to withstand these many challenges?

The answer: through political co-operation. In Tolkien’s world, it was the Council of Elrond. Perhaps in our world, it could be Council of the West.

It’s been done before. In AD 325, Constantine the Great convened the Council of Nicaea, drawing together quarrelsome bishops from across Europe to hammer out the basic doctrines of the church. Constantine was the first Christian Roman Emperor, although he concerned himself more with geopolitics than theological minutiae. “It is my desire,” he told this first ecumenical convocation, “that you should meet together in a general council … and to know you are resolved to be in common harmony together.” The council was a success, producing the Nicene Creed, which united European faith for centuries to come.

But today, how to find a new unity that reaches across oceans and continents, to include the likes of Putin and Chavez? Answer: with great difficulty, not all at once, and with no certainty of success.

And what of other hard cases? What of Africa? The Christian countries of Africa are part of the Shire Strategy and need to be embraced with tough love. The immediate mission is to delineate a Christian Zone and a Muslim Zone, dividing countries if need be. All Christians, and all Muslims, have a stake in minimizing conflict; the obvious way is by separating the combatants. So a wall should go up between the warring faiths, and then a bigger wall, until the flashpoint risk of civilization clash goes away. Then, and only then, might we hope to find workable solutions within the Christian Zone.

Some will insist that this neo-Constantinian vision of muscular political Christendom is implausible—or inimical to world peace. But in fact, whether we like it or not, the world is forming into blocs. Samuel Huntington was right about “the clash of civilizations”—but with political skill, we can keep clashes from becoming larger wars.

No matter what we say or do, the blocs of Hindus, Chinese, and Japanese are all going their separate cultural ways, rediscovering their own unique heritages. And Islam, of course, is at odds with all of its neighbors. In his book a decade ago, Huntington, mindful of the indirect danger posed by American universalism, was even more mindful of the direct danger posed by Muslims: “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards,” he writes. “Muslim bellicosity and violence are late-twentieth century facts which neither Muslims nor non-Muslims can deny.” That’s bad news, but there’s a silver lining: if Westerners, Russians, Africans, Hindus, and Chinese all feel threatened by Islam—and they all do—there’s plenty of opportunity for a larger encircling alliance, with an eye toward feasible strategies of containment, even quarantine. But not conquest, not occupation, not “liberation.” So the big question is whether or not Christians will continue to be divided into four blocs, as they are at present: Western, Russian, African, Latin. Can four smaller Christian blocs really become one big bloc? One Christendom? Perhaps—borrowing once again from Tolkien—such unification was meant to happen.

That is an encouraging thought: a Council of the West, bringing all the historically Christians countries of the world into one communion.

The Rescue of Israel

But what of Israel? If East is East and West is West, what of the Jewish state, which sits in the East? After all, the entire Middle Eastern region is looking more and more Mordor-like. Tolkien described that terrible wasteland: “High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light.” Not much hope there, at least for Westerners. Whatever possessed us to think we could make Muslims into our own image? Was it a Ring that lured us?

We can make two points: first, Israel must survive, and second, on its current course, Israel will likely not survive.

In recent years, Israel finds its strategic situation worsening. It is increasingly confronted, not by incompetent tinhorn dictators but by determined Muslim jihadists, many of whom live in the Palestinian territories, some of whom live within Israel itself. Meanwhile, Iran proceeds with its nuclear program, while Pakistan, just a heartbeat away from Taliban-ification, already has its nukes in place, ready for export should the right fatwa be uttered. And the Russians and the Chinese, empowered and lured by high energy prices, have their own designs on the region, which include no good tidings for Jews.

Unfortunately, if we look forthrightly into the future, we can see blood and fire ahead for Israel. Aside from the civilization-jolting moral tragedy of a Second Holocaust—a phrase used freely, albeit not lightly, by such Jewish observers as Philip Roth and Ron Rosenbaum—there would be the physical devastation of the Holy Land. How would Christians recover from the demolition of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem? How would Diasporic Jews absorb the Temple Mount’s obliteration? And how, for that matter, would Muslims react to the detonation of the Noble Sanctuary, which sits atop that mount?

Any destruction of Israel would be accompanied, one way or another, by the destruction of much of the Middle East. If Masada came again to Zion, it would likely also be a Strangelovian doomsday for tens or hundreds of millions in the Middle East. And it might mean the annihilation as well of other Muslim religious sites, from Qum and Karbala to, yes, Mecca and Medina.

Some say that the solution to Middle Eastern problems is some sort of pre-emptive strike: get Them before they get Us. That, of course, is exactly the sort of bewitching that Tolkien warned most strongly against—the frenzy to solve a problem through one hubristic stroke, to grab the One Ring of power for oneself, even if that grabbing guarantees one’s own fall into darkness.

A better vision is needed. The Council of the West must do its duty, to Christians, to Jews, and to the need of the world for peace. Having agreed that Israel must survive, within the protective ambit of Christendom, the council could engage Muslims—who are, themselves, in the process of restoring the Caliphate—in a grand summit. Only then, when West meets East, in diplomatic twain, might a chance exist for an enduring settlement. When all Christians, and all Muslims, are brought to the bargaining table, they all become stakeholders in a pacific outcome.

This summit of civilizations would be difficult and expensive, even heartbreaking. It might take a hundred years. But let us begin because the reward could be great: blessed are the peacemakers.

The Knights of the West

With great effort, the West could unite around the Shire Strategy, seeking to secure and protect all our Christendom, spanning oceans and continents. But it won’t be easy. It will take more than diplomacy—it will take strength.

This Shire is ours now, but the way things are going, it won’t be ours permanently. So we must vow to defend the Shire, always. In the last of the “Rings” films, Aragorn the Strider proclaims, in full St. Crispin’s Day mode, “A day may come when the courage of Men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the Age of Men comes crashing down, but it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!”

We in the West will always need warriors. We must have chevaliers sans peur et sans reproche—“Knights without fear and without reproach”—to safeguard our marches and protect our homes. Men such as Leonidas, whose Immortal 300 held off the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 BC, long enough for other Greeks to rally and save the nascent West. Or Aetius, the last noble Roman, who defeated Attila the Hun, Scourge of God, at Chalons in AD 451. Or Don Juan of Austria, who led the Holy League to naval victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571. Or Jon Sobieski, whose Polish cavalry rescued Vienna from the Turks in 1683.

These are not just legends, not just fictional characters—they were real. And if we dutifully honor those heroes, as heroic Men of the West and of Christendom, we will be rewarded with more such heroic men.

Future epics await us. Future Knights of the West, ready to defend Christendom, are waiting to be born, waiting for the call of duty. If we bring them forth with faith and wisdom and confidence, then also will come new heroes and new legends.

Maybe it was meant to be. And that is an encouraging thought.

________________________________________

James P. Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday and a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. He served in the White House under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

September 10, 2007 Issue

More Killing Please! - Palestinian Conflict and the American Civil War

SPENGLER
More killing, please!

"I think people are sick of [killing]," said President George W Bush of the Israeli-Palestinian war. The contrary may be true. People may want the killing to continue for quite some time, as the Palestinian radical organizations suggest. A recurring theme in the history of war is that most of the killing typically occurs long after rational calculation would call for the surrender of the losing side.

Think of the Japanese after Okinawa, the Germans after the Battle of the Bulge, or the final phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty Years War, or the Hundred Years War. Across epochs and cultures, blood has flown in proportion inverse to the hope of victory. Perhaps what the Middle East requires in order to achieve a peace settlement is not less killing, but more.

Mut der Verzweiflung, as the Germans call it, courage borne of desperation, arises not from the delusion that victory is possible, but rather from the conviction that death is preferable to surrender. Wars of this sort end long after one side has been defeated, namely when enough of the diehards have been killed.

Don't blame the president's provincialism. This has nothing to do with Bushido, Nazi fanaticism or other exotic ideologies. The most compelling case of Mut der Verzweiflung can be found in Bush's own back yard, during the American Civil War of 1861-1865. The Southern cause was lost after Major General Ulysses S Grant took Vicksburg and General George G Meade repelled General Robert E Lee at Gettysburg in July 1863. With Union forces in control of the Mississippi River, the main artery of Southern commerce, and without the prospect of a breakout to the North, the Confederacy of slaveholding states faced inevitable strangulation by the vastly superior forces of the North.

Nonetheless, the South fought on for another 18 months. Between Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the two decisive battles of the war fought within the same week, 100,000 men had died, bringing the total number of deaths in major battles to more than a quarter of a million. Another 200,000 soldiers would die before Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox in April 1865. The chart below shows the cumulative number of Civil War casualties as the major battles of the war proceeded.



The chart is demarcated into sections labeled "Hope" (prior to Gettysburg and Vicksburg) and "No Hope". Geometers will recognize a so-called S-curve in which the pace of killing accelerates immediately after Gettysburg and Vickburg and remains steep through the Battle of Cold Harbor, before leveling off in the last months of the war. Not only did half the casualties occur after the war was lost by the South, but the speed at which casualties occurred sharply accelerated. The killing slowed after the South had bled nearly to death, with many regiments unable to field more than a handful of men.

In all, one-quarter of military age Southern manhood died in the field, by far the greatest sacrifice ever offered up by a modern nation in war. General W T Sherman, the scourge of the South, explained why this would occur in advance. There existed 300,000 fanatics in the South who knew nothing but hunting, drinking, gambling and dueling, a class who benefited from slavery and would rather die than work for a living. To end the war, Sherman stated on numerous occasions these 300,000 had to be killed. Evidently Sherman was right. For all the wasteful slaughter of the last 18 months of the war, Southern commander Lee barely could persuade his men to surrender in April 1865. The Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, called for guerilla war to continue, and Lee's staff wanted to keep fighting. Lee barely avoided a drawn-out irregular war.

What will happen now in the Middle East? At the outbreak of the war, Grant and Sherman were unknown. They rose to command because the nerve of their predecessors snapped at the edge of the abyss. The character of the war was too horrible for them to contemplate. Bush's nerve appears to have snapped, as I predicted ( Bush's nerve is going to snap, March 4), "The danger is that America will find itself fighting a sort of Chechnyan war on a global scale. President George W Bush cannot wrap his mind around this," I wrote then. "The blame lies at the doorstep of the neo-conservative war-hawks who persuaded the president that America should undertake a democratizing mission among a people who never once voted for their own leaders."

For that matter, Ariel Sharon's claim before last week's Likud party congress that Israel had achieved victory against terrorism was both accurate and misleading. Wars do not end when they are won, but when those who want to fight to the death find their wish has been granted. Sherman's 300,000 fanatics could not face the mediocre circumstances of a South without slaves and were willing to die for their way of life.

Three million Palestinians packed into a narrow strip of land one day may accept the modest fate of a small and impecunious people, but their young people do not seem ready to do so. We do not know how many ever will. The killing will continue for some time before we find out.

(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

Horror and humiliation and Chicago
By Spengler

What causes the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to imagine that "the government gives [young black men] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, [and] passes a three strikes law" to incarcerate them? It is the same kind of unbearable grief that still causes white Southerners to believe that their ancestors fought the Civil War for a noble cause? It is too humiliating to think that the miscreants had it coming.

An uncanny parallel links the fate of young African-Americans today and that of the young white men of the slave-holding South in 1865. Both cohorts have lost a terrifying proportion of their number to violence. One third of black Americans between the ages of 20 and 30 passed through the criminal justice system in 1995, according to the Sentencing Project, a prisoners' advocacy group. Nearly a third of military-age Southern men military age were killed or wounded during America's Civil War. [1]

It is a measure of the inherent good-heartedness of Americans that they evince a low threshold of horror. Three hundred thousand Confederate dead and millions of ruined African-American lives are too awful to contemplate. Some part of Senator Barack Obama's appeal derives from America's revulsion over the destruction of a generation of young black men; electing an African-American president would assuage part of the guilt.

From this great suffering arise two genres of American popular culture, the Gone With the Wind ilk of Civil War epic, and the "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" brand of gangsta tale. Both try to take the edge off the revulsion and placate the dishonored dead by turning them into folk-heroes. That is understandable, but also unfortunate, for America still has a great deal of killing left to do around the world, and might as well get used to it.

"Get Rich or Die Tryin'" would have been a good epitaph for the Confederate dead, who fought for land and slaves, not for "states' rights" or the sanctity of their soil. Slave-owners along with want-to-be slave-owners had it coming. The Union general William Tecumseh Sherman who said after he burned Atlanta, "I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand, I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them."

Given the sad history of racial oppression in the South for a century after the Civil War, the only thing to regret is that Sherman didn't finish the job. I stopped watching the film version of Gone With the Wind after Scarlett O'Hara saved her plantation from the tax-collector. I wanted her to pick cotton until her back broke.

It is appalling that the criminal justice system has devoured one out of three young African-Americans, to be sure, but the number must be too small, because the police will have failed to apprehend some who still commit crimes. I did not attempt to watch the film Get Rich or Die Tryin'. I want the police to incarcerate such people before they commit enough crimes to fill a screenplay.

Europeans are far more attuned to horror. They have had the opportunity to get used to it. Cannibalism was rampant in 17th-century Germany during the Thirty Years' War, and in the Ukraine during Joseph Stalin's 1931 starvation. Americans abandoned the horrors of the Old World. Terrible as the Civil War may have been, it spared civilians. Sherman burned his way from Atlanta to the sea in 1864, but the number of rapes and murders committed by his soldiers can be counted on one's fingers.

Nonetheless, there is no market for Hollywood epics about Sherman's March to the sea, arguably the most brilliant military campaign in the history of American arms, while the film industry still grinds out kitsch about the supposedly gallant losers. Perhaps one should feel sorry for the impoverished privates who bled for the Confederacy. Few had slaves, yet they fought stubbornly to preserve slavery, because they hoped that they, too, would obtain land and slaves as the victorious Confederacy became a hemispheric empire. I have expanded on this subject elsewhere (Happy birthday, Abe - pass the blood Asia Times Online, February 10, 2004).

The embittered fighters of the South sacrificed themselves in proportions unsurpassed in modern history, excepting the Serbs in World War I. But there was no honor, no gallantry, and no nobility in the blood-letting. They fought for empire and advancement, like Albrecht von Wallenstein's freebooters of the Thirty Years' War or Napoleon's ambitious Grande Armee. Sherman's belief that the war objective was not to occupy this or that piece of territory, but to kill 300,000 men, was almost exactly correct: the final total of Confederate dead was 289,000, just 11,000 short of Sherman's estimate. Perhaps the 11,000 men Sherman failed to kill were the founders of the Klu Klux Klan.

In fact, Sherman's superior, General Ulysses S Grant, did far more of the killing. Sherman burnt property and humiliated the South on their home soil. But a people that has given its all for a defeat that is too terrible to recall with clarity has nothing left but pride, and the wounded pride of the South has turned Sherman's memory into a curse.

Southerners thought of themselves as an oppressed people, the descendants of Scots-Irish immigrants driven out of their Celtic homelands by the English, flying the X-shaped cross of Scotland's patron saint in the Confederate battle flag, redolent of Scotland's "Lost Cause". The self-pity of the South pervades American popular culture, from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, to The Band's bathetic song, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down". It is best known in the cover version by Joan Baez, an old civil rights campaigner. Such is the pull of identity politics.

With good reason, the descendants of Scots villagers expelled from the Highlands after the rebellion of 1746 may have thought themselves oppressed. Because they came from oppressed folk, their passion to better themselves burned all the more fiercely. When they set to build a slave empire, they could be stopped only by killing so many of them that insufficient numbers were left to form the ranks. The South fought on with redoubled ferocity after the twin Union victories of 1863, Vicksburg and Gettysburg, made Confederate victory improbable. Most Southern casualties, I reported in an earlier essay (More killing please!, Asia Times Online, June 13, 2003), occurred after Southern hopes had faded, and the South surrendered only after its manpower was too depleted to continue.

Sherman, who lived in the South and had many close Southern friends, understood that the ambitions of the South could be quelled only by a sea of blood. He is the decisive personality of the Civil War, yet there never has been a single cinematic treatment of the man. Twenty-one films, by contrast, portray Jesse James, the Confederate guerilla turned outlaw. He is the 50 Cent of the old South.

I do not mean to draw a moral equivalency between would-be slave-owners and the descendants of slaves, but the functional parallel is compelling. According to the Sentencing Project, "More than 60% of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities. For black males in their twenties, one in every eight is in prison or jail on any given day. These trends have been intensified by the disproportionate impact of the 'war on drugs', in which three-fourths of all persons in prison for drug offenses are people of color."

A generation of African-Americans has been decimated. Murder is the leading cause of death among young African-American men; an American black has a 5% lifetime probably of becoming a murder victim (against a 0.7% probably for a white American).

Wright offers one sort of explanation: it is all due to a conspiracy by a racist government that wants to exterminate black people. The comedian and actor Bill Cosby now is touring America to offer a different explanation: the problems of African-Americans stem from a lack of individual responsibility, especially among men. In the May 2008 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Ta-Nehesi Coates reports on a Cosby event in Detroit, writing, "Cosby had come to Detroit aiming to grab the city's black men by their collars and shake them out of the torpor that has left so many of them - like so many of their peers across the country - undereducated, overincarcerated, and underrepresented in the ranks of active fathers."

Cosby speaks pure sanity to black Americans, but the circumstances are enough to make a man crazy - Wright, for example. Sanity is conveyed through humiliation. If young black men are killed in the commission of petty crimes, Cosby told a civil rights conference in 2004, it is their own fault:

Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! And then we all run out and are outraged, "The cops shouldn't have shot him." What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?

It is horrific to die young, and humiliating to die for the wrong reason. Living with the humiliation is the beginning of recovery. But Wright and his congregation cannot bear the horror and humiliation any more than the average white Southerner, who after a few Bourbons will tell you, "The South shall rise again!"

Americans need a higher threshold for horror. Tragedies sometimes must play themselves out, and the losers must be allowed to lose. Whole peoples can go bad, and sometimes it is necessary to prevent them from doing evil by winnowing their ranks. It is just as perverse to excuse Wright's paranoid outbursts as it is to perpetuate the self-consoling myth of the gallant slave-holding South. America will be on the right track when it celebrates Sherman instead of 50 Cent.

Note
1. Nearly four-fifths of Southern white men served in the Confederate Army, and of these, half were wounded and a quarter were killed

But What Can I Do About the Crisis Facing Israel and the Jewish People?

March 09, 2008
But What Can I Do About the Crisis Facing Israel and the Jewish People?
By Rachel Neuwirth
More and more people have been saying to me, "I realize that Jews are facing a major crisis in Israel, here in America, in Europe, and everywhere in the world. But what can I do about it? I am just one person. Vast forces are threatening Israel. Can I stop anti-Israelism and anti-Judaism on my own? I feel helpless in the face of the vast forces that are arrayed against us."

These are natural and normal human feelings. I have felt them at times myself. The confluence of international forces that has gathered against the Jewish people and faith, including the spiritual and intellectual fifth column amongst us, is indeed a formidable adversary. Nevertheless, there are things we can do if we are willing to work together to protect our rights and stand up to the massive defamation campaign waged against us.

One very important thing that all of us can do is to counter the endless lies and distortions of Israel's history and character that appear in the press, mass media, on the Internet, and even in scholarly journals. These distortions and outright falsehoods are a major reason why Israel is in such deep trouble, and in danger of "going under." Because the entire world has been led to believe an inaccurate, grossly distorted "narrative" of the conflict, the government of Israel feels it has no choice but to make concessions to the demands of its enemies, in order to appease world opinion. But these concessions imperil Israel's existence.

Each of us can help to correct this appalling situation by acting immediately, whenever we encounter such a distortion in the press or mass media, to correct it with a letter to the editor or news manager. We can also actively monitor the mass media on the Internet in order to locate as many distortions as we can and correct them. Further, we can speak up to counter distortions in public lectures and meetings about the Arab-Israel conflict, and even in private conversations. All of this requires work and time, but it really does help. Each of us should devote as much time and energy to these tasks as we possibly can.

But in order to counter the endless flow of lies and distortions about Israel, we must first learn what the true facts of Israel's history are. Before we can answer the chorus of unfair criticisms leveled against Israel and her supporters in the United States and elsewhere, we must first educate ourselves.

What are the facts about the conflict over "Palestine" that Arab and other anti-Israel propagandists have distorted, misrepresented and covered up? The following are some, although by no means all, of the most important ones:

The Israelis are not colonialists or alien "settlers" in the Land of Israel with no past connection or relationship to the country; on the contrary, we Jews have lived in Israel for at least 3,200 years if not longer. This is far longer than most peoples have lived in their present national homelands. Our two glorious temples, wonders of the ancient world, were there for a thousand years. King David's kingdom endured for more than four hundred years; later, there was the independent Jewish state of the Maccabees. Jews had lived in the Land of Israel in large numbers for at least 1,800 years before the Arabs conquered it in 635 C.E. Moreover, while hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from their land or put to death in it by foreign conquerors, there have been at least some Jews living there almost continuously for 3,200 years.

There has never been a distinctive "Palestinian" Arab people or an Arab "Palestine" state or nation; while it is true that some Arabs have lived in the Land of Israel for many centuries, they have never been ethnically or culturally distinct or different from the Arabs who live in other lands, including the original Arab homeland, the Arabian Peninsula. The Jews, however, are a people who originated in the Land of Israel and never had any other national homeland.

During over a thousand years of Muslim rule, "Palestine" was rarely the name even of an administrative district, let alone a nation. Arabs referred to the entire land that now comprises Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and the "occupied territories" as "al-Shams" (Syria), which they regarded as one country.

While the Land of Israel, also called "Palestine" by Romans and Europeans, was densely populated in ancient times, its population steadily declined during over 1,000 years of Muslim rule. In the nineteenth century, Israel/Palestine was very thinly settled. There was very little agriculture, and extensive abandoned and uninhabited "waste" lands. Most of the population, such as it was, lived in dire poverty. Brigandage was such an established and accepted way of life that it was impossible to travel on the roads without the payment of large bribes to the leading men of each village along the way. The roads themselves were no more than unpaved footpaths. Villages fought wars with each other. Nomadic Bedouin tribes frequently raided villages and even larger towns. The inhabitants of the few larger towns (there were no real cities) had to cower behind thick walls and locked gates every night for security.

The Arab population of Israel/Palestine only began to grow in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the same time that Jews began to resettle the land. Jewish immigrants brought with them modernized agriculture, including the growing of oranges, which had been previously unknown; a market for Arab agricultural goods; employment at Jewish farms and factories; modern hospitals and medicine that saved thousands of Arab lives; the draining of swamps that had caused thousands of deaths from malaria and other insect-born diseases; and vastly expanded Arab education funded by Jewish taxes.

The Arab population of Palestine has grown extensively, from under 500,000 in 1891 to over 3,600,000 today, partly because of increased life expectancy brought about by the economic and scientific progress introduced by Jewish immigrants/settlers, but also in part because of extensive immigration to Palestine from many Arab countries.

As a result, many of the Arabs who call themselves, or who are called by other Arabs "Palestinians," have ancestors who originated in Egypt, Syria, what are now Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and other Arab countries. These Arab countries ought rightfully to give these "Palestinians" citizenship, but refuse to do so.

The Arabs, including and especially the Palestinian Arabs, have been the aggressors throughout the nearly 100 years of the Arab-Israel conflict. This "one long war" began with the communal violence that convulsed Palestine between 1920 and 1948, even before Israel was founded.

Palestinian and other Arabs organized and carried out massive pogroms against the Jews of Palestine in 1920, 1921 and 1929, waged a sustained terrorist campaign against them from 1936 through 1939, and a full-scale jihad against them in 1947-48. Thousands of Palestinian terrorist/guerillas, the regular armies of six Arab states, and "volunteers" from throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds all participated in this aggressive war. Before the 1947-48 Arab attack against the Palestinian/Israeli Jews there had been few if any displaced Palestinian Arabs. The Palestinian Arabs were not innocent bystanders in the war that made them refugees. They initiated the war in which some, although not all, of them fled from parts of Israel in 1948. They killed over two thousand Jews in that war. The six invading Arab states killed over 4,300 more Jews.

The Israelis defended themselves as best they could against these unprovoked attacks. But they did not expel the Palestinian Arabs. Many Arab leaders as well as ordinary Palestinian Arabs have admitted that Arab leaders urged the Arabs living in Palestine to flee, promising them that Arab armies would soon defeat the Jews and allow them to return to their homes. Despite this bad advice, many Palestinian Arabs never left Israel, and became Israeli citizens, with full rights of citizenship. Today there are over one million Arab citizens and residents of Israel -- more than there were in 1947, before Israel was established.

Following this first major Arab-Israel war, the Arab states induced the United Nations to keep the Palestinian Arabs refugees and their descendants in "refugee camps" (actually segregated towns) for generations. All of the Arab states except Jordan denied the Palestinian Arabs citizenship and equal rights. Arab governments and the refugee camp administrations taught the Palestinians that it was their Arab duty to wage war against Israel in order to gain back the homes in what is now Israel where (some) of their ancestors had lived before 1948. This segregation and indoctrination of the Palestinian refugees, as well as their descendants to the third, fourth and all later generations, is the true origin of Palestinian terrorism, not Israeli "oppression" or "occupation."

Also following the Arab-Israel war of 1947-49, the Arab nations refused to sign peace treaties with Israel, sponsored Palestinian Arab terrorist raids into Israel in which hundreds of Israelis were killed, and waged war by economic boycott and propaganda as well. Last but not least, Egypt waged war by blockading Israeli shipping in the Suez Canal and in the Gulf of Aqaba (also called the Gulf of Eilat by Israelis). These acts of war severely damaged the Israeli economy in addition to causing widespread loss of life and injury to Israel's citizens.

Palestinian Arab terrorist attacks on, and raids into, Israel have been continuous since 1949. Whatever reprisal raids and counterterrorist operations Israel has conducted over these years against the Palestinian terrorists have been reluctant responses to aggression against Israeli civilians and soldiers--not deliberate attacks on Arab civilians, as Arab spokesman and much of the press in the West have misrepresented them.

Israel only "occupied" the so-called "occupied territories" in 1967 as a necessary act of self-defense, in response to a whole series of acts of aggression by the Arab world: two and a half years of Palestinian Arab terrorist raids sponsored by Syria; decades of Syrian shelling of Israeli border villages from artillery positions on the Golan Heights, the forced removal of United Nations peacekeepers from the Sinai by Egypt's President Nasser: a reinstatement of the Egyptian blockade of Israeli shipping in the Gulf of Eilat/Aqaba: the mobilization of the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies along Israel's three borders, and public declarations of war on Israel by Egypt's Nasser, the government of Syria and other Arab regimes. Israel "occupied" these territories only as a means of forestalling the publicly proclaimed, imminent Arab invasion, and to stop the Jordanian shelling of Israeli Jerusalem. This Jordanian barrage had killed 17 Israelis and wounded many more before Israel moved to occupy the "West Bank," (more accurately known as Judea and Samaria).

Israel has now withdrawn from 90% of the territories that it occupied in 1967, including all of the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza region, large parts of Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank"), and part of the Golan Heights. But these very substantial concessions have failed to persuade the Arab world to make peace with Israel.

All of the other Arab-Israeli wars were also initiated or heavily provoked by Arab states, usually working in tandem with the Palestinian Arab terrorist groups whom they sponsored. Egypt forced a war with Israel in 1956 by sponsoring Palestinian terrorist raids deep into Israeli territory for more than two years, and by blockading Israeli shipping in the Suez Canal and Gulf of Aqaba. In 1973, Egypt and Syria launched an unprovoked surprise attack on Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur (the timing was surely no coincidence). Israel invaded Lebanon in 1981 only after years of Palestinian Arab terrorist attacks originating in that country; Israel withdrew completely from Lebanon in 2000, but was forced in 2006 to deal with renewed terrorist attacks into its territory from Lebanon -this time, by a Lebanese, not a Palestinian, terrorist organization, Hezbollah. Israel quickly withdrew from Lebanon again following a ceasefire.

Jewish settlements established since 1967 outside the pre-Six Day War ceasefire lines are not "illegal." The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, issued in 1922 with the unanimous support of the League member states and with the additional support of the United States (although it was not a member of the League), requires that the administration of Palestine "shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency . . . close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes" (article 6). The International Court of Justice has ruled in a similar case (that of Southwest Africa) that the Mandate documents issued by the League of Nations remain international law, even though the League itself was disbanded in 1946, and its responsibilities transferred to the United Nations. The United Nations Charter (Article 80) states that the "rights of peoples" in the League of Nations Mandate documents remain in force, as well as the documents themselves.

The Israel "occupation" of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza is also legal according to international law, for three reasons: 1) Israel only occupied these territories in a defensive war; 2) her enemies continue to wage an aggressive war of terror from these territories, requiring a continued Israel military presence in them for self-defense. 3) Israel has a better title to these territories than any other nation, since the League of Nations Mandate document for Palestine, which has never been rescinded, specifies that the administration of these territories "shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home," The British Mandatory power ceased when the State of Israel was born but the rights of the Jewish people to the land remain intact, since they are a "sacred trust of civilization," as defined by the Covenant of the League of Nations, Art. 22. These permanent rights are enshrined in the Trusteeship Chapter of the UN Charter [Chapter XII, Art. 80]

There are many, many additional salient facts about the conflict that supporters of Israel should learn in order to combat the campaign of defamation and slander waged against her throughout the world. Here we have had space only to summarize a few of the most important points. But learning even these few important facts makes a useful start for those who wish to be activists in correcting the lies and distortions about Israel's history and character. They make important "talking points" for responding to these lies and distortions, whether in the mass media, on the Internet, at lectures and public meetings, or in private conversations.

We need to remember Benjamin Franklin's observation during the American Revolution: "if we don't hang together, then most assuredly we shall hang separately." We Americans, whether Jewish, Christian and even Muslim, cannot separate our own freedom and security from that of Israel.


John Landau contributed to this article.


Documentation: For the history of the Palestinian refugee problem, as well as good general introductions to the history of the Arab-Israel dispute, see Big Lies: Demolishing The Myths of the Propaganda War Against Israel by David Meir-Levi, Introduction by David Horowitz, and Arab and Jewish Refugees - The Contrast, by Eli E. Hertz For see Carta's Historical Atlas of Israel, the Jewish History Atlas, by Martin Gilbert, present the long and continuous history of the Jewish habitation of Israel/Palestine in clear, easy-to-follow language with visual aids. Also very helpful for this purpose is " Israel 's Story in Maps," produced by www.Israelinsider.com. For the condition of Palestine under Islamic rule before Jewish resettlement, see Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial, also Arnold Blumberg, Zion Before Zionism 1838-1880, and Saul S. Friedman, Land of Dust: Palestine at the Turn of the Century, Ms. Peters' book also contains documentation of the extensive Arab immigration to Palestine that went on at the same time as the Jewish resettlement. For the history of the Arab-Israel wars and Arab terrorism in Palestine, the best source is Neaten Lorch, One Long War: Arab versus Jew Since 1920, also excellent on this subject is Martin Gilbert, The Arab-Israeli Conflict: Its History in Maps. Another book by Netanel Lorch, The Edge of the Sword: Israel's War of Independence 1947-49, gives the best account of the Palestinian and other Arab aggression in which the Palestinian Arab refugee "exodus" occurred. Also useful guides to these events are Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem; and Jon and David Kimche, Both Sides of the Hill, also published also under the alternative title A Clash of Destinies. For the legality of the Israeli settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and the legality of the Israeli administration of these areas, see Eli E. Hertz, "This land is My Land: Mandate for Palestine; The Legal Aspects of Jewish Rights; and Eugene V. Rostow, "Resolved: are the Settlements Legal?"

Professor Meir-Levi's pamphlet Big Lies can be downloaded from the www.frontpage.com web site, and can also be ordered in "hard copy" from that site. All of Mr. Eli E. Hertz's articles can all be downloaded from his www.mythsandfacts.org web site. Eugene V. Rostow's article can be found on the http://middleeastfacts.org web site and elsewhere on the web; it was originally published in the Oct. 21, 1991 issue of The New Republic. " Israel 's Story in Maps," is available for downloading on the www.Israelinsider.com web site, and can also be ordered on DVD. Carta's Historical Atlas of Israel can be ordered from eisenbrauns.com, TomFolio.com, Biblio-com, and Israel-catalog.com. Martin Gilbert's Jewish History Atlas and The Arab-Israeli Conflict: Its History in Maps can be ordered from Amazon.com. Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial can be ordered from http://shop.wnd.com/store, www.eretzyisroel.org, amazon.com, and other sites on the web. Professor Blumberg's Zion Before Zionism 1838-1880 can be ordered from amazon.com and antiqbook.com. Professor Friedman's Land of Dust can be obtained from www.Nowandtherebooks.com. Netanel Lorch's books One Long War and The Edge of the Sword can be ordered from Amazon.com and antiqbook.com. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre's O Jerusalem are available through amazon.com and centuryone.com. Jon and David Kimche's Both Sides of the Hill can be ordered through amazon.com, AmericanaExchange.com, BookNet.com, and alibris.com.

Pro-Israel activists wishing to counter the constant misrepresentations of Israel's history and actions should obtain, and read, as many of these or similar books and articles as possible.

First Temple seal found in Jerusalem

A stone seal bearing the name of one of the families who acted as servants in the First Temple and then returned to Jerusalem after being exiled to Babylonia has been uncovered in an archeological excavation in Jerusalem's City of David, a prominent Israeli archeologist said Wednesday.

Photo: Edwin Trebels courtesy of Dr. Eilat Mazar

The 2,500-year-old black stone seal, which has the name "Temech" engraved on it, was found earlier this week amid stratified debris in the excavation under way just outside the Old City walls near the Dung Gate, said archeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar, who is leading the dig.

According to the Book of Nehemiah, the Temech family were servants of the First Temple and were sent into exile to Babylon following its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.

The family was among those who later returned to Jerusalem, the Bible recounts.

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The seal, which was bought in Babylon and dates to 538-445 BCE, portrays a common and popular cultic scene, Mazar said.

The 2.1 x 1.8-cm. elliptical seal is engraved with two bearded priests standing on either side of an incense altar with their hands raised forward in a position of worship.

Dr. Eilat Mazar
Photo: Dr. Eilat Mazar Expedition

A crescent moon, the symbol of the chief Babylonian god Sin, appears on the top of the altar.

Under this scene are three Hebrew letters spelling Temech, Mazar said.

The Bible refers to the Temech family: "These are the children of the province, that went up out of the captivity, of those that had been carried away, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away, and came again to Jerusalem and to Judah, every one unto his city." [Nehemiah 7:6]... "The Nethinim [7:46]"... The children of Temech." [7:55].

The fact that this cultic scene relates to the Babylonian chief god seemed not to have disturbed the Jews who used it on their own seal, she added.

The seal of one of the members of the Temech family was discovered just dozens of meters away from the Opel area, where the servants of the Temple, or "Nethinim," lived in the time of Nehemiah, Mazar said.

"The seal of the Temech family gives us a direct connection between archeology and the biblical sources and serves as actual evidence of a family mentioned in the Bible," she said. "One cannot help being astonished by the credibility of the biblical source as seen by the archaeological find."

The find will be announced by Mazar at the 8th annual Herzliya Conference on Sunday.

The archeologist, who rose to international prominence for her recent excavation that may have uncovered King David's palace, most recently uncovered the remnants of a wall from Nehemiah.

The dig is being sponsored by the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem research institute where Mazar serves as a senior fellow, and the City of David Foundation, which promotes Jewish settlement throughout east Jerusalem.