Death of a mythm

by Jonathan Rosenblum
March 11, 2004
Jerusalem Post

One central myth has guided American Middle East policy for more 
than three decades: Resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict 
holds the key to curing the region's manifold deformations. 

Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman put that myth to rest for 
good last week - at least as far as the Bush administration is 
concerned - when he publicly told Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed 
Maher in Cairo that democratization of the Middle East is too urgent 
to "wait until there is full peace [between Israel and the 
Palestinians]." (The State Department had been the last holdout 
within the Bush administration.) For Israelis long inured to bad news, 
Grossman's statement is indeed cause for celebration. 

The old doctrine, however, would doubtless return in full force 
in a Kerry administration. Witness how the New York Times trotted 
out Jimmy Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski 
on Monday to instruct Vice President Dick Cheney that neither 
Palestinians nor Iraqis will be attracted to the virtues of 
democracy as long as their lands are under Israeli and American 
occupation, respectively. 

Brzezinski implied that the Bush administration's focus on Arab 
democracy is nothing more than a device to avoid "any serious 
American effort to push the Israelis and Palestinians to reach 
a genuine peace settlement." 

The thesis that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has caused the 
endemic failures of the Arab world cannot bear five minutes of 
scrutiny. Even a brief catalogue of those failures makes clear 
Israel's irrelevance. Israel had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein's 
invasion of Iran, at the cost of more than a million lives on 
both sides, or with his decision more than a decade later to invade 
Kuwait. Similarly, Israel did not cause the brutal decade-long 
civil war in Algeria, and is not responsible for the tensions 
between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, which recently prompted Saudi Arabia 
to contemplate building a fence across its southern border. 
The mutual loathing of Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims, so chillingly 
on display in Iraq last week, precedes the creation of the State 
of Israel by 1,200 years. 

Most importantly, Israel's existence cannot explain the chronic 
backwardness of Arab nations, despite being blessed with the world's 
most valuable natural resources. 

THE 2002 Arab Human Development Report, produced by a group of Arab 
intellectuals under the auspices of the UN, identified three areas 
of deficit that characterize the Arab world: knowledge, democracy, 
and the status of women. 

Arab states rank lowest on the freedom scale of the world's seven 
regions. Arab despots are so terrified of their subjects that 
they fear to grant them access to knowledge. Internet connectivity 
in the Arab world ranks behind that of sub-Saharan Africa. 
The entire Arab world translates 300 books annually. Greece alone 
translates five times as many. 

Arab expenditures on research and development as a percentage of 
gross national product are one-seventh of the world average. 
From 1980 to 2000, Arab countries registered 370 patents; Israel, 
with less than one-40th the population, registered 7,652. 
Any Arab who does manage to acquire a decent education quickly 
flees for the freedoms of the West, creating a massive brain drain. 
The result: The total GNP of 22 Arab nations, with 280 million people, 
is less than that of Spain, with a population of 40 million. 

In light of the Arab world's complete failure to keep pace with 
the West, it is pointless to ask why Arabs hate the West. 
As the great Orientalist Bernard Lewis notes: "It is very natural 
that they should. You have this millennial rivalry between two world 
religions, and now, from their point of view, the wrong one seems 
to be winning." 

Those who are rich, strong, and successful are always likely to 
be despised by those who are the opposite. 

Take any hot spot around the globe where large numbers of people 
are being killed, and you will find angry Muslim men between the 
ages of 18 and 25 at the center of the action. Every single act 
of terrorism since 9/11 has been perpetrated by Islamic fanatics. 

Arab and Muslim hatred of Israel is a subspecies of the generalized 
hatred of the West; but hatred of Israel is more intense because 
Israel is viewed as a projection of the West into the midst of 
Arab territory. 

Israel is not the cause but the excuse for the Arab failure to 
join the modern world. Arab dictators require Israel as an object 
of hatred to distract the attention of their subject populations 
from their ignorance, poverty, and lack of freedom. As Lewis said 
in a Jerusalem lecture last week: "The great fear of Arab leaders 
is not that America will fail to establish a democracy in Iraq 
but that it will succeed." 

The Egyptian claim that democratization of the Arab world cannot 
take place as long as "Israeli aggression against the Palestinian 
people continues" is tantamount to a schizophrenic's refusing to 
take desperately needed medication in order to punish his loving 
parents who are begging him to take it. 

And Dr. Z is in the position of the psychiatrist who encourages 
that refusal.