Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

The new European immigrants didn’t seize land by force; they bought the land they settled; but they bought it mostly from absentee landlords,

What happened just before and during World War II in Palestine resembled what happened earlier in Algeria when French immigrants bought up much of the land and planted a parallel economy there, rendering the original inhabitants irrelevant.

In the context of the European narrative, the Jews were victims. In the context of the Arab narrative, they were colonizers with much the same attitudes toward the indigenous population as their fellow Europeans.

Arabs who saw the Zionist project as European colonialism

Instead, militant organizations sprang up among the would-be Jewish settlers, and since they were a dispossessed few fighting the world-straddling British Empire, some of these militant Jewish groups resorted to the archetypal strategy of the scattered weak against the well-organized mighty: hit and run raids, sabotage, random assassinations, bombings of places frequented by civilians—in short, terrorism. In 1946, the underground Jewish militant group Haganah bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one ordinary civilians, the most destructive single act of terrorism until 1988,

when Libyan terrorists brought down a civilian airliner, Pan Am Flight 103, over Scotland, killing 270.

The horrors of Nazism proved the Jewish need for a secure place of refuge, but Jews did not come to Palestine pleading for refuge so much as claiming entitlement. They insisted they were not begging for a favor but coming home to land that was theirs by right. They based their claim on the fact that their ancestors had lived there until the year 135 CE and that even in diaspora they had never abandoned hope of returning. “Next year in Jerusalem” was part of the Passover service, a key cultural and religious rite in Judaism. According to Jewish doctrine, God had given the disputed land to the Hebrews and their descendants as part of His covenant with Abr...

Palestine was just the sort of issue the United Nations was designed to resolve. In 1947, therefore, the United Nations crafted a proposal to end the quarrel by dividing the disputed territory and creating two new nations. Each competing party would get three patches of curiously interlocking land, and Jerusalem would be a separate international city belonging to neither side. The total territories of the proposed new nations, Israel and Palestine, would be roughly equal. Essentially, the United Nations was saying, “It doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong; let’s just divide the land and move on.” This is the sort of solution that adults typically impose on quarreling children.

But Arabs could not agree that both sides had a point and that the truth lay somewhere in the middle: they felt that a European solution was being imposed on them for a European problem, or more precisely that Arabs were being asked to sacrifice their land as compensation for a crime visited

by Europeans on Europeans. The Arabs of surrounding lands sympathized with their fellows in Palestine and saw their point; the world at large did not. When the matter was put to a vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations, th...

Most Arabs had no personal stake in the actual issue: the birth of Israel would not strip an Iraqi farmer of his land or keep some Moroccan shop-keeper from prospering in his business—yet most Arabs and indeed most Muslims could wax passionate about who got Palestine. Why? Because the emergence of Israel had emblematic meaning for them. It meant that Arabs (and Muslims generally) had no power, that imperialists could take any part of their territory, and that no one outside the Muslim world would side with them against a patent injustice. The existence of Israel signified European dominance ove...

On May 15, 1948, Israel declared itself born.

Immediately, Arab armies attacked from three sides, determined to crush the new country before it could take its first breath. But instead, Israel did the crushing, routing the armies of its three Arab adversaries, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, and so it was Palestine, not Israel, that became the stillborn child. When the war ended, a war that Israel remembers as their War of Independence but that Arabs called the Catastrophe, some seven hundred thousand Arabs found themselves homeless and stateless, living as refugees in the neighboring Arab

countries. The lands that were supposed to become Palestine were annexed (mostly by Jordan). The bulk of the Arab refugees collected on the West Bank of the Jordan River, where they seethed and stewed and sometimes s...

In the aftermath of the war of 1948, the Arabs lost the public relations battle even more drastically than they had lost their land. For one thing, some prominent Arabs publicly and constantly disputed Israel’s “right to exist.” They were speaking within the framework of the nationalist argument: Zionists wanted Israel to exist, the Arabs of Palestine wanted Palestine to exist, and since they claimed the same territory, both could not exist: the assertion of each nation’s “right to exist” was inherently a denial of the other nation’s “right to exist.” But...

To make matters worse, at least one Arab notable made no bones about actually endorsing Nazi anti-Semitism. This was the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had lived in Nazi Germany during the war and now spouted racism from many pulpits including his radio broadcasts. The weight of world opinion, the tone of media reporting, and the rantings of Arabs such as this mufti subtly conflated the Arab cause with Nazism in the public mind, especially in the West. Arabs not only lost the argument about the land but in the process became the Bad Guys who deserved to lose their land. This co...

Gamal Abdul Nasser.

Overall then, what did the Six Day War accomplish? Israel gained the Occupied Territories. They were supposed to buffer the country against further attacks. Instead, within those same territories, Israeli authorities have faced ever-mounting insurgencies called intifadas, to which they have responded with ever more brutal measures. Year after year and decade after decade, this strike-and-counterstrike syndrome has drained the nation’s energies and compromised its moral arguments in the world.

On the other side of the ledger, the war radicalized and “Palestinianized” the PLO, empowered the Ba’ath party, and energized the Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned Jihadist splinters as the years went by, ever more extremist zealots who mounted increasingly horrific attacks not just at innocent bystanders who got in the way—a tragic byproduct of virtually all wars—but against anyone who could be gotten and the more innocent the better, the distinctive genre of violence known today as terrorism. In short, the Six Day war was a crushing setback for world peace, a disaster for the Muslim world, and not much good in the end even for Israel.

It was only after World War I that Muslims really started taking notice of the United States, and their first impression was highly favorable. Right through World War II, they admired America’s sleek efficiency, its ability to pour out wonderful goods, its military strength, especially in light of the

higher values the United States proclaimed—freedom, justice, democracy. They respected the American argument that its political system could save people of every nation from poverty and oppression. American idealists proffered democracy with something of the same ardor enjoyed by religious movements, making it a competitor to other world-organizing social ideas such as communism, fascism, and Islam. Religious Muslims may have rejected America’s moral claims, but secular modernist Muslims saw great hope in it, and found no inherent contradiction between American ideals and Islam as they understood it.

When Wilson’s Fourteen Points came to nothing, Muslims didn’t blame the United States; they blamed the European old guard. In the last days of World War II, American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt renewed America’s moral leadership by issuing (with Winston Churchill) the Atlantic Charter, a document calling for the liberation and democratization of all countries. Churchill later said he didn’t mean it, but American leaders never repudiated the charter. In fact, just after the war, the United States took the lead in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which ...

Mohammad Mosaddeq

Mosaddeq had pledged to recover total control of the country’s most precious resource, its oil, and accordingly upon taking office he canceled the lease with British Petroleum and announced that he was nationalizing the Iranian oil industry.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency immediately moved to stop “this madman Mosaddeq” (as U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles called him). In late August of 1953, a faction of the Iranian military carried out a bloody CIA-funded coup that left thousands dead in the streets and put Iran’s most popular political figure under house arrest from which he never emerged. In his place, the CIA restored the son of Reza Shah Pahlavi (also called Reza Shah Pahlavi) as the country’s king. The young shah signed a treaty with the United States giving an international consortium of oil corporations the job of “managing” Iran’s oil.

As it happened, during this Arab-Israeli War, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries was meeting to conduct its routine business of coordinating production and pricing policies. OPEC was founded in 1960, and of its twelve member nations, nine were Muslim countries. At the very moment that OPEC leaders were gathering to confabulate, the masses in their countries were marching and raging about the military humiliation Israel and the United States were dealing the Arabs. OPEC had not been particularly political up to this point, but at the 1973 meeting, its members decided to use oil as a weapon for striking back. They announced an embargo on shipments to countries that supported Israel.

Saddam Hussein, the ruler of Iraq, was a Sunni secular modernist and a sworn enemy of radical religious Islamism. In 1980, directly after Khomeini took power, Hussein invaded Iran. Perhaps he considered the country ripe for the picking due to its internal turmoil; perhaps he had his eye on Iran’s oil; perhaps he felt threatened by Khomeini—as he had good reason to be: Khomeini blatantly announced his intention to export his revolution, and secular Iraq, with its large Shi’i population, was the obvious first market for this export. Whatever Hussein’s aims, his war proved catastrophic for both countries. Both lost nearly an entire generation of their young men and boys. Not since World War I had such vast armies met head to head nor had so many lives been squandered so casually for such trivial gains. And throughout this war, the United States funneled arms and funds to Iraq, bolstering its capacity to keep fighting to the last Iraqi, because the United States feared that the Soviets might gain ground in this strategic region, now that the United States had lost its foothold in Iran. Helping the Iraqis was a way to weaken Iran and possibly keep the Soviets at bay. Here again was a catastrophic intertwining of the Muslim and Western narratives, the one narrative still about secular modernism versus back-to-the-source Islamism, the other still about superpower rivalry and control of oil, though couched in rhetoric about democracy and totalitarianism.

The Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988