The essence of the Arab mystery is: Don’t predict the unpredictable. Don’t expect to see what you set out in search of. Don’t dig deeper. Remember the Curse of Tutenkhamen

By Bala Chandran

Bala Chandran

The desert, says the Bedouin, is an illusionist. Overnight, mighty sand dunes would shift places, harmless plateaux would change into treacherous quicksands and a lusty oasis would turn out to be a hopeless mirage. The desert doesn’t follow the rationale as humans know it. In other words, it doesn’t yield to the art of disambiguation.

The illusion is not just about the desert; it’s also about desert politics. Which is why, perhaps, Middle East politics would read like a misspelt Finnegans Wake, confusion worst confounded, to many who are not initiated into its fabled history of ironies and contradictions.

If Israel was born out of a need to resettle the tribe of Judah, it was also expected to consolidate the tribe of Ishmail. But as the desert must surely show its sleight of hand, the Arabs became more divided since 1948 than they ever were in the last one millennium and more.

Four wars and 57 years later, the Arabs, instead of wiping Israel off the map, have lost more land to the Jews, and are also saddled with what Israel considered its own baggage — the Palestinian refugees. Instead of steeling their resolve to fight the ‘expansionist’ policies of the Zionist regime, something they never tire of claiming in public, the Arab leaders and their friends abroad ended up, in effect, helping Israel to swell its demographic underbelly by sending Jews from their respective countries to their ‘Promised Land’.

Until the 1980s, the Arab confidence in the ‘ultimate’ and ‘inevitable’ disintegration of the Zionist State was rooted in the region’s demographic and geographic imperatives. A small island of Pharisees surrounded by an ocean of Arabs, waiting to be lapped up at the latter’s will. It was not an unrealistic assessment in the given situation.

But unknown to most of the Arab world, some of them were on a ‘Swell Israel’ mission. To quote one instance: On January 3, 1985, a secret airlift, aided and abetted by a few Afro-Arab nations led by Sudan, transported some 25,000 Falashas or Black Jews from Ethiopia to Israel. Six years later, it was augmented by another 10,000 by the same route. Add to this the nearly four million Russian Jews, most of whom came to their ‘fatherland’ after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and we know what put paid to the demographic designs the Arab leaders had on Israel. Significantly, rather ironically, most of the able-bodied men from these immigrant Jews were straightaway drafted into the Israeli armed forces, with a substantial number getting assigned to defend the extended Jewish empire in the Gaza and the West Bank.

While campaigning for global isolation of Israel in public, many Arab nations thought nothing of doing business with it. Some of them, until recently, had even allowed the Jewish State to set up full-fledged trade offices in their capitals (but made sure the Israeli flag was not flying on the building). Trade, they argued, should not be politicised. And the world was told that the very existence of Israel was an affront to Arab pride.

Again, for the gilded sheikhs of the Arab peninsula, Haifa, the Israeli resort city, is as preferred a tourist spot as Acapulco or St Tropez. And as for their women, the fashion divas of Tel Aviv are as much sought after as their counterparts in Paris and Milan. Local media have recently carried stories about Arab women buying undergarments embossed with — hold your breath, the Star of David.

No doubt, officially, Israel is still the enemy number one for every Arab — man, woman and child. And, in all earnest, the Arab leaders keep trying to get their act together in evolving a unified response to Zionist designs. But the problem, as TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) said, is that Arab leaders talk to each other with their heads buried in a deep sack, with the result that before they confuse the world, they are confused themselves.

Dogs of War: An Iraqi soldier takes a break during a US Marines raid in Haditha , May 2005 AP Photo

Arabian history’s catacombs are filled with great men who began, to paraphrase Will Durant’s tribute to Napoleon, as the sons of revolution, but ended up as the sons-in-law of reaction; men who were born to lead, but who, eventually, went astray; men whose deaths were interned in mystery; who were feted by their people, but died in the collective anger of the same people

The call for democratising the Arab world and reforming the society can be heard ringing from every Arab capital these days. A dozen-a-day summits and seminars are held and addressed not by some out-of-job political activists but by the potentates themselves. Imagine the picture of an Arab ruler appealing to his people to democratise his own iron-clad regime! And imagine dozens of them pontificating at some five-star summit over why democracy is the only way to the future; but hastening to add that it should come on its own steam, which means: Not yet.

Many of them do boast about representatory parliaments which, in effect, are no better than royal courts stuffed with cherry-picked members. When they pass laws, they don’t come out as legislative decisions, but as ‘decrees’ from His Highness or His Majesty.

Iraq, perhaps, provides the most striking example of the Arab irony. A country divided into 65 percent Shia and 35 percent Sunni has been ruled by the latter, as they claim, since the birth of Islam. And now, when they are losing power, they cry foul. The Iraqi insurgency, which is undoubtedly Sunni, is not just about throwing the US occupation forces out of the country, but equally about throwing the Shia-Kurd alliance out of power.

Arabian history’s catacombs are filled with great men who began, to paraphrase Will Durant’s tribute to Napoleon, as the sons of revolution, but ended up as the sons-in-law of reaction; men who were born to lead, but who, eventually, went astray; men whose lives were public exhibits, but whose deaths were interned in deep mystery; men who were feted by their people, but died in the collective anger of the same people.

Currently, the Middle East is in the middle of mourning two of its iconic leaders, both of whom came to be identified with shaping the destiny of their respective people. Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat — both lived for peace and, quite paradoxically, died violent and unnatural deaths.

Ten years ago, on November 4, 1995, Rabin was addressing a peace rally in Jerusalem when he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet. The assassin was not a Palestinian, but an ultra-rightist Jew; Rabin was killed not for being a non-Jew, but for not being enough of a Jew. He was seen by the fundamentalist Jew as a ‘soft Jew’ who made too many concessions to the Palestinians.

Rabin’s death was preceded 14 years earlier by a similarly bloody assassination of another man who dared to talk peace — Anwar Sadat of Egypt. Both started their lives as fighters in fatigues, later became crusaders for peace, and eventually died, as irony would have it, at the hands of the same people whose lives they wanted to make peaceful.

Yasser Arafat died not as violently as Rabin or Sadat did. He died visibly and gradually, like a horse in the desert. Arafat passed away on November 11, 2004 in a military hospital near Paris, after being in coma for a week. Prior to that, he had been sinking in his cramped, ill-lit, besieged tenement-cum-office in the West Bank where he had been virtually kept a prisoner by the Israeli forces.

One year on, the exact cause of his death remains a matter of debate and conjecture. Was Arafat poisoned? Was he suffering from aids? Was he a cancer patient? All the three causes have found near-acceptance at some point or the other, but never fully endorsed, officially or otherwise.

Who could have wanted Arafat dead? Could it be the hotheads in Hamas? Or his own confidants like Mohammad Dahlan, who had once reportedly drawn his pistol at his leader during a heated argument? Could it be his political rivals, some of those who were actually taking orders from Tel Aviv and Washington by then? Or could it be his own family which alone was privy to the millions he had invested in foreign stocks and secret banks?

We would never know, perhaps. Last month, a report released by a ministerial commission set up to investigate the possible cause of Arafat’s death claimed that the investigations could not conclude whether he died naturally or was killed.

Unlike Arafat and Rabin, Rafiq Hariri of Lebanon was not a people’s man. He belonged to Lebanon’s super elite who lived a charmed life with the help of the billions he made in Saudi Arabia. If Arafat made millions from politics, as his critics say, Hariri spent millions to earn a place in politics. Modern Beirut is said to be a living monument to the man’s corporate philanthropy.

Enter Irony. Arafat’s death relieved even his comrades; Hariri’s incensed his worst adversaries. Arafat’s ‘martyrdom’ was expected to unleash anarchy in Palestine; it brought relative peace and order to its people. Hariri’s violent assassination was meant to tighten the Syrian stranglehold around Lebanon. Instead, it brought about the Cedar Revolution that bundled the Syrians out after 30 years of a surrogate dictatorship.

The essence of the Arab mystery is: Don’t predict the unpredictable. Don’t expect to see what you set out in search of. And should you decide to dig deeper, remember there is something called the Curse of Tutenkhamen.

So here’s something to ponder for a poor student of history called George W. Bush: Beware of the Pharaohnen curse, for no one really escaped it in nearly three thousand five hundred years.

The writer is a journalist based in the Gulf