Author: Martin Kramer

Ignatieff’s Empire

On By Martin Kramer

Michael Ignatieff has a meandering piece in today’s New York Times Magazine on American empire. In it, he tells us that “leaving the Palestinians to face Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships is a virtual guarantee of unending Islamic wrath against the United States.” The exit from the present situation is a “United Nations transitional administration [for the Palestinians], with U.N.-mandated peacekeepers to provide security for Israelis and Palestinians.” Without this, victory in Iraq won’t staunch the hemorrhaging of U.S. prestige in the Middle East. These ideas have been bouncing around for some time. Now they get the endorsement of a noted journalist and Harvard professor, in the most prominent spot in the print media.

I admit I have a hard time taking Ignatieff seriously on the Middle East, in part because of an article he published back in April in the London Guardian entitled “Why Bush Must Send in His Troops.” Before you decide that Ignatieff is a sure guide to things Middle Eastern, read it.

You’ll find that it includes, in one form or another, every trendy calumny against Israel. There is the infamous South African analogy: Palestinian self-rule was really “a Bantustan, one of those pseudo-states created in the dying years of apartheid to keep the African population under control.” The Palestinian Authority had “failed because Israel never allowed it to become a state.” Reading through this piece, you would never know that there were Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David because they’re never mentioned. Perhaps Ignatieff didn’t want to get into the debate over what happened or didn’t happen in those talks, in which an Israeli leader proposed the creation of a Palestinian state on virtually all the lands occupied in 1967. But that would only have complicated things for Ignatieff’s inevitably Solomonic verdict: “Both sides have an equal share of blame.”

As for the Palestinian half of the blame, Ignatieff quickly shifts some of that to Israel’s shoulders, too. Israel kept the Palestinian Authority too weak. “Had Israel realized that its own security depended on assisting in the establishment of a viable and, if necessary, ruthless Palestinian Authority it might now be secure.” In particular, Israel did not allow the PA “enough military and police capability.”

Not enough? Did Ignatieff have a clue about what was going on in the PA? The PA (even according to David Hirst in the Guardian) had forty to fifty thousand persons in its security services—ten to twenty thousand more than the number agreed upon in Oslo II. As one observer put it, “the PA has become the most heavily policed territory in the world, with an officer-to-resident ratio of 1:50; the U.S. ratio for police officers and sheriff’s deputies, in contrast, is 1:400.” So what, in Ignatieff’s view, would have been “enough military and police capability”? (And why military?)

In fact, the problem was never one of capability. It was one of will. The PA decided to wage war with the weapons it had been given to keep peace. Some think that had there been fewer “security services” and guns, there might not have been an intifada at all.

But the absolute low point of this article is Ignatieff’s invocation of the “sacrifice of the young people on both sides in a mutually reinforcing death cult.” It’s an insufferable case of false symmetry, especially coming as it did in the midst of the worst suicide bombings. Even if you believe Israelis and Palestinians are locked in a “cycle of violence,” you’re showing yourself ignorant if you compare the suicidal “death cult” rampant among Palestinians to the stoic resolve of Israelis.

“The Americans now face a historic choice,” pronounced Ignatieff back in April. “For 50 years, they have played the double game of both guaranteeing Israel’s security and serving as honest broker in the region. This game can’t go on.” This is the greatest of all the calumnies—not just against Israel, but against generations of U.S. policymakers. A “double game”? It’s been an immensely successful strategy, which won the Cold War in the Middle East and produced the Israeli-Egyptian peace. This “double game” has prevented a general conflagration for thirty years. And it must go on, because the moment America’s commitment to Israel seems diminished in Arab eyes, the region is destined to spiral into war, just as it did in 1967 and 1973.

None of the nonsense Ignatieff published in the Guardian would have gotten past an editor at the Times, but all of it is implicit in today’s new piece. 9/11 has turned everyone into a Middle East expert for fifteen minutes. That’s about as long as it will take you to get through the lead article of today’s Magazine. Time’s up.

Modernizing Islam

On By Martin Kramer

This letter by Martin Kramer, in response to the article by Francis Fukuyama and Nadav Samin, “Can Any Good Come of Radical Islam?” published in Commentary, September 2002, appeared in Commentary, December 2002, pp. 17-18. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

What happens when a really big reality (like 9/11) collides head-on with a really big idea (like Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”)? Inevitably, the idea crumples to absorb the shock. Let us survey the wreckage.

In “Can Any Good Come of Radical Islam?” [September], Mr. Fukuyama and his co-author Nadav Samin concur that Islamism is a destructive force that warrants comparison with Communism and fascism. But, they write, it might also be a modernizing one—it might, despite itself, strip away the traditional constraints that have prevented Muslims from modernizing. And if Islamism, in turn, can be stripped of its ideology, then perhaps it might turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

If. And if only. In Francis Fukuyama, Hegel springs eternal, and it was Hegel who passed this judgment early in the 19th century: “Islam has long vanished from the stage of history, and has retreated into oriental ease and repose.” The persistent refusal of Islam to do just that remains one of the principal flaws of “endism,” from Hegel to this day—that is, for as long as the modern West has rubbed shoulders with Islam.

After some two centuries, the evidence is compelling. Islam has been an inexhaustible power cell for scores of movements that have defied the values of modern liberalism. From Mahdism to bin Ladenism, from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Taliban, Islam continues to generate new and potent antidotes to the infection of the West. All of which suggests that the power of radical Islam (like Islam itself) is its ability to mutate—to adapt itself to ever-changing circumstances. Today it ingeniously exploits the very modernism that it seeks to thwart. Just when you think it is outmoded—as many analysts thought 30 years ago—it suddenly reappears in some completely new (and often more virulent) form.

Radical Islam, Messrs. Fukuyama and Samin speculate, “may yet help pave the way for long-overdue reform. If so, this would certainly not be the first time that the cunning of history has produced so astounding a result.” In theory, of course, Islam might be reformed into irrelevance. The late Ernest Gellner even opined that while Islam “did not engender the modern world, it may yet, of all the faiths, turn out to be the one best adapted to it.”

The problem is that in actual practice, real Muslims have treated their would-be reformers very shabbily; the space between Islamism and the authoritarian state remains a leaderless void, which neither side has an interest in filling. The reformers, who have always been a small minority, are today even worse off than they were a half-century ago: today, terrorists threaten to kill them. By all means, let us pray five times daily for an Islamic Reformation. But let us admit that there is no Luther in sight who could inspire one.

The danger of the Fukuyama-Samin argument is that it could encourage complacency. They really do not come down very far from the starry-eyed Middle East experts. One recalls in particular the Georgetown political scientist Michael Hudson, who once told a congressional committee that “whatever the ultimate intent of Islamist movements, their current function is a liberalizing one.” Messrs. Fukuyama and Samin would just switch the adjectives around: whatever the current intent of Islamist movements, their ultimate function is a liberalizing one. It is a short distance from this point to the argument that we should welcome Islamist seizures of power, so as to speed up the inevitable process of regeneration.

As for the authors’ idea that Islamist “independent action” might “lay the groundwork of a true civil society,” this sounds precisely like the argument of John Esposito and a raft of “experts” who tell us that we should weigh the good social deeds of groups like Hamas. Only in the absence of any other mediating institutions can this illusion be maintained. Islamism is a poor man’s civil society, and a poor substitute for it, since it lacks a concept of tolerance. There is no evidence it can develop further, and ample evidence suggesting that it cannot.

In any case, the Fukuyama-Samin thesis cannot be proved or disproved in any near term, and it is pointless to debate it. Its policy implications are vague at best. And it does not change the fact that at this moment in time, it is not Islamism but “endism” that (to quote Hegel) has “vanished from the stage of history”—even if it has cropped up in the pages of Commentary.

Middle East Quarterly
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

President Beinin’s Farewell Address

On By Martin Kramer

On November 24, Professor Joel Beinin, Stanford University historian, delivered his presidential address to an audience of 800 members of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) at their annual conference. On the face of it, it’s a tedious read. Beinin belongs to the far-left, blame-America-first, Zionism-is-colonialism school, and much of his address just rehashes its key dogmas: we’re hated in the Middle East for what we do, not what we are; our civil liberties have gone down the tube since 9/11; Ariel Sharon should be put on trial for Sabra and Shatila (and may have had someone killed to keep himself out of a Belgian court), etcetera. This is followed by a none-too-accurate sketch of the history of Middle Eastern studies in America, and expressions of indignation over “scurrilous attacks that have been leveled against MESA collectively and several of our members individually.” Beinin mentions no names, but since he’s described my own book, Ivory Towers on Sand, as a “lengthy screed…trashing the entire field of Middle East studies,” I guess I’m included.

But Beinin’s speech is more interesting than its agitprop style would suggest. There’s a compelling subtext here, and it has nothing to do with Arab or Muslim grievance against America. It’s about Beinin’s own grievance against an academic establishment that supposedly tried (and failed) to keep him down.

At three stages, Beinin tells us, he encountered “repress[ion].” “When I was an undergraduate at Princeton,” he says, “I was not permitted to write my senior honors thesis on the post-1948 Palestinian national movement on the grounds that the topic was less than fifty years old.” Princeton’s Middle East professors also refused to discuss or teach the Arab-Israeli conflict, an issue that fired his passion. Then, while pursuing an M.A. at Harvard, “I witnessed the misuse of academic power on matters relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” This is an oblique allusion, one duplicated in his MESA autobiographical statement, where he reports that after finishing his M.A., “I sought respite from Harvard by moving to Detroit.” In fact, it was Harvard that sought respite from Beinin: it rejected his application to its doctoral program. Beinin has attributed his rejection to his outspokenness during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Finally, at the University of Michigan, he was persuaded to do a thesis on Egypt rather than the Palestinian working class, for “fear that those who held the then dominant views in the field of Middle East studies would use their power” to ” impede [my] advancement.”

The real significance of the MESA 2002 presidential address, Beinin is telling us, is the simple fact that Beinin is the one delivering it. Beinin is offering himself—once scorned, now vindicated—as prime evidence for his crucial point: Middle Eastern studies are better today than they were under the ancien regime. These days, says Beinin, there is “free and open discussion” in MESA, “significantly expanding the range of what is considered a legitimate topic of inquiry and liberating some space for articulating previously repressed opinions.” And standing before you, he winks, is the living proof.

I have no idea whether the details in Beinin’s personal narrative of repression, perseverance, and vindication are true. (Three years after Beinin left Princeton, in 1973, its Near Eastern Studies department accepted a senior thesis on “The Palestinian Resistance Movement, 1964-1971,” so the Princeton profs must not have been that obtuse.) But the real issue is whether he is right: is there more “space” and “range” in Middle Eastern studies?

I can’t see any. The “space” and the “range” have shifted, there’s no doubt about that. But they haven’t been enlarged at all. If Palestine was excluded from the research agenda thirty years ago, then today it is radical Islamism and its tributaries that are off-limits. Just read accounts of recent MESA conferences, both last year’s and this year’s. I get missives from students all the time, complaining of how their professors have tried to dissuade them from the pursuit of these topics. The day after Beinin’s speech, his successor as MESA’s president, Lisa Anderson of Columbia University, stopped by The Washington Institute to appear with me on a breakfast panel entitled “Middle Eastern Studies: What Went Wrong?” In her remarks she allowed that some valid research topics had indeed been excluded from the scholarly agenda. Both Beinin and Anderson are right to note that the academic record of what they call “terrorology” has been less than distinguished. But this is precisely because Middle East experts have refused to develop the study of radical Islamism, and in many cases have actively discouraged it.

Have things begun to change? At our panel, Anderson said that I had been too pessimistic in assessing the impact of my book, and that many responses within the field had been “appreciative.” I myself quoted a few e-mail messages I’d gotten over the past year. In one, a graduate student from a major Middle East center wrote: “As a student of Middle East politics and a member of MESA, I am quite relieved that you have put pressure on the academy from the outside. It has made more intellectual space for a wider diversity of views.” Well, maybe. “I have been meaning to write to you for some time,” wrote the left-leaning head of a major center. “We don’t know one another but I wanted to let you know that I liked your book. (And thanks, too, for leaving me out.) I have enough of the old radical ethos in me to wish only that conditions were such that younger scholars-in-the-making were launching these polemics.”

Nothing will change those conditions faster than the kind of rigidity on display in the 2002 MESA presidential address. So Professor Beinin, take note: at this very moment, there are scholars-in-the-making who are experiencing precisely the “repression” you believed yourself to have experienced all those many years ago. They’re being told to stay away from certain topics, and they’re collecting letters of rejection—all because they wish to study and understand those forces that seized their imaginations on 9/11. I don’t doubt that one day, one of them will stand on MESA’s podium as its president, and make allusion to you. He or she will speak of the way an entire generation fabricated a scholarly agenda that had nothing to do with the Middle East, but was dictated by ideology and fad. He or she will wonder why the leaders of Middle Eastern studies failed to anticipate the changes that were about to unfold. And he or she will celebrate the end of illusion.

I can’t wait.

ADDENDUM: Word has it that the Stanford-Israel Alliance and the Stanford Hillel have declined to sponsor a lecture by Daniel Pipes on the Stanford campus, yielding to the pressure of Beinin’s student acolytes. I understand that Pipes even offered to forgo his customary lecture fee—to no avail. That doesn’t speak well for either organization, and I’d urge them to reconsider. Stanford’s students have had thousands of hours with Joel Beinin. Are a couple of hours with Daniel Pipes that threatening?