Tag: Egypt

Barbara Walters, impresario of peace

On By Martin Kramer1 Comment

CELEBRITY journalist Barbara Walters, who died last Friday at the age of 93, owed much of her fame to her interviews with Middle Eastern leaders. These included the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein, Mu‘ammar Qaddhafi, King Hussein of Jordan, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah II of Jordan, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, and Yasir Arafat. 

But none of these interviews made a splash like the one she conducted on November 20, 1977, in a room at the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem. The interviewees: Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.

She interviewed them together, in the tumult of Sadat’s surprise visit to Jerusalem and just after they delivered their addresses to the Knesset. The joint interview was a breakthrough, and Walters later gave a riveting account of how it came about. (Begin told her he had asked Sadat to do it “for the sake of our good friend Barbara,” and Sadat agreed.)

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Walters had scored a scoop. In her memoirs, she called this “the most important interview of my career.” But the answers she got didn’t advance Israel and Egypt toward an agreement by one iota. Walters tried her best, probing for possible concessions from both leaders. “You are always like this, Barbara,” Sadat gently chided her. “Politics cannot be conducted like this.” Her reply: “I have to keep trying.” 

The bonhomie in the room failed to conceal the deep differences between Begin and Sadat, in those earliest days of a negotiation that would last years. Journalism isn’t diplomacy: divergent interests can’t be reconciled by media celebrities operating in the glare of lights. Sadat used Walters, and before her Walter Cronkite (who’d spliced together interviews with Sadat and Begin) to push a distracted Carter administration into action. Once U.S. diplomacy kicked in, the news blackout went up, and even Walters found herself prowling the perimeter of Camp David.

Fraternize? Already?

A footnote to the Knesset interview has been forgotten, but deserves a retelling. The tireless Walters was already on the hunt for her next scoop, and she opened the interview with a series of questions meant to set it up. The exchange went like this:

Walters: After tomorrow, your ambassadors, for example, your two ambassadors in Washington can meet and talk? 

Sadat: Why not? 

Walters: Well, because they never have before. 

Sadat: It has never happened, yes. But, as I said today, we are ready. 

Begin: There shall always be a beginning and I can only express my deep satisfaction at the words uttered by the president. I do hope that, starting from tomorrow, the ambassadors of Egypt and Israel all over the world will give common interviews with journalists and express their opinions and that will apply also to the United Nations. 

(Watch this exchange here, at minute 19:45.)

This back-and-forth confused Egyptian ambassadors all over the world. Sadat’s visit had already plunged Egypt’s foreign ministry into turmoil: the foreign minister, Ismail Fahmy, had resigned two days before the trip. Sadat’s remarks in Jerusalem now deepened the uncertainty, complicated by his answer to another question posed by Walters: “Do you still consider that you are in a state of war?” Sadat: “Unfortunately, yes.”

A “diplomatic source” tried to clarify the situation for the New York Times:

Mr. Sadat’s televised sessions in Jerusalem left Egyptian ambassadors abroad unsure whether they, too, should begin fraternizing with Israeli counterparts. The instructions now emanating from Cairo are that the President’s trip was an exceptional diplomatic maneuver and should not be construed as a signal for warmer contacts.

This did not take into account the dogged determination of Barbara Walters.

Walters counted among her Washington friends the suave Ashraf Ghorbal, Egyptian ambassador and an old pro. A Harvard PhD, he had been in the Egyptian diplomatic service for almost thirty years. He ran the Egyptian interests section in Washington after 1967, did a stint as a security adviser and press spokesperson for Sadat, and returned to Washington as ambassador upon the resumption of U.S.-Egyptian relations in 1974. Ghorbal knew how to roll with the punches. Unlike Fahmy, with whom he had a sharp rivalry, he would stick with Sadat. (Rumors even labelled him a candidate for foreign minister.) But how far would he go? This is what Barbara Walters set out to test.

Who’s coming to dinner?

As soon as Sadat left Jerusalem, she went straight to Ghorbal and to Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Simcha Dinitz, another career pro. Would they agree to be interviewed together on ABC News’s Sunday afternoon weekly, Issues and Answers? A foreign ambassador couldn’t dream of more media exposure than that. 

Dinitz agreed, but Ghorbal demurred. He was prepared to meet Dinitz, but not on television. Fine; would Ghorbal meet Dinitz before an audience? Ghorbal agreed, provided the meeting was off the record.

How could Walters leverage an off-the-record meeting into the talk of the town? Her solution: invite an A-list of officials and media celebrities to dinner. ABC, Walters’ network, booked a banquet room at the Madison Hotel, and she invited fifty people to dinner in honor of the two ambassadors. Yes, it would be off the record, but word would reach all the right people. Perhaps that would set the stage for another scoop. After all, the Israeli-Egyptian show had only just begun.

The list of RSVPs glittered. From the Carter administration: Zbigniew Brzezinski (National Security Advisor), Hamilton Jordan (President Carter’s chief political advisor), and Robert Strauss (U.S. Trade Representative). From the media: Roone Arledge (president of ABC News, and co-host of the dinner), Ben Bradlee (Washington Post editor), Art Buchwald (Washington Post columnist), Sam Donaldson (ABC White House correspondent), Katherine Graham (Washington Post owner), Peter Jennings (ABC chief foreign correspondent), Sally Quinn (Washington Post style reporter), and William Safire (New York Times columnist). From the Hill: Tip O’Neill (House Speaker), Jim Wright (House Majority Leader), and Abe Ribicoff (an influential Jewish senator). From the diplomatic corps: Ardeshir Zahedi (Iran’s flamboyant ambassador). 

And the guest of guests: Henry Kissinger, who as secretary of state in the previous Nixon administration negotiated not one but two military disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt, in 1974 and 1975.

Dinner was served on the evening of December 4. When Kissinger’s turn came to speak, he quipped: “I have not addressed such a distinguished audience since dining alone in the Hall of Mirrors” at Versailles. But the significance of the evening didn’t arise from the toast offered by Kissinger, or the compliments exchanged by Ghorbal and Dinitz (for which there is no record). Rather, it brought some of the Jerusalem pageant to Washington, and made Washington stand up. People Magazine called the dinner “a political and conversational watershed.” William Safire described the atmosphere for readers of the New York Times: “There, in that room, at that moment, not even the most cynical media satrap present could help but be touched by the drama of the beginning of communication between two strong spokesmen of nations that have spent a generation at war.”

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a “get” for Walters. (That’s the term for landing a big interview.) It was much more of a “give.” The day of the event, the Washington Evening Star ran a gossip piece, describing the planned dinner as a sequel to the carnival of  “media diplomacy” that had unfolded in Cairo and Jerusalem. Walters pushed back: there had been no press release, there would be no broadcast, no ABC cameras, and no diplomacy. “If the dinner could have been held in New York,” she insisted, “I would have had it in my home.” Did the dinner add to her luster? Of course. Did it do anything for her Nielsen ratings? Not a bit.

More than a meal

The dinner had two probable effects. First, it may have helped galvanize the Carter administration into action.

Sadat’s move caught Carter’s people flat-footed. “There’s a general confusion in the Middle East about specifically what we should do next,” Carter wrote in his diary the week after Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem. “The same confusion exists in the White House.” The confusion showed at the Madison Hotel fête. Brzezinski, Carter’s national security advisor, lasted through the drinks but left before the dinner. That raised some eyebrows: why didn’t he stay to propose a toast? Jordan, Carter’s political advisor, was reported to have behaved boorishly: he had one too many, and, staring at Mrs. Ghorbal’s bodice, declared: “I always wanted to see the Pyramids.” True or not, the episode sparked a gossip piece in every newspaper and a full-column news story in the New York Times.

The dinner came as one more reminder to the Carter administration that it had to start looking proficient and proactive, and do it fast. The CIA had just produced a profile of Sadat, saying he had a “Barbara Walters syndrome,” meaning a sense of self-importance inflated by the media. But who could blame him? She took him seriously; Carter’s people didn’t. The administration needed to get the peace process into its pipeline (and out of Kissinger’s shadow). The dinner probably accelerated that.

Second, it launched a different kind of show, starring Ashraf Ghorbal and a succession of Israeli ambassadors. Off-the-record went out the window: Sadat wanted to persuade American Jews to back Israeli concessions, and Begin wanted fast normalization. How to do both? Get the affable Ghorbal in front of American Jewish audiences, in an all-smiles show of camaraderie with Israel’s ambassador. 

So the Ghorbal-and-Dinitz show went on the road, to synagogues and banquet halls. The biggest encore took place a year after the Walters dinner, at an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) luncheon for 250 guests in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. Kissinger delivered his one-liners, Ghorbal and Dinitz talked peace, and Barbara Walters (along with news anchors Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor) received ADL awards for giving “enormous impetus and thrust to the peace process between Israel and Egypt.” The applause must have been thunderous.

In March 1980, the show finally reached America’s big top. Carter had earned the right to play host, having personally hammered out the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel the previous year. To mark the first anniversary of his triumph, he summoned Ghorbal and Ephraim Evron (who’d replaced Dinitz on the Israeli side) to a celebratory reception held in the Grand Entrance Hall of the White House. Carter gave the keynote, and the two ambassadors spoke their well-rehearsed parts. 

Diplomacy and spectacle

“We’ve been like Siamese twins,” Evron said of his many appearances with Ghorbal. “The public was intrigued by it.” Keeping the public intrigued was part of the process. Most of this fell on Ghorbal: by the time he finished in Washington, Dinitz and Evron had been followed by two more Israeli ambassadors. Ghorbal finally retired in 1984. The Washington Post remarked that “the joint appearances of Ghorbal and a succession of Israeli diplomats serving here during the past six years have been one of Washington’s enduring spectacles.” It endured because it was in the Egyptian interest. Ghorbal, like Sadat, understood that if you wanted to get something from Israel, complaining to the White House and the State Department would only take you so far. You had to charm American Jews, an art that Ghorbal perfected.

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What he really thought of it all is hard to say. In his Arabic memoirs, written twenty years into his retirement, he didn’t mention any of it. By then, most of his Egyptian readers probably would have viewed all this elbow-rubbing and glad-handing with Israelis and Jews as bordering on the treasonous. But he did his professional duty, and he did it well.

Barbara Walters went beyond hers. Books on the secret diplomacy behind the Egyptian-Israeli peace deal fill shelves. It’s hard to find even one serious article on the marketing of that peace. When that story finally gets written, Walters should get her own chapter. Naturally, pride of place will go to the famous dual interview in Jerusalem. But perhaps the dinner in Washington left the more lasting legacy. “This was, believe me, a major event,” Walters wrote in her memoirs. “Even today the Egyptian and Israeli ambassadors are rarely at the same dinner.” Indeed, and at this distance in time, it’s all the more extraordinary.

Martin Kramer is the Walter P. Stern fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is writing a book on influential ambassadors from the Middle East.

Nasser’s death, 50 years on

On By Martin Kramer

Fifty years ago last night, on September 28, 1970, at 6:15 pm Cairo time, Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser died. Cause: heart attack. A minute before midnight, Egyptian vice-president Anwar Sadat announced the death to the nation. “Abdul Nasser is more than words,” he said. “He is more immortal than all words.” The funeral took place on October 1. Millions of grieving Egyptians surged around the cortege. A government minister later announced that at least 46 persons died in the crush, and 80 were severely injured.

A scene from Nasser’s funeral. Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Gamal Abdel Nasser Foundation.

Abdul Nasser may have been “more than words,” but that didn’t stop them from flowing, also in the millions. Even some of the contemporary Western commentary lamented his death. 

His departure, wrote the New York Times the next day, “leaves a void that can only add to the chaos already threatening to overwhelm the Middle East.” The Washington Post practically mourned him, praising his “wisdom and underlying political strength,” because he’d recently seemed amenable to American mediation with Israel. Even the Jerusalem Post regretted his demise: “Despite his enmity, Abdul Nasser offered a hope, however slight, which was afforded by no other Arab leader—that of a man strong enough to lead the Arab world to peace.”

True or not? Last year, I published an essay on when and how the unexpected deaths of leaders matter. (Publisher: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.) Below, I excerpt what I wrote about Nasser. 

• •

The crucial question is this: If a leader were to disappear, where would he be in the arc of his life, his career, his vocation? If he is a leader, presumably he has a record of achievement. Is he in the middle of his life’s work, still attending to it? Is he bringing it to a conclusion? Or is it behind him? (This doesn’t directly correlate with age. Sometimes leaders launch early; others do so late.) 

Let me now give an example of an unexpected death that came too late to have a huge effect. Gamal Abdul Nasser and his Free Officers overthrew the Egyptian monarchy in 1952. He soon emerged as the first among equals, then as the unquestioned ruler of Egypt. His biography became identical to Egypt’s history: the Soviet alliance, the Suez war, the Nasserist wave of 1958, the makeup and breakup of union with Syria, the stumble of the Yemen war, and the disaster of the 1967 war with Israel. 

Nasser became diabetic, according to his wife, in 1958. He smoked a hundred cigarettes each eighteen-hour workday, had arteriosclerosis, and suffered acute pain in his legs, so that he relied heavily on painkillers. In 1969, he had a heart attack and spent six weeks in bed. According to his Egyptian physician, this destroyed 40 percent of his cardiac function. A few months later, Nasser appointed Anwar Sadat as vice president. In the summer of 1970, Nasser went on a three-week visit for treatment in Moscow. 

All the while, the Egyptian public was kept completely in the dark; they were told he had influenza. His Soviet doctors urged him to avoid stress, but he ignored them. In 1970, at the close of an Arab summit in Cairo, in the midst of the Black September crisis in Jordan, he suffered another heart attack and died. Sadat later related that he and Nasser had joked about the “poor fellow” who would succeed the president. “It certainly never crossed our minds,” Sadat wrote, “that Nasser would die in the very same month.” 

Because of the illusion of immortality Nasser created, his followers, like the journalist Mohamed Heikal, could claim that he was about to write another great chapter when his life was cut short. And because of that, many old Nasserists believed Nasser couldn’t possibly have died of natural causes. Heikal would later go on to insinuate that Sadat poisoned him. 

But did Nasser’s death, at age 52, really change the course of events? It is interesting to read a Central Intelligence Agency analysis of this, written early in 1971, a few months after Nasser died. It reviewed all the history-making events of Nasser’s tenure, at home and in the region. Then it added this: 

On the face of it, the demise of so powerful and charismatic a leader would appear to mean widespread and fundamental change in the Arab world. And the months since Nasser’s death have indeed seen changes in inter-Arab relations. But these differences have been subtle…This is so because Nasser’s ability to influence events in the Arab world had declined substantially in recent years as a result of the humiliating Egyptian defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967. The other Arab leaders… all felt free to refuse to follow Nasser’s policy direction. In a sense, then, the biggest “post-Nasser” changes had taken place prior to his death.

In other words, he was finished before he was dead; he was already at the end of his arc. 

The late Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami once speculated on what would have happened if Nasser had lived some more years. Just as Sadat did, Nasser probably would have gone to war with Israel to break the post-1967 deadlock. It is an argument Sadat himself made in 1974, when he announced that “if Nasser had lived to this day he would be doing what I am doing.” But Ajami went on to add that had Nasser lived, “his charisma would have continued to fade and weaken, and his supporters would have grown increasingly lukewarm and indifferent to him. His premature and sudden death at 52 probably preserved his legacy and added to its potency.”

Now, there is a debate over the extent of continuity and change between Nasser and Sadat. But we can agree that Nasser’s death in 1970 was less consequential than, say, his death would have been in 1954. This date has not been selected at random. In October 1954, Nasser gave a speech in the central square of Alexandria. In the middle of the speech, a would-be assassin, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, fired eight shots at Nasser. All of them missed, Nasser didn’t flinch, and then he began to roll up the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Leaving aside the conspiracy theories (most notably, that Nasser himself engineered the whole thing), the point is this: had Nasser been killed in 1954—before Suez, before the United Arab Republic, before 1967—the effect on Egypt and the region would have been far more profound than the effect of his actual death in 1970. 

Again, in making assessments, one has to ask where the leader stands in the arc of his life. In the middle, toward the end, or is all behind him? In 1954, Nasser was positioned somewhere in the middle—after the revolution, full of ambition, but with little to show for it yet. His death by bullet would have had incalculable effects. By 1970, his great achievements and errors were already in the past, his death by heart attack had fewer effects, and these were moderated by his chosen successor. 

It isn’t that such departures have no consequences. Specialists can always compose a long list of them. But the list shrinks when a leader is simply putting touches on his largely completed project. Of course, it can always be argued that a departed leader had one more move to make, one more trick up his sleeve. But no one has unlimited moves or tricks, the possibilities recede over time, and leaders late in life are sometimes averse to bold initiatives, especially if they have moved to planning for succession.

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End of excerpt. Agree or disagree? Food for thought on this fiftieth anniversary. (For my full assessment of untimely deaths, read my whole essay here. There is an Arabic version right here.)

Cross-posted at the Times of Israel.

Europe defeats Islam

On By Martin Kramer

I summarize four more sessions from my fall course on the introduction to the modern Middle East (Turkey and the Arab lands) at Shalem College in Jerusalem. Below are entries for sessions five through eight. For earlier sessions, go here. As before, I spice up each entry with an insight from the late Bernard Lewis.

Class Five: Islam (reformed) Then Joined Europe. The Tanzimat, the Ottoman reforms of the mid-19th century, are the centerpiece of session five of my intro to the Middle East at Shalem College. Then as now, many in the West complained of misgovernment, corruption, and repression in the East. The Ottoman empire, on the doorstep of Europe, seemed like an affront to enlightened European values. Arbitrary government, a bureaucracy for sale, discrimination against non-Muslim subjects—the list was long. Sound familiar?

Was it that bad? Debatable. But one Ottoman sultan set out both to satisfy Europe and strengthen his own position by pushing through far-reaching reforms. This was Abdülmecid I, the first sultan to speak a European language fluently (French). He reorganized imperial finances, established a civil code and courts outside the Islamic framework, opened a university, formed an education ministry, and more. Abdülmecid announced his plans in two imperial edicts, in 1839 and 1856—promissory notes to European opinion—and he bought the empire time by aligning with the British, who came to his defense, first against an Egyptian invading force, later (in alliance with France) against the Russians in the Crimean War. When it was over, the concert of Europe admitted the Ottomans and recognized the empire’s territorial integrity—until it didn’t.

But the big reform the Europeans demanded was to equalize the status of non-Muslims with that of Muslims in the empire. As Bernard Lewis wrote, in his magisterial Emergence of Modern Turkey, most Muslims viewed this as an “insult and outrage,” and as “a triumph over Islam of the millennial Christian enemy in the West.” The resulting resistance would slow the pace of reforms, but there could be no going back.

It’s hard to interest students in old treaties, but the Treaty of Paris (1856), following the Crimean War, can’t be avoided, since it recognized the Ottoman empire as part of the European system, subject to and guaranteed by its laws (which we now call “international law”).

If you visit the palace at Versailles, you can view this huge painting (three by five meters) that captures the moment. The artist, the Frenchman Édouard-Louis Dubufe, depicts the negotiators of the treaty. The two Ottoman negotiators are here: Mehmed Cemil Bey (the smallish figure by the door in the back), and Ali Pasha (seated on the far right). Contemporary reports say they came well-prepared.

Congress of Paris

Class Six: Britain’s Veiled Protectorate in Egypt. Exactly one class session: in my course on the modern history of the Middle East, that’s all the time we have to cover Egypt from the British occupation in 1882 to the First World War. Talk about compression. So what’s a must-have for this (sixth) session of the class?

Looming large is Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, who basically ran Egypt as British “agent” and “consul-general” from 1883 to 1907. To this day, he remains enveloped in controversy. He took a dim view of the Egyptian capacity for self-rule: “We have to go back to the doubtful and obscure precedents of Pharaonic times to find an epoch when, possibly, Egypt was ruled by Egyptians. Neither, for the present, do they appear to possess the qualities which would render it desirable… to raise them at a bound to the category of autonomous rulers.” And so he ran the country himself. He stabilized the economy, but couldn’t stop the tide of nationalism.

The pigeons came home to roost, so to speak, in 1906, when a party of British officers on a pigeon hunt clashed with villagers in a Nile delta village called Denshawai. An officer died in the altercation, apparently of heatstroke, but several villagers were tried and hanged, others were flogged and sentenced to penal servitude.

The perceived injustice caused a huge uproar. In class, we read the condemnation of Cromer by George Bernard Shaw, and the poem on the executions by Constantine Cavafy. And we read a manifesto by Egyptian nationalist leader Mustafa Kamel, as well as the warden’s report on Ibraham Wardani, the nationalist who in 1910 assassinated Boutros Ghali, by then Egypt’s prime minister, who’d been one of the judges in the Denshawai trial. The stage is set for the later eruption of nationalist revolt against all things British, good or bad.

(My Israeli students also need to hear that in 1903, Theodor Herzl tried to persuade Cromer to open up northern Sinai to Jewish settlement. Cromer feigned interest but eventually nixed the plan. Herzl called him “the most disagreeable Englishman I have ever faced.”)

We end by discussing a passage in Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958). True, he writes, Egyptians

need medical help or education before they can understand, or make use of, an increase in their freedom…. First things come first: there are situations in which—to use a saying satirically attributed to the nihilists by Dostoevsky—boots are superior to Pushkin… The Egyptian peasant needs clothes or medicine before, and more than, personal liberty, but the minimum freedom that he needs today, and the greater degree of freedom that he may need tomorrow, is not some species of freedom peculiar to him, but identical with that of professors, artists and millionaires.

But when is “tomorrow” today? It’s a question that much preoccupied Bernard Lewis. But more on that on another occasion.

Images: Above, the accused at the Denshawai trial; below, the assassinated Boutros Ghali in death. (Both, Wikimedia.)

Egypt 1900s

Class Seven: The Last Ottoman Sultan Standing. By the last quarter of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was in salvage mode. It was bankrupt, its armies couldn’t stave off defeat, and its politics stagnated. But the once-glorious empire refused to give up the ghost. This was due, at least in part, to the resolve of its last effective sultan, Abdülhamid II, who reigned for almost 33 years, from 1876 to 1909. Session seven of my intro class on the Mideast at Shalem College revolves around this enigmatic man, who was controversial while he lived, and who remains so.

The last few years have seen something of an Abdülhamid revival in Turkey. He’s been the hero of a hugely popular television drama series, Payitaht Abdülhamid. High production values combine with a sharp disregard for the record of events (plus a dash of antisemitism), to paint Abdülhamid as a devout paragon of Muslim virtue. This perfectly suits the neo-Ottoman agenda of Turkey’s present ruler, who’s more of an Abdülhamid than an Atatürk. (That’s perhaps why it was persistently rumored that the new mega-airport just opened on the edge of Istanbul would be named after Abdülhamid. For now, it’s just Istanbul Airport.)

So who was the real Abdülhamid? You know the trope of the reform-minded prince who comes to power amid great expectations in the West, only to dash them by sliding into the authoritarian mode, or worse. (Sound familiar, Syria- and Saudi-watchers?) Abdülhamid’s first move as sultan was to promulgate a constitution and convene an elected parliament. Perhaps he thought this would prevent the amputation of Christian-populated provinces in the Balkans.

It didn’t, and a year later, Abdülhamid suspended the constitution and disbanded the parliament. It was his own show after that, and as “Turkey-in-Europe” dwindled, he fell back on the Muslim masses of Asia, to whom he promoted himself as savior-caliph. Massacres of Armenians and Assyrians eventually followed, and Abdülhamid became known as the “Red Sultan” in the European press. The later architects of secular Turkey similarly took a dim view of him.

It was Bernard Lewis, in his landmark Emergence of Modern Turkey, who first took a more favorable tack. “Abdülhamid was far from being the blind, uncompromising, complete reactionary of the historical legend,” he wrote (back in 1960). “On the contrary, he was a willing and active modernizer.” Railroads, telegraphs, schools, libraries, museums—he promoted just about any innovation that wouldn’t weaken his grip on power. No doubt, Abdülhamid deserved a rethink, and some historians have done it meticulously and fairly. But the present fad for him is over the top.

As I remind my Israeli students, Herzl met Abdülhamid in a futile attempt to extract some kind of charter for Zionism. It’s the stuff for another course, but we read Herzl’s verdict from his diary: “My impression of the Sultan was that he is a weak, cowardly, but thoroughly good-natured man. I regard him as neither crafty nor cruel, but as a profoundly unhappy prisoner in whose name a rapacious, infamous, seedy camarilla perpetrates the vilest abominations. If I didn’t have the Zionist movement to look after, I would now go and write an article that would give the poor prisoner his freedom.” It’s ironic, given the Elder-of-Zion treatment of Herzl in the current Turkish telenovela on Abdülhamid.

The Ottoman Empire outlasted Abdülhamid (he was thrown out in a revolution in 1909), but not by long. That it lasted as long as it did, may well have been to his credit.

(Image: Abdülhamid on his way to, or back from, Friday prayer. Herzl gives a vivid account of this spectacle in his diary. “Within less than an hour the most magnificent images rushed past us…”)

Abdulhamid at Selamlik

Class Eight: The War that Made the Middle East. It’s no small challenge to pack the entire First World War into one session (the eighth) of my intro to the Mideast at Shalem College. So I always fail, and end up running over into the next session. In large measure, the Middle East today is the product of that war, so it’s not remote history at all.

There’s the pre-war calculation that put the Ottomans into the war on the side of Germany. There’s the war itself, on multiple fronts, from Gallipoli to Mesopotamia, from Allenby in Palestine to the Arab Revolt (advised by Peter O’Toole… oops, Lawrence of Arabia). There’s the Ottoman-Russian struggle and the internal war on the Armenians.

In parallel, there’s the (double?) dealing: the British promises (such as they were) to the Arabs, the Sykes-Picot partition accord, the Balfour Declaration. Lots of maps to decipher, lots of texts to parse, and it can overwhelm the undergrad student. On top of that, part of the session gets eaten up explaining what the wider war was all about. That involves explaining why 20 million died, just as an aside.

In the end, I try to impress upon the students one major takeaway: the war tore up the old map, and the new one, based on a mix of great power interests and “national self-determination,” produced an endemic instability. But as I also remind my Israeli students, for the foresighted (such as the Zionists), the war provided a one-and-only opportunity to realize fantastic plans. The upset was total; no one in 1914 could have imagined what the Middle East would look like only 20 years later.

One aspect of the war was a source of grief for Bernard Lewis. He took the view that the Ottoman regime didn’t have a plan to destroy the Armenians, whose wholesale expulsion and massacre in 1915 didn’t constitute genocide. He said as much in an interview to France’s leading newspaper in 1993, and Armenian groups took him to court over it. It’s a complicated story; you’ll find Lewis’s side of it in chapter 11 (“Judgment in Paris”) of his memoirs.

His own final verdict is interesting: “If the word ‘genocide’ is to be used in its original and legal meaning… then the appropriateness of this term to the Armenian massacres of 1915 remains unproven. However, language changes, and looking at this again twenty years later it is clear that the word ‘genocide’ has developed a broader and less precise meaning today.” I suppose that meant Lewis came to acquiesce in the historicity of the Armenian genocide, in line with current-day usage. The question is, at what point does the term “genocide” become so elastic and ubiquitous in common usage that it ceases to move us? We may be past that point already.

Image: General Allenby, fresh from his conquest of Jerusalem, reads his proclamation to the city’s inhabitants, December 11, 1917 (Wikimedia).

Allenby in Jerusalem