Soho feeds the needs and hides the deeds, the mind that bleeds Disenchanted, downstream in the night Soho hears the lies, the twisted cries, the lonely sighs Till she seems lost in dreams
Al Stewart, Soho (needless to say) (1973)
Whenever I recall London’s Soho in the sixties, I always think about my bedsitter days in the city in the early seventies and also, British singer-songwriter Al Stewart’s over-orchestrated but quite excellent debut album of 1967, Bedsitter Images.
My bedsitter images
My bedsitter images
You could say that I knew Al Stewart’s London ‘ere I first knew London. I bought the album when, as a sixth former, I first saw him perform at the famous Jug o’ Punch folk club in Digbeth, Birmingham, run by The Ian Campbell Folk Group. I’d go there regularly with my schoolmates – we saw some great singers, including a young Joni Mitchell in the summer of 1968 – it was love at first sight, and I bought her first album there too: Songs from a Seagull). Al may have autographed his record – I can’t recall. It was stolen from my bedsit room in Reading in 1970 along with many of my favourite discs – including that one of Joni’s.
Maybe it’s about what here in Australia – borrowing from our indigenous compatriots – we might call “spirit of place”: the association with the streets within a hop, skip and an amble from Old Compton Street out into Shaftsbury Avenue and that bookshop in Charing Cross Road, the opening verse of the second track Swiss Cottage Manoeuvres, and that flat in Swiss Cottage, a suburb I used to frequent in the seventies when several of my friends lived there. You can listen to the whole of album below.
In a trawl through my back pages (OK! Enough with the Bob Dylan already!), wrote of my early encounters with Soho:
”As a sixth former, I’d often hitch to “swinging” London for the weekend, to explore the capital and visit folk and jazz clubs, kipping in shop door-ways and underground car parks under cardboard and napping wrapped in newspapers, and eating at Wimpy bars and Lyons teas houses”.
And naturally, I discovered Soho, a bright, colourful and disreputable warren of narrow streets behind the theatre-strip of Shaftesbury Avenue, with its mix of cafés, trattorias, delicatessen, book shops and strip clubs – and Carnaby Street, internationally famous by then as the fashion mecca and the “place to be” of “Swinging London”.
“… the motorway from Birmingham to London was a road well-traveled. In my final year at Moseley Grammar, I’d often hitch down to London for a weekend with pals who’d gone there before. We’d hang out at cheap and cheerful Pollo’s Italian restaurant in Old Compton Street in Soho and the Coach and Horses across the road, and go to Cousins folk and blues joint in a cellar in nearby Greek Street, and the 101 Jazz Club off Oxford Street. Bunjies folk cafè and Ronnie Scott’s jazz club were just around the corner. After a meal or a pint, I’d often catch the last tube to the end of the line closest to the M1. I can’t recall how many times I headed off into the night; and there were always drivers on the road at the witching hour. I guess many folks “get the urge for going”, as Joni sang back then, “and they had to go …” And in those generous times, people were happy to offer a lift to a wayfaring stranger – gentle souls who would not leave strays stranded by the dark wayside; lonesome folks seeking company and conversation in the dark night of the soul; curious people wondering why a young man would hitch the highways in the middle of the English night”. There’s more in Ciao Pollo di Soho – the café at the end of the M1.
Pollo. The café at the end of the motorway
I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand, walking the streets of Soho in the rain. Warren Zevon
There was something vicarious in ithe seedy, needy, greedy vibe of the priapic songs on Al’s follow up albums. An old friend and Al Stewart fanboy who has now passed on called them aural masturbation. Although there were many “love chronicles”, the title track of his second album, Al also wrote about melancholy middle aged suburban couples, historical events and more, with the odd foray into poetic mysticism, self-reflection, and also, nonsense. And some excellent instrumentals – he is an imaginative and flamboyant guitarist. My flat mates and I were all fans of Al back then, and went to most of his gigs when he played in London. Here’s one of our favourite ‘history’ songs:
In the early seventies, when a girlfriend started going out with Al, I actually got to know him for a brief while. Indeed, once, when he played in Birmingham Town Hall, me and a couple of pals drove up to my old hometown to see him, and after the show, invited him back to my folks’ place for a late night fry up. My mom reckoned he need fattening up. And afterwards, she and Al sat in the kitchen for a couple of hours talking about pop music. “I love Cat Stevens”, mom said. “Oh, I much prefer the Incredible String Band”, said Al. “Oh, they’re very weird, but Paul like them!” She said. Then they got talking about Mick Jagger. And my dad, in the sitting room, said to us others gathered there, and referring to Al’s stature, said “there’s not much to him is there!”. Strange but nice how you recall these little things. The folks have passed on a long time ago …
Afterthought – Clifton in the Rain
Whilst I always associate Al Stewart with London and Soho, my favourite song is set in a Bristol suburb. Released in 1970, it is gentle, lyrical, and paints a beautiful picture of English weather – and it features the gorgeous Jaqueline Bisset.
The rain came down like beads
Bouncing on the noses of the
People from the train
A flock of salty ears
Sparkled in the traffic lights
Feet squelched soggy leaves across the grain
I took my love to Clifton in the rain
And all along the way
Wanderers in overcoats with
Collars on parade
And steaming in the night
The listeners in the Troubadour
Guitar player weaves a willow strain
I took my love to Clifton in the rain
Jacqueline Bisset
I saw your movie
Wondered if you really felt that way
Do you ever fear
The images of Hollywood
Have you felt a shadow of its pain
I thought of you in Clifton in the rain
Most folk who are into history like to draw parallels and identify patterns in the past that reflect upon the present. As I do also, albeit in a more ambivalent way. Cleaving to Mark (Twain, that is). am fascinated more by the rhymes than the repetitions. Five years ago, i wrote Messing with the Mullahs – America’s phoney war? Events in the Middle East since October 7 2023, not least tit-for-tat aerial exchanges on we have seen in recent months between Israel and Iran, and the potential return of the unreformed and unchained prodigal son on January 6th 2025 render it relevant still. How long will it be before the war drums start beating on the Potomac and the Iran hawks circle over Washington DC seeking the restored king’s feckless and fickle ear? As they say, fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Back then, I wrote:
“The story of the Iranian Revolution is a complex, multidimensional one, and it is difficult for its events and essence to be compressed into brief opinion pieces of any political flavour, no matter how even-handed they endeavour to be.
The revolution began slowly in late 1977 when demonstrations against Shah Reza Pahlevi, developed into a campaign of civil resistance by both secular and religious groups. These intensified through 1978, culminating In strikes and demonstrations that paralyzed the country. Millennia of monarchy in Iran ended in January 1979 when the Shah and his family fled into exile. By April, exiled cleric and longtime dissident Ayatollah Khomeini returned home to a rapturous welcome. Activist fighters and rebel soldiers overwhelmed troops loyal to the Shah, and Iran voted by national referendum to become an Islamic republic on April 1st, 1979. A new constitution saw Khomeini became Supreme Leader in December 1979.
The success and continuing durability of the Iranian Revolution derived from many sources, and many are not touched upon by commentators and pundits.
One can’t ignore the nature of the monarchy that preceded it – modernist on the one hand, and brutally repressive on the other; nor the unwavering and hypocritical support (including infrastructure, weapons, and intelligence) provided to it by western “democracies” since Britain and the US placed Reza Shah Pahlevi on the throne in 1953.
Nor should we ignore the nature of the unprecedented regime and state that was established forty years ago – a brutal, theocratic, patriarchal, quasi-totalitarian system that endeavours to control all aspects of its citizens’ lives, its rule enforced by loyal militias like the ruthless Basij and by the Revolutionary Guard, a military-industrial complex more powerful than the regular army.
The support and succour that the US gave to the deposed Shah and his family and entourage, and later, to the opponents of the revolution, served to unite the population around a dogmatic, cruel and vengeful regime, which, in the manner of revolutions past and present, “devoured its children”, harrying, jailing, exiling and slaughtering foes and onetime allies alike. One of the ironies of the early days of the revolution was its heterodox complexion – a loose and unstable alliance between factions of the left, right and divine. History is replete with examples of how a revolution besieged within and without by enemies actual and imagined mobilizes it people for its support, strength and survival.”
This brief outline summarises the events of 1979 and the decades which followed. It does not elaborate in any detail on the reasons for the downfall of the Shah and the durability of the regime that succeeded him. An impressive essay in the Jewish cultural e-zine Mosaic endeavours to do just that, providing as it does, insights into the history of modern Iranian history that few people today would be familiar with.
In it, the author suggests that “the most impressive of our experts persist in downplaying or ignoring the Islamic Republic of Iran’s driving forces can lead to misunderstandings of current affairs that are far from academic. Both nuclear negotiations and the sanctions, for instance, are premised on the assumption that Tehran is eager above all else to improve its country’s economy. While Ayatollah Khamenei and his minions doubtless care about trade and finances, they care much more about advancing their religious ideology across the Middle East, and like most religious believers, feel that spiritual concerns must ultimately trump material ones. It’s even possible that some might find the idea of suffering material hardships to achieve ideological goals appealing …
… If I’m right that Iranians didn’t rise up en masse because of the rising costs of onions or because they wanted to drive nicer cars, but because they were passionately opposed to secularization and American influence, then the U.S. cannot make peace with Iran even if the nuclear deal succeeds. The Islamic regime doesn’t oppose America because it supports Israel or Saudi Arabia, but because it represents Western secularism. Unless mass-conversion to Islam is in America’s future, that’s not something that’s likely to go away …
… One hopes that the loss of Afghanistan will finally hammer home the truth that the loss of Iran (in 1979) so signally failed to do: it’s religion, stupid.”
With a new nuclear deal on the way, attention is again turning to Iran. Four recent books, plus the deal itself, suggest that America and Europe are blind to the regime’s motivating spirit.
A portrait of the late Ayatollah Khomeini projected on the Azadi (Freedom) Monument in western Tehran on the 43rd anniversary of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution in February 2022. Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images.
There is a well-known Persian children’s game in which a parent recites limerick-like poems while engaging in horseplay. One version, popular in the mid-20th century, had the father of the household seat himself on a carpet in the living room with one of his progeny standing to his right and the other to his left. The father would declaim:
There once was a cat (yek gorbeh bud)
Poor and miserable (bichareh bud)
A dog came and bit him in the belly (delash-o sag gaz gerefte bud)
(At this point the first child charges across the room and dives headlong into his father’s stomach.)
Next came a bear from behind and nearly killed the cat (khers az poshtesh taghriban koshtesh)
(The second son now bounds over and leaps onto his father’s back.)
But that cat, he rose, and he roared, and . . . turned himself into a lion! (gorbeh beh shir avaz shodeh bud)
(This being the signal for the father to get up and hurl his offspring this way and that onto the soft furniture.)
More than just child’s play, this post-dinner diversion harbored an obvious historical-ideological meaning—a meaning as relevant today as it was 130 years ago. Anyone looking at a map of modern Iran will perceive the lineaments of what the country’s inhabitants call “the sleeping cat.” This cat—the Iranian state—was indeed in miserable shape domestically and geopolitically by the reign of Naser al-Din Shah (1848-1897). What little authority this Qajar king still possessed over his realm was retained by a method that a 20th-century Iranian intellectual would dub “positive equilibrium”: the sovereign survived by parceling out large swaths of Persian territory and granting irresponsibly generous economic concessions to local potentates and foreign powers so that each would defend the capital and environs against the encroachments of his counterparts. Of the many forces that Naser al-Din Shah had to “buy off” in this manner, none was more menacing than Russia, the bear that jumped onto the cat’s back, or more influential than Britain, the (bull)dog that bit the cat’s belly.
Before ousting the last Qajar ruler in a bloodless coup, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-1979), Reza Shah, had risen through the ranks to become commander of the only serious military force in the country, the Cossack Brigade, created with Russian assistance decades earlier by that same Naser al-Din Shah. While in this post, Reza is said to have engaged every morning in a ritual reading of the newspaper, his face waxing redder with each account of Iranian failure or humiliation until finally, in a fit of rage, he would stand up and rip the tabloid to shreds. Soon, this determined corporal would rewrite the headlines that had so dismayed him, and do much to turn the sleeping cat into a rising lion.
Assisted by a cadre of military comrades and nationalist intellectuals, the new monarch set about pacifying the countryside, developing infrastructure, implementing reforms in fields like education, sanitation, technology, agriculture, and women’s rights, and in general shoving Iran, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century. He even gave his subjects three days to come up with last names for purposes of taxation, conscription, and general modernization (hitherto everyone had been known as “so-and-so son or daughter of so-and-so” or by a nickname reflecting his profession, town of origin, or infirmity). For all that Reza Shah has been depicted in post-revolutionary Khomeinist retrospect as the epitome of an incorrigible Westernizer, it cannot be denied that he raised Iran from a trampled and torn-apart virtual protectorate and a conspicuous consumer of European goods to the status of an essentially independent and self-respecting polity boasting border integrity and assiduously cultivating import-substitution industry. That the method employed to achieve all this progress was despotic was a price that even many liberal Iranian thinkers of the time were willing to pay.
Ousted by the allies in 1941 on the pretext of harboring Nazi sympathies—sympathies partially tied to the “Aryan Thesis” that made Germans and Persians ethnolinguistic cousins and that was all the rage in both countries at the time—Reza Shah was replaced by his twenty-one-year-old son Mohammad Reza Shah. In awe of his father, and having spent his teenage years in Switzerland at an elite boarding school, the new king was prepped to take up where the dynasty’s founder had left off. His career, and his overthrow in 1979 by the Islamist movement that now rules Iran, is at the center of four books published in the past decade which I will consider here. These books offer much in the way of fresh insights and original research, correcting some of the misconceptions that plague commentary about the country. And yet, for all their merits, they fail to grasp fully why the shah fell, what motivated the revolutionaries, and by extension, what motivates the current regime. For if we want to be able to make sense of the revolutionary ideologues who now rule Iran, we have to understand the political and cultural order they rebelled against, and why they rose up against it.
By looking at what these four works get right and, more importantly, what they get wrong, we can also better understand why so many Western experts and policymakers so consistently misread the Islamic Republic, its sensitivities, its hierarchies of honor and shame, holy and profane, just and unjust—and why academics are so ill-equipped to figure out a society that doesn’t conform to their own ideas of secular rationalism. With the U.S. about to conclude a second nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic, if press reports are to be believed, it’s worth considering how this regime came to be, and what makes it tick.
I. The Last Shah
As the Council on Foreign Relations scholar Ray Takeyh has shown better than any previous author in The Last Shah, Mohammad Reza’s reign began with an impressive geostrategic victory: with a little help from astute advisors at home and a determined postwar American administration, the fledgling Iranian sovereign induced no less a megalomaniacal expansionist than Joseph Stalin, at the zenith of his power, to pull his troops out of the northwestern province of Azarbayjan (not to be confused with the neighboring Soviet Republic of the same name), where they had supported local socialist secessionist movements. The cold war had begun, and Tehran was poised to reap the benefits.
Mohammad Reza’s next major challenge came from within, in the person of the charismatic prime minister Mohammad-e Mosaddeq (in office 1951-3), perceived ever since in popular imagination—and in much scholarship—as Iran’s fatefully foregone hope for true democracy.
Takeyh sets the record straight, demonstrating more effectively than any writer to date that Mosaddeq was, to the contrary, a highly unstable personality with dangerous dictatorial tendencies. (He also quashes once and for all the myth that the CIA and MI6 were primarily responsible for the 1953 coup that removed him.) The shah, argues this author, though no friend of democracy himself, was ultimately better for Iran than the prime minister. Indeed, Mohammad Reza eventually realized the very dream that Mosaddeq had failed so badly to achieve: not just oil independence, but oil hegemony for Iran. (Remember when we switched the limousine-like sedans we used to drive for the cramped, sardine-cans-on-wheels that we squeeze into today? That was because of the shah.)
Surrounding himself instead with one-dimensional, sycophantic technocrats, the shah soon became the lonely autocrat, a one-man-show.
The second Pahlavi sovereign got so good at his job, Takeyh maintains, that he felt he could dispense with the independent aristocratic elite whose corruption, bickering, and jostling for advantage threw a spoke into his rapidly rotating wheel of progress—even though it was just these aristocrats who had been the agents of his success, and had saved his throne on more than one occasion. Surrounding himself instead with one-dimensional, sycophantic technocrats, he soon became the lonely autocrat, a one-man-show. When the Middle East-wide, and worldwide, revolutionary fever of the second half of the 20th century finally caught up with him in 1979—another significant connection Takeyh makes—Iran’s ruler faced it bereft of the crucial assistance he needed to weather the storm.
II. The Fall of Heaven
The inability to delegate and insistence upon ruling instead of merely reigning that Takeyh perceives as a shortcoming, Andrew Scott Cooper sees as a strength: Mohammad Reza’s hands-on approach to monarchy got things done for his country. To Cooper, the shah is something very different from the corrupt autocrat of most histories, whose disastrous mistakes supposedly smothered democracy and brought about the revolution. Indeed, in The Fall of Heaven, Cooper’s 2016 history of the decline and fall of the Pahlavi dynasty, there is little that has traditionally been held against this despot that isn’t deftly turned into a virtue, or at worst a well-intentioned miscalculation. The abolition of the multiparty system in 1975, itself largely nominal by that time, and the inauguration in its place of the single Rastakhiz (“Resurrection”) party to which all citizens were obligated to pledge allegiance, is presented as a (botched) stepping-stone toward democracy—a claim doubly audacious since, as Takeyh had shown, Rastakhiz’s own leaders admitted that it was a bad joke from day one. Cooper does not scruple to attribute the refusal of Iran’s Westernizing monarch to rule constitutionally to “his skeptical attitude to the 1906 constitution, which he regarded as a European invention imposed on Iran by former colonial powers.” The shah’s innumerable affairs with married women and regular visits to Paris prostitutes were evidence of his “boundless energy,” and usefully cleared his head to attend to matters of state. Even the king’s leisurely helicopter rides (and those of his siblings) over a capital city choked to a stand-still by some of the worst traffic jams in history are depicted by this creative and sometimes credulous author as his majesty’s noble attempt to help alleviate that same congestion.
These impressive feats of legerdemain aside, however, Cooper is no cheap apologist. The Fall of Heaven is a stunning achievement, and will go down in literary-scholarly history as the book that did more to rehabilitate the Pahlavi family’s reputation than any volume published before or since the revolution. Cooper accomplishes this formidable task—punching a corridor through decades of pervasive and unrelenting vilification—primarily by amassing, organizing, analyzing, and presenting in vivid color an unprecedented amount of detail surrounding the final years of the monarchy. On top of play-by-play accounts of the political ins-and-outs, the economic ups-and-downs, the burgeoning unrest and the frantic diplomatic maneuverings, Cooper can tell us for any given date of 1978 what pop song topped the charts, which jewels Queen Farah Diba was wearing, whose child was killed in a hit-and-run accident, what TV series garnered the highest ratings, whether the king had indigestion (and what he took for it), which night-club was the hottest in town, and what the weather and pollution levels were like. Who knew, for instance, that on November 5, 1978, as the Khomeinist tidal wave crested and began to break over the Land of the Lion and the Sun, Fiddler on the Roof was playing to a full house at the Goldis movie theater in Tehran?
Cooper’s broad and meticulous sweep allows him to put a human face to Iranian society on the eve of what may plausibly be called the first genuinely popular revolution in modern times.
Such an accumulation of detail may seem frivolous; it is anything but. Cooper’s broad and meticulous sweep allows him to put a human face to Iranian society on the eve of what may plausibly be called the first genuinely popular revolution in modern times. It also allows him to put a human face to the royal couple—Mohammad Reza and his wife Farah Diba—painting them convincingly as benevolent, idealistic, patriotic, hard-working, fragile but fortitudinous, beleaguered but long-suffering, intelligent and generally likeable. Finally, this author’s wide grasp facilitates the assembly of an incomparably variegated collage of factors that, so he maintains, together contributed to the uprising of 1979. Beyond the usual suspects—a regime that educated the hell out of its subjects but denied them political participation; rapidly rising but no less rapidly disappointed economic expectations; the alienation and radicalization accompanying mass urbanization—Cooper adduces: a milk shortage, an egg shortage, a power outage, a cholera outbreak, a heatwave, a UFO sighting, an earthquake, a tax increase, the kidnapping and murder of a young boy, drought (on the one hand), unseasonably heavy rains (on the other), “a slew of disaster movies” that “emphasized failure of leadership, loss of control, and public panic,” the fact that according to the Asian zodiac 1978 was the Year of the Horse when people are prone to ”let loose” and “ignore the consequences of their actions,” and, to top it off, a plague of locusts.
The present writer admits to entertaining doubts about the “coalescence of causes” approach to historical convulsions. I remain convinced that people make history, and on the rare occasions when the particular person typing these lines does anything at all important, I tend to feel like I do it for one reason. Extrapolating to the relevant macrocosm, I’m basically with Ruhollah Khomeini, who famously remarked that “the Iranian people did not make the Islamic revolution to lower the price of watermelons” but rather did so “for the sake of throwing off the foreign yoke and restoring their kidnapped culture and creed.” (That’s two reasons, but they are closely related). Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the human will, independent and focused though it may be, is nourished, guided, and battered this way and that by the context surrounding it, and for this reason Cooper’s litany is highly enlightening. Ironically, the only one of our four authors who is not Iranian digs more deeply into daily Iranian reality than any of his colleagues.
III. Moods of Self-Assurance and Insecurity
Louis XIV’s famous quip, L’etat c’est moi (“the state—is me”), rarely rang as true as it did in Iran of the 1960s and 70s. Flush with eleven-figure oil revenues and spoiled rotten by U.S. support that had gone from conditional to unconditional, Mohammad Reza neutered the government apparatuses, military command structures, and traditional pillars of the Persian state—court, bazaar, and mosque—that he saw as so many obstacles to his imperious charge in the direction of the “Great Civilization.” The king became the only game in town, his picture on the wall of every home and business, his decisions the only ones that mattered. Thus, an intimate biography of the man on the throne is essential to an understanding of the state of the Iranian nation in the decades immediately prior to the Khomeinist debacle. In his 2012 The Shah, Abbas Milani—a Stanford political scientist and Hoover Institution fellow—provides us with the best example of such a biography.
Milani chronicles the initially reluctant sovereign’s rise to power with an apposite mixture of objectivity, sympathy, and drama. He masterfully interweaves the personal and political, offering probing analyses of Mohammad Reza’s ambitions and inhibitions, phantoms and phobias, worldviews and prejudices. He covers more widely and perceptively than any earlier scholar the experiences and influences of the prince’s formative years, and arrays before the reader the alternating moods of self-assurance and insecurity, tenaciousness and irresolution, optimism and depression that helped make his reign something akin to a non-stop roller-coaster ride. Milani aptly points out that “many of [the shah’s] weaknesses as a leader were his virtues as a human being,” referring, inter alia, to this embattled ruler’s unwillingness to spill gallons of his countrymen’s blood in order to stay in power.
The king made use of authoritarian methods to propel Iranian society forward—which set that society on a direct collision course with those same authoritarian methods.
No work details and dissects to the same degree the myriad challenges facing this well-meaning monarch on the foreign and domestic scenes (not the least of which was the rampant corruption of his own family), challenges which—by exploiting the cold war, dispersing petrodollars, repressing Communists and clergymen, and generally playing his cards right—he faced down successfully for almost four decades. His inability to face down the final challenge Milani ascribes to a paradox: the king had made use of authoritarian methods to propel Iranian society forward in the direction of literacy, industry, professionalism, research, technology, consumerism, capitalism, nationalism, intellectualism, secularism, and individualism—all of which set that society on a direct collision course with those same authoritarian methods. (Or as Takeyh puts it, the shah “built the modern middle class, but refused to grant it a voice in national affairs.”) Indeed, Milani asserts, monarchy itself as an institution, and the squelching of political participation it inevitably entails, was fast becoming an anachronism by the mid-20th century, especially in the countries that Mohammad Reza held up to his subjects as models, and to whose universities he sent thousands of college students.
IV. Reasons for Ruination
Whereas from Milani we learn about the general from the particular—about the situation in the country from the personality of its ruler—the Yale historian Abbas Amanat, in Iran: A Modern History(2012), takes the reader on an oceanic voyage in the opposite direction. One of the many advantages of this impressively ambitious magnum opus is the historical depth and topical breadth it brings to bear on the issues that have preoccupied us so far, and that preoccupy all who think about contemporary Iran: Mohammad Reza’s record as leader, and the reasons for his ruination.
Amanat, one of the premier Iranologists of our time, whose vast and diverse erudition is matched only by the humanity that permeates his texts, is uniquely qualified to construct the stage upon which the 20th-century showdown between Pahlavism and Khomeinism would be played out. By the time we reach the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah—some 500 pages into the book—we have been exposed repeatedly to an interlocking network of patterns and trends that have functioned as the matrix of Iranian history for centuries, sometimes millennia. Many of these are couched in terms of dichotomies: centripetal versus centrifugal forces, tribal versus sedentary existence, antinomian heterodoxy versus a state-supported clerical establishment, Persian versus Arab, Turk versus Persian, Russian versus British, religion versus nationalism, tyranny versus just rule.
Amanat tackles the tenure of the “King of Kings, Light of the Aryans” (Mohammad Reza’s self-chosen moniker) with all these tensions in mind, while simultaneously illuminating the political, economic, social, and especially cultural mise en scene of the period. We do not get the shah as a willful individual, as a volatile jumble of psychological traits, as with Milani, but the shah as one actor among hundreds of others, in what sometimes feels like a non-fiction Persian version of War and Peace. The dense tangle of processes that eventually led to the fall of the monarchy cannot be easily untangled here, but it should be said that unlike Tolstoy, Amanat does not present the tragic denouement of 1979 as the inevitable result of an amalgam of impersonal forces. The hundreds of authors, artists, ambassadors, academics, activists, and agitators, together with no few vendors, workers, thugs, and other ordinary Iranians who contributed to this momentous event are more often than not introduced by name, their dreams and activities fleshed out, and these many human threads woven together into a kaleidoscopic revolutionary tapestry.
Amanat’s presentation is painfully balanced: he rakes the post-revolutionary regime over the coals for its many human-rights violations, but criticizes the Western supporters of Iraq during its war with Iran in the same breath, and no less fiercely. He takes Mohammad Reza to task for curtailing liberty and stifling creativity, but overall—as with Takeyh, Cooper, and Milani—appreciates much of what the ill-fated Pahlavi sovereign did for Iran, depicting him as a driven reformer with high ideals who transformed his country so profoundly that even the Islamists could not turn back the clock.
Certainly, one must be careful not to overdo such revisionist rehabilitation. It is one thing to debunk Amnesty International’s ridiculous claim— popularized with most effect by Reza Barahani’s powerful but unreliable 1977 Crowned Cannibals—that over 100,000 political prisoners were tortured in the shah’s jails. It is quite another to claim—as does Ervand Abrahamian, the highly regarded scholar who literally wrote the book on the subject—that torture as a method of repression virtually disappeared from the Iranian scene under the Pahlavis, re-emerging with a vengeance only with the onset of the Islamic Republic. The shah was a more benevolent dictator than the image conjured up for the West by the various shrill (and ungrateful) Iranian Students Associations that regularly marred his visits to Europe and the United States; but no small number of atrocities were carried out in his name and with his knowledge. Even Cooper, the Pahlavis’ biggest fan, saddles the king with the ultimate responsibility for decades of state-sponsored prisoner abuse, including not a few extrajudicial murders.
Women in today’s Iran may have to cover their hair, but they vote like maniacs and there are more of them in the universities and in a whole slew of prestigious professions than their male counterparts.
Still, to read these four authors, Iran’s final monarch did far more good than harm. He took a particularly ignorant populace (tellingly, Jewish academicians concluded that even Persian Jews were less knowledgeable than their co-religionists anywhere on the planet) and increased their literacy level sevenfold in less than two decades. He used the endless supply of black gold that percolated up through the Khuzestan flats not just to purchase tanker-loads of state-of-the-art weaponry (useless, in the event, as they had been for his father), but also to build schools, roads, hospitals, clinics, orphanages, universities, vocational colleges, sports centers, airports, sea-ports, factories, research laboratories, parks, zoos, commercial centers, chemical plants, railroads, theaters, galleries, and museums by the thousands. He divvied up latifundia all over the country, compensating the owners fairly and doling out hundreds of thousands of acres to the peasantry. (The fact that these peasants often preferred migration to shantytowns on the edge of big cities to farming their newly acquired plots was a worldwide problem, and not Mohammad Reza’s fault). He protected minorities—Jews, Bahais, Sunni Muslims—and, though a dyed-in-the-wool chauvinist himself, energetically promoted women’s causes. The last achievement was one that Khomeinism could not roll back: women in today’s Iran may have to cover their hair, but they vote like maniacs and there are more of them in the universities and in a whole slew of prestigious professions than their male counterparts.
The king made Iran into a respected player on the international scene, encouraging and inspiring other third-world countries by example, to say nothing of financing their development projects. Though easily irritated by independent thinking among his subordinates, he tolerated more societal dissent than is generally acknowledged, and his “liberalization program” of the late 1970s, as Takeyh points out, actually saw that tolerance increase just before things got really hairy. When the revolutionary tsunami finally hit, thousands of oppositionist intellectuals and activists were of sound enough body and mind to surf on it all the way to victory.
V. Economy or Religion?
So why did the tsunami hit at all? Why, in the end, did the country choose Islamist rule instead? If so many impressive accomplishments can be laid at Mohammad Reza’s door—and they indubitably can—then why did his people, whom he had benefited so greatly, give him the heave-ho in such a peremptory and humiliating fashion? For many, the answer revolves around the bottom line. Despite the dazzling economic success story that was Pahlavi Iran—between 1957 and 1977 the standard of living among the Persian populace rose no less than 500 percent—many Middle East specialists persist in seeking the underlying causes of the Khomeinist revolution in economic woes of one sort or another. Scores of analysts have proffered such confident assertions as the following, from the pen of the astute student of Islamism Nazih Ayubi, drawing on the no-less-astute Iran expert Fred Halliday:
“The revolution was the outcome of a complex and painful process of rapid and uneven economic development. The main reason why it occurred was that “conflicts generated in capitalist development intersected with resilient institutions and popular attitudes which resisted the transformation process.” (Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World, p. 387)
Takeyh himself opens his study with a question, “Why did Iran have a revolution in 1979?,” and an answer: “The immediate causes can be easily summarized: the economic recession of the mid-1970s had halted the shah’s development projects and created expectations that the state could not meet.” (This is the well-known but discredited “J-curve” theory, which states that an economic boom followed by a sudden downturn tends to cause revolution and unrest.) To his credit, Takeyh contradicts his own assessment at the very end of the book: “The economic recession of the mid-1970s is sometimes casually blamed for the revolution, but the Iranian people were frustrated with the shah’s dictatorship even when the economy was performing well.”
The main problem with such claims is that the various processes they blame for engendering discontent and consequent unrest in Iran—including “inflationary pressures,” “rising expectations,” and the catch-all urbanization and its manifold consequences—were in no way unique to Iran, and were in many if not most cases more moderate versions of simultaneous developments in other third-world polities where no comparable revolutions ensued. One of Amanat’s arguments, for instance, is not only questionable in itself, but could be applied just as well to any other country in the developing world:
”Since the beginning of the Pahlavi era, the Iranian population had improved in every generation physically, hygienically, and medically, from the frail, malnourished, and diseased population at the turn of the 20th century . . . to a relatively healthy, sanitary, and better nourished people in the last quarter of the century. The need for greater quantities and greater varieties of food, home appliances, electronics, and cars thus was bound to become a burden for a government anxious to keep its population economically content. “(p. 655)
None of this holds water. The citizens of Iran did not bare their chests to the bullets of the largest and best-equipped army in the region, overthrow their sovereign, and put an end to a millennia-old monarchical tradition, all for the lack of a toaster oven. The Washington Post had it right way back in 1978: “Rarely would contemporary history appear to provide such an example of a people’s ingratitude towards a leader who has brought about an economic miracle of similar proportions.”
The citizens of Iran did not bare their chests to the bullets of the largest and best-equipped army in the region all for the lack of a toaster oven.
Though no amount of counterargument will eliminate the widespread post-facto imagining of Iranian economic distress (which somehow went unnoticed before the revolution), if we seek to isolate the sui-generis ingredients that went into making the Khomeinist upheaval of 1979, we must look elsewhere. Admittedly, this additionally rules out factors like irritation on the part of the educated classes at the lack of opportunities for political participation: such irritation, too, existed in spades in other countries, and although secular democracy-seekers had kept the embers of Iranian dissidence glowing for years, it was not they who ignited the conflagration. The central motivations for the mass revolutionary action of 1978-9 must be sought in factors more specific to Iran, or at least more unique to the situation in the country at the time.
Where shall we look? Here our masters all fall short. Ask the average Joe who was compos mentis 40 years ago why the Iranians rose up against their ruler. (Mind you, not your average Iranian Joe: Persian-speakers are conspiracy freaks of a caliber beyond anything one finds in the West, and they are convinced to a man that the U. S. was behind the whole thing. Even the shah thought so.) Anyone who paid attention at the time—and who was not an academic and could therefore think straight—was cognizant of the simple truth that the king got canned because he had spat on his people’s most hallowed traditions. He and his coterie of “Westoxified” sophisticates had mocked their rituals, stripped their women, insulted their clergymen, blasphemed their god, replaced their sacred paragons with pagan nymphomaniacs, gotten drunk on their solemn holidays, razed their mosques (sometimes building banks and stadiums in their place), and made common cause with heretics and infidels—all in the name of progress.
We should pause to admit that Milani, Cooper, and others don’t see it this way: they make much of what they claim was the second Pahlavi sovereign’s backpedaling of his father’s harsh secularizing policies, pointing to everything from the son’s oath of office, which included appeals to Allah and commitments to promote Shiism; the widely publicized visit paid by the new monarch to the hospitalized Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi, head of the seminary system in the holy city of Qom; mystical experiences in which Mohammad Reza claimed to have received blessings from this or that imam; his habit of carrying a mini-Quran into his breast pocket; and a significant increase in the number of new places of worship, and a partial easing of the restrictions on the veil, under his reign.
While there is truth to all of this, the broader picture tells a different story. Oaths of office and hospital visits are recognized by the genuinely pious for just what they are: lip service. While assertions of dream visitations by saintly figures can be a feather in the turban of a respected theologian, in the case of non-observant ignoramuses like Mohammad Reza Shah—who once boasted to a gathering of Muslim divines that “I say my prayers every night before bed,” a decidedly non-Muslim comment—such claims merely point to the claimant’s abject irreligiosity. And, one might add, the irreligiosity of those who record and build theories upon such empty gestures.
More importantly, while the father’s anti-clericalism and march toward modernization may have been gruffer, under the son these tendencies matured and expanded relentlessly, to a large extent due to Iran’s exponentially proliferating contacts with Europe and even more so the United States. There were, albeit, more mosques built during this period, but the mushrooming cinemas were the up-and-coming place to be. The veil, it is true, could now be worn, but it was scorned by refined society, and more and more women preferred bouffant hairdos and mini-skirts. As uncomfortable and un-moored as traditional members of Iranian society began to feel in the 1930s, they would feel so to a far greater extent in the 1960s, and if they did not, that was because they had grown accustomed to the direction the country had been taking for decades, not because that direction had changed or been reversed.
The few supposedly regressive features that characterized the reign of the second Pahlavi monarch in connection with religion were offset ten times over by the juggernaut of modernization that was the hallmark of the era. And while traditionalism would on occasion receive disingenuous royal support as a counterweight to radicalism, the shah and his governments were, if anything, more inclined toward socialism than Shiism. Above all, as all our authors readily admit, their lodestar was always the West. In the eyes of the vast conservative sector of Iranian society, Pahlavism was hedonism, plain and simple. In the eyes of the increasing number of students who subscribed to the lay theoretician Ali Shari’ati’s militant neo-Shiiism—young people for whom faith had become cool again, and for whom the imperative of the hour was “the return to ourselves”—Pahlavism was the contemptible, traitorous antithesis of religio-cultural authenticity.
Political Islam has been eulogized by untold analysts almost since its birth, the classic example being Olivier Roy’s 1992 L’échec de l’islam politique (“The Failure of Political Islam”), a book that, given all that has transpired since its publication, should long ago have been renamed “My Failure as a Middle East Expert.” Incurable rationalist-materialists that so many Western thinkers are, it is extremely difficult for them to credit the power of the spiritual or theological, and they accordingly search high and low for alternate motivations, especially economic ones, to explain the behavior of individuals and collectives. Such an approach both informs, and is informed by, schools of thought like Marxism and realpolitik, as well as no few social sciences. Immune to religious passions themselves, scholars and journalists simply can’t accept that these passions can motivate tens of thousands of people.
If there is one deficiency common to the four undeniably outstanding studies we have been reviewing, it is that whereas Ayatollah Khomeini and company were sure that they had risen in revolt because Westernization in Iran had gone too far, our authors are all convinced that the revolution occurred because Westernization had not gone far enough. A related argument has been advanced by the prominent postmodernist scholar Ali Mirsepassi in his 2019 Iran’s Quiet Revolution. Mirsepassi notes correctly that intellectuals close to the Pahlavi court, and the sovereign himself, sometimes coopted the anti-“Westoxification” discourse of leftists and Islamists in order to take the wind out of their sails and, at the same time, delegitimize democracy as a foreign implant. He then maintains, based on this paradox, that it was the Pahlavi rejection rather than the Pahlavi adoption of modernity that led to the dynasty’s destruction, a theory as creative and counterintuitive as it is utterly spurious.
Islam as the central propelling factor in the resistance movement to the shah receives extremely short shrift from Takeyh, Cooper, Milani, and even Amanat. The last scholar’s profound knowledge of Shiism is matched only by his dislike for it: for instance, he calls the premier intellectual pursuit of the ayatollahs in their seminaries “tedious” on no less than four separate occasions in his massive tome. The revolutionaries aver in no uncertain terms that they did it for Islam; but our four authors, and scores of their colleagues, claim to know better.
Certainly, there were other modernizing rulers in other Middle Eastern countries who antagonized their Muslim constituents, both before and after the Iranian revolution. Taking Islam seriously as a motivating and enabling factor means, however, familiarizing ourselves with this confession’s considerable inner diversity. Iranian Islam has been Shiite Islam for over 500 years, and Shiism is a revolutionary vehicle like no other. Thanks to the circumstances of its evolution, the slogan “Fight the Powers that Be” is virtually encoded on its DNA. Moreover, Shiite clerics are comparatively independent of temporal rulers, while enjoying the wall-to-wall obedience of their flocks. Not for nothing did Khomeinism succeed so spectacularly where other Islamist movements had succeeded only partially or failed: the creed on which it is based provided both the impetus and the instrument for its triumph.
VI. Missing the Point
That the most impressive of our experts persist in downplaying or ignoring the Islamic Republic of Iran’s driving forces can lead to misunderstandings of current affairs that are far from academic. Both nuclear negotiations and the sanctions, for instance, are premised on the assumption that Tehran is eager above all else to improve its country’s economy. While Ayatollah Khamenei and his minions doubtless care about trade and finances, they care much more about advancing their religious ideology across the Middle East, and like most religious believers, feel that spiritual concerns must ultimately trump material ones. It’s even possible that some might find the idea of suffering material hardships to achieve ideological goals appealing.
Likewise, President Obama’s negotiations with Iran sought to recognize the country’s “equities” in the Middle East, with the ultimate aim of creating a balance among Iranian, Saudi, and Israeli spheres of influence. Again, Tehran may not be immune to such realpolitik considerations. But ultimately the Islamic Republic is engaged militarily in Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon to advance the Islamic Revolution. The idea that well-meaning Western diplomats can simply sit Iranian diplomats down with their Saudi, Emirati, and Yemeni counterparts and work out a compromise based on mutual interests completely ignores the theological aspect of Khomeinist foreign policy.
Both nuclear negotiations and the sanctions are premised on the assumption that Tehran is eager above all else to improve its country’s economy.
And all this is even more true when it comes to Israel. Economics and power politics simply fail to explain the conflict between the two countries, which share no borders and had cordial relations under the shah. While Shiism historically contains ample anti-Semitic currents, it is not indelibly anti-Semitic—but Khomeinism is. And it views Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East as an unacceptable offense, which must be eradicated at almost any cost.
But Israel is only the Little Satan. The Great Satan is America, the main driver of “Westoxification.” If I’m right that Iranians didn’t rise up en masse because of the rising costs of onions or because they wanted to drive nicer cars, but because they were passionately opposed to secularization and American influence, then the U.S. cannot make peace with Iran even if the nuclear deal succeeds. The Islamic regime doesn’t oppose America because it supports Israel or Saudi Arabia, but because it represents Western secularism. Unless mass-conversion to Islam is in America’s future, that’s not something that’s likely to go away.
Only several months have elapsed since the richest and most powerful country in the world, having spent $300 million per day for twenty consecutive years on the restoration of the various branches of the national economy and on the creation of a 300,000-strong national army, was sent ignominiously packing with its tail between its legs by a bunch of ill-equipped local amateurs wearing turbans, robes, and sandals. One hopes that the loss of Afghanistan will finally hammer home the truth that the loss of Iran so signally failed to do: it’s religion, stupid
Ze’ev Maghen is chair of the department of Arab and Islamic studies at Bar-Ilan University. His latest book is Reading the Ayatollahs: The Worldview of Iran’s Religio-Political Elite. He is also the author of John Lennon and the Jews: A Philosophical Rampage.
Two Islamic terms and one Hebrew have been making the media rounds of late.
Taqiyyah is the employment of deception and dissimulation in an ostensibly Islamic cause. The term تقیة taqiyyah is derived from the trilateral root wāw-qāf-yā, literally denoting caution, fear, prudence, guarding against a danger), carefulness and wariness. It is related to kitmān (كتمان), the act of covering or dissimulation. While the terms taqiyya and kitmān may be used synonymously, kitmān refers specifically to the concealment of one’s convictions by silence or omission. Kitmān derives from Arabic katama “to conceal, to hide”.
The Hebrew word ishasbara. It has no direct English translation, but roughly means “explaining”, a communicative strategy that seeks to explain actions, whether or not they are justified). It is often interpreted by critics of Israel as public relations or propaganda. It has even been described as the fool’s gold version of diplomacy.
The Hamas’ assault of October 7 2023 was an almost perfect act of Taqiyyah, It used unprecedented intelligence tactics to mislead Israel over months, by giving a public impression that it was not willing to go into a fight or confrontation with Israel while preparing for this massive operation. As part of its subterfuge over the past two years, Hamas refrained from military operations against Israel even as another Gaza-based armed group known as Islamic Jihad launched a series of its own assaults or rocket attacks.
It has been said before and often, that the Qatari-owned news platform Al Jazeera presents the non-Arabic speaking world with a markedly different narrative of to what it relays to its Arabic readers – it is the most popular news source in the Arab world, particularly among Palestinians. Viewing or reading Al Jazeera English, you would think that Israel’s ongoing onslaught in Gaza is directed entirely against the defenceless and helpless civilians of the unfortunate enclave. There are very rarely images of the militants who are engaged on a daily basis in fierce battles and deadly firefights with the IDF. Al Jazeera Arabic on the other hand, posts pictures and videos of the fighters, illustrating their courage, their resilience in the face of overwhelming odds, and their successes in the face of overwhelming military odds. In that Howling Infinite recently covered the issue of divergent narratives in Al Aqsa Flood and the Hamas holy war.
The following opinion piece published this week in Haaretz suggests that the gas-rich and influential emirate of Qatar, erstwhile mediator in many contemporary of conflicts has indeed need playing a much more subtle long game of taqiyyah and kitmān.
I leave it to the reader to determine whether there is some truth in the author’s case or whether this is part of some deceptive hasbara.It would indeed be in Israel’s interests to propagate a narrative that emphasises the existential threat posed by its Muslim neighbours.
Personally, I am inclined to take this opinion piece with a large pinch of salt. For a start, it is badly written and many of its historical references are inaccurate. And then there is the matter of ascribing caliphate ambitions to the Gulf emirate of Qatar, a tiny autocracy, albeit one of the richest, and until recently at odds with its equally autocratic Gulf neighbours with regard to it’s having given support and succour to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood – from which Hamas evolved in Palestine – which is similarly reviled and repressed by the rulers of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, who have dealt brutally with the organisation in the past. Other Sunni Muslim regimes were, moreover, unimpressed by Qatar’s cordial relationship, political and economic, with The Shia Islamic Republic of Iran – although the Gulf regimes have of late been increasingly conducive to improving their relationships with the hardline theocracy. Indeed, it was not so long ago that Qatar’s neighbours endeavoured to impose a blockade on the recalcitrant emirate. They would be hardly inclined to countenance Qatar as the leader of an Islamic Caliphate – even if the Muslim street in most Arab states were enthusiastic about the idea.
In a brief article in Haaretz the following week, also republished below, a former Israeli diplomat took issue with Ronit Marzan’s “one-dimensional approach” to Qatar: “…Israel’s tendency to divide the world into “good” and “bad” is not a good approach to intelligent foreign policy. Skillful diplomacy identifies common interests shared by diverse and often opposing players – partners in one area who are adversaries in another. That is precisely why the term “frenemies” exists. Qatar is a classic example”.
On October 7, 2023, the idee fixe that Hamas was deterred was shattered. But Israel is still mired in another idee fixe – that Qatar is a friendly country that helps resolve conflicts.
Israel is ignoring the hearts-and-minds campaign Qatar is waging against it and against the entire Western world by arguing that liberating all of Palestine will liberate the Middle East from colonialism, liberate the world from the unipolar order of American hegemony and liberate the human psyche from Western culture.
The hashtags “Spain,” “Andalusia,” “Palestine” and “history and culture,” which Qatar’s online influencers regularly use, are not understood by either Israel or Spain.These hashtags are part of a historical, cultural and psychological campaign that links two central narratives. It seeks to convince Muslims worldwide that the medieval Islamic empire in Andalusia fell as a result of jealousy and rivalry among Muslim kings. Additionally, historical Palestine isn’t being liberated because of the rivalry among Arab countries and their cooperation with the Israeli enemy against Palestinian resistance organizations.
Tweets posted online by Qatari influencers such as “Haifa is beautiful, but it will be more beautiful when it burns down,” “Don’t dream about a happy world as long as Israel exists” and “Liberating all of Palestine is possible, and it has begun” have also not been met with any effective response by Israel’s official public diplomacy network.
And Qatar’s threats that it is considering deporting Hamas leaders from the country should not be taken seriously so long as senior Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, who lives there, keeps telling Muslims around the world that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is “the explosive that sets off intifadas”; inciting residents of the West Bank and “the 1948 Arabs” (i.e. Israeli Arabs) to resume suicide bombings; urging the Arab nation to embark on both a jihad of the soul and an armed jihad against the Zionist enemy, which isn’t a natural part of the region; encouraging the Arab masses to take to the streets and pressure their leaders to sever ties with Israel; and urging student leaders worldwide to renew street protests to put an end to Zionist and American hegemony.
It’s not only Israel that has fallen asleep while on guard duty. European and American leaders also don’t understand that Qatar is working via its agents of change to bring about a clash between the global north and the global south by exploiting the distress of failed states and the woke movement in the West. They are failing to recognize that it is undermining the Western model of the modern nation-state whose borders were drawn in the past.
Its goal is to replace this Western model with that of a traditional Arab state, meaning one where the regime’s legitimacy would come from its willingness to put the interests of the Arab-Islamic nation above those of its own country, first and foremost in the battle against Israel.
Tawakkol Karman, an Islamic activist from Yemen, received aid from Qatar to promote a revolutionary discourse in her country during the Arab Spring and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for it.
Now, she is helping Qatar incite a revolt against Western governments among young people and indigenous peoples. At the One Young World Summit in Canada, she argued that democracy, human rights and the rule of law are in retreat in the United States, Canada, Britain and France and urged action against powerful companies and governments that had stolen the resources of indigenous peoples.
In an edited Al Jazeera video of a speech by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at an Arab League summit, the following chyrons were prominently displayed: “Guterres urged the Arab states to unite and not let outside parties manipulate them,” “Guterres highlighted the golden age of Islamic culture and praised the Arab contribution over the course of hundreds of years, from the Andalusian renaissance in the Iberian peninsula to Baghdad, which was a global center of culture and civilization,” “The secretary-general blamed the Arab states’ backwardness on colonialism and the war of liberation that the Arab nation had to wage.”
All of the above show that Guterres, like many former UN employees who are today employed at Azmi Bishara’s research institute in Doha, don’t represent the values in whose name the United Nations was established. Instead, they have become Qatar’s water carriers.
Israel and the United States erred when they let Qatar send aid to the Gaza Strip.And they are erring now by allowing it to send aid to Lebanon. Now that Gaza has been devastated, and the chances of Hamas returning to power are low, Qatar is racing ahead towards Lebanon.
It is part of the five-member committee that was established to help resolve Lebanon’s political crisis, along with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, America and France.
Qatar is embracing veteran Druze politician Walid Jumblatt, the former head of Lebanon’s Progressive Socialist Party, in the hopes that the Druze community will provide help in the future to topple Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria.
It is giving millions of dollars to the Lebanese army to help pay soldiers’ salaries ($100 a month per soldier). And it is cooperating more closely with Lebanese government ministries – for instance, the internal security ministry, which is responsible for training police officers – while moving forward on agreements in the field of solar energy.
Israel’s ground operation in Lebanonis giving Qatar an opportunity to settle itself in the hearts of the Lebanese people. After Israel dismantles Shi’ite Hezbollah for it, along with the ring of fire Iran has for years nurtured in the region, Qatar will appear in the role of the “savior” and repeat what it did with Sunni Hamas in Gaza.
But this time, it will do so with the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. And Iran’s Shi’ite ring of firewill be replaced with Qatar’s Sunni ring, which will be no less dangerous, and might well lead Israel to new versions of the October 7 attacks, just as Meshal has been promising.
Saladin liberated Palestine, Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa after securing geographic and demographic depth for himself in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Jordan. That’s what Meshal and Mohamed El-Shinqiti, a faculty member at Qatar University, have been saying, and presumably not by chance.
Lolwah Al-Khater, the country’s minister for international cooperation, landed in Beirut a few days ago with a generous supply of aid and promises of “plans for the medium and long term.” We should believe what she says, because Qatar is a long-distance runner, and patience is a key value in the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology.
Ronit Marzan is a researcher of Palestinian society and politics at the Tamrur-Politography
Qatar Can Be Part of the Solution, and Not Just Part of the Problem
In her article “Qatar is preparing a ‘ring of fire’ around Israel to supplant Iran’s,” (Haaretz, October 15), Dr. Ronit Marzan takes a one-dimensional approach toward Qatar. However, Israel’s tendency to divide the world into “good” and “bad” is not a good approach to intelligent foreign policy. Skillful diplomacy identifies common interests shared by diverse and often opposing players – partners in one area who are adversaries in another. That is precisely why the term “frenemies” exists.
Qatar is a classic example. It does indeed support the Muslim Brotherhood, but the conclusion that it therefore supports terrorism is mistaken and misleading. The Muslim Brotherhood spans a wide spectrum. Anyone who understands the dramatic difference between MK Mansour Abbas and Hamas, or Raed Salah and the late Mohammed Morsi, the former Egyptian president who, during his presidency, upheld the peace agreement with Israel, realizes this. Unlike Iran, Qatar has never sought to promote terrorism, even though it has not avoided connections with those involved in it.
The transfer of Qatari aid to Hamas was carried out in response to an Israeli-American request to create Western leverage over Hamas and mechanisms for ending the fighting in Gaza. Hosting the political leadership of Hamas in Qatar was part of a broader approach, aimed at distancing the movement from Iran.
Qatar’s assistance is highly valued by Israeli and American negotiators in the efforts to release hostages held by Hamas and this is a good example of the importance of working with Qatar. But even after the war, we will still need the Qataris as mediators and stabilizers, because Hamas will not disappear from Gaza and other Palestinian territories.
Qatar hosts the largest U.S. airbase in the Middle East, Al-Udeid Air Base. It is also home to branches of some of the most important American universities. Qatar and Iran are partners in a large offshore gas field, which allows it to influence and moderate Iran. Being the richest country per capita in the world enables Qatar to invest significant resources in rebuilding countries like Syria and Lebanon, and in Gaza – a capability that may be critical to any political settlement following the war.
Qatar’s soft power diplomacy could serve as an alternative to the ongoing military conflicts, which is perhaps a strategy Israel should also consider adopting. We should also learn from the U.S., which utilizes Qatar for diplomatic moves with hostile countries and organizations. For example, Qatar helped release American citizens from Iranian prisons and facilitated the agreement that allowed U.S. forces to exit Afghanistan.
After the Oslo Accords, Israel opened an Israeli interest office in Doha, Qatar’s capital. From this and other actions, we learned that Qatar is interested in helping create processes that promote peace and stability in the region through soft power. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used Qatar to fund Hamas with the declared goal of weakening the Palestinian Authority and the chances of a political settlement, I propose using Qatar to help advance a settlement with the Palestinians as part of a regional agreement. Similarly, it is important to leverage Qatar, one of the five key countries assisting governance in Lebanon, to help weaken Hezbollah domination in Lebanon.
A country does not choose its surroundings and Qatar is not a friendly state, but it is a state that can serve as a counterforce to Iran’s rise. Qatar is an actor with economic and political interests in both the Western and Arab-Muslim worlds. It should be approached with caution but utilized rather than kept away.
Therefore, instead of denigrating Qatar’s significant influence in the region, we should consider how to leverage its skills in navigating among different regional alliances, which give Qatar unique capabilities – not as a sole player or even central one but as a country with influence that even much larger nations, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, don’t posses
In 1929, there is violence at the Western Wall in Jerusalem – then a narrow alley named for Buraq, the steed with a human face that bore the Prophet Mohammed on his midnight journey to Jerusalem, and not the Kotel Plaza of today. The event, which was actually called the Buraq rising was incited by rumours that Jews planned to overrun the Haram al Sharif, the third holiest site in Islam. A massacre of Jews in Hebron in the south followed. These were a bleak precursor of the wars to come.
Fast forward to mid-April 1936. Following two incidents of killing carried out in by both Arabs and Jews, an Arab National Committee declared a strike in the city of Jaffa. National Committees were formed in other Palestinian cities and representatives of Arab parties formed the “Arab Higher Committee” led by Haj Amin al-Husseini. A general strike spread throughout Palestine, accompanied by the formation of Palestinian armed groups that started attacking British forces and Jewish settlements. Thus began the “Great Palestinian Revolt. It lasted for three years.
British troops run through Jerusalem’s’ Old City during the Great Revolt
Roots and fruits
The ongoing struggle with regard to the existence Israel and Palestine is justifiably regarded the most intractable conflict of modern times. Whilst most agree that its origins lie in the political and historical claims of two people, the Jewish Israelis and the predominantly Muslim Palestinians for control over a tiny wedge of one-time Ottoman territory between Lebanon and Syria in the north, Jordan in the east, and Egypt to the south, hemmed in by the Mediterranean Sea. There is less consensus as to when the Middle East Conflict as it has become known because of its longevity and its impact on its neighbours and the world in general, actually began.
Was it the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 promising a national home for Jews in an Ottoman governate already populated by Arabs, or the secretive Sykes Picot Agreement that preceded it in 1916, staking imperial Britain’ and France’s claim to political and economic influence (and oil pipelines) in the Levant? Was it the establishment of the British Mandate of Palestine after the Treaty of Sèvres of 1922 which determined the dissolution of the defeated Ottoman Empire. Or was it the end of that British mandate and the unilateral declaration of Israeli independence in 1948 and the war that immediately followed?
In his book Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) Israeli journalist and author Oren Kesslerargues powerfully that the events in Mandatory Palestine between 1936 and 1939 shaped the subsequent history of the conflict for Israelis and Palestinians. The book identifies what was known at the time as The Great Revolt as the first Intifada, a popular uprising which actually sowed the seeds of the Arab military defeat of 1947-48 and the dispossession and displacement of over seven hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs, which has set the tone of the conflict for almost a century.
It is a tragic history shared with knowledge in hindsight of the decades of violence and bloodshed in the region that followed. It begins in the time before Palestine became political entity, when mainly Eastern European Jews began settling in progressively larger numbers to the consternation of the Arab populace.
The 1936 conflict stemmed from questions of how to divide the land and how to deal with the influx of Jewish people – questions that remain relevant today. In an extensive interview coinciding with the book’s publication (republished below) Kessler notes that, for the Arab residents, the problem was one of immigration and economics; for the Zionists, it was about finding a home. These two positions soon became irreconcilable issues, leading to sporadic violence and then to continual confrontation.
He believes that the Revolt is the point when both sides really came to see the conflict as zero sum. insofar that whichever community had the demographic majority in Palestine would be the one that would determine its fate. However, in the 1920s, the Jews were so far from that majority that both sides were able to postpone the final reckoning. In the 1930s, the Jews threatened to become a majority, and this was the immediate precursor to the rising. There was no way that the objective of bringing as many Jews to the land as possible could be achieved without bringing about some serious Arab pushback.
It is Kessler’s view that it was during revolt that a strong sense of Arab nationalism in Palestine extended beyond the urban elites to all corners of the country. All segments of Arab society – urban and rural, rich and poor, rival families, and even to a large extent Muslim and Christian – united in the same cause against Zionism and against its perceived enabler, the British Empire. The Arab public in Palestine was becoming increasingly politically aware and consciously perceiving itself as a distinct entity – distinct from its brethren in Syria, in large part because it has a different foe: not simply European imperialism but this very specific threat presented by Zionism.
The British government made early efforts at keeping the peace, but these proved fruitless. And when the revolt erupted in 1936, it sent a royal commission to Palestine, known to history as the Peel Commission, to examine the causes of the revolt. It proposed in effect the first ‘two state solution.’ The Emir Abdullah of Transjordan publicly accepted this plan. The main rival clan to the Husseinis, the Nashashibis, privately signaled that they were amenable – not thrilled, but amenable. And their allies held the mayorships of many important cities – Jaffa, Haifa, and even Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarem, which today are centres of militancy. And yet the Mufti makes very clear that he regards this plan as a degradation and a humiliation, and all of these erstwhile supporters of partition suddenly realise that they are against partition.
Kessler believes that this is the point at which a certain uncompromising line became the default position amongst the Arab leadership of Palestine, with dire consequences for the Palestinians themselves, and when Yishuv leader David Ben Gurion saw an opportunity to achieve his long-standing objective of creating a self-sufficient Jewish polity, one that could feed itself, house itself, defend itself, employ itself, without any help from anyone – neither British or Arabs. When the Arabs called a general strike and boycott, cut all contacts with the Jewish and British economies and closed the port of Jaffa in Spring 1936, he lobbied successfully with the British to allow the Jews to open their own port in Tel Aviv, ultimately causing a lot of economic pain to the Arabs and helping the Jews in their state-building enterprise.
This is a mosaic history, capturing the chaotic events on the ground through snippets of action. And also, the people involved.
There are heroes and villains aplenty in this relatively untold story. The urbane and erudite nationalists Muhammed Amal and George Antonius who strive for middle ground against increasingly insurmountable odds, and who died alone and exiled having failed to head off the final showdown that is today known as Al Nakba. The farseeing, resolute, and humourless Ben Gurion and the affable, optimistic Chaim Weizmann, who became Israel’s first prime minister and president respectively. The New York born Golda Meyerson, more of a realist than either leader, who would also one day become prime minister. The irascible revisionist Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinski, the forebear of today’s virulent rightwing nationalists
The hardliner Mufti Haj Amin al Husseini, whose uncompromising stance, malign political influence, and conspiratorial association with the Nazis set the stage for a long general strike, the Great Revolt, and ultimately, the débâcle of 1948. The flamboyant rebel leaders, Syrian Izz al Din al Qassam, who is memorialized in the name of the Hamas military wing and a Gaza-made rocket, and Fawzi al Qawuqji. Qassam was gunned down by British soldiers during the revolt whilst Qawuqji lived on to become one of the most effective militia leaders in the war of 1948, and to perish therein. Both are remembered today as Palestinian martyrs whilst the Mufti is an arguably embarrassing footnote of history. There’s an article about his relatively unremarked death at the end of this post.
Amin al-Husseini in 1929
And in the British corner, the well-intentioned high commissioners who vainly endeavoured to reconcile the claims of two aspirant nations in one tiny land, and quixotic figures like the unorthodox soldier Ord Wingate who believed he was fulfilling prophecy by establishing the nucleus of what would become the IDF (like many charismatic British military heroes, and particularly General Gordon and Baden-Powell, both admirers and detractors regarded him a potential nut-case); and the Australian-born ex-soldier Lelland Andrews, assistant district commissioner for Galilee, who also conceived of his mission as divinely ordained. Lewis was murdered by Arab gunmen and Wingate went down in an aeroplane over Burma during WW2.
There are appearances from among many others, Lloyd George, Winton Churchill and Neville Chamberlain, Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Franklin D Eisenhower and Joseph Kennedy.
The book highlights the work of powerful British functionaries in handling early confrontations: they are memorialized for starting commissions to study the matter and to generate ideas, though many of their ideas weren’t followed or were followed to ill effect. None solved the problem, making this account of the earliest days of the conflict all the more heartbreaking.
All under the shadow of the impending Shoah, and the inevitable showdown that would culminate in al Nakba.
The road to Al Nakba
Kessler argues that the Arab social fabric and economy are completely torn and shattered by the end of this revolt that in many ways the final reckoning for Palestine between Jews and Arabs – the civil war that erupts in 1947 – is actually won by one side and lost by the other nearly a decade earlier.
The final paragraphs of Kessler’s enthralling book are worth quoting because they draw a clear line between the events of the Great Revolt and the catastrophe, al Nakba, of 1948:
“For the Jews, perhaps the greatest shift was psychological. they had withstood of powerful sustained assault and lived to tell about it. One book on Zionist leaders” thinking in this era is titled Abandonment of Illusions. The belief of material gains would bring Arab consent now naïve and, worse, dangerous. Instead, by the end of the revolt and the start of the world war, much of Palestine’s Jewish mainstream had accepted the fact that the country’s fate would ultimately be determined and maintained by force.
“By 1939, the Yishuv had achieved the demographic weight, control of strategic areas of land, and much of the weaponry and military organization that would be needed as a springboard for taking over the country within less than a decade”, writes the Palestinian American historian Rasheed Khalidi.
Khalid argues that the Palestinian catastrophe of 1947 -1949 was predicated on a series of previous failures: “a deeply divided leadership, exceedingly limited finances, no centrally organized military forces or centralized administrative organs, and no reliable allies. They faced a Jewish society in Palestine which although small relative to theirs, was political unified, had centralized para-state institutions, and was increasingly well-led and extremely highly motivated”.
For Palestinians, he maintains, the Nakba – the catastrophe of their military drubbing, dispossession and dispersal – was but a forgone conclusion. For them, the terrible events that bookended the year 1948 “were no more than a postlude, a tragic epilogue to the shattering defeat of 1936- 39”.
The Great Revolt, Kessler says, has cast its shadow over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since – for the Arabs, for the Jews, and for attempts to resolve the conflict. It is still remembered by Palestinians and Israelis alike. Palestinian folk songs still celebrate the revolt, and in my he regards the. BDS movement as direct descendant of the general strike that preceded the revolt. The two-state solution that is still the international community’s favoured solution to the conflict is but a variation of that original partition plan of 1937.
In so many ways, for both Israelis and Palestinians, this revolt rages on.
The picture at the head of this post shows British troops marching through Ibn Khatib Square in 1936 past King David’s Citadel and towards the Jaffa Gate
British policemen disperse an Arab mob during the Jaffa riots in April 1936 (The Illustrated London News)
Jews evacuate the Old City of Jerusalem after Arab riots in 1936.
Oren Kessler’s new book Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) argues powerfully that events in Mandatory Palestine between 1936 and 1939 have shaped the subsequent history of the conflict for Israelis and Palestinians. Called ‘the definitive study’ by Michael Oren, Kessler’s book identifies the revolt as the true first intifada, an uprising which laid the ground for the Arab defeat in 1947-48 and which has set the tone of the conflict for almost a century. He sat down with Fathom deputy editor Jack Omer-Jackaman to discuss the book, recently released in the UK.
Jack Omer-Jackaman: The general reader, in English at least, has lacked a history of the Great Revolt and its repercussions. What have they been missing and with what consequences for our understanding of the conflict?
Oren Kessler: I argue that although this is an Arab revolt, it is as much a Jewish story as an Arab story. From the Arab perspective it’s an extremely formative event – it’s the crucible in which Palestinian Arab identity coalesced as virtually all strands of Arab society came together in a common purpose against a common foe. But on the Jewish side this is an equally seminal and decisive event. It’s often forgotten but this is the period in which the words ‘Jewish State’ first appear on the international agenda – not just the ‘national home’ promised in the Balfour Declaration, but a Jewish state to all intents and purposes, as part of a ‘two-state solution.’ It’s also the period in which the British Empire sows the seeds for a Jewish army. So, in all of these ways this is a hugely formative chapter in the history in the Land of Israel/Palestine, for the conflict itself, and for attempts to resolve it. The degree to which this chapter hasn’t gotten its due is actually quite startling. It’s not entirely clear to me why such a pivotal event right before the Second World War hasn’t gotten its due in English outside of a handful of academic works.
JOJ: And why has the 1936-1939 Revolt been relatively ignored?
OK: It’s a very good question. In the book I quote Professor Mustafa Kabha of the Open University of Israel, who argues that in the Palestinian narrative and consciousness, the revolt has been side-lined, marginalised by the overwhelming primacy of the Nakba. The Nakba is much ‘easier’ to fit into the narrative because, from the Palestinian perspective, it’s the moment at which they are betrayed and unjustly treated by Zionism, by British Imperialism, even by their fellow Arabs who fail to rescue them from the Zionist menace. Whereas dealing with 1936-39 requires a lot more soul-searching. There is a huge convulsion of Arab infighting in this period – there is much Arab bloodshed at the hands of fellow Arabs. That is a lot more difficult for a national narrative to rationalise.
Every national movement has its narrative and its storyline, and the Jewish national narrative tends to be quite forward moving: from the first wave of immigration in the late 19th Century, on to the Balfour Declaration, the start of the British Mandate and the Jewish state-building of the 1920s and 30s, then the agony of the Holocaust and finally the redemption of statehood. That’s essentially the Zionist story, and I think a large-scale, concerted nationalist uprising against that story is a somewhat unwelcome blip in the narrative arc.
JOJ: Let’s set the geopolitical scene at that time: talk to us about the connections between European and local events.
OK: Throughout the book, I bounce back and forth between the situations in Palestine and Europe, because they’re inseparable – certainly from a British perspective, and equally from a Jewish one. The revolt begins only three years after Hitler comes to power in Germany in 1933. There are also other antisemitic movements ascendent across Europe, in places like Poland, Hungary and Romania, and very many Jews are desperate to leave. But almost all potential sanctuaries in the world have been closed; the US has been almost closed to immigration since the Immigration Act of 1924. In many ways, Palestine is the only significant possible refuge left for the Jews of Europe. So Jewish immigration into Palestine is skyrocketing in these years – the Jewish population there doubles in the first half of the 1930s. In 1935, 60,000 Jews come into Palestine, which is nearly double that of the year before, so the Jews are approaching 30 per cent of the population by the time the revolt erupts. The revolt is thus a direct result of the European situation, since it’s very clear to the Arabs of Palestine that if things continue this way, Palestine will have a Jewish majority before long.
From a British perspective, the war clouds looming over Europe make it very difficult for the British army to quash the revolt. They simply don’t have the manpower for it, at least until the Munich Agreement of 1938, granting Hitler the Sudetenland. With the appeasement of Hitler, Britain and all of Europe breathe a sigh of relief and buy some time (at least that’s how it felt at the time). After Munich the British are able to send two divisions to Palestine, which constitutes the largest British army deployment in the interwar period. This is another reason it’s startling that this era has been so overlooked.
JOJ: That leads us neatly onto the next topic, which looks at the balance of power post and ante the revolt. How does each side – and let’s include the British – go into the period and how do they emerge?
OK: Until Munich, the British are severely undermanned in Palestine, and this directly benefits the Jews because this is the period in which the British finally accede to a long-standing demand by the Haganah – the Jewish self-defence group that is technically illegal but tolerated by the British – to arm and train Jews in large numbers. And that’s what happens: 15,000-20,000 Jews join the Palestine Police as Jewish Supernumerary Police. And though they receive their weapons, training and part of their salary from the British government, it’s clear to everyone that they’re ultimately answerable to the Haganah. So the Jews, led by David Ben-Gurion – already in this era the clear leader of Palestine’s Jews – are able to turn adversity to advantage and make tremendous gains, militarily and otherwise, throughout the Arab revolt.
it’s the mirror image for the Arab side. The revolt to crush Zionism crushes the Arabs instead. The initial unity of the revolt’s first phase under the leadership of Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al Husseini – which includes a six-month general strike – gives way in the second phase (from Autumn 1937) to a convulsion of infighting and score settling. Several thousand Arabs are killed by their fellow Arabs, and the Arab leadership – namely the mufti and his associates – is driven into exile. And of course the British begin taking very heavy-handed measures – including a number of incidents that qualify as atrocities – to quash the revolt. Huge numbers of Arab men are put in prison or killed by the British, and thousands of homes demolished. The Arab social fabric and economy are completely torn and shattered by the end of this revolt. I argue in the book, and this is an argument that has also been made by the Palestinian-American professor Rashid Khalidi, that in many ways the final reckoning for Palestine between Jews and Arabs – the civil war that erupts in 1947 – is actually won by one side and lost by the other nearly a decade earlier.
JOJ: The popular narrative is that Palestinian nationalism – as distinct from wider Arab or Syrian nationalism – was a product of the 1930s. What did your study of the period tell you about this?
OK: I think Palestine is sui generis in many ways, including the development of nationalism there. In my view it is during the Arab revolt that a strong sense of Arab nationalism in Palestine extends beyond the urban elites to all corners of the country. All segments of Arab society – urban and rural, rich and poor, rival families, and even to a large extent Muslim and Christian – unite in the same mission against Zionism and against its perceived handmaiden: the British Empire.
The Arab public in Palestine is growing increasingly politically aware and consciously perceiving itself as a distinct entity – distinct from its brethren in Syria, in large part because it has a different foe: not simply European imperialism but this very specific threat presented by Zionism.
JOJ: So was the 1936-1939 Revolt the crucial event in the origins of the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Was this the point at which it became zero sum for both sides? Or was it just the first time there was a wider realisation of this?
OK: I’ve lost track of how many people who, when I start telling them about my book, assume I’m referring to the Hebron massacre of 1929. In my view the Hebron riots were just that: they were riots, they were an outburst of terrorism, but not a sustained nationalist uprising in the way that the Great Revolt of 1936 is – not an intifada in the parlance of today. I think in many ways, the Revolt is when both sides really come to see this conflict as zero sum. But it was always in a way zero sum in that whichever community has the demographic majority in Palestine would be the one that would determine its fate. This is an age in which the world is moving, however haltingly, from imperialism towards self-determination, and it is clear to both Jews and Arabs alike that having a majority would be absolutely key. However, in the 1920s, the Jews were so far from that majority that both sides were able to postpone the final reckoning. In the 1930s, the Jews are threatening to become a majority, and that’s the immediate precursor to this revolt erupting.
JOJ: Is it fair to say that the tone was set at this time, on the Palestinian side, for this being a conflict that demands hardliners? That the tone was set of leadership by extremists like Qassam and Hajj Amin[1] and not more moderate figures like Faisal or the Nashashibis?
OK: Yes, I do think that this is the period in which the intransigent line taken by Hajj Amin becomes not just mainstream but one from which it is very dangerous to deviate. Hajj Amin, even after fleeing the country in Autumn of 1937, manages to exert his will over the revolt from afar, and anyone who dares step out of line or contemplate reaching some sort of modus vivendi with the Zionist movement tends to find himself dead or in some other serious trouble. A prime example of that is the reaction among prominent Arabs to the partition plan. In late 1936, the British government sends a royal commission to Palestine, known to history as the Peel Commission, to examine the causes of the revolt, and famously it proposes the first ‘two state solution.’ The Emir Abdullah of Transjordan publicly accepts this plan. The main rival clan to the Husseinis, the Nashashibis, privately signal that they are amenable; not thrilled, but amenable. And their allies hold the mayorships of quite a few important cities – Jaffa, Haifa, and even Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarem, which today are centres of militancy. And yet the Mufti makes very clear that he regards this plan as a degradation and a humiliation, and all of these erstwhile supporters of partition suddenly realise that they are against partition. So yes, I do think that this is the point at which a certain uncompromising line becomes the default one amongst the Arab leadership of Palestine, with really devastating results for the Palestinians themselves.
JOJ: Let’s look to the Jewish side. Is it the first, or at least a formative, time when differing approaches to state-building and self-defence within the Zionist movement are clearly exposed?
OK: Absolutely. During the Arab Revolt the Haganah adheres to a policy called havlagah, meaning self-restraint, despite the revolt’s very high toll in Jewish blood. Some 500 Jews are killed in this revolt; these are huge numbers, comparable to those in the Second Intifada in much more recent times. The logic is to convince the British that they can be trusted with weapons and, as mentioned earlier, that’s exactly what happens. The Irgun – the Revisionist, right-wing dissident Zionist group, whose ideological leader is Vladimir Jabotinsky – has a very different view, much more in line with ‘an eye for an eye’. They believe that it has to be made very clear to the Arabs that Jewish blood could not be shed unanswered, and that taking the fight to the Arabs, including civilians, would have a deterrent effect. We see dozens of Irgun attacks targeting Arab civilians during the revolt. I don’t think there’s any other way to describe this than terrorism – this isn’t ‘collateral damage’ in an attempt to target militants, but a mentality in which ‘If the Arabs target our civilians, we’ll target theirs’. So, there’s a real schism between these two Zionist movements, but the Haganah are able to convince the British that they are in control and are the mainstream, and that the Irgun is merely a fringe group. And that’s how this crucial British-Jewish military cooperation begins.
JOJ: Could the Yishuv leadership have acted any differently in the years prior to the revolt and forestalled it? Or not without sacrificing immigration?
OK: A very good question, and one which gets back to this question of whether it’s a zero sum conflict. I don’t agree with the rose-tinted analyses of history that I sometimes hear, which claim that in the Ottoman and early Mandate eras the two communities were able to get along in peace and it is somehow British mismanagement that prompted the conflict. Rather it seems to me that when the Jews were a minority, they didn’t present too much of a disruption to the status quo, but as soon as they began to threaten to reach a majority, there is almost no alternative to this conflict breaking out. That’s how Ben-Gurion looks at this situation throughout, and he never agrees to even slowimmigration. By contrast, Chaim Weizmann, head of the world Zionist Organisation, is willing to slow immigration to try to cultivate Arab goodwill and cooperation. I don’t see how that objective of bringing as many Jews to the land as possible could be achieved without bringing about some serious Arab pushback.
JOJ: To what extent was the Arab general strike self-defeating in allowing Ben-Gurion unprecedented opportunities for a key Zionist priority: the conquest of labour?[2]
The general strike starts almost at the very beginning of the revolt and lasts six months – still one of the longest general strikes anywhere in history. It is a source of great Arab pride. As I mentioned, Ben-Gurion really is an expert in turning adversity into advantage. He sees a tremendous opportunity to achieve his long-standing objective of creating a self-sufficient Jewish polity, one that could feed itself, house itself, defend itself, employ itself, without any help from anyone – not the British or the Arabs. In the strike, the Arabs cut all contacts with the Jewish and British economies, and when Jaffa port closed in Spring of 1936, Ben-Gurion pleads successfully with the British to allow the Jews to open their own port in Tel Aviv. The British agree and Ben Gurion is euphoric, hailing the fact that the Jews now have an outlet to the world as a second Balfour Declaration. That’s just one example of how the Arab strike and boycott ultimately cause a lot of economic pain to the Arabs and help the Jews in their state-building enterprise.
JOJ: You benefited tremendously from the declassification of the Peel Commission’s secret testimonies, which threw up some fascinating revelations. What did we learn about the origins of the Balfour Declaration, for example?
This was one of the most interesting troves of archival documents that I found in my research. The British Government kept the Peel Commission documents classified for 80 years, and they were very quietly declassified only in 2017. I wrote an article in Fathom in 2020 about the 1937 secret testimony of David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration, on why the government had issued that historic and controversial document. Explaining his decision of two decades earlier, he says the Jews ‘are a dangerous people to quarrel with, but they are a very helpful people if you can get them on your side.’ He says that he and his ministry were very concerned, in the midst of the First World War, that the Jews of America and Russia might not support the allies but go over to the German side. There were even murmurings that the Germans were thinking of a ‘Balfour Declaration’ of their own. Lloyd George makes very clear in this testimony that that was a primary reason that the Declaration was given at that time. And he says that, in his opinion, the declaration more than paid for itself by the help that the Jews of America and Russia gave in various ways during the war.
JOJ: Herbert Samuel’s testimony was interesting, too.
OK: Samuel was the first High Commissioner for Palestine, as well as a Jew and a Zionist. In his testimony he is asked why he appointed Hajj Amin as Grand Mufti in the first place in the early 1920s – this is the only occasion I’ve ever seen him asked about this decision, which is one of the most fateful taken in the entire history of the Israeli-Arab conflict. He basically says, and I’m paraphrasing: ‘look, I had no choice. We had to appoint someone from the Husseini family because we had already given the other great Arab families various other perks, and so the Husseinis needed to get the muftiship. And Amin was the only Husseini with the requisite religious education having studied at al Azhar in Egypt.’ Samuel doesn’t admit it was a mistake but defends the decision and says that Hajj Amin had more or less behaved well until that point. (That is not quite true: the British had sentenced him in absentia for rabble rousing in 1920.) These are fascinating documents that were originally slated for destruction; the witnesses who give testimony do so on that understanding. But one very forward-looking British official has the foresight to stow them away,scribbling in the marginsthat they chronicle ‘an important chapter in the history of Palestine and the Jewish people, and will, no doubt, be of considerable value to the historians of the remote future.’
JOJ: Let’s look at Peel’s partition proposals a little deeper. We tend, optimistically, to think that decisions taken by high level politicians and civil servants are subject to forensic detail and informed by expert knowledge. How does the British process for proposing the first two-state solution correct us on this?
OK: That is one of the most fascinating discoveries contained in the secret testimonies: just how this two-state solution is arrived at. One of the commission members is an Oxford don by the name of Professor Reginald Coupland, an Africa-focused historian not particularly well-versed in the Middle East. He arrives at the idea that just as the Greeks and Turks were separated after World War One, in what he referred to as a ‘clean cut’, so Jews and Arabs need to be separated in that same way. It is really Coupland, with the help of a few British colonial servants in Palestine, who pushes through this idea of a two-state solution. And they do so quite hastily – when you look at the minutes of these secret testimonies, it’s just a few pages in which they discuss the practicability and the details of such a solution. It’s Coupland, an irrigation advisor by the name of Douglas Harris, and the assistant district commissioner for Galilee, Lewis Andrews (who shortly thereafter is assassinated) who draft the first two-state solution, which becomes the ideological template for every subsequent attempted solution to the conflict, from the UN’s exactly a decade later onto the various subsequent iterations until our time.
JOJ: Let’s talk about another piece of Mandate administration,the 1939 MacDonald White Paper, which barred Jews entry to Palestine just months before the outbreak of World War Two. Does your book have anything to say on this that is new?
OK: There’s a general familiarity, at least among Jews, with the White Paper and that it is a bad an unjust thing. But the genesis of the White Paper has not been researched to the degree it deserves, and in the book I devote a whole chapter to it. The Colonial Secretary at the time is Malcolm MacDonald, who is only 37 years old (he is the son of the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald). This is the Chamberlain government, which is dedicated to appeasement, not just in Europe but in the Middle East. Even though MacDonald is a member of the National Labour Party, he is a loyal member of the ministry and determines, with the advice of senior officials in the army and the government, that some drastic changes need to be made to Britain’s Palestine policy in such a crucial period. There is a feeling that world war would break out at any point and that Muslim opinion, particularly in India, has to be appeased, lest Muslim subjects of the empire side with Hitler.
When you look at the discussion, you see that the British policy makers plan to go far in the direction of Arab demands when they call the St James’s Conference in 1939. And yet, throughout these negotiations, they go quite a bit farther even than they originally intend. So, where 60,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine in 1935, the 1939 White Paper limits Jewish immigration to a total of 75,000 over five years, after which Palestine would become an independent state. The White Paper doesn’t say an independent Arab state, but of course if Jewish immigration is limited to keep the Jews under 35 or 40 per cent of the population, it’s clear to everyone that this would be a de facto Arab state. This is mid-1939, when the Jews of Europe are most desperate to find sanctuary outside of Europe, and the White Paper is seen by the Jews and their supporters as a tremendous betrayal, and a reneging not just on the Peel Commission plan of two years previous, but on the Balfour Declaration itself.
This is one of the tremendous ‘what ifs’ of history: what would have happened had the White Paper not been passed, or had the Peel partition plan of 1937 gone through? Ben-Gurion, after the Holocaust, said that had the Jews had the small state promised to them in 1937, six million could have been saved. I think that’s perhaps an overstatement: I’m not sure that the very small state offered to them was developed enough to absorb six million people. It was Golda Meir who said that had the Jewish state been established (and the White Paper not implemented), hundreds of thousands could have been saved: I think that’s a plausible reading of history. The White Paper is what finally turns Ben-Gurion against the British. It’s when he decides that the British-Zionist partnership is essentially over and when he starts to look across the ocean to America as the great potential supporter of Zionism.
JOJ: Finally, it’s fascinating to see how the 1936-1939 Revolt and this period lives in the iconography of both Israelis and Palestinians. You don’t have to look too hard to see it referenced or deployed in the present day. It occupies a place of glory for Palestinians, which is rather ironic given its role in the catastrophe of 1948. And on the Israeli side, it was referenced not too long ago by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
OK: I argue that the revolt has cast its shadow over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since – for the Arabs, for the Jews, and for attempts to resolve the conflict. Just recently, for example, in the Gaza conflict of May 2021, you may remember that the war extended to the battlefield of social media. When the Arabs of Israel and the West Bank joined together in a one-day strike, Twitter was abuzz with comparisons to 1936. And, as you mention, Bezalel Smotrich tweeted: ‘the riots of the Arab enemy take us back many years to the great Arab revolt. Back then a hostile British government protected rioters. Today a worthless, weak Jewish government, a contaminated judiciary and a law enforcement system emasculated by dangerous post-national and post-modern notions…’ Palestinian folk songs still celebrate the revolt, and in my view the BDS movement is a direct descendant of the general strike. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, the two-state solution that is still the international community’s the favoured solution to the conflict is simply a variation of the original partition plan of 1937. In so many ways, for both Israelis and Palestinians, this revolt rages on.
[1] Editor’s note: Hajj Amin al Husseini, appointed by the British Mandate as Grand Mufti in 1921, would become a determined supporter of Nazi Germany. At his 1941 meeting with Hitler, Hajj Amin declared himself ‘fully reassured and satisfied’ with Hitler’s reassurance that once having achieved the ‘total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe… Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere’. In 1943, the SS enlisted Hajj Amin to lead a recruitment drive among Bosnian Muslims, SS Main Office Chief Berger noting the ‘extraordinarily successful impact’ of the Mufti’s activities.
[2] Editor’s note: The concept of Kibbush Haavoda, the conquest of labour, was a key plank in Labour Zionism. Its priorities were the encouraging of manual and agricultural labour amongst Jewish immigrants to Palestine and a reliance on Jewish labour for the Jewish economy
In 1936, widespread Palestinian dissatisfaction with Britain’s governance erupted into open rebellion. Several key dynamics and events can be seen as setting the stage for this uprising. In Palestine, as elsewhere, the 1930s had been a time of intense economic disruption. Rural Palestinians were hit hard by debt and dispossession, and such pressures were only exacerbated by British policies and Zionist imperatives of land purchases and “Hebrew labor.” Rural to urban migration swelled Haifa and Jaffa with poor Palestinians in search of work, and new attendant forms of political organizing emerged that emphasized youth, religion, class, and ideology over older elite-based structures. Meanwhile, rising anti-Semitism—especially its state-supported variant—in Europe led to an increase of Jewish immigration, legal and illegal, in Palestine.
Unsurprisingly, the combination of these various trends produced periodic upheavals, from the 1929 al-Buraq Uprising to multicity demonstrations in 1933 against the British Mandate. In October 1935, the discovery of a shipment of arms in the Jaffa port destined for the Haganah fueled Palestinian concerns that the Zionist movement was introducing the human and military resources necessary for its state-building project under the nose of the British. Meanwhile, the popular and populist Syrian Shaykh Izzeddin al-Qassam , who preached to the slum-dwelling rural transplants near Haifa’s rail yards and who had spent the early 1930s building a cell-based paramilitary network, was killed in a firefight with British forces in November 1935. Qassam’s funeral in Haifa elicited a mass outpouring of public outrage. These events are often seen as direct predecessors of the mass Palestinian uprising that took place in 1936.
The Great Palestinian Rebellion , or the Great Arab Revolt, as this uprising came to be known, lasted for three years and can be generally divided into three phases. Thefirst phase lasted from the spring of 1936 to July 1937. With tensions throughout Palestine running high since the fall of 1935, the revolt was ignited in mid-April 1936 when followers of Qassam attacked a convoy of trucks between Nablus and Tulkarm , killing two Jewish drivers. The next day, the Irgun killed two Palestinian workers near Petah Tikva , and in the following days, deadly disturbances ensued in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. In Nablus, an Arab National Committee was formed and a strike was called on 19 April. National Committees in other cities echoed the call to strike, and on 25 April the Arab Higher Committee (Lajna) (AHC) was formed, chaired by Haj Amin al-Husseini , to coordinate and support a nationwide general strike, which was launched on 8 May.
The strike was widely observed and brought commercial and economic activity in the Palestinian sector to a standstill. Meanwhile, Palestinians throughout the countryside came together in armed groups to attack—at first sporadically, but with increasing organization— British and Zionist targets. Some Arab volunteers joined the rebels from outside Palestine, though their numbers remained small in this period. The British employed various tactics in an attempt to break the strike and to quell the rural insurrection. The ranks of British and Jewish policemen swelled and Palestinians were subjected to house searches, night raids, beatings, imprisonment, torture, and deportation. Large areas of Jaffa’s Old City were demolished, and the British called in military reinforcements.
Concurrent with military operations and repressive measures, the British government dispatched a commission of inquiry headed by Lord Peel to investigate the root causes of the revolt. In October 1936, under the combined pressure of British policies, other Arab heads of state, and the effects of a six-month general strike on the Palestinian population, the AHC called off the strike and agreed to appear before the Peel Commission . A period of lower intensity conflict prevailed as the Peel Commission toured the country, but tensions continued to build in anticipation of the commission’s report. In July 1937, the Peel Commission published its report, recommending Palestine’s partition into Jewish and Arab states. Dismayed by this negation of their desires and demands, the Palestinian population relaunched their armed insurgency with renewed intensity, initiating the second phase of the revolt.
This second phase, lasting from July 1937 until the fall of 1938, witnessed significant gains by the Palestinian rebels. Large swaths of the hilly Palestinian interior, including for a time the Old City of Jerusalem , fell fully under rebel control. Rebels established institutions, most significantly courts and a postal service, to replace the British Mandate structures they sought to dismantle. The British, meanwhile, imposed even harsher measures to try to quash the revolt. The AHC and all Palestinian political parties were outlawed, political and community leaders were arrested, and a number of high-profile public figures exiled. The military aspects of counterinsurgency intensified, and British tanks, airplanes, and heavy artillery were deployed throughout Palestine. The British also meted out collective punishment: thousands of Palestinians were relegated to “detention camps”; residential quarters were destroyed; schools were closed; villages were collectively fined and forced to billet British troops and police. Zionist military institutions took advantage of the situation to build up their capacities with British support. By early 1939, members of the Jewish Settlement Police (about 14,000) were subsidized, uniformed, and armed by the British government as a thinly veiled front for the Haganah, and so-called Special Night Squads comprising Jewish and British members launched “special operations” against Palestinian villages.
Thethird phaseof the rebellion lasted roughly from the fall of 1938 to the summer of 1939. The British dispatched another commission of inquiry, this one headed by Sir John Woodhead , to examine the technical aspects of implementing partition. In November 1938, the Woodhead Commission report concluded that partition was not practicable, marking a certain British retreat from the Peel recommendation. At the same time, however, the British launched an all-out offensive: in 1939 more Palestinians were killed, more were executed (by hanging), and nearly twice as many were detained than in 1938. Such brutality placed immense pressure on the rebels, exacerbating rifts between the political leadership of the AHC exiled in Damascus and local leadership on the ground, between rebel bands and village populations that were expected to support and supply them, and ultimately between Palestinians who remained committed to the revolt and those willing to reach a compromise with the British. British-supported Palestinian “Peace Bands” were dispatched to battle their compatriots.
In May 1939, the British government published a new White Paperthat proposed the following: Britain’s obligations to the Jewish national home had been substantially fulfilled; indefinite mass Jewish immigration to and land acquisition in Palestine would contradict Britain’s obligations to the Palestinians; within the next five years, no more than 75,000 Jews would be allowed into the country, after which Jewish immigration would be subject to “Arab acquiescence”; land transfers would be permitted in certain areas, but restricted and prohibited in others, to protect Palestinians from landlessness; and an independent unitary state would be established after ten years, conditional on favorable Palestinian-Jewish relations.
The combined impact of Britain’s military and diplomatic efforts brought the rebellion to an end in the late summer of 1939. Over the revolt’s three years, some 5,000 Palestinians had been killed and nearly 15,000 wounded. The Palestinian leadership had been exiled, assassinated, imprisoned, and made to turn against one another. At the same time, the White Paper—despite its limitations—offered certain concessions to the rebels’ demands. Whatever gains Palestinians might have made through the revolt, however, were quickly overtaken by the larger geopolitical processes of World War II , and the combined British-Zionist assault on Palestinian political and social life during the revolt had a long-lasting impact.
“VISIT OF H.R.H. PRINCESS MARY AND THE EARL OF HARWOOD. MARCH 1934. PRINCESS MARY, THE EARL OF HARWOOD, AND THE GRAND MUFTI, ETC. AT THE MOSQUE EL-AKSA [I.E., AL-AQSA IN JERUSALEM].” LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-M33- 4221.
A two-part archive, labeled “Activities of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem” and dated 1940-1941, sits in Britain’s National Archives in Kew. This writer successfully had the first part declassified in 2014. The second part remains sealed. My 2018 attempt to have these ten pages declassified was refused on the grounds that the archive might “undermine the security of the country [Britain] and its citizens.”[1] None of its secrets are to be available until January, 2042; and if the paired file is any precedent, even in 2042 it will be released only in redacted form.
The ‘Grand Mufti’ in the archive’s heading is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader whom posterity best remembers for his alignment with the Italian and German fascists; and the years 1940-1941 place him not in Palestine, but in Iraq — and if the second archive extends to late 1941, in Europe. What could possibly be hidden in a World War II document about a long-dead Nazi sympathizer that would present such a risk to British national security eight decades later, that none of it can be revealed? At present, only the UK government censors know; but the answer may have less to do with the fascists and al-Husseini than with British misdeeds in Iraq, and less to do with Britain’s national security than with its historical embarrassment.
When in 1921 votes were cast for the new Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini came in last among the four candidates. But votes in Palestine mattered as little then as they do now, and the British, Palestine’s novice replacement occupiers for the Ottomans, handed the post to al-Husseini. At first, he proved to be an asset to the British. But as the years passed, his opposition to Zionism, support for Palestinian nationalism, and ultimately his involvement in the 1936 Palestinian uprising, led to calls for his arrest.
“ARAB DEMONSTRATIONS ON OCT. 13 AND 27, 1933. IN JERUSALEM AND JAFFA. RETURN OF GRAND MUFTI FROM INDIA. MET BY HUNDREDS OF CARS AT GETHSEMANE, NOV. 17, 1933.” LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-M33- 4218.
In mid-October of 1937, he fled from hiding in Palestine to Beirut. Two years later and six weeks after the outbreak of World War II, in mid-October of 1939, he slipped to Baghdad, where his sympathies for the Italian fascists further alarmed the British. Fast-forward another two years to late 1941, and al-Husseini is in Europe, meeting with Benito Mussolini on the 27th of October, and on the 28th of November meeting with the Führer himself at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.
Al-Husseini’s motivation for embracing the Axis was likely a combination of selfish political opportunism and the belief that the alignment would help safeguard against the takeover of Palestine by the Zionists. The reasoning, however grotesque, was the same used by Lehi (the ‘Stern Gang’) in its own attempted collaboration with the fascists: Britain was the obstacle both to Palestinian liberation, and to unbridled Zionism, and for both the Mufti and Lehi, defeating that obstacle meant embracing its enemies. Even the ‘mainstream’ David Ben-Gurion had no moral qualms about taking advantage of Britain’s struggle against the Nazis — a struggle for which his Jewish Agency was already conspicuously unhelpful — by exploiting Britain’s post-war vulnerabilities.[2]
Posterity has treated Lehi’s and the Mufti’s flirtations with the fascists quite differently. Lehi, the most fanatical of the major Zionist terror organizations, was transformed into freedom fighters, and ex-Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir was twice elected as Israeli Prime Minister. In contrast, Zionist leaders quickly seized on al-Husseini’s past to smear not just him, but the Palestinians as a people, as Nazis.
The use of al-Husseini’s unsavory history to ‘justify’ anti-Palestinian racism continues to the present day. Most bizarrely, in 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Hitler had not intended to exterminate the Jews — that is, not until al-Husseini planted the words in his ear — which translates as “got the idea from the Palestinians”. A private citizen would likely have been arrested under German law for this attempt to rewrite the Holocaust.
THE MUFTI OF JERUSALEM, SAYID AMIN AL HUSSEINI, MEETS WITH HITLER, NOVEMBER 1941.
Iraq won limited independence in 1932, just before the Nazis came to power. When the Mufti ensconced himself in Iraq seven years later, the country was under nominally ‘pro-British’ Prime Ministers, and Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah for the four-year-old king, Faisal II. This uneasy British-Iraqi equilibrium ended on first day of April 1941, when four Iraqi officers known as the Golden Square, wanting full independence (and similarly aligning themselves with the fascists in the foolish belief that doing so would help them get it), staged a coup d’état. It lasted two months. British troops ousted the coup on the first day of June — and as they did, anti-Jewish riots rocked Baghdad. An estimated 180 Jewish Iraqis were killed and 240 wounded in this pogrom known as the Farhud.
Why would the momentary power vacuum of the British takeover lead to anti-Jewish terror? While doing research for my 2016 book, State of Terror, I was intrigued by the claim of one Iraqi Jewish witness, Naeim Giladi, that these ‘Arab’ riots were orchestrated by the British to justify their return to power.[3] Indeed, the riots seemed unnatural in a society where Jews had lived for two and a half millennia, and the “pro-Axis” Golden Square takeover two months earlier had not precipitated any such pogrom. Yet it was also true that Zionism had created ethnic resentment, and Giladi did not question that junior officers of the Iraqi army were involved in the violence. The evidence provided by Giladi was compelling enough to seek out clues among British source documents that were not available to him.
And that, along with the hope of shedding new light on the Mufti’s pro-fascist activities, brought me to the archive at issue and my qualified (redacted) success in getting the first part declassified– officially titled, CO 733/420/19. Not surprisingly, much of the file focused on legitimate worry over the Mufti’s dealings with the Italian fascists. Some of the British voices recorded considered him to be a serious threat to the war effort, and a report entitled “Inside Information” spoke of the Mufti’s place in an alleged “German shadow government in Arabia”. Others dismissed this as “typical of the sort of stuff which literary refugees put into their memoirs in order to make them dramatic” and suggested that the Mufti’s influence was overstated.
Whatever the case, by October 1940, the Foreign Office was considering various methods for “putting an end to the Mufti’s intrigues with the Italians”, and by mid-November,
it was decided that the only really effective means of securing a control over him [the Mufti] would be a military occupation of Iraq.
British plans of a coup were no longer mere discussion, but a plan already in progress:
We may be able to clip the Mufti’s wings when we can get a new Government in Iraq. F.O. [Foreign Office] are working on this”.
So, the British were already working on re-occupying Iraq five months before the April 1941 ‘Golden Square’ coup.
A prominent thread of the archive was: How to effect a British coup without further alienating ‘the Arab world’ in the midst of the war, beyond what the empowering of Zionism had already done? Harold MacMichael, High Commissioner for Palestine, suggested the idea “that documents incriminating the Mufti have been found in Libya” that can be used to embarrass him among his followers; but others “felt some hesitation … knowing, as we should, there was no truth in the statement.”
But frustratingly, the trail stops in late 1940; to know anything conclusive we need the second part’s forbidden ten pages: CO 733/420/19/1.
The redacted first part partially supports, or at least does not challenge, Giladi’s claim. It proves that Britain was planning regime change and sought a pretext, but gives no hint as to whether ethnic violence was to be that pretext. Interestingly, Lehi had at the time reached the same conclusion as Giladi: its Communique claimed that “Churchill’s Government is responsible for the pogrom in Baghdad”.[4]
Does the public have the right to see still-secret archives such as CO 733/420/19/1? In this case, the gatekeepers claimed to be protecting us from the Forbidden Fruit of “curiosity”: They claimed to be distinguishing between “information that would benefit the public good”, and “information that would meet public curiosity”, and decided on our behalf that this archive fit the latter.[1] We are to believe that an eight-decade-old archive on an important issue remains sealed because it would merely satisfy our lust for salacious gossip.
Perhaps no assessment of past British manipulation in Iraq would have given pause to the Blair government before signing on to the US’s vastly more catastrophic Iraqi ‘regime change’ of 2003, promoted with none of 1940’s hesitation about using forged ‘African’ documents — this time around Niger, instead of Libya. But history has not even a chance of teaching us, if its lessons are kept hidden from the people themselves.
Note: According to Giladi, the riots of 1941 “gave the Zionists in Palestine a pretext to set up a Zionist underground in Iraq” that would culminate with the (proven) Israeli false-flag ‘terrorism’ that emptied most of Iraq’s Jewish population a decade later. Documents in Kew seen by the author support this. But to be sure, the Zionists were not connected with the alleged British maneuvers of 1941.
1. Correspondence from the UK government, explaining its refusal to allow me access to CO 733/420/19/1:
Section 23(1) (security bodies and security matters): We have considered whether the balance of the public interest favours releasing or withholding this information. After careful consideration, we have determined that the public interest in releasing the information you have requested is outweighed by the public interest in maintaining the exemption. It is in the public interest that our security agencies can operate effectively in the interests of the United Kingdom, without disclosing information that would assist those determined to undermine the security of the country and its citizens.
The judiciary differentiates between information that would benefit the public good and information that would meet public curiosity. It does not consider the latter to be a ‘public interest’ in favour of disclosure. In this case, disclosure would neither meaningfully improve transparency nor assist public debate, and disclosure would not therefore benefit the public good.
2. Ben-Gurion looked ahead to when the end of the war would leave Britain militarily weakened and geographically dispersed, and economically ruined. He cited the occupation of Vilna by the Poles after World War I as a precedent for the tactic. For him, the end of WWII only presented an opportunity for the takeover of Palestine with less physical resistance; it also left Britain at the mercy of the United States for economic relief, which the Jewish Agency exploited by pressuring US politicians to make that assistance contingent on supporting Zionist claims to Palestine. At a mid-December 1945 secret meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, Ben-Gurion stressed that “our activities should be directed from Washington and not from London”, noting that “Jewish influence in America is powerful and able to cause damage to the interests of Great Britain”, as it “depends to a great extent on America economically” and would “not be able to ignore American pressure if we succeed in bringing this pressure to bear”. He lauded Rabbi Abba Silver in the US for his aggressiveness on the issue, while noting that he was nonetheless “a little fanatical and may go too far”. (TNA, FO 1093/508). The Irgun was more direct in 1946, stating that Britain’s commuting of two terrorists’ death sentences and other accommodations to the Zionists “has been done with the sole purpose to calm American opposition against the American loan to Britain”. (TNA, KV 5-36). Meanwhile, in the US that year Rabbi Silver’s bluntness on the tactic worried Moshe Shertok (a future prime minister). Although like Ben-Gurion, Shertok said that “we shall exploit to the maximum the American pressure on the British Government”, in particular the pre-election period (and in particular New York), but urged “care and wisdom in this” so as not to give ammunition to “anti-Zionists and the anti-semites in general”. Shertok criticized Silver for saying publicly that “he and his supporters opposed the loan to be granted to the British Government”. (TNA, CO 537/1715)
3. Suárez, Thomas, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel[Skyscraper, 2016, and Interlink, 2017]; In Arabic, هكذا أقيمت المستعمرة [Kuwait, 2018]; in French, Comment le terrorisme a créé Israël[Investig’Action, 2019] Giladi, Naeim, Ben-Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews [Dandelion, 2006]
4. Lehi, Communique, No. 21/41, dated 1st of August 1941
Update: This post originally referred to the “four-year-old Prime Minister, ‘Abd al-Ilah,” not the four-year-old King Faisal under Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah. Commenter Jon S. corrected us, and the post has been changed.
The day the Mufti died
Yes, Hajj Amin al-Husayni collaborated with the Nazis, but that’s not why he was dropped from the Palestinian narrative
Martin Kramer, Times of Israel Blogs, July 5, 202
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“To His Eminence the Grand Mufti as a memento. H. Himmler. July 4, 1943.” Israel State Archives.
Fifty years ago, on July 4, 1974, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem, passed away in Beirut, Lebanon, at the American University Hospital. At age 79, he died of natural causes. The Mufti had faded from the headlines a decade earlier. In 1961, his name had resurfaced numerous times during the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann. But a couple of years later, the Palestinian cause gained a new face in Yasser Arafat. With that, the Mufti entered his final eclipse.
When he died, the Supreme Muslim Council in Jerusalem asked the Israeli authorities for permission to bury him in the city. Israel refused the request. Any Palestinian who wanted to attend the funeral in Lebanon would be allowed to do so, but the Mufti of Jerusalem would not be buried in Jerusalem. Instead, the Mufti was laid to rest in the Palestinian “Martyrs’ Cemetery” in Beirut.
The Mufti was appointed to his position by the British in 1921. Within the British Empire, authorities preferred to work through “native” institutions, even if they had to create them on the fly. So they established a supreme council for Palestine’s Muslims and placed the Mufti at its helm. Although he lacked religious qualifications, he came from a leading family and appeared capable of striking deals.
In fact, he used his position to oppose the Jewish “National Home” policy of the Mandate. The “Arab Revolt” of 1936 finally convinced the British that he had to go, and in 1937 he fled the country.
After a period in Lebanon, he ended up in Iraq, where he helped foment a coup against the pro-British regime. When British forces suppressed the coup, he fled again, making his way through Tehran and Rome to Berlin. There, the Nazi regime used him to stir up Arabs and Muslims against the Allies. He was photographed with Hitler and Himmler, recruited Muslims to fight for the Axis, and attempted to secure promises of independence for colonized Arabs and Muslims. None of his efforts met with much success. His role, if any, in the Holocaust is a contested matter. Hitler and his henchmen hardly needed any prompting to execute their genocidal plans. Clearly, though, the Mufti rooted for Jewish destruction from the fifty-yard line.
After the Nazi collapse, he fell into French hands and spent a year in comfortable house detention near Paris. Later, he fled to Egypt and subsequently moved in and out of Syria and Lebanon. Following the Arab debacle of 1948, Egypt established an “All Palestine Government” in the refugee-choked Gaza Strip, leaving the presidency open for the Mufti. It didn’t last long. He continued to maneuver through Arab politics, but he was yesterday’s man to a new generation of Palestinians born in exile. During the Eichmann trial, the prosecution sought to implicate the Mufti as an accomplice. Yet the Mossad never came after him, and he didn’t die a martyr’s death.
Man without a country
The Mufti was a formidable politician. In 1951, a State Department-CIA profile of him opened with this evocative enumeration of his many talents, which is worth quoting at length:
King of no country, having no army, exiled, forever poised for flight from one country to another in disguise, he has survived because of his remarkable ability to play the British against the French, the French against the British, and the Americans against both; and also because he has become a symbol among the Arabs for defending them against the Zionists. His suave penchant for intrigue, his delicate manipulation of one Arab faction against another, combined with the popularity of his slogan of a united Muslim world, has made him a symbol and a force in the Middle East that is difficult to cope with and well nigh impossible to destroy. The names of Machiavelli, Richelieu, and Metternich come to mind to describe him, yet none of these apply. Alone, without a state, he plays an international game on behalf of his fellow Muslims. That they are ungrateful, unprepared, and divided by complex and innumerable schisms, does not deter him from his dream.
Profilers would later write similar things about Arafat, but the Mufti had none of Arafat’s cultivated dishevelment. He was manicured, even chic:
The Mufti is a man of striking appearance. Vigorous, erect, and proud, like a number of Palestinian Arabs he has pink-white skin and blue eyes. His hair and beard, formerly a foxy red, is now grey. He always wears an ankle length black robe and a tarbush wound with a spotless turban. Part of his charm lies in his deep Oriental courtesy; he sees a visitor not only to the door, but to the gate as well, and speeds him on his way with blessings. Another of his assets is his well-modulated voice and his cultured Arabic vocabulary. He can both preach and argue effectively, and is well versed in all the problems of Islam and Arab nationalism. His mystical devotion to his cause, which is indivisibly bound up with his personal and family aggrandizement, has been unflagging, and he has never deviated from his theme. For his numerous illiterate followers, such political consistency and simplicity has its advantages. The Mufti has always known well how to exploit Muslim hatred of ‘infidel’ rule.
So why did the Mufti fade into obscurity? (By 1951, he was on his way out.) Many mistakenly believe his collaboration with Hitler and the Nazis discredited him. It didn’t. Not only did the Arabs not care, but Western governments eyed the Mufti with self-interest. The general view in foreign ministries held that he had picked the wrong side in the war, but not more than that.
The above-quoted American report expressed this view perfectly: “While the Zionists consider him slightly worse than Mephistopheles and have used him as a symbol of Nazism, this is false. He cared nothing about Nazism and did not work well with Germans. He regarded them merely as instruments to be used for his own aims.” If so, why not open a discreet line to him and let him roam the world unimpeded?
Nakba stigma
What finally discredited the Mufti in Arab opinion, where it mattered most, was his role in the 1948 war. It was a war he wanted and believed his side would win. In late 1947, the British sent someone to see if there might be some behind-the-scenes flexibility in his stance on partition, which he had completely rejected. There wasn’t. He explained:
As regards the withdrawal of British troops from Palestine, we would not mind. We do not fear the Jews, their Stern, Irgun, Haganah. We might lose at first. We would have many losses, but in the end we must win. Remember Mussolini, who talked of 8,000,000 bayonets, who bluffed the world that he had turned the macaronis back into Romans. For 21 years he made this bluff, and what happened when his Romans were put to the test? They crumbled into nothing. So with the Zionists. They will eventually crumble into nothing, and we do not fear the result, unless of course Britain or America or some other Great Power intervenes. Even then we shall fight and the Arab world will be perpetually hostile. Nor do we want you to substitute American or United Nations troops for the British. That would be even worse. We want no foreign troops. Leave us to fight it out ourselves.
This underestimation of the Zionists proved disastrous, even more so than his overestimation of the Axis. He later wrote his memoirs, blaming “imperialist” intervention, Arab internal divisions, and world Zionist mind-control for the 1948 defeat. To no avail: his name became inseparable from the Nakba, the loss of Arab Palestine to the Jews. His reputation hit rock bottom, along with that of the other failed Arab rulers of 1948.
Upon his death in 1974, he received a grand sendoff in Beirut from the PLO. In 1970, Arafat had transferred the PLO headquarters from Jordan to Lebanon, and the funeral finalized his status as the sole leader of the Palestinian people. Four months later, Arafat addressed the world from the podium of the UN General Assembly, achieving an international legitimacy that the Mufti could never have imagined.
The PLO then dropped the Mufti from the Palestinian narrative; nothing bears his name. Even Hamas, which inherited his uncompromising rigidity and Jew-hatred, doesn’t include him in their pantheon. (Their man is Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a firebrand “martyr” killed by the British in 1935.)
If anyone still dwells on the Mufti, it’s the Israelis, including their current prime minister, who find him useful as a supposed link between the Palestinian cause and Nazism. One can understand Palestinians who push back on this; the Mufti was no Eichmann. But that doesn’t excuse Palestinian reluctance to wrestle candidly with the Mufti’s legacy. He personified the refusal to see Israel as it is and an unwillingness to imagine a compromise. Until Palestinians exorcise his ghost, it will continue to haunt them.
Contrary to what many of the historically uniformed opponents of Israel and the US and its allies might think as they rush to judgement on the streets of western cities, the current Israeli Lebanese war (the third of that name) did not begin with the wired pagers and walkie talkies and the killing of much of Hezbollah’s leadership, including its chief, Hasan Nasrallah. It started the day after the Hamas’ murderous assault on Israel’s border communities on October 7th last year, when, ostensibly as a show of solidarity for Hamas and Gaza and with theocratic Iran’s tacit approval, the Lebanese Hezbollah began launching drones and missiles at northern Israel – some 9,000 to date – forcing the evacuation of probably up to 100, 000 citizens to safer areas to the south – where they remain to this day.
Yet, it is only now, a year later, that there are calls internationally for a ceasefire. I’ve seen glaciers move faster! Not that messianic jihadis are much into ceasefires, let alone surrender. It’s not in their doomsday DNA – they’d sooner burn down the house with themselves and their co-religionists inside, as they have done in Gaza.
There is no question that Hezbollah had it coming and that Israel’s strikes have been perfectly justifiable. Hezbollah committed a series of gross miscalculations and grievous strategic blunders. Nasrallah’s delusions of power were his undoing. Now it remains to be seen if Hezbollah can survive the devastation it has suffered in the last two weeks, and more critical for the rest of the world, if the conflict escalated into a regional war in which Israel and Its allies have to confront Iran’s “Ring of Fire”, its “Axis of Resistance” – a war that is actually now being waged on seven fronts: Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran – and world opinion.
Anyone who is willing to bet for or against an escalation between Israel and Iran should quit gambling. While the United States’ involvement endeavours to avert further escalation, this is like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube: theoretically possible, practically impossible. Remember the ludicrous American and Israeli concept of “escalate to de-escalate” from merely a week ago. Unpredictable developments and spiraling escalation obviously outpace analysis
Hezbollah members carry the coffins of two commanders during a funeral procession in Beirut’s southern suburbs on September 25. AP
Slouching towards Beirut
The Sydney Morning Herald provided an excellent summary of how the Shia Hezbollah came to create a parasitic state within a state and to dominate Lebanon’s politics, economy and society, outman and outgun the meagre Lebanese army, and to potentially threaten the country’s survival. Like Hamas, its Sunni counterpart in Gaza, it is an Iran-funded messianic, fundamentalist organization dedicated to the elimination of Israel, and the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran’s most important proxy in the “Axis of Resistance” to the Jewish state and the United States and its allies, a keystone in its Ring of Fire strategy. And also like Hamas, its jihadi ideology, evident in its name, The Party of God, does not permit compromise let alone surrender.
On 27th September, Tom McTague, the political editor of the UK e-zine Unherd wrote in an article called Why Lebanon can’t be saved:
“Today, Lebanon is a dead state, eaten alive by Hezbollah’s parasitic power. The scale of the catastrophe in the country is hard to comprehend, much of it caused by the disruptive nature of Syria’s civil war. Since its neighbour’s descent into anarchic hell, some 1.5 million Syrians have sought refuge in Lebanon — a tiny country with a population of just 5 million. But, more fundamentally, with Hezbollah fighting to protect Bashar al Assad, the opposing countries — led by Saudi Arabia — began withdrawing funds from Lebanese banks. This sparked a financial crisis that left Lebanon with no money for fuel.
By spring 2020, the country had defaulted on its debts, sending it into a downward spiral which the World Bank in 2021 described as among “the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises globally since the mid-nineteenth century”. Lebanon’s GDP plummeted by around a third, with poverty doubling from 42% to 82% in two years. At the same time, the country’s capital, Beirut, was hit by an extraordinary explosion at its port, leaving more than 300,000 homeless. By 2023 the IMF described the situation as “very dangerous” and the US was warning that the collapse of the Lebanese state was “a real possibility”.
With Iranian support, however, Hezbollah created a shadow economy almost entirely separate from this wider collapse. It could escape the energy shortages, while creating its own banks, supermarkets and electricity network. Hezbollah isn’t just a terrorist group. It is a state within a state, complete with a far more advanced army. “They may have plunged Lebanon into complete chaos, but they themselves are not chaotic at all,” as Carmit Valensi, from the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told the Jerusalem Post.
Then came 7 October, after which Hezbollah tied its fate to that of the Palestinians, promising to bombard Israel with rockets until the war in Gaza was brought to a close. We have witnessed the frightening scale of its power over the past year, its bombardment forcing some 100,000 Israelis from their homes in Galilee to the safety of the Israeli heartlands around Tel Aviv. For the first time since modern Israel’s creation, the land where Jews are able to live in their own state has shrunk; the rockets are a daily reminder of the country’s extraordinary vulnerability, threatened on all sides by states who actively want it removed from the map – even from history itself. The pretense (in the walk of the Abraham Accords brokered by the US between Israel and a number of ‘friends’ Arab autocracies that the Palestinian and Lebanese questions could be contained, ignored or bypassed as part of a wider grand strategy to contain Iran has been shattered”.
The day after
Some commentators are more upbeat than McTague about Lebanon’s prospects in the event of the weakening if not outright removal of Hezbollah’s stranglehold on Lebanese life. I republish two such below. Both acknowledge that this would not be easy.
Hezbollah’s command-and-control infrastructure is in tatters. But the Iranian control of Syria gives Hezbollah significant strategic depth, and, despite the recent losses, Hezbollah is a very large organization that is deeply woven into Lebanon’s Shia population, the largest sect in the country. But the events of the past two have seen the mystique around Hezbollah broken. Its prestige, built on “resistance” to Israel, has been irreparably damaged – not least by the revelation of how extensively Israeli spies have infiltrated its ranks. Hezbollah’s ability to dominate Lebanon is open to challenge in a way it has not been for decades. The end could well be nigh for the terrorist group.
As Israeli commentator Zvi Bar’el,wrote in Haaretz on 28 September:
“Even if Israel succeeds in destroying the entire stock of Hezbollah missiles that threaten it, the arms that remain in the organization’s hand will continue to serve as a whip threatening Lebanon’s domestic front so long as the country has no effective, equipped and trained army that can contend with Hezbollah. Iran fears that this lever is now liable to lose its power in the face of the heavy blows suffered by Hezbollah, which may lead to the Lebanese public to rear its head, considering the very heavy price it has had to pay for the war that is not its own, whose rationale has not been defense of the homeland, but assisting Hamas.
The Lebanese public and in particular the political rivals to Hezbollah, despite the sharp criticism that has intensified during the war, and in particular over the past two weeks, has still not taken to the streets to confront the organization. The political harmony between Hezbollah’s rivals has not yet ripened, their internecine revulsion and hate rivals what they feel toward Hezbollah, and there is no certainty that even in the face of the destruction of Lebanon will they be able to close ranks. Hezbollah is still demonstrating fighting ability despite the loss of its senior commanders, and the political road map that now appears optimal may disappear if a regional confrontation begins following the expected Israeli strike against Iran.
But the Lebanese have already demonstrated their power several times in the country’s recent history. In 2005, they drove the Syrian forces out of the country following the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri,and in 2008, they violently confronted Hezbollah in a clash that killed dozens. They have toppled governments and forced the replacement of ministers, and most of all, in contrast to Gaza, they have a country that offers a collective national structure that they believe has been undermined by Iran, by way of Hezbollah.
With more than a million Lebanese uprooted from their homes, and Hezbollah’s social and health services no longer capable of responding to the needs of the homeless and wounded, forcing the group to rely on the services of the government it aspired to replace – Iran’s strategic challenge is to prevent a situation in which the country and its people will reject, or at least erode, Hezbollah’s status as the party that determines the nation’s policy and character.’
But the way ahead is daunting. Lebanon was in dire straits even before October 7th.
An economic crisis that began in 2019 and a massive 2020 port explosionfor which Hezbollah was partly responsible, have left Lebanon struggling to provide basic services such as electricity and medical care. Political divisions have left the country of 6 million without a president or functioning government for more than two years, deepening a national sense of abandonment. Reeling from years of economic dysfunction brought on by corruption and the presence of perhaps over a million refugees. A comprehensive international effort is needed to rebuild its political, economic, and military institutions. Yet critical aid and reconstruction money has been withheld precisely because of exasperation with Hezbollah’s corrupting presence in the country.
Lebanon must be freed of Hezbollah and Iran, and it should not be left up to Israel and its highly problematic Netanyahu government. The international community needs to take an active role in supporting Lebanon’s recovery and resisting Iranian interference. The UN Security Council can start the process by demanding the implementation of the United Nations Security Council resolution 1701 which was intended to resolve the2006 Lebanon War. It was unanimously approved by the Security Council and the Lebanese cabinet.
That resolution called for a full cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah; the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon to be replaced by Lebanese and United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) forces deploying to southern Lebanon; and the disarmament of armed groups including Hezbollah, with no armed forces other than UNIFIL and Lebanese military south of the Litani River which flows about 29 km north of the border. As of 2024, the resolution was not fully implemented. Hezbollah and other armed groups in southern Lebanon have not withdrawn at all; in particular, Hezbollah has since significantly increased their weapons capabilities
The Day After Nasrallah: Lebanon’s Government Is Unsure How to Handle the ‘Historic Opportunity’ Ahead
With Nasrallah gone, Lebanon has a unique opportunity to envision a post-Hezbollah reality, yet the militant organization still maintains a tight grip on the country. They will not permit the government to secure a diplomatic solution acceptable to Israel.
A little more than 20 years after the execution of Saddam Hussein and the end of his reign of terror, and about 13 years after the Arab Spring overthrew a number of dictators, a show of euphoria is resolutely predicting that Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah’s death will “change the map of the Middle East,” accompanied by proposals and work plans meant to take advantage of the opportunity to redraw that “dream map.”
The obvious starting point for this imagined renaissance is Lebanon, whose most significant political, economic and military center since the civil war ended in 1989 with the signing of the Taif Agreement, has now been damaged. The uniqueness and importance of the Taif Agreement was that it sought to shatter the confessional structure of the government that gave Christians a majority in the government and its institutions, as well as in the companies affiliated to it and in the army.
The agreement stipulated that Christians would no longer have an automatic majority in parliament, based on a population census conducted in 1932. Instead, its 128 seats would be divided equally between Christians (and other non-Muslim minorities) and Muslims, a definition that also included the Druze and the Alawite. In the important secondary division of the Muslim sects, 27 seats were allocated to Sunnis and 27 seats to Shi’ites.
At the base of this division was the aspiration that no single sect would ever be able to rule the country exclusively; for a government to be established, each sect would have to form a coalition with other sects that would share the political and economic spoils.
At the time, this structure was seen as an appropriate solution to ending the 15-year civil war. It did not build better politics in the country, but it did give Lebanon years of stability. This structure has not changed and it is not expected to change even after the removal of Nasrallah and Hezbollah’s military leaders; it is anchored in the Lebanese constitution, which no one currently intends to change.
The Taif agreement has led to the formation of trans-confessional coalitions, but they brought the country to economic collapse and to the brink of bankruptcy and political paralysis: In this situation, the rival parties cannot agree on a president, and since it is the president who appoints the prime minister it is then impossible to form a permanent government to make the critical decisions necessary to rescue the state from the crisis.
In an interview with Yossi Melman, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardosaid, “The Israeli government should announce loudly and clearly that Lebanon is a single entity, and that the Lebanese government bears sole responsibility for every act of aggression that comes out of Lebanon. That the territory known to the world as Lebanon has one government, one flag and one army. That any negotiations to end the war and determine security arrangements will only take place with the Lebanese government. This war could be ended within hours from the moment Israel makes this clear and the international community acknowledges the fact that there is only one single legal entity in Lebanon.”
This is a statement that rests on admirable theoretical foundations, but they are detached from the reality of Lebanon and above all from the reality of the torn, crazy patchwork quilt known as the “Lebanese government.” It is true that any negotiations must be conducted with the Lebanese government, and that the country has “one government,” but it is a government with cabinet members who serve on behalf of Hezbollah who, together with their coalition partners from the Amal movement and, until recently, Gebran Bassil’s Christian party the Free Patriotic Movement, hold the government and the country by the throat, with or without Nasrallah. To bring about the “historic change,” Lebanon will have to hold a new general election, which at the present is about as likely as appointing a president or implementing economic reforms.
Lebanon has “one flag and one army,” but in practice it has two armies: the official one, headed by the Christian general Joseph Aoun, who has been mentioned as a candidate for the presidency; and the “Hezbollah army.” Even after all of the latter’s long- and medium-range missilesare destroyed and it no longer poses a threat to Israel, it will still have enough weapons to threaten Lebanon’s internal security and its own political rivals.
The Lebanese Army, on the other hand, is a ghost army. On paper, it has an estimated 80,000 or so soldiers, as well as a token navy and air force, lacking air defenses that could protect Lebanon’s skies from hostile attacks. Above all, it is a bankrupt army, that relies on Qatar and America for the wherewithal that allows the force to pay its soldiers their monthly wages of about $100. Many soldiers on the army’s payroll take on odd jobs in order to support their families.
Hezbollah’s fighters have no such problems. Their salaries are much higher, with a funding pipeline that relies on tremendous assistance from Iran and on the organization’s resources outside of Lebanon, without forgoing their share from the state budget.
During and before the war, Jean-Yves Le Drian, French President Emmanuel Macron’s special envoy to Lebanon, and U.S. President Joe Biden’s envoy Amos Hochstein have presented an operating plan to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1701, in particular the section that prescribes that the Lebanese Army and UNIFIL will deploy in southern Lebanon and prevent the establishment of Hezbollah forces up to the Litani River.
The plan includes recruiting, training, equipping, and arming 15,000 more men for the Lebanese Army and it even has the consent of Prime Minister Najib Mikati’s government, which announced an initial plan to recruit 5,000 “volunteers”. Paralleling the deployment of these forces, when their recruitment and training is completed, Lebanon and Israel will negotiate to mark their land border, which is supposed to neutralize Hezbollah’s grounds for pursuing the conflict with Israel.
Only one element was missing in the plan to complete its implementation: Hezbollah’s agreement. Although Nasrallah hinted that he would not oppose any decision that the Lebanese government would make on the issue of demarcating the border, he stressed that he was only prepared to discuss it after a cease-fire in Gaza. Even after his death, Hezbollah MPs and ministers will continue to be committed to this position.
It may be assumed that if the Lebanese government decides to initiate the plan with Hezbollah’s consent, the Lebanese Army or any international body that goes to Lebanon to help implement the settlement will encounter violent resistance by Hezbollah, for which they will not need long-range missiles. Assault rifles, machine guns, grenades, and IEDs will suffice.
Nonetheless, there is a chance for a turnaround and implementation of the diplomatic action plan, and it lies in establishing a strong political coalition that will adopt the French-American action plan. The key figure for this measure is the Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri, who, until now, served as Nasrallah’s representative in all negotiating issues on settlements, a cease-fire, and contact with the West.
Berri, 86, is a veteran and sophisticated political battle fox, who has made a fortune estimated at tens of millions of dollars (other estimates mention a billion dollars), and enjoys broad support in the Shi’ite community. In the last elections, in 2022, his party won 15 seats, compared to Hezbollah’s 12.
Nasrallah’s removal may give Berri a major political edge, which if he can exploit to build a supporting coalition, he will be able to navigate Lebanon toward a diplomatic and military settlement or even finally bring about the appointment of the country’s president. And yet, even with his new position of political power, Berri cannot ignore or bypass Hezbollah’s position if he wants to implement a settlement that will satisfy Israel.
To help Berri and the Lebanese government make the “right” decision, it is possible to try and mobilize international pressure, offer financial rewards for Lebanon or threaten sanctions, but it should also be remembered that they have all been applied to Lebanon, before and during the war, without leaving their stamp on Lebanese politics.
It seems that the map of the new Middle East that will begin in post-Nasrallah Lebanon will have to find a different cartography department to draw it.
Without Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Economy Could Rise Out of the Ashes
It’s a long shot, but even amid financial crisis, dysfunctional government and brain drain, Lebanon has many of the raw materials to start over
Back in 2021, it was hard to see how Lebanon could fall any further. The economy had been shrinking since 2011. It fell off a cliff in 2019, with gross domestic product falling by more than half over two years after the national Ponzi scheme that had kept the economy afloat collapsed. The country defaulted on its foreign debt in 2019, its financial system was paralyzed and its main port was decimated in an explosion in 2020. Elections in 2021 resulted in a political stalemate that left the country without a permanent government or president.
As it turns out, things could get a lot worse. As Israelis hail a decisive victory over Hezbollah, Lebanon is being pummeled by Israeli bombs. Hundreds of thousands of residents in the south have fled for fear of Israeli airstrikes. The government – three years later, still a caretaker without a president – not only can’t defend the country, it has done nothing to help the refugees or care for the wounded. “They have no money and they have no control over what’s happening on the ground,” Mark Daou, a lawmaker, told The New York Times.
The old chestnut about Lebanon being the Switzerland of the Middle East is nothing more than a fun fact out of the distant past for the history books. The last time Beirut could boast of being a major banking center was before its civil war erupted in 1975. Today, it would be better described as the Somalia of the Middle East, with warlord No. 1 being Hezbollah.
Yet the Somalia comparison isn’t entirely fair. Amid all the dysfunction and chaos in Lebanon, there remains considerable latent potential to return to the glory days.
In the short term, the economy may be even worse off without Hezbollah, which the hundreds of millions of dollars a year it received in Iranian funding was spent on local goods and services. Lebanon also stands to lose the export receipts from Hezbollah’s drug smuggling, arms and cigarette smuggling, and currency counterfeiting mainly in Latin America.
There is also a risk that Israel’s successful assault on Hezbollah over the past two weeks could set off a new round of sectarian fighting in Lebanon and destroy the last remnant of political stability and a functioning economy. “The demolition of Hezbollah’s capabilities will likely embolden its opponents and anti-Iranian forces within Lebanon,” Imad Salamey, an expert on Lebanon at the Lebanese American University, told Al-Jazeera television.
But the reverse could also happen: the elimination, or at least the significant weakening, of Hezbollah could remove its baleful influence and enable Lebanon to begin rebuilding its decimated economy.
Silver lining
Among other things, Lebanon would have to contend with far fewer Western sanctions, most of which are directed at Hezbollah and affiliated institutions. It is just possible that freed of Hezbollah interference, a government can finally be formed. Aid and investment from the Gulf and the West may be forthcoming for the first time in years.
Perhaps a more intense effort to find natural gas off Lebanon’s Mediterranean coastwill get underway. Lebanon’s enormous diaspora – estimated at 15.4 million, almost three times the domestic population – could be a source of capital and for opening up foreign markets, just as the Jewish diaspora was for Israel in the past. There is even a silver lining to Lebanon’s feckless government, namely less government red tape and low taxes.
But in the end, Lebanon’s economic fate will depend on its people, or more precisely its human capital. Without significant natural resources or a domestic market to support industry, the future will depend on its becoming a knowledge economy, one based on technology and sophisticated services, as Tarek Ben Hassen, a Qatar University economist, proposed in a recent article.
Not surprisingly, even in 2019, before the roof caved in, Lebanon had long ceased to be a globally competitive economy. The World Economic Foundation’s Global Competitiveness Report that year ranked Lebanon 88th of 141 countries, one notch below Tunisia and one above Algeria – not the kind of neighbors a self-respecting country would want on this league table.
But on a few critical metrics, Lebanon came out looking much better. It placed 24th on graduates’ skill sets, 23rd on digital skills and 26th for imparting critical thinking in primary school teaching. And, these rankings probably understate Lebanon’s talent base: Like many countries, they are an average between a highly skilled elite and a less skilled majority. But a knowledge economy can get started with a small elite, if it is sufficiently capable.
Lebanon has another knowledge economy asset in its system of higher education. Despite all the economic and political vicissitudes of the last few years, six Lebanese universities are ranked among the world’s top 1,000 (top-ranking American University of Beirut comes in at 250), according to the QS World University Rankings for 2025.
And although it is not much in evidence these days amid economic collapse (the WEF ranked Lebanon 74th in 2019 for entrepreneurial culture), Lebanon has a long history of entrepreneurship stretching back to the days of the Phoenicians. Lebanese labor costs for engineers and the like are low. These kinds of numbers are a good foundation for a knowledge economy. The catch is that they reflect the situation as it was in 2019; since then, the collapse of the economy caused the country’s traditionally high rate ofemigration to balloon 4.5-fold in 2020 and 2021. Many of those who fled were Lebanon’s best and brightest, and the young who contend with a youth unemployment rate of nearly 50 percent.
If Lebanon can get its act together, it may be able to lure many of these expatriates back. The knowledge that Hezbollah is no longer casting its shadow over the country will certainly be an incentive. The wreckage that Lebanon is today may be seen by the most ambitious and entrepreneurial as an opportunity.
With or without Hezbollah, establishing relations with Israel is unlikely. But if Lebanon were to do that and establish a warm peace involving trade, tourism and business deals, like the one between Israel and the other Abraham Accord countries, the road to a thriving economy would be that much shorter.
We aknowledge the Gumbaynggirr People, the traditional custodians of the Land we are standing upon, and the Land from the Tablelands to the sea; and who have been here for over sixty-five thousand years. We also pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging of the Gumbaynggirr nation and to other Aboriginal and First Nation people present.
Today, at public gatherings and meetings, at carnivals and ceremonials, at conferences and conventions, many of us recognize and acknowledge our first peoples as the traditional owners of this land and acknowledge elders past, present and future.
Last year, among Murdoch’s myrmidons and his stablemates on Foxtel’s Sky after Dark, Chris Kenny was the only advocate for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
In the an opinion piece republished below, he writes: “In my view they have become a welcome and useful addition to our national culture. However, there is no reason they should be treated as some sacred rite, beyond criticism or even a laugh … In recent weeks there has been more anger and outrage rather than laughter over welcomes to country, and much of it is entirely unreasonable. It is clear some Australians resent them; we often hear people completely misconstrue the sentiment by declaring they do not want to be “welcomed to their own country”.
On the first anniversary of the unsuccessful Voice referendum, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that leading No campaign spokesperson Nyunggai Warren Mundine had said that debate on the Voice provoked a more profound national discussion about whether Indigenous people should have what he termed “special rights”. He says progressives and conservatives he spoke to during the campaign wanted practical improvements on issues such as education but were sick of gestures such as welcome to country ceremonies. “People like the concept but it goes overboard when it is every meeting at work and every plane when you land. It’s like a new religion, like the new saying of grace before meals. The Yes people haven’t realised they are actually turning people against them by overkill.”
Much of the antagonism towards Welcome to Country has indeed been fuelled by the divisive hangover of the referendum. In its aftermath, there was talk among some right-wing commentators, including former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott, and organizations like Advance Australia, that the time had come to see off the irritatingly woke and ubiquitous welcomes and acknowledgements. The “silent majority” of Australians, they claimed, had made their view known with the resounding rejection of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The attacks have expanded and amplified on talkback radio and by some of Kenny’s colleagues on Sky News (particularly the opinionated and misanthropic swamp creatures of Sky After Dark) which had run a news-stream dedicated to promoting the No case.
But the reality is that these expectations have not been realized and that regardless of the unfortunate outcome of the referendum of October 14th, 2023, the Welcome to Country is alive and well among Australians of goodwill throughout our wide land.
I concur with what Kenny writes, including his admonition that the ritual ought not be overdone and inappropriate, such as in events wherein a local Indigenous representative offers an official welcome to country, and then every speaker feels the need to share their own version of recognition in well-intentioned but redundant virtue-signalling.
There are also instances where welcomes and acknowledgements can be too political and aggressive. Declaring that “sovereignty was never ceded”, or demanding that we defer to a particular culture can be interpreted as is an unwelcome and uncomfortable imposition and is not the reason people may have turned up to a particular event.
Back in July 2022, when The Voice was a hopeful prospect, the ABC’s Q&A programme was hosted by the indigenous Garma Festival in the Northern Territory. Its MC, Stan Grant, journalist, writer, academic and a Wiradjuri man, defined sovereignty in the context of the indigenous Voice to Parliament and the Uluru Statement from the Heart as a spiritual concept. White folk associate it with powers and thrones, with control over states and nations and their citizens, with ownership, particularly of territory, of land, of real estate. Country, as Kenny concludes in his opinion piece, does not mean a sovereign nation, but rather, the traditional lands of indigenous people – just as these routinely talk about going back to their traditional family regions as being “on country”.
To some Welcome to Country might be a “woke” imposition, but to many others, it is a mark of respect and an acknowledgment of our history. To borrow from Mark Twain, reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
I’m quite relaxed and comfortable about that …
For more in In That Howling Infinite on on Indigenous Australians and The Voice Referendum, see:
Brendan Kerin gives a Welcome to Country at Sydney Olympic Park. Fox Sports
Welcomes to country and recognitions of traditional owners have rapidly become ubiquitous, if not universally embraced. They continue to spark unnecessary controversy and acrimony.
In my view they have become a welcome and useful addition to our national culture. However, there is no reason they should be treated as some sacred rite, beyond criticism or even a laugh.
Early on, I was sceptical and remember two decades ago, when working for then foreign minister Alexander Downer, we were at a function at the Adelaide Convention Centre, built over the city’s main railway station, and Downer was on stage waiting to speak when then Democrats senator Natasha Stott-Despoja began her remarks by recognising the “traditional owners”. It was quite a novel and woke gesture at the time, and I texted Downer asking why we needed to recognise the South Australian railways?
Boom Tish! The private quip was just to see the amusement on Downer’s face, and I wasn’t disappointed.
In recent weeks there has been more anger and outrage rather than laughter over welcomes to country, and much of it is entirely unreasonable. It is clear some Australians resent them; we often hear people completely misconstrue the sentiment by declaring they do not want to be “welcomed to their own country”.
Kenny acknowledges that there were rational and reasonable reasons to oppose the referendum, but “it was clear then and is perhaps even more obvious now that a sizeable minority voted no because they did not want to hear from their Indigenous compatriots again”.
Welcome to country speech of the International Test Match between the Wallabies and Georgia at Allianz Stadium in Sydney in July. Getty
Much of this antagonism has been fueled by the divisive hangover from the unsuccessful voice referendum. During that debate, Marcia Langton said that if the no vote prevailed it might be difficult for Indigenous elders to accept invitations to provide welcomes to country.
This understandably emotional reflection has been twisted into a promise to abandon the ceremonies if the referendum failed and thrown back at Professor Langton and Indigenous Australians ever since, with demands for the promise to be honoured. As a voice advocate, I was at pains to point out there were rational and reasonable reasons to oppose the referendum, but it was clear then and is perhaps even more obvious now that a sizeable minority voted no because they did not want to hear from their Indigenous compatriots again.
“Controversial Welcome to Country at AFL semi-final sparks bitter backlash,” screamed the Daily Mail this week after Brendan Kerin performed the ceremony at the GWS Giants versus Brisbane Lions match at Homebush. The story quoted social media posts saying: “What a disgrace, referring to BC as Before Cook and then lecturing everyone” and “Woke Joke. Australia has fallen.”
Others pointed out, in a chippy display, that there would be no AFL if Captain Cook had not voyaged to Australia. Our nation’s history is not a zero-sum equation.
The attacks were expanded and amplified on talkback radio and by some of my colleagues on Sky News. In my view, Kerin’s speech was brilliantly welcoming and informative, and genuinely aimed at explaining why these ceremonies are not about welcoming people to Australia.
Kerin said the ceremony had existed for 250,000 years BC, which he explained as “Before Cook” drawing laughs from the crowd. Sure, the figure he used was ridiculous (homo sapiens are only known to have existed for 200,000 years) but let us call that poetic license – his point was that welcome to country ceremonies existed in ancient Indigenous cultures as a way for members of one tribe or language group to gain permission to traverse or visit the country of another group.
“Within Australia we have many Aboriginal lands, and we refer to our lands as ‘country’,” Kerin said. “So it’s always a welcome to the lands you’ve gathered on – a welcome to country is not a ceremony we’ve invented to cater for white people.”
That was a terrific and generous explainer. Country does not mean a sovereign nation but the lands of that people – just as Indigenous people routinely talk about going back to their traditional family regions as being “on country”.
Dancers perform during the welcome to country before the friendly between AC Milan and AS Roma in Perth in May. Getty
Major sporting events are occasions when these ceremonies are most appropriate; the crowd was about to enjoy a terrific game of a sport Indigenous Australians love, claim some role in creating, and excel at. And Kerin was there to welcome people, not to their nation, but to that particular region, letting them know about the cultural history of that place, and inviting them to have a wonderful night. It astounds me that anyone could find this anything but uplifting, adding to the richness of the experience.
Sometimes welcomes to country are overdone and inappropriate. I have been to events where they open proceedings with a local Indigenous representative doing an official welcome to country, but then every speaker feels the need to share their own version of recognition, as if they have to tick it off for fear of being seen to boycott the gesture.
Even online meetings can labour under the same endless virtue-signalling. This sort of stuff is over the top and unnecessary, and in the end, it must be counterproductive because it generates eye-rolling or open resistance.
There are also instances where welcomes to country can be too political and aggressive. Telling us that sovereignty was never ceded, or demanding that we defer to a particular culture, is not welcoming. Especially at sporting, artistic or entertainment events, any sort of political lecturing is an unwelcome imposition – it is not the reason people have turned up.
Ancient tribal practices about visiting other tribal lands were very different and varied across the continent, so it is true that the modern welcome to country model has only been around for about 40 years. This does not delegitimise it; rather it correctly identifies it as a modern cultural evolution to help bring Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians together.
More to the point, if people try to invest some legal weight to the custom – with references to “nationhood” and “sovereignty” – they will kill it off. I too object to the “first nations” terminology which has been imported from the US and is heavily politicised.
Welcomes to country work best and will survive best if we keep politics and legality right out of it. At heart, it is simply about people sharing their histories and offering a hand of friendship.
Just like toasts at birthday parties or speeches at weddings, these things are sometimes over-cooked or strike the wrong chord. Other times they just seem completely inappropriate and out of place – last year I heard a recorded welcome to country on a bus from Melbourne’s Spencer Street station to Tullamarine.
But conducted properly at the right events, this practice enriches all of us and furthers reconciliation. As I travel around Australia I find it fascinating to know which Aboriginal group covers which territory, and it is terrific that children learn this at school.
That does not mean that we need to change the names of our cities or places, and it does not mean that schools should send kids on a guilt trip. However, it does mean we can have a richer sense of our history, one that stretches at least 40,000 years BC.
When I have travelled in Ireland, for instance, I have wanted to know which county I am in and learn a little about its unique history, likewise the states of the US. And in America I have wanted to know a little about the indigenous groups, the Sioux or Lakota, Cherokee, Cheyenne and Navajo, their similarities, differences, battles, and their impact on contemporary events.
Why would we not want to know about all this in our own cities and states, in our own country? Sure, there are Indigenous activists who run extreme agendas, just as there are racist extremists who have abhorrent attitudes towards Indigenous people, but surely the overwhelming majority of us want to know each other, help each other, and respect each other.
It is that simple. Welcomes to country are a mark of mutual respect, and a touchstone for deeper understanding. I am hopeful and confident they will be part of our national culture for centuries to come
You offspring of serpents who warned you of the wrath to come. Matthew 3:7
There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind. Prelude to the film of Gone with The Wind (1939)
… by the time you can no longer avoid thinking about your history, it has become so complex and confusing that you can no longer think about it clearly, and your morality is what is gone with the wind.
Sarah Churchwell, The Wrath to Come (2023)
American cultural historian Sarah Churchwell’s book The Wrath to Come – Gone With the Wind and the Myth of the Lost Cause or its alternative title, the Lies America Tells (tells itself” is more accurate) is a harrowing read about slavery, America’s original sin; about the civil war fought to end it; the brief Reconstruction years that followed; the lingering stain of white supremacism and racial violence; and of how discriminatory and oppressive Jim Crow laws of the late nineteenth century survived well into the twentieth with lynch law, segregation, vote suppression and the civil rights struggles of the sixties.
The Wrath to Come is also about how historiography – how historians analyze and interpret history, and how “we, the people” recall and retell history.
She quotes author and civil rights advocate James Baldwin’s essay The White Man’s Guilt:
“White man, Hear me! History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all we do”.
Churchwell notes how in 1935, Black writer WEB Du Bois warned “against writing history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego”, or “using a version of historic fact, in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish”. Such propaganda history is merely “lies agreed upon”, and had enabled a toxic mixture of libel, innuendo and silence to poison the well of American historiography”.
The Wrath to Come is also very much about today. Running right through the narrative are the currents and crises that culminated in the great American unraveling that led to the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 – and as we know well, are yet to be fully played out in November 2024, and, as is most likely, beyond it. January 6th was, in her opinion the actualization of what Baldwin called “the wrath to come”, the moral derangement – spinning the nation off its axis. “Beyond the bars of our foolish little cages”, she writes, “a reckoning looms, at a scale we can’t assimilate”.
As an article in the New Yorker wrote recently, the pertinent issue now is not what caused the Civil War but what we should have learned from it. “January 6, 2021, is not an equivalent date in our history to April 12, 1861, but the radical Republican leaders who lived through the Civil War understood a principle that has been lost on their successors: that, if entrusted with power, leaders who commit assaults on the national government once may well attempt to do so again”. Many commentators remind Americans of the time when Benjamin Franklin, one of the original framers of the US Constitution, was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when someone shouted out, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin supposedly responded, with a rejoinder at once witty and ominous: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
“The past is not a prediction” Churchwell writes, “but it is a precedent, creating the possibilities for what the future will tolerate. The American future would, it turns out, tolerate a great deal”.
Gone with the myth
Gone with the Wind shows what white America has believed – and wanted to believe – about its own history; it’ curates and cultivates America’s great white myths about itself.
Churchwell anchors her history around one of the most well known and loved stories of the twentieth centuries – the novel and the film of Atlanta author Margaret Mitchell’s epical Gone With the Wind. But while she may be deconstructing the iconic motion picture, it is very evident that the real target of her thesis is number forty-seven, whom she sees as America’s chaos personified. Whilst describing the brief and ineffective Reconstruction years that followed the American Civil War, with its “scallywags and carpetbaggers”, she gaslights “the greatest grifter the Republic has ever seen”. Like slavers, abortion and Vietnam, Trump is an issue that divides Americans, splitting families, straining the mystic chords of memory.
Within six months of its release in June 1936, Mitchell’s tale of tangled love set against the northern invasion and fall of the Old South, sold one million copies, making it the biggest-selling American novel to that date. It won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and has sold more than 30 million copies internationally.
The 1939 film adaptation starring Vivien Leigh as willful anti-heroine Scarlett O’Hara and Clark Gable as her rakish third husband Rhett Butler, won eight Academy Awards, including best picture, best actress for Leigh and best supporting actress for African-American actress Hattie McDaniel. McDaniel portrayed Scarlett’s outspoken chief house slave, Mammy, and made film history as the first black woman to take home an Oscar (although she was colour-barred from attending the Atlanta world premier).
Churchwell mounts an excoriating critique of the novel-turned-film for its denialism of the horrors of slavery and “shameless” historical distortions about the civil war and its aftermath. Such denialism, she contends, continues to divide America today.
Churchwell’s book adds a contemporary, political twist to such criticism: she argues America’s “most famous epic romance … provides a kind of skeleton key, unlocking America’s illusions about itself” and she links its sanitized treatment of slavery and promotion of white nationalism to Trumpism and the January 6, 2021, attack on Washington’s Capitol.
“When we understand the dark truths of American experience that have been veiled by one of the nation’s favourite fantasies, we can see how the country travelled from the start of the Civil War in 1861 to parading the flag of the side that lost that war (the Confederate flag) through the US Capitol in 2021.’’
Gone with the Wind advances a misleading version of American history known as the Lost Cause. This is the notion that “the Confederacy fought the Civil War (1861–65) as a principled defense of a noble civilization (the Old South) and its democratic rights, rather than as an unprincipled defense of the white supremacist system of chattel slavery … The specific rights in question were individual states’ rights to keep and trade enslaved people, but the Lost Cause skipped that part.’’
Extending this mythology, the film’s opening title cards briefly mention slavery but also refer to the Old South – which was home to four million slaves – as “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton fields,” and a “pretty world where Gallantry took its last bow.”
Similarly, she writes that Gone with the Wind “marks a cultural breakdown, the point where mythology triumphed over history’’. Therefore, “urging the erasure of Gone with the Wind would simply reinforce that … “
“… when a nation’s myths, no longer make sense of its reality, violence erupts. That is one of the many things that has happened to America. Mythmaking and misinformation have been spinning wildly through American political discourse, so they can be hard to catcher as they float, disembodied across our conversations … Like a carnival magician, myth-making points at something with its right hand while picking our pockets, with its left stop. If we stop looking where it’s pointing, we might just manage to protect our valuables – in this case a republic, if we can keep it … It turns out that the heart of the myth, as well as its mind, and its nervous system, most of its arguments and beliefs, it’s loves and hates, it’s lies and confusions and defense mechanisms, and wish fulfilments, are all captured) for the most part in inadvertently) in America’s most famous epic romance: Gone with the Wind.
… and when a country, become so lost in dreams, that it can no longer see reality, it loses its moral sanity … This book follows American history back down into the myth, to excavate what’s been buried – not just the fact that historians have carefully been long, bringing to light … but also suppressed psycho political realities. The lies, the distortions, justifications, the half-truths, the rampant projections, the cognitive dissonances, the negations, the flat denials all the stinging truths Americans don’t want to admit about ourselves that Gone with the Wind caught like flypaper …
It has often been said that America had to imagine itself to existence. Less often remarked is the corollary, that America is, in a very real sense, mainly a story the nation tells itself. That makes the US singularly subject to the meanings of stories and myths – all nations tell stories about themselves, but America has little to hold it together beyond those stories (which is one of the reasons it fetishes its founding documents). If Gone with the Wind is one of the most popular stories America has ever told about itself, then it matters that it is a profoundly antidemocratic, and a moral horror Show … judgment has been remarkably absent from the stories we tell about ourselves.
While Churchwell hopes that Donald Trump loses the November election, she is hardly optimistic about the republic’s future. She sees the events of the last eight years, and indeed those preceding as “portents of a much deeper dislocation in American society. For over two decades now, Americans have been battered by non-stop crises at home and abroad – from the long War on Terror to Covid and the George Floyd protests – leading to what feels like national exhaustion and a deep pessimism about the future of democracy”.
The old revolution and The Lost Cause
Gone with the Wind took a series of historical forces, and made them seem only natural
Maybe we were on the losing side. Not quite sure it was the wrong one.
Captain Mal Reynolds, Firefly (episode 3)
From the beginning of Donald Trump‘s campaign to the turbulent end of his presidency, debates raged about whether his supporters were motivated by economic anxiety or racial animus. But in America the two are intertwined in a system of racial capitalism.
Gone with the Wind doesn’t just romanticize that system – it eroticizes it. The Lost Cause provided a genesis for modern America’s racialized economics and paramilitary white nationalism, in which racial segregation was the supposedly logical outcome of a fight over states’ rights. But the most vicious fights over these supposedly principled stances on states’ rights have always consistently been over racial power. In fact, states’ rights are almost never invoked in a context that is distinct from race. States’ rights created a fig leaf, an alibi from which white America benefits so deeply that the denials continue to this day.
Slavery was America’s Original Sin, a stain running through its technicolor grain. Over the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million men, women, and children were taken in captivity from Africa; 10.7 million were taken aboard ship to the New World and placed in bondage in the Americas – possibly the costliest in human life of all long-distance global migrations. Four hundred years of slavery ended in civil war and a wasteland.
America’s road to the Civil War took decades. It is beyond the scope of this article. but within a month of Lincoln’s victory in the presidential election of 1861, South Carolina took the fatal step, followed over the next few months by the secession of most of the Lower South. A month after his inauguration, the Civil War erupted with the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour. As Churchwell recounts it, “…. once a people decides that it cannot live together or when a citizenry divides into clearly opposed blocs, it is impossible to predict just how conflict may erupt. But to say that it cannot happen is to ignore history. Even Lincoln downplayed the threat of southern secession during the 1860 campaign, not believing until it was too late that the South ever would take such a final step”.
The American Civil War claimed more than seven hundred thousand American lives, tore a young nation apart, and its echoes reverberate still one hundred and sixty years later, reflecting unresolved political fault lines that go back two centuries. years. Though the war ended slavery, there was still another hundred years of toiling towards true freedom. As Martin Luther King said, “Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what were gonna be, but thank God, we ain’t where we was”.
“The white South grabbed the moral high ground and clung on for dear life – while the white North met it more than halfway. By the turn of the century the south was winning the war of ideas, its big lie accepted across the United States”.
It used to be said that the South would rise again. It did, and indeed, some reckon, the South finally won the war.
Dixie rising
Predictably, the ghosts of the American civil war have been haunting the ongoing presidential campaign and have forced their way back into popular consciousness.
Statues depicting figures from the war – and even of founding fathers or older presidents – and even the names of the schools, military bases and streets, have increasingly become a flashpoints for a real political and cultural struggle. A low-intensity war on the past is now being waged across many states, with the effect of hardening hearts and solidifying the battle lines being drawn in the sand.
In May 2024, it was reported that the Shenandoah County School Board in Virginia would restore the names of Confederate generals Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Turner Ashby to two local schools. The controversial reversal comes nearly four years after the names were changed.
“Residents speaking in favour of reverting to the Confederate names included Stuart Didawick, who noted that his family’s roots run deep in the community, where his ancestors received land grants in the decades before the American Revolution. “When you vote on the name restorations”, he asked board members, “will you listen to the opinions of woke outsiders who have for the most part no ties to the land, the history, or the culture of this county? Or will you listen to the voices of the people who elected you to represent them, the people whose families built and have sustained this county for generations?” To which a student and athlete responded: “I would have to represent a man that fought for my ancestors to be slaves,” adding that she would feel as if she’s being disrespectful both to her ancestors and her family’s values.
Another pervasive ghost of the Civil War, the battle flag of Dixie, has never gone away. It was long a favoured accessory above government buildings and at right wing rallies in The South, those former secessionists states that lay south of the Mason-Dixon Line. It played a cameo role in popular culture, flying in The Dukes of Hazzard, True Blood, and even The Walking Dead. The right to flaunt “the Stars and Bars”, an enduring symbol of the lost Confederate cause, and a rallying point for those who still believe the rebel cause to be just, those who take solace from an heroic defeat, and those who believed that “the South will rise again”, and indeed those who KNOW that the South has indeed risen again. For have not the white, right wing, God fearing, Clinton-baiting, and Obama-hating ‘Red’ states of the South conquered and colonized the American political system?
Failed Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley was governor of South Carolina, the first state to secede in 1861, in 2015, when in 2015, Dylann Roof, a young white supremacist who had draped himself in the Confederate flag, massacred nine African American parishioners at a Black church in Charleston, the state capital. Haley called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the State House, where it had been hoisted in the early 1960s as a rebuke to the civil rights movement. When the flag came down, a ceremony that felt like the final surrender of the Civil War, little did we know that what we were actually witnessing that summer was the beginning of the white nationalist counter-offensive headed by Trump. In a strange quirk of history, he launched his presidential bid the very day before the Charleston massacre.
During the run up to the Republican primaries, POTUS aspirant and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis defended part of his state’s African American history curriculum standards that claimed some enslaved people developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit.” Flag-remover Nikki Haley omitted any mention of slavery when she was asked to explain the cause of the Civil War at a town hall event. It wasn’t until the next day that Haley acknowledged the war was “about slavery”. Both now failed candidates reflected unresolved political fault lines that go back nearly 200 years.
In !955, Ella Fitzgerald was jailed for singing to an integrated audience in Texas
Author’s note
Last year, my favorite podcast The Rest is Historybroadcast a long but informative interview with Churchwell herself. The link is below. I also republish a review of the book and its content that first appeared in The Australian in April 2023, and the unique story an escaped slave who found his way to Australia and lived to tell his tale in print – an 18,000-word essay about slavery, titled The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots.
Such was my enthusiasm for Churchwell’s book, I transcribed many of what I considered to be memorable and cogent quotes. They are categorized and listed immediately after the following videos.
Like my father before me I will work the land And like my brother above me Who took a rebel stand He was just 18, proud and brave But a Yankee laid him in his grave I swear by the mud below my feet You can’t raise a Kane back up When he’s in defeat
Robbie Robertson, The Band
Churchwell quotes …
The Dixie Dreamtime
The story is cloaked in self-delusion far worse than Scarlet’s, and the film – which recognizes the novel’s flaws more clearly perpetuated these solutions out of commercial interests. This modern myth affirmed all the nation’s favorite illusions about itself, up to and including its faith in its own innocence – and then sold that bill of goods to all and sundry, making a fortune in the process. Scarlett’s blinkers are typical too – the willful ignorance in which American popular memory likes to trade. What she couldn’t or wouldn’t see is the subject of the rest of this book …
… the savage viciousness of Jim Crow produced the consoling legend of a noble land of Cavaliers, and ladies, who presided over loyal servants, with gentle benevolence, which would become America’s favourite story for decades to come. Listen closely to what a culture keeps telling itself, and you’ll know not only what’s on its mind, but what it needs to hear. Gone with the Wind told Americans that they could survive anything, especially if ignored it … the denialism of American culture (is) its refusal to face facts, to recognize that what it tells itself simply isn’t true …
Even as white Americans were sharply censoring the rise of Fascism in Europe, traveling to Spain to volunteer against Franco’s army, they were also longing for the good old days when the United States have enslaved millions of non-white Americans …
Good stock
Slavery was abolished by the war, but white supremacism was not. The problem was that white Americans could abhor slavery, and fight a war to end it, and also abhor Black people. They could believe that slavery was a moral abomination, and also believe in eugenicist racial science that claimed non-white people were biologically inferior to white people, and that racism was the natural order of things, even if slavery was not …
Gone with the Wind appeared a mere decade after the Scopes Monkey Trial took Darwinism to court to try to deny that humans will be related to apes. The immense anxiety sparked by this idea was bound up in older racist tropes which held the Black people were apes and white people were human. Proof that white people were also descended from apes challenged the racial hierarchy …
Once white people were forced to concede that they might’ve come out of jungles two, scientific gracious, and sort through that they had emerged much earlier, and how much farther and Black people
Playing along with lesser folks, taking from them what you can, and then, kicking them to the curb, is also the secret of social Darwinism, which is inextricable from the novels racism. Both preach survival of the fittest, defining fitness through biological determinism, as heritable traits that mean survivalism is a question of innate character rather than environmental good fortune These ideas are fundamentally eugenicist, claiming not only that some humans “stock” is biologically superior to others, but that such groups come racially and ethnically presorted. Presumptions of lesser and greater beings, the right of merit to rule, was at the heart of the argument: an aristocratic entitlement to title that claimed privilege was founded on inherited superiority, rather than brute force or the dumb luck of circumstance … the notion of “good stock” and “breeding” that underpinned scientific racism …
In the wake of first first world war and the Russian revolution, the “red scare” enabled the second Klan to maintained its white supremacism but expanded its list of enemies to include most foreigners, especially Catholics, Jews, eastern and southern Europeans, as well as communist, socialist and labor organizations, all of whom it generally equated. This broad, stroke nativism was strongly eugenicist, promising to protect the “pure stock” of white American Protestantism from the racial “pollution” of mixing with inferior breeds …
Heirs to the white supremacist cause, the replacement theorists, Tucker Carlson, Kyle Rittenhouse. Fox host Tucker Carlson professed to be “shocked” that “seventeen year olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would”. This is precisely the alibi that was always offered for white supremacist violence, straight out of Gone with the Wind and the newspaper lynching reports that that accompanied it. Scapegoating makes violence redemptive, as savagery is projected onto its victims, who deserve what they’re getting. The Klan was a group shaped around projection and scapegoating. Apologists of white supremacist from Thomas Dixon and Margaret Mitchell to Tucker, Carlson and Ann Coulter to the hyper partisan mob that stormed the Capitol all insisted that they were defending “extralegal justice”, as if extralegal were not just another word for illegal …
History is endlessly revised, even when it’s been chiseled in stone. Newly discovered facts can improve our understanding of the past, and sometimes people even ask new questions about the same old facts.
… Black Americans are left arguing that they are the ones owed by a nation which is yet to redeem the promises it made to the makes to them. That is the entire import of Dr. King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech, a metaphor of redemption that he makes explicit, and explicitly economic: “we’ve come to our national capital to cash a check”, King said, on the “promissory note” signed by the architects of our republic, a promise of “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. But America has “defaulted on this promissory note” King charged. “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds” .
… the seed of white grievance, a nostalgic, resentment that perceives only loss of individual power, refusing to consider the question of collective equality. Grievance is the politics of narcissism, the refusal to shift your ground, nursing your grudges, building spite into politics, while telling your enemies to move on in the interest of unity, a unity in which you do not believe, and which you have no intention of compromising.
Women’s rights and suffrage
Mitchell was outraged that Blacks could vote and women could not … Real estate was also entangled with women’s rights, as women gradually bou property and paid tax, but still could not vote. Her mother argued the women’s suffrage, and is very terms woman paid taxes, but we’re not allowed to vote drunken bums on the sidewalk because they were men that they haven’t paid a dime when titled to vote, and we are not …
White wealth through property ownership is what Gone with the Wind wants to exult – while trying, less than successfully, to ignore the role of slavery and it’s aftermath in the creation of that wealth.
Gone with the Wind Shows how the mythology of American success stories, including those of immigrants, were also inculpated in the bloody history of institutionalized slavery. The triumphalism of the end of the immigrant success story has worked to school the question of complicity, the suppose and dog in this town, making good does so at the expense, And More, senses of one, of an entire Other, racially marked, underclass.
Fascism and the kloning of the Klan
My summary: Fascism as represented by the KKK and the plethora of “clothes line” political groups distinguished by a colourful array of shirts was characterized by an American nativism, xenophobic, and white supremacist, conspiratorially anti-Semitic and anti-communist paramilitary groups, leveraging existing bigotries on behalf of state violence, consolidating power for one small group, while dehumanizing, persecuting, and annihilating – the eugenicist exultation of certain “bloodlines” of over others, white grievance displaced onto racialized enemies within.
Fascism as represented by the KKK and the plethora of “clothes line” political groups distinguished by a colourful array of shirts was characterized by an American nativism, xenophobic, and white supremacist, conspiratorially anti-Semitic and anti-communist paramilitary groups, leveraging existing bigotries on behalf of state violence, consolidating power for one small group, while dehumanizing, persecuting, and annihilating – the eugenicist exultation of certain “bloodlines” of over others, white grievance displaced onto racialized enemies within.
The affinities between the second Klan and European fascism had only grown clearer since they are simultaneous start in the early 20s, with their shared cults of paramilitary violence, legal apartheids, eugenicist, ideologies, and paranoid cultures … a mast native about the sacredness of the course, the purity of the nation, and the exultation of violence to defend against the enemy within.
… there is a strong case for the fascism of the Klan with its paramilitary violence, it’s extra-legal assertions of power, it’s uniforms and rituals, it’s love of esoterica, its nostalgic racial fantasies, its conspiracy theories, and its existential rejection of the legitimacy of any government that opposes it, as historians of fascism pointed out … It was ennobled by myths of national purity, performed by masculinist cults of the leader, and sold as the will of the people.
Robert O Paxton, in the five stages of fascism, characterized it as a politics, “marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass based party of committed nationalist militants, working in un easy, but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues, with redemptive violence, and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion“.
The Black and brown shirts of European fascism were met by America’s own clothesline politics, all declaring sympathy with European fascism and espousing the rights of the white Christian American herrenvolk to dominate their nation too. The American right wing “haberdashery brigade” includes silver shirts, white shirts, dress shirts, and gray shirts. They were joined by the black Legion, the order of ‘76 and as well as Cristo-fascist groups, including defenders of the Christian faith and the Christian Front, whose members called themselves the brown shirts. The Friends of the Hitler movement, the official Nazi Association in America, was established in 1933, eventually becoming the German American Bund.
Denialism it had nothing to do with European Fascism ….
Racial bigotry in America, the times insisted, was just unthinking in the good, old, thickheaded, prejudiced, irrational human fashion. Whether unthinking racism is preferable to thinking racism is probably immaterial to its victims, as if lynching would be less objectionable if it weren’t defended on the grounds of rationality … i.e. white supremacism was just good old thickheaded American prejudice.
If Gone with the Wind is broadly fascistic in its outlook, the lost cause is even more so, in its glorification of the confederate causus belli, the cults of its leaders of its dead, its propaganda, it’s wars for territorial expansion, and the insistence on the sacred rebirth of the nation in the ashes reconstruction, the new order founded on the ongoing defiance of the federalist government of the United States, and a fundamental rejection of pluralist democracy.
A collection of material at Ferris State’s Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2004. Jim Prichard/AP
The Grapes of Wrath
Eight months before the film premiered in Atlanta, John Steinbeck published the grapes of broth, which would become the most popular novel of 1939. Widely hailed as a testament to human endurance, the novel took its title from the battle hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe’s mighty Civil War anthem …Howe’s Bible steeped language comes from the book of revelation, in invoking divine Justice, when God’s truth will force the wine of freedom from the grapes of wrath. It is an image of anger, accumulated, even cultivated, long march of times.
What defined fascist propaganda was never its lies, wrote Hannah Arendt in 1945, for all propaganda is based on lies. What distinguishes fascist lies is that they are intended to negate reality, making “that true, which, until then could only be stated as a lie”. Fascists don’t lie to deceive; they lie to change reality. Lies about the Lost Cause did just that, using fiction to displace reality until the fiction has become a reality. Soon that fiction spread beyond the cult of true believers, normalizing itself in the body, politic for the best part of the century, a cancer legitimating unreason that metastasized long ago Mythology replaced history as the arbiter of American truth.
Line is not only the Hitlerian big lie of propaganda, but a culture of perversive, lying, what a Arendt called “lying as a way of life” and “lying on principle”. It is a systematic dishonesty that destroys the collective space of historical-factual reality.
The Birth of a Nation
In February 1915, upon viewing The Birth of a Nation at a special White House screening, President Woodrow Wilson reportedly remarked, “It’s like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true. This line has appeared in numerous books and articles over the past seventy years. But it was appended twenty years after the event to add a spurious authority- from a former president no less – to the mythical account of reconstruction told in the birth of a nation that gone with the wind recycled, creating a very efficient closed circle of mythmaking.
The Birth of a Nation, by all accounts the first American blockbuster, the first historical epic, the first Hollywood film to resemble what movies are like today, premiered in Los Angeles exactly 100 years ago on Sunday. But the centennial won’t be celebratory. It will likely be awkward, sobering even — because in director D.W. Griffith’s 12-reel Civil War saga, the Ku Klux Klan members are the glorious heroes.
Since its premiere on Feb. 8, 1915, the film has been at once wildly popular and widely condemned. It inspired the revival of the KKK but also galvanized what was then a nascent NAACP into action. It helped define what cinema means for American audiences. It was the first film ever shown inside the White House.
After 100 years, it has left a complicated, powerful legacy, but a legacy of what, exactly?
“Excuses are sometimes made by scholars of film for the content, but I don’t think that for the last ten to 15 years there has been any doubt that this is an unequivocally, viciously racist film,” says Paul McEwan, Associate Professor of Media and Communications at Muhlenberg College. McEwan has been studying and writing about the history of Birth of a Nation for 12 years. “I mean, this film makes Gone With the Wind look very progressive.”
Griffith claimed to be filming history, but Birth of a Nation, based on the novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, features a stunning revision of Reconstruction. White actors in blackface portray members of a barbaric, sex-crazed militia of freedmen that terrorizes and disenfranchises cowering whites. Black men overtake South Carolina’s judicial system and legislature, swigging whiskey and eating fried chicken on the floor of the State House. After the blackface character Gus attempts to rape a white woman, the protagonists don their hoods and apprehend him, lynching him after their version of a fair trial. The film is ostensibly about white national reconciliation at the expense of emancipated black Americans. A title card punctuates the action toward the end of the silent film to declare, “The former enemies of North and South are united again in defense of their Aryan birthright.” Despite its objectionable content, the film remains an essential part of the discussion about American cinema because of Griffith’s pioneering technical innovations. Things that today are completely taken for granted — like close-ups, fade-outs and even varying camera angles — originated with The Birth of a Nation‘s director and crew.
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks And the hoofbeats pound in his brain And he’s taught how to walk in a pack Shoot in the back With his fist in a clinch To hang and to lynch To hide ‘neath the hood To kill with no pain Like a dog on a chain He ain’t got no name But it ain’t him to blame He’s only a pawn in their game
Bob Dylan
In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel To show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level And that the strings in the books ain’t pulled and persuaded And that even the nobles get properly handled Once that the cops have chased after and caught ’em And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom Stared at the person who killed for no reason Who just happened to be feelin’ that way without warnin’ And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished And handed out strongly for penalty and repentance William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence
Bob Dylan, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
In !955, Ella Fitzgerald was jailed for singing to an integrated audience in Houston, Texas
Goosestepping back to political relevance
Artist Barry Blitt’s “Back to the Future.” In another year of political chaos, he “looks forward to depicting the pageantry, solemnity, and awe of the upcoming Presidential election”.
A slave writes to a Sydney paper
I’m trying to imagine what it might have been like to be the editor of a little Sydney newspaper called The Empire in the 1850s when a “fugitive slave” – owned from birth by the invalid daughter of an innkeeper in North Carolina – walked through the door, asking for a copy of the US Constitution.
He wanted to write about the slavery endured by whole branches of his family, and he needed the Constitution for reference.
It seems that this actually happened in Sydney in 1855. The New York Times had a story about it on the weekend. And you’re not going to believe how that story ends.
The slave in question was John Swanson Jacobs, described by the editors of The Empire (they are sadly not named) as “a man of colour, with bright intelligent eyes, a gentle firm voice, and a style of speech decidedly American.”
Jacobs had escaped bondage and made his way to Australia where he was desperate to find somebody willing to tell the story of slavery. By chance, the editors had “the last edition of the United States’ Constitution authorised by Congress” in their offices, and they agreed to lend it to Jacobs, who returned it after a fortnight, with an 18,000 word essay about slavery, titled The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots.
The editors of The Empire agreed to publish it, and “scarcely altered a word”.
A first-hand account of slavery by an escaped slave has been found in an Australian newspaper archive.
“The writer is in Sydney; we understand he has been among the successful gold-diggers,” they said. “We shall be much mistaken if his narrative is not read with a lively interest.”
More than 160 years later, you are being offered the opportunity to read that essay, because it has rather amazingly been re-discovered, and published in book form, and oh, it’s so harrowing.
It begins: “I was born in Edenton, North Carolina, one of the oldest States in the Union, and had five different owners in 18 years.
“My first owner was Miss Penelope Hannablue, the invalid daughter of an innkeeper. After her death I became the property of her mother.”
He describes the slavery endured by his father: “To be a man, and not to be. A father without authority – a husband and no protector … Such is the condition of every slave throughout the United States; he owns nothing – he can claim nothing. His wife is not his – his children are not his; they can be taken from him, and sold at any minute, as far as the fleshmonger may see fit to carry them.
“Slaves are recognised as property by the law and can own nothing except at the consent of their masters.
“A slave’s wife or daughter may be insulted before his eyes with impunity; he himself may be called on to torture them, and dare not refuse. To raise his hand in their defence, is death by the law. He must bear all things and resist nothing. If he leaves his master’s premises at any time without a written permit, he is liable to be flogged; yet they say we are happy and contented.”
He describes the death of Mrs Hannablue, and the sale of her slaves: “Here they are, old and young, male and female, married and single, to be sold to the highest bidder … They began to sell off the old slaves first, as rubbish; one very old man sold for one dollar; the old cook sold for 17 dollars; from that to 1,600 dollars, which was the price of a young man who was a carpenter.
“Dr Norcom, whose daughter owned my sister, bought me for a shop boy. It would be in vain for me to attempt to give a description of my feelings while standing under the auctioneer’s hammer.”
Jacobs escaped, and spent years on a whaling ship before landing in Australia. His essay was discovered just a few years ago, by an American literary scholar, Jonathan D.S. Schroeder, who came across it while digging through the Australian online newspaper database, Trove.
It is being published by the University of Chicago Press, who says accounts of slavery by the slaves themselves are exceedingly rare, and precious. They believe that Jacob was the brother of Harriet Jacobs, whose 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is revered in the US as one of the first, first-hand published accounts of slavery, and therefore a treasure, as this essay also so very clearly is. You may read the whole thing on Trove or buy the book here.
The 20th century’s most famous fictional lovers had ‘profoundly fascistic worldviews’, according to an author who has mounted an excoriating critique of the novel-turned-film for its denialism of the horrors of slavery.
Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind
American author Margaret Mitchell expected her first and only novel, Gone With The Wind, to sell about 5000 copies. Yet from the day it was published on June 30 1936, Mitchell’s 1037-page fable about the American Civil War and the pampered, manipulative daughter of a Georgia plantation owner, was not merely a bestseller: it evolved into an enduring – and polarising – cultural phenomenon.
Within six months of its release, Mitchell’s tale of tangled love set against the northern invasion and fall of the Old South, sold one million copies, making it the biggest-selling American novel to that date. It won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award and has sold more than 30 million copies internationally.
The 1939 film adaptation starring Vivien Leigh as willful anti-heroine Scarlett O’Hara and Clark Gable as her rakish third husband Rhett Butler, won eight Academy Awards, including best picture, best actress for Leigh and best supporting actress for African American actress Hattie McDaniel. McDaniel portrayed Scarlett’s outspoken chief house slave, Mammy, and made film history as the first black woman to take home an Oscar.
The film’s melodramatic love story — Scarlett spends years pining for a man she cannot have — along with its elegant balls, burnt orange skies, hooped gowns and epic scenes of dead and injured Confederate troops, proved a hit with moviegoers around the world. When adjusted for inflation, Gone with the Wind, which tracks Scarlett’s journey through civil war, near-starvation, three marriages and the loss of her only child, remains the highest-grossing film of all time, ahead of Avatar and Titanic.
American author Sarah Churchwell recounts these milestones in her provocative book, The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells — and goes on to mount an excoriating critique of the novel-turned-film for its denialism of the horrors of slavery and “shameless” historical distortions about the civil war and its aftermath. Such denialism, she contends, continues to divide America today.
In fact, Churchwell — one of the headline speakers at next month’s Melbourne Writers Festival — argues that society belle-turned-wily survivor, Scarlett O’Hara, and gambler turned doting father, Rhett Butler, are “homicidal white supremacists with profoundly fascistic worldviews’’. Not the kind of academic who pulls her punches, she adds that Mitchell’s novel is “about enslavers busily pretending that slavery doesn’t matter — which is pretty much the story of American history’’.
The novel and film’s depiction of loyal, happy enslaved people — neither Scarlett’s family nor their wealthy plantation neighbours mistreat their slaves — has long been criticised. “Gone with the Wind does such violence to American history that it practically lynches it,’’ black journalist Ben Davis Jr wrote in 1940.
Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) being laced into a corset by Mammy (Hattie McDaniel)
Churchwell’s book adds a contemporary, political twist to such criticism: she argues America’s “most famous epic romance … provides a kind of skeleton key, unlocking America’s illusions about itself” and she links its sanitised treatment of slavery and promotion of white nationalism to Trumpism and the January 6, 2021 attack on Washington’s Capitol. Significantly, just months before this attack, Donald Trump invoked Gone with the Wind at a rally while complaining about the South Korean film, Parasite, winning the Best Picture Oscar. Trump said he wished America would “bring back” films like the 1939 classic: “Can we get, like, Gone with the Wind back please?’’
As an American who lives in London and writes about US culture and history, Churchwell is often asked, “What has happened to America?”, since the 2016 election of Trump as US president “dumbfounded most of the watching world’’. She writes: “When we understand the dark truths of American experience that have been veiled by one of the nation’s favourite fantasies (Gone With The Wind), we can see how the country travelled from the start of the Civil War in 1861 to parading the flag of the side that lost that war (the Confederate flag) through the US Capitol in 2021.’’
In a Zoom interview, Review asks Churchwell whether she has faced pushback over her claims Scarlett and Rhett are homicidal white supremacists. A professor of American Literature at the University of London, she grins and says: “People have noticed it.’’
She says the book hasn’t come out in the US yet – it will be published there in June – “so we’ll see what they think’’ of her revisionist history of this popular American classic.
With her curtain of long blonde hair, Churchwell cuts a glamorous figure as she delivers her rapid-fire answers, which, like her writing, are mercifully free of academic jargon. She says of her denunciation of Scarlett and Rhett: “It is a statement of fact because they both espouse white supremacism over and over and over again. So it’s not an interpretation. It is a simple description of the things that they do and the things that they say.’’
The Wrath to Come – which British critics have described as “extraordinary” and as prising opening “often jaw-dropping history’’ – documents how, when under pressure, Scarlett uses the n-word in the novel. This racial slur appears in Mitchell’s book more than 100 times but was removed from the film’s script after black cast members and activists lobbied the blockbuster’s powerful producer, David O. Selznick.
In Mitchell’s novel, during one wartime crisis, Scarlett threatens to sell a young, flighty slave, Prissy, “down the river’’ and also threatens her with: “You’ll never see your mother again or anybody you know’’. Later, when Scarlett and her Tara household are facing starvation following the siege of Atlanta, she again loses her temper with Prissy, uses the n-word against her for the first time and threatens to “wear this whip out on you’’.
During Reconstruction, Scarlett refers in disparaging terms to “damned n—-r lovers” and when she starts a timber mill business, she is troubled by “free nxxxxrs’” who won’t work for her (because ex-slaves now have the right to resign). All of these racial insults are omitted or softened in the film.
As for those homicidal claims, Scarlett shoots a white Yankee deserter who invades her family’s plantation house, in self-defence, takes his money and hides the body. In the novel, she is initially shocked at her violence, but Churchwell notes how she later mused she “could have … taken sweet pleasure in the feel of his warm blood on her bare feet’’. Rhett Butler, a self-interested gambler who eventually joins the Confederacy, admits in the book he killed a Yankee soldier in a bar-room argument, and murdered a black man because “he was uppity to a lady, and what else could a Southern gentleman do?’’
Then there is the racist language of Mitchell’s novel, which is “far more extreme”, says Churchwell, “than those who haven’t read it probably imagine’’. She argues: “Gone with the Wind never once refers to Black people as people or human beings – not a single time. They are only dehumanised and generic racial categories. Black people are either (various) animals, especially all sorts of apes; or they are savages, just out of the jungle; or they are ‘slaves’, ‘blacks’, ‘darkies’, ‘pickaninnies’, ‘negroes’, ‘mulattos’, or ‘nxxxxrs’.
“ … Tara’s field hands have ‘huge black paws’ and ‘caper with delight’ at encountering Scarlett, while freed slaves run wild ‘like monkeys or small children’ after emancipation, ‘as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do’.’’
The film uses the now-objectionable term “darkies” and as mentioned above, dropped the n-word. This toning down of the book’s racism “had the perverse outcome of reinforcing the Lost Cause myth that white Southerners treated Black people courteously,’’ Churchwell argues.
For the academic and author, the novel’s racial prejudice goes beyond its extensive use of offensive words: “It’s unreflective in its racism. It thinks there’s such a thing as a willing slave without stopping to think about the fact that those two words literally mean the opposite.’’ Although slavery ended because of the Civil War, she also contends that Gone with the Wind presents America’s post-war reconstruction and new era of rights for freed slaves as a tragedy – for Scarlett, and her slave-owning plantation class.
Churchwell, who has also written cultural histories of other American icons Marilyn Monroe and The Great Gatsby, says Gone with the Wind advances a misleading version of American history known as the Lost Cause. This is the notion that “the Confederacy fought the Civil War (1861–65) as a principled defence of a noble civilisation (the Old South) and its democratic rights, rather than as an unprincipled defence of the white supremacist system of chattel slavery … The specific rights in question were individual states’ rights to keep and trade enslaved people, but the Lost Cause skipped that part.’’
Extending this mythology, the film’s opening title cards briefly mention slavery but also refer to the Old South – which was home to four million slaves – as “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton fields,” and a “pretty world where Gallantry took its last bow.”
Churchwell, who has a PhD in English and American literature from Princeton University, is not the only cultural expert to question Gone with the Wind’s use of racist terms and extreme euphemism. This month, British journalists revealed that Pan Macmillan, publisher of Mitchell’s epic, had added a detailed trigger warning to the 2022 edition, pointing out the novel “includes problematic elements including the romanticisation of a shocking era in our history and the horrors of slavery’’.
In 2020, HBO Max temporarily pulled the film in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. It has since been restored to the streaming service with accompanying videos that denounce its racial representations and examine the film’s historical context.
The African-American rapper Queen Latifah has said the film should have been permanently banned by HBO Max. “Let Gone with the Wind be gone with the wind,’’ she said. Actress and TV host Whoopi Goldberg – the second black woman to win an acting Oscar after McDaniel – disagreed. She favoured educating viewers on the film’s context, adding: “If you start pulling every film, you’re going to have to pull … a very long list of films.’’
Churchwell’s inspiration for her book, which took her five years to write, were the American and UK statue wars. “I initially envisioned it as a much shorter, faster book,’’ she says. “ … At the same time, history kept galloping forward and Gone With the Wind kept coming into the news and Donald Trump kept pushing things forward. And so it was like it had more and more to say to our moment.’’
Sarah Churchwell
She does not advocate cancelling Gone with the Wind or destroying statues. She argues it is better to place key statues of controversial historical figures in museums, with accurate contextual information. Similarly, she writes that Gone with the Wind “marks a cultural breakdown, the point where mythology triumphed over history’’. Therefore, “urging the erasure of Gone with the Wind would simply reinforce that failure’’.
Mitchell disliked nostalgic characterisations of the Old South as a land of “magnolias and moonlight’’. She describes Rhett – the embodiment of masculine virility – as “dark of face, swarthy as a pirate”, and conceived of Scarlett as a not especially beautiful anti-heroine: she was perplexed when her self-centred protagonist became a national heroine. An ex-journalist from Atlanta, Mitchell saw the adoration of Scarlett as “bad for the mental and moral attitude of a nation” and once complained: “The mythical Old South has too strong a hold on their (the public’s) imaginations to be altered by the mere reading of a 1037-page book.’’
The Wrath to Come acknowledges all this but notes that while Mitchell condemns Scarlett’s failings such as her greed and lack of self-awareness, she doesn’t challenge her racism. “Her white supremacism isn’t part of what makes her not admirable for Mitchell,’’ Churchwell tells Review.
Mitchell maintained that her black characters, including Tara’s slaves Mammy, Pork and Big Sam – the latter saves Scarlett’s life when she is attacked – behaved in a more noble manner than their white mistress. “It’s true most of the black characters in the novel are admirable in the sense they’re not evil,’’ responds Churchwell. However, she says that after the Civil War, as slaves were freed, Mitchell’s text often falsely characterised them as “a danger to civilised society’’.
Published in 27 languages, the novel has often been praised as a powerful account of the effects of war on innocent civilians, especially women, and Scarlett has been seen as a proto-feminist — a selfish but determined young woman who endures the chaos of war and flouts the stifling gender conventions of her time by going into business for herself. Former Democrat first lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a fan of the book, writing that it made the lingering enmity of the south “easy to understand … even to those who haven’t understood it before”. As a result, she sympathised, she said, with southern women whose “bitterness persisted so long” against the “northern invaders”.
Churchwell writes scornfully of this: “Even a white liberal like Eleanor Roosevelt sympathised after reading the novel not with enslaved people but with the women fighting to keep them in chains. This is what it means to naturalise a value system.’’ In our interview, Churchwell says Roosevelt’s sympathetic take “was obviously very representative of the ways that Americans read the book at that time’’.
The university professor concedes Scarlett has some winning qualities: “Vivien Leigh’s portrayal of Scarlett is one of the things that makes the film quite indelible. I think it’s an incredible performance. And she takes this character who is unlikable in all kinds of ways — is kind of stupid — and makes her a lot more interesting, charming and sympathetic.’’
McDaniel’s parents had been enslaved and she famously retorted to critics of her devoted house-slave role that she had chosen between $7 a week to be a maid, or $700 a week to play a maid. Even so, on the night she made Oscars history, McDaniel was forced to sit apart from white cast members during the awards ceremony in Los Angeles. Says Churchwell: “A lot of people now have the idea of a Jim Crow segregation in the US as being something that only happened in the south, but …. a kind of an apartheid line ran all the way across the US.’’
What about the notion Mitchell was a product of the early 20th century era, and that adult readers of her saga would understand this? “It’s true up to a point,” replies Churchwell. She says Mitchell’s contemporaries, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, also reflected the casual racism of their era, but “considerably less viciously” than she did. Unlike Mitchell, who defended her right to use the n-word, “they both evolved”.
Although Leigh’s Scarlett and Gable’s Rhett were arguably 20th century film’s most recognisable lovers, Churchwell maintains that Gone with the Wind’s historical distortions are still “vastly underestimated.’’.
“The book has always been recognised as racist,’’ she says. “I certainly didn’t write the book to be like, ‘Hey, I’ve got a revelation, ‘Gone With the Wind is racist – we never knew’.
“But the more that you go into it, the more you realise that there are ways in which we still haven’t reckoned with some of the truths about their (Scarlett and Rhett’s) positions. And (this is) despite the fact that they are both homicidal white supremacists — they just are.’’
It has been said before and often, that Qatari owned Al Jazeera presents the non-Arabic speaking world with a markedly different narrative of the Gaza war to what it relays to its Arabic readers – it is the most popular news source in the Arab world, particularly among Palestinians.
Viewing or reading Al Jazeera English, you would think that Israel’s onslaught is directed entirely against the defenceless and helpless civilians of the unfortunate enclave. There are very rarely images of the militants who are engaged on a daily basis in fierce battles and deadly firefights with the IDF. Al Jazeera Arabic on the other hand, posts pictures and videos of the fighters, illustrating their courage, their resilience in the face of overwhelming odds, and their successes in the face of overwhelming military odds.
The title refers to the pogrom of October 7 in which Islamic militants slaughtered some 1,200 Israeli men, woman and children and kidnapped over 200. It was given the name Amaliyyat Tufān al Aqsa –Al Aqsa Flood, insofar as its purpose was to preempt a Jewish takeover of Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest Islamic shrine – notwithstanding the fact that nothing of the kind was happening. Israel’s angry response has been biblical in its brutality, with nine months of air and ground assault that has devastated the enclave of Gaza and, according to health officials killed more than 40,000 people (uncorroborated figures provided by the Hamas-run health authorities that include thousands of militants killed in the fighting, and persons who would have died under normal circumstances had war not broken out).
An earlier piece in In That Howling Infinite, Lebensraum Redux – Hamas’ promise of the hereafterrevealed the Hamas master plan for the destruction of the state of Israel and the dispersion and disposal of its Jewish inhabitants. Statements like this and the longstanding foundational Hamas Covenant, which also calls for the eradication of Israel do not generally attract mainstream and social media interest, even after October 7.
Few have actually read the 1988 Hamas Covenant or the revised charter that was issued in 2017. The neglect is nonetheless surprising considering the clear exposition of the Islamist, genocidal intent of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This accords with a view held by many knowledgeable and well-informed observers and commentators that the original intent of Operation Al Aqsa Flood was to race en-masse across the Negev to the Occupied Territories and spark a general Palestinian rising which would precipitate an invasion of Israel by its Arab neighbours – a repeat of the war of 1948 without its outcome, but rather, al Nakba in reverse.
We’ll probably never really know why this scenario was not followed through, and what may have been the outcome. Some may argue a 100km sprint across the open desert to the nearest Palestinian city, Hebron, was an impossible task. Others might surmise that the militants who descended on the borderland kibbutzim and the Nova Trance Festival to molest, maim and murder were distracted by the easy prey and the release of pent-up rage and brutal vengeance.
Al Aqsa Flood may have failed, with only the Black Shabbat and the destruction of Gaza to show for it, but without doubt, it ignited a wildfire that has reinvigorated the Palestinian cause in the eyes of the world and severely damaged Israel’s standing on the world stage. The Hamas maintains that the ongoing carnage is justified, with many senior officials, declare in the safety of their sanctuaries in Qatar and Beirut that they’d do it all over again … and again.
The Al Jazeera series is enlightening in several respects, particularly insofar as it does not recognise the events of October 7 for what they were; and whilst acknowledging that there is a battle raging in the enclave but eschewing any reference to the carnage it is causing among the Gazan population, it presents the moral and humanitarian disaster of the Gaza war as the beginning of an Islamic enlightenment:
“Outside the military battlefield, there was another battle raging alongside the flood, which is the battle of conflicting identities that the world witnessed with the flood, and the accompanying signs of a noticeable religious awakening among young people around the world, and the restoration of the centrality of the role of religion in Arab public affairs”.
By happenstance, I read this series not long after In That Howling Infinite published A Messiah is needed – so that he will not come, which discussed the phenomenon of messianism with particular reference to the connections between the conflict and catastrophe of the Gaza war on the one hand and an emerging messianism on the other among both religious and non-religious Jew. It noted:
The irony is that increasingly in the Jewish state, the existential crisis emanating from the catastrophe of October 7 and the encirclement of the tiny country by enemies determined to wipe it off the map, has arguably fostered a messianic fervour in Israel too.
We republish the foreword to the Al Jazeera series below in both English and Arabic.
Al-Aqsa Flood and Religiosity … A New Islamic Awakening?
“Outside the military battlefield, there was another battle raging alongside the flood, which is the battle of conflicting identities that the world witnessed with the flood, and the accompanying signs of a noticeable religious awakening among young people around the world, and the restoration of the centrality of the role of religion in Arab public affairs”.
What is the religious symbolism of the red cows that the Zionist settlers brought before the flood? Why did the spokesman for the Qassam Brigades denounce them in a speech? And what is the meaning of the concept of the nation in the speeches of the resistance leaders? Why did the Zionist Prime Minister invoke the story of the “Amalekites” from the Old Testament to justify the Israeli brutality in the Gaza Strip? And why do we only receive clips of resistance fighters accompanied by glorification and praise and mention of the virtue of martyrdom?
Many questions about religion and religiosity and their relationship to the flood have imposed themselves since the outbreak of the flood on October 7, 2023. From the first moments of the flood, and with the resistance members crossing the security fence of the Gaza Strip, the sounds of glorification and praise of the resistance fighters preceded the sounds of the Kalashnikovs. During the battle, the leaders of each team did not limit themselves to the military and strategic mention of the battle, but they loaded the battle itself with many religious symbols, which are no less present and important than the importance of the security, intelligence and military machine. Outside the military battlefield, there was another battle raging alongside the flood, which is the battle of conflicting identities that the world witnessed with the flood, and the accompanying signs of a noticeable religious awakening among young people around the world, and the restoration of the centrality of the role of religion in Arab public affairs.
All of this prompted us to ask the question: What is the position of religion and religiosity in the battle of the flood? This was the file titled “The Flood of Al-Aqsa and Religiosity… A New Islamic Awakening?!” which consisted of 7 articles.
The first article was an extensive article titled “From the Tortured of the Earth to the Beloved of God… How did Arab Youth Return to the Questions of Faith and Religiosity after the Events of October 7?” The work on the article took 8 months, during which we met with dozens of young people around the world between the ages of 20 and 40 to monitor the transformations of Arab youth after the flood, and the transformation of many of them from “indifference” to a state of sweeping religiosity, and sometimes even readiness to engage in the broad Islamic state, and support the Islamic resistance. All of this was monitored by the article, and their testimonies recorded the impact of the flood on them and its effect on the transformations they went through.
As for the second article, it was a conceptual article entitled “Cultural Wars and the War on Gaza… How did October 7 formulate the concept of the nation?” The article followed the conflict of identities that accompanied the flood, and how the speeches of the resistance spokesman restored the concept of “nation” and made it the heart of the battle of the flood, and how the Zionists and their allies tried to redraw the concept of the term “nation” in the past decades!
Then we delved into the third article into a forward-looking article entitled “The Flood, Prophecy, and the Hour… Welcome to the Exceptional Times!” to tell us how prophecy can have its effect on military reality? And how faith becomes a refuge for salvation for the resistance fighters when all roads are narrow, moments of foresight are absent, and work becomes based on the sites of destiny.
As for the fourth article, it was about the presence of the Zionist religious narrative on social media platforms, especially TikTok. The article “Religious Zionism on TikTok… This is how genocide was legitimized in Gaza” attempted to monitor the religious presence of Zionist figures and those influenced by them on TikTok, and how this presence helped justify the genocide with a clear conscience! The article placed this Zionist religious narrative in a comparative case with the role of Arab influencers and the religious narrative they carried during the war.
From TikTok to psychology, in the fifth article we went to reconsider Western psychology and the problem of Western standards on religion and religiosity in the article “What is faith? About Gaza and the Istisqa prayer in the summer”, which monitored the academic deficiency in Western standards of religiosity when trying to apply them to Muslim peoples. The article revealed that the case of “Gaza” remains a unique case that is difficult to frame within the material framework of the psychology of religiosity in its Western perspective.
Then we reinforced it with the sixth article, in which we returned to the impact of religion on the battlefield, which is the article “Psychology of Religiosity… The Infrastructure of Resistance in Gaza”, which attempted to draw the line between religious motivation and mental health in crises, and monitored the religious beliefs of the people of Gaza that created meaning from the womb of suffering, and concluded the article by talking about the uniqueness of Islam in drawing the path of salvation for its followers in the two cases of life or martyrdom.
Finally, we concluded with the seventh article, which tells the expansion of the circle of influence to the ends of the world by reviewing the story of an evangelical Christian Islam, and how the Gazan model of religiosity was transformed into a beacon of global guidance.
طوفان الأقصى والتدين … يقظة إسلامية جديدة؟!
مقدمة الملف ما الرمزية الدينية للبقرات الحُمر التي استجلبها المستوطنون الصهاينة قبيل الطوفان؟ ولمَ ندد بها المتحدث باسم كتائب القسام في خطاب له؟ وبأي مدلولٍ حضر مفهوم الأمة في خطابات قادة المقاومة؟ ولماذا استدعى رئيس الوزراء الصهيوني قصة “العماليق” من العهد القديم تبريرًا للوحشية الإسرائيلية على قطاع غزة؟ ولماذا لا تصلنا مقاطع مقاتلي المقاومة إلا مصحوبة بالتكبير والتهليل وذكر فضل الشهادة؟
أسئلة كثيرة حول الدين والتدين وعلاقتهما بالطوفان فرضت نفسها منذ اندلاع الطوفان في السابع من أكتوبر ٢٠٢٣. فمنذ اللحظات الأولى للطوفان، ومع عبور أفراد المقاومة السياج الأمني لغُلاف غزة كان أصوات التكبير والتهليل للمقاومين تسبق أصوات الكلاشنكوف. وفي أثناء المعركة لم يكتف قادة كل فريق بالذكر العسكري والإستراتيجي للمعركة، وإنما شحنوا المعركة ذاتها بكثير من الرمزيات الدينية، التي لا تقل في حضورها وأهميتها عن أهمية الآلة الأمنية والإستخباراتية والعسكرية. أما خارج ميدان المعركة العسكري، فكان ثمة معركة أخرى تدور رحاها إلى جوار الطوفان، وهي معركة الهويات المتصارعة التي شهدها العالم مع الطوفان، وما صاحب ذلك من بوادر استفاقة دينية ملحوظة في أوساط الشباب حول العالم، واستعادة محورية دور الدين في الشأن العام العربي.
كل ذلك دفعنا إلى طرح سؤال: ما هو موقع الدين والتدين في معركة الطوفان؟ فكان هذا الملف الذي حمل عنوان “طوفان الأقصى والتدين … يقظة إسلامية جديدة؟!” والذي تكون من 7 مواد.
كانت المادة الأولى مادة مستفيضة بعنوان “من معذبي الأرض إلى أحباب الله … كيف عاد الشباب العربي إلى سؤالي الإيمان والتديّن بعد أحداث السابع من أكتوبر” وقد استغرق العمل على المادة 8 أشهر، التقينا فيها بعشرات الشباب حول العالم من الفئة العمرية ما بين 20 إلى 40 لرصد تحولات الشباب العربي بعد الطوفان، وتحول كثير منهم من “اللامبالاة” إلى حالة التدين الجارف، بل وأحيانا التأهب للانخراط في الحالة الإسلامية الواسعة، ومناصرة المقاومة الإسلامية. كل ذلك رصدته المادة، وسجلت بشهاداتهم وقع الطوفان عليهم وأثره في التحولات التي خاضوها.
أما المادة الثانية كانت مادة مفاهيمية بعنوان “الحروب الثقافية والحرب على غزة.. كيف صاغ 7 أكتوبر مفهوم الأمة؟” تتبعت المادة صراع الهويات التي صاحب الطوفان، وكيف استعادات خطابات المتحدث باسم المقاومة مفهوم “الأمة” وجعلته في القلب من معركة الطوفان، وكيف حاول الصهاينة وحلفائهم إعادة رسم مفهوم مفردة “الأمة” في العقود الماضية!
ثم دلفنا في المادة الثالثة إلى مادة استشرافية بعنوان “الطوفان والنبوءة والساعة … مرحبًا بك في الأزمنة الاستثنائية!” لتخبرنا كيف يمكن للنبوءة أن يكون لها أثرها في الواقع العسكري؟ وكيف يصبح الإيمان ملاذ الخلاص للمقاومين عندما تضيق جميع الطرق، وتنعدم لحظات الاستشراف، ويصبح العمل على مواقع القدر.
أما المادة الرابعة فكانت عن حضور السردية الدينية الصهيونية على منصات التواصل الاجتماعي، وخاصة التيك توك. فكانت مادة “الصهيونية الدينية على “تيك توك”.. هكذا شُرّعت الإبادة في غزّة” حاولت هذه المادة رصد الحضور الديني للخامات الصهاينة والمتأثريين بهم على التيك توك، وكيف ساعد هذا الحضور على تبرير الإبادة بضمير مرتاح! ووضعت المادة هذه السردية الدينية الصهيونية ضمن حالة مقارنة مع دور المؤثريين العرب والسردية الدينية التي حملوها أثناء الحرب.
ومن التيك توك إلى علم النفس، فقد ذهبنا في المادة الخامسة إلى إعادة النظر في علم النفس الغربي وإشكالية المقايس الغربية حول الدين والتدين في مادة “ما الإيمان؟ عن غزة وصلاة الاستسقاء في الصيف” والتي رصدت النقص الأكاديمي في مقاييس التدين الغربية عند محاولة تطبيقها على الشعوب المسلمة. وكشفت المادة أن حالة “غزة” تظل حالة فريدة ومستعصية على التأطير ضمن الإطار المادي لعلم نفس التدين في منظوره الغربي.
وثم عززنا بالمادة السادسة التي عُدنا فيها إلى أثر الدين في أرض المعركة، وهي مادة “سيكولوجية التديّن.. البنية التحتيّة للمقاومة في غزة” والتي حاولت رسم الخط بين الدافع الديني والصحة النفسية في الأزمات، ورصدت المسلمات الدينية لأهل غزة والتي خَلّقَت المعنى من رحم المعاناة، وختمت المادة بالحديث عن فرادة الإسلام في رسم مسار الخلاص لأتباعه في حالتي الحياة أو الشهادة.
وأخيرًا ختمنا بالمادة السابعة، التي تحكي اتساع دائرة التأثير إلى أطراف المعمورة باستعراضنا لقصة إسلام مسيحيّ إنجيليّ، وكيف تحول نموذج التديّن الغزيّ إلى منار هداية عالميّة.
In our more secular, rational times, we condemn those who maim and murder in the name of their god. But do not for a moment dismiss the power of religious fervour … The promise of a full remission of all sins and a place in paradise was a powerful motivator (and among some faithful, it still is). Al Tariq al Salabiyin – the Crusaders’ Trail, In That Howling Infinite
… it would be a mistake to assume that the pattern of apocalyptic thought exists only within the framework of religious belief. Its fingerprint can also be found in secular revolutionary movements and in modern ideological worldviews
Amit Vershinsky, Israeli historian and author
Messianism, the belief in the advent of a “promised one”, a Messiah or Mahdi, who emerges as the saviour of a people and who will bring about a better world, has never gone out of fashion, particularly in the Middle East, its theological birthplace. It originated as a Zoroastrian religious belief and flowed into the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but other faiths also harbour messianistic proclivities. And yet, messianism can be temporal as much as spiritual, as illustrated by the ideological movements which determined the course of twentieth century history.
The yearning for an ideal leader has long been ingrained in our collective psyche: a hero, mortal or divine, who would appear at the darkest hour and lead his people through the struggle to ultimate triumph. Even though we may not personally subscribe to a spiritual belief in the end of days, it is there in our historical memory and in the myths that are often shaped by it, as the following lines, referencing Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and King Arthur, these “once and future” kings, illustrate:
We sing such songs as we might hear In dreams before day breaking, As ancient echoes hide between The slumber and the waking. We remember, Yes, we remember
Iskander marched this way and back Across these battlefields of old. Persepolis he burned and in Babylon he died, And now, embalmed in gold, He lies waiting.
The killer khan in death reclines Amidst his guards and concubines, Who died so none would ever see The final resting place where he Lies waiting.
And in our own imagining The fabled, once and future king Upon an island in a lake, He slumbers still but will awake One day.
World-renowned Critical Theorist, activist, psychoanalyst, and public Marxist intellectual, Erich Fromm(1900-1980) distinguished two kinds of messianism. One he saw as radical and progressive, the other as regressive and potentially reactionary: “prophetic messianism” and “catastrophic or apocalyptic” messianism.
Prophetic messianism, Fromm argued, conceives the messianic event as occurring within history and time and not arriving through a rupture from history and time. Regressive catastrophic messianism on the other hand sees the messianic event entering history from outside, a force majeure, and not as an outcome of human activity. He saw “prophetic messianism” as a “horizontal” longing, a longing for human-made change, and “catastrophic messianism” as a vertical” longing, a longing for an external, transcendent “saviour” (perhaps a human leader or a deterministic law governing history) that will enter history from a realm outside of human affairs.
Because prophetic messianism views the messianic event as the outcome of human progress, it encourages productive and revolutionary action, and it makes planning or “anticipatory change” possible. By contrast, because catastrophic messianism views the messianic event as the outcome of the transcendent entering history to rescue a fallen humanity, catastrophic messianism encourages passive waiting or even destructive or unnecessarily violent action aimed at speeding the coming of the apocalypse. Like the types of false hope that Fromm warns against, catastrophic messianism risks becoming quietism on the one hand or actively destructive nihilism on the other.
[These two previous paragraphs are an edited extract of a review by Dutch publishing house Brill of Erich Fromm’s Revolutionary Hope by Joan Braune, 1st January 2014}
Today, catastrophic messianism is active and influential in our world’s most enduring conflicts – the clear and present danger facing the non-Muslim world by Islamic extremism, and the current war between the predominantly Jewish State of Israel and the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas and its allies
In islamic eschatology, the end of times will portend Malhama Al-Kubra, the “last battle between the forces of light and of darkness, an apocalyptic struggle so intense that according to some Hadith narrations, were a bird to pass their flanks, it would fall down dead before reaching the end of them. Many texts say that this will take place at Dabiq in northern Syria. As testament to its relevance in contemporary Islamist thinking, the brutally fundamentalist Islamic State adopted the name for its magazine.
The irony is that increasingly in the Jewish state, the existential crisis emanating from the catastrophe of October 7 and the encirclement of the tiny country by enemies determined to wipe it off the map, has arguably fostered a messianic fervour in Israel too.
In an informative article in Haaretz, writer and historian Amit Varshizky contemplates the connections between conflict and catastrophe on the one hand and an emerging messianism on the other among both religious and non-religious Jews.
This article reminded me of British historian Norman Cohn‘s influential book The Pursuit of the Millenium which I first read in ‘seventies. Indeed, Varshinsky refers to him. Cohn’s work as a historian focused on the problem of the roots of a persecutorial fanaticism which became resurgent in modern Europe at a time when industrial progress and the spread of democracy had convinced many that modern civilization had stepped out forever from the savageries of earlier historical societies. In ThePursuit, he traced back to the distant past the pattern ofchiliasticupheaval that marred the revolutionary movements of the 20th century. He had described all his workas studies on the phenomena that sought “to purify the world through the annihilation.
Vershinsky writes:
“The origins of this craving for destruction and strife reside in the belief that the coming of the Messiah will be preceded by a period of “pangs of the Messiah,” characterized by suffering and ordeals; in short, there is no redemption that is not acquired without torments. This is a basic element of political messianism, which interprets historical events in a mythic light, as the embodiment of sanctity in concrete reality … the power of this redemptive mysticism derives from the fact that it does not talk about far-reaching cosmic transformations in the order of creation, as predicted by the Prophets. It refers, rather, to messianic fulfillment within the realm of historical, concrete time, and as such it is tightly linked to human deeds … History demonstrates how apocalyptic interpretations can be created from the experience of an existential crisis, which brings to a head the everlasting tension between deficiency and the striving for fulfillment – a tension that characterizes the human condition in general. Since the start of recorded history, periods that were marked by political crises, plagues, social anxieties and collective despair have been accompanied by the rise of apocalyptic interpretations that have vested history with a new and sanctified significance and have charged the events of the hour with redemptive meaning. As Norman Cohn showed, marking a low point as a formative moment of spiritual renascence that leads to redemption is part of a recurring pattern that appears in all apocalyptic interpretations of events throughout Western history. Cosmic disorder is a precursory and necessary stage for the coming of the Messiah and the establishment of the Kingdom of God … But it would be a mistake to assume that the pattern of apocalyptic thought exists only within the framework of religious belief. Its fingerprint can also be found in secular revolutionary movements and in modern ideological worldviews”.
Disasters are a fertile ground for purveyors of apocalyptic prophecies
Oil-storage facility in Hםuthi-held Hodeida, Yemen after the port was hit by Israeli planes July 20. “War advances “the purification, refining and galvanizing of the Jewish people” Rav Kook.”: AFP
Social media is flooded with clips of rabbis calculating the end times and intoxicated with salvation as they declare that we are poised at the onset of the flowering of our redemption. Rabbi Naftali Nissim, a YouTube star in-the-making, waxed poetic: “There has never been a beautiful period like this… What happened on Simhat Torah [October 7] is a prelude to redemption.” Rabbi Yaakov Maor explained that “Rafah [in Gaza] refers to ‘288 sparks’ [the numerological value of the word ‘RFH,” and a concept in kabbalistic literature]. The redemption is near!” And Rabbi Eliezer Berland, head of the Shuvu Banim group in the Breslav Hasidic sect, promised: “This is the last war before the Messiah. After this war, Messiah Son of David will come.”
But such talk is not confined to the yeshivas and the kollels (yeshivas for married men), it’s even voiced on commercial television. Dana Varon, a presenter and commentator on the right-wing Channel 14, stated, “It’s written in the Mishna: The Galilee will be destroyed and the Golan shall be emptied, and the people of the border wander from city to city, that’s the Mishna coming to realization within us literally, I’m happy about this.”
Her colleague Yinon Magal went even farther in a radio broadcast. “The feeling is that we are approaching great days. We are in a redemptive process, and prophecies are happening.” And on another occasion: “Only the Messiah [can] supplant Bibi.” Magal is a demagogue and the embodiment of narcissism, but his remarks reflect a prevailing sentiment among broad circles of the settler and Hardali(nationalist ultra-Orthodox) right, and one that has also been adopted by broad segments of the ruling party.
The sentiment itself is not new. Since the advent of religious Zionism, it has greased the movement’s ideological wheels and been the driving force of the settlement project and the vision of Greater Israel. What is new is the popularity these ideas enjoy in the present-day political and public discourse, and how they have traveled from the margins of right-wing politics into the Likud center. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is captive by choice of power-hungry Kahanists and other extremists, is dragging Israel into the grip of an apocalyptic ecstasy that is deepening the existing crisis and creating new conditions for realizing the messianic fantasy of conquering all the territories of the Land of Israel, replacing Israeli democracy with the kingdom of the House of David and building the Third Temple.
This accounts for the enthusiastic spirit that has gripped the messianic camp since October 7, as well as the repeated provocations on the part of individuals and groups in an attempt to ignite a conflagration in the West Bank and pull the Arabs in Israel into the blaze.
War of Gog and Magog
The origins of this craving for destruction and strife reside in the belief that the coming of the Messiah will be preceded by a period of “pangs of the Messiah,” characterized by suffering and ordeals; in short, there is no redemption that is not acquired without torments. This is a basic element of political messianism, which interprets historical events in a mythic light, as the embodiment of sanctity in concrete reality. According to this approach, the birth of Israel and the Zionist enterprise, particularly since the victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, are manifestations of emerging redemptive reality. This reading of events is based in part on tractate Berakhot in the Talmud, according to which between this world and the time of the Messiah there is only “servitude to the [foreign] kingdoms.”
Indeed, the power of this redemptive mysticism derives from the fact that it does not talk about far-reaching cosmic transformations in the order of creation, as predicted by the Prophets. It refers, rather, to messianic fulfillment within the realm of historical, concrete time, and as such it is tightly linked to human deeds. Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, the dean of Ateret Yerushalayim Yeshiva and the former rabbi of the settlement of Beit El, put it succinctly: “We assert the absolute certainty of the appearance of our redemption now. There is no barrier here of secret and hidden.”
The same applies to the present war; it needs to be seen in its biblical dimension and perceived through a messianic prism. In this sense, the history of our generation is not much different from the chronicles of the Exodus from Egypt and the conquests of Joshua. At that time, too, the events occurred by natural means and the military victories opened the age of redemption.
The Gaza war, from this perspective, is bringing closer the Jewish people’s collective redemption. Light and dark are intertwined here, destruction and revival are interlocked like revealed and concealed, and as material and spiritual reality. Accordingly, the greater the dimensions of the destruction and the devastation, so too will the spiritual transformation brought by the campaign in its wake be augmented. The war is the purgatory that will steel the spirit of the Jewish people, which is already at the stage of incipient redemption. Anyone seeking a foundation for this idea will find it in the thought of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook (the son of Abraham Isaac Kook): “What is the reason for the War of Gog and Magog? Following the establishment of Israel’s sovereignty, war can possess only one purpose: the purification, refining and galvanizing of Knesset Israel [the Jewish people].”
What is the conclusion? The more that suffering increases, the more good there will be; and “the more they were oppressed, the more they increased and spread out” (Exodus 2:12). They will multiply and burst forth, for like the measure of justice, so too is the measure of mercy. And as Dana Varon noted in replying to her critics, “It’s a good sign. Because if all the bad and the wicked materialize, that is a sign that the good is also guaranteed and is arriving.”
Sanctified victims
The designation of catastrophe as a condition for salvation is not new in human history. History demonstrates how apocalyptic interpretations can be created from the experience of an existential crisis, which brings to a head the everlasting tension between deficiency and the striving for fulfillment – a tension that characterizes the human condition in general. Since the start of recorded history, periods that were marked by political crises, plagues, social anxieties and collective despair have been accompanied by the rise of apocalyptic interpretations that have vested history with a new and sanctified significance and have charged the events of the hour with redemptive meaning.
As the British historian Norman Cohn showed, marking a low point as a formative moment of spiritual renascence that leads to redemption is part of a recurring pattern that appears in all apocalyptic interpretations of events throughout Western history. Cosmic disorder is a precursory and necessary stage for the coming of the Messiah and the establishment of the Kingdom of God.
But it would be a mistake to assume that the pattern of apocalyptic thought exists only within the framework of religious belief. Its fingerprint can also be found in secular revolutionary movements and in modern ideological worldviews. Marxism, for example, is based on the assumption that history is progressing toward a final end, after which there will be no more oppression, injustice or wars. The realization of the Marxist utopia sees extreme aggravation in the living conditions of the working class as a necessary condition for world revolution, and for the formation of a classless society that will bring about the end of history.
Fascism, and German fascism in particular, preserves a central place for apocalyptic patterns of thought. In Hitler’s Third Reich, whose followers adopted the Christian eschatological concept of the “Thousand Year Reich,” extensive use was made of the narrative of fall and redemption as a means to consolidate the Nazi movement’s ideological hold on the German public. The Nazi ideologues and propagandists were successful in evoking the deepest fears of their contemporaries, and in depicting Germany’s military defeat in World War I and the national nadir as a formative moment of illumination, resurrection and renewal.
As the Nazis conceived it, the catastrophe of the war marked the watershed – it was a rupture that exposed the subversive activity of the Jews, awakened the German people to recognize its inner strength and accelerated a process of national renewal. It was precisely the destruction and the mass killing of the Great War that made it possible to formulate a new worldview and philosophy of life that was based on recognition of the vital powers of the race and the organic essence of the people (the Volk). As such, the sacrifice of the war’s fallen was vested with sanctified validity.
The totalitarian movements thus secularized the apocalyptic pattern of thought and implanted it in their worldview. They offered their believers a utopian vision that was based not on divine redemption but on scientific progress, naturalism and the sovereignty of humanity. Their followers were driven by a sense of moral eclipse and existential dread, accompanied by a call to eradicate the old world and to build on its ruins a new, orderly world. The total war, in the Nazi case, or the total revolution, in the communist case, were perceived as a necessary stage to realize the secular utopia, and made it possible to normalize the most horrific crimes and sanctify every form of violence. The historical lesson is thus clear: Every attempt to establish the Kingdom of God on earth is destined to ignite the first of in the abode of man.
Here lies the danger in striving for a politics of “total solutions,” whether on the right or on the left. That form of politics entrenches a false picture of reality and paves the way for demagogues and populist false messiahs who are adept at exploiting social distress and anxiety by appealing to the urge for redemption and the human need for absoluteness.
Not only does political messianism cast on its leaders a sanctity of religious mission that is insusceptible to doubt; it also requires the marking of enemies (or political rivals) as foes that are delaying redemption, in the spirit of the Latin phrase, “Nullus diabolus, nullus redemptor” (No devil, no redeemer). In this sense, the more powerful the messianic idea is, the greater the violence and the destruction it sows when the demand for absoluteness shatters on the rocks of reality; the height of the sublimity toward which it thrusts is matched only by the depth of the abyss into which it is liable to slide. For the more that reality declines to acquiesce to the absolutist demands of the advocates of political messianism, the greater the strength they wield to shape it in the image of their utopian visions; and the more untenable this becomes, the more they attribute their failure to an internal enemy and to the power of abstract conspiracies.
David Ben Gurion: “The Messiah has not yet come, and I do not long for the Messiah to come. The moment the Messiah will come, he will cease to be the Messiah”. Fritz Cohen / GPO
Between the absurd and the meaningful
It’s only natural for people to seek to inform their lives with meaning that transcends their temporary, ephemeral existence. It’s also natural that in periods of mourning and distress they should wish to console themselves and imbue their sacrifice and loss with cosmic meaning. Crisis and catastrophe can indeed serve as an opportunity for renewal, and there is also nothing intrinsically wrong with the longing for redemption or for the absolute that is innate in the human psyche. The danger lies in the attempt to transform redemption into a political program, and the ambition to bring the heavenly kingdom into being in this world. The demand for absolute justice always ends in injustice. Moreover, a cause that relies on unjust means can never be a just cause.
In a meeting with intellectuals and writers in October 1949, David Ben-Gurion said, “The Messiah has not yet come, and I do not long for the Messiah to come. The moment the Messiah will come, he will cease to be the Messiah. When you find the Messiah’s address in the phone book, he is no longer the Messiah. The greatness of the Messiah is that his address is unknown and it is impossible to get to him and we don’t know what kind of car he drives and whether he drives a car at all, or rides a donkey or flies on eagles’ wings. But the Messiah is needed – so that he will not come. Because the days of the Messiah are more important than the Messiah, and the Jewish people is living in the days of the Messiah, expects the days of the Messiah, believes in the days of the Messiah, and that is one of the cardinal reasons for the existence of the Jewish people.”
Those remarks can be taken at face value, but it’s desirable to understand them as a message that encapsulates universal human requirements: People need belief, vision and a guiding ideal, but as is the way with ideals, it’s certain that this too will never materialize but will remain on the utopian horizon toward which one must strive but to which one will never arrive. Humanity, thus, is fated to exist in the constant tension between want and fullness, between the absurdity and futility of life and our need for meaning, purpose and significance. That tension can be a millstone around our necks and enhance the attraction of political messianism in its diverse forms.
Accordingly, it’s a mistake to assume that the allure of messianism can be fought only with rational tools. Myth cannot be suppressed by reason, and the yearning for the absolute cannot be moderated by means of learned, logical arguments. It was Friedrich Nietzsche, of all people, the philosopher who perhaps more than any other is associated with modern atheism and the “death of God,” who maintained that the death of God does not necessarily herald the death of faith, and that the rejection of religion and a consciousness of God’s absence do not mean that the craving for the absolute has ceased to exist.
On the contrary, it is precisely the death of God, precisely his nonexistence, that keeps alive more forcefully the longing for him, and spurs man to find substitutes. Hence Nietzsche’s famous cry: “Two thousand years have come and gone – and not a single new god!” The secular individual who has been orphaned of God is fated to give birth from within to new gods that will provide a response to one’s unfulfilled religious longing. God is dead, but his shadow continues to pursue humanity and to drive people to act in numberless forms and ways.
The denial of God’s shadow and of the unrequited longing of the human psyche for the absolute are the root of the blindness of secular culture in our time, and the source of its weakness in the light of the messianic sentiment. Under the guise of post-ideological pragmatism and economical rationalism, secular liberalism has completely forsaken the psycho-religious needs of the current generation in favor of material utilitarianism, narcissistic individualism and consumerist escapism, and has abandoned the possibility of bringing into being a life of a spiritual and cultural character capable of providing a response to the basic need for meaning and self-transcendence. Secular culture may perhaps allow freedom of choice (and that’s not a little), but in itself it does not offer another positive meta-narrative, guiding idea or existential meaning in an era of consumer and technological alienation. Into this vacuum political messianism has penetrated, as it offers an answer for spiritual longings and existential anxieties.
The formulators of state-oriented Zionism, head by Ben-Gurion, understood this well. They sought to harness the religious impulse to nation building and to the formation of a new Hebrew (Jewish) identity that draws on the messianic sources but does not attach itself to their religious content and instead secularizes it. In this way the messianic tension served Ben-Gurion to forge an ideal vision of a Jewish state that would be a moral paragon and a light unto the nations.
Is a return to the fold of Ben-Gurion-style Zionism the answer? Probably not. One thing, however, is certain: besides the urgent need to separate religion and state, and to anchor Israel’s secular-liberal character in a constitution, a deep transformation is also necessary in secular culture, in education, in artistic creation and in the intellectual-spiritual life. Because in order to do battle against the messianic myth, a counter-myth is needed, one that does not lie within the realms of religion and meta-earthly redemption, but in the imperfect world of humankind. It alone is capable of providing a substitute for the temptations of the diverse types of political messianism and of providing human beings with a horizon free of all supernatural, theistic, utopian or redemptive qualities.
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Bob Dylan, Chimes of Freedom
Hear the cry in the tropic night, should be the cry of love but it’s a cry of fright Some people never see the light till it shines through bullet holes
Bruce Cockburn, Tropic Moon
When Freedom Comesis a tribute to Robert Fisk (1946-2020), indomitable, veteran British journalist and longtime resident of Beirut, who could say without exaggeration “I walk among the conquered, I walk among the dead” in “the battlegrounds and graveyards” of “long forgotten armies and long forgotten wars”. It’s all there, in his grim tombstone of a book, The Great War forCivilization (a book I would highly recommend to anyone wanting to know more about the history of the Middle East in the twentieth century – but it takes stamina – at near in 1,300 pages – and a strong stomach – its stories are harrowing).
The theme, alas, is timeless, and the lyrics, applicable to any of what Rudyard called the “savage wars of peace” being waged all across our planet, yesterday, today and tomorrow – and indeed any life-or-death battle in the name of the illusive phantom of liberty and against those intent on either denying it to us or depriving us of it. “When freedom runs through dogs and guns, and broken glass” could describe Parisand Chicago in 1968orKristallnacht in 1938. If it is about any struggle in particular, it is about the Palestinians and their endless, a fruitless yearning for their lost land. Ironically, should this ever be realized, freedom is probably the last thing they will enjoy. They like others before them will be helpless in the face of vested interest, corruption, and brute force, at the mercy of the ‘powers that be’ and the dead hand of history.
The mercenaries and the robber bands, the warlords and the big men, az zu’ama’, are the ones who successfully “storm the palace, seize the crown”. To the victors go the spoils – the people are but pawns in their game.
In 2005, on the occasion of the publication of his book, Fisk addressed a packed auditorium in Sydney’s Macquarie University. Answering a question from the audience regarding the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, he replied:
“Freedom must crawl over broken glass”
Freedom Comes
… all wars come to an end. And that’s where history restarts. Robert Fisk
There goes the freedom fighter,
There blows the dragon’s breath.
There stands the sole survivor;
The time-worn shibboleth.
The zealots’ creed, the bold shahid,
Give me my daily bread
I walk amongst the conquered
I walk amongst the dead
Here comes the rocket launcher,
There runs the bullets path,
The revolution’s father,
The hero psychopath.
The wanting seed, the aching need
Fulfill the devil’s pact,
The incremental balancing
Between the thought and act.
The long-forgotten army
In the long-forgotten war.
Marching to a homeland.
We’ve never seen before.
We feel the wind that blows so cold amidst
The leaves of grass.
When freedom comes to beating drums
She crawls on broken glass
There rides the mercenary,
Here roams the robber band.
In flies the emissary
With claims upon our land.
The lesser breed with savage speed
Is slaughtered where he stands.
His elemental fantasy
Felled by a foreign hand.
The long-forgotten army
In the long-forgotten war.
Marching to a homeland.
We’ve never seen before.
We feel the wind that blows so cold amidst
The leaves of grass.
When freedom comes to beating drums
She crawls on broken glass.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done
On heaven and on earth,
And each shall make his sacrifice,
And each shall know his worth.
In stockade and on barricade
The song will now be heard
The incandescent energy
Gives substance to the word.
Missionaries, soldiers,
Ambassadors ride through
The battlegrounds and graveyards
And the fields our fathers knew.
Through testament and sacrament,
The prophecy shall pass.
When freedom runs through clubs and guns,
She crawls on broken glass.
The long-forgotten army
In the long-forgotten war.
Marching to a homeland.
We’ve never seen before.
We feel the wind that blows so cold amidst
The leaves of grass.
When freedom comes to beating drums
She crawls on broken glass
When freedom comes to beating drums
She crawls on broken glass
“VISIT OF H.R.H. PRINCESS MARY AND THE EARL OF HARWOOD. MARCH 1934. PRINCESS MARY, THE EARL OF HARWOOD, AND THE GRAND MUFTI, ETC. AT THE MOSQUE EL-AKSA [I.E., AL-AQSA IN JERUSALEM].” LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-M33- 4221.
In That Howling Infinite 