Middle East - Anthony Ham [37]
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The officially secular Phalange army in Lebanon was established in 1936 by Pierre Gemayel as a youth movement, inspired by his observations of Nazi party organisation at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.
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NEW FORCES OF ARAB RESISTANCE
All too often, the Arab-Israeli conflict, as with so many other events in the Middle East, has been explained away as a religious war between Jews and Muslims. There has at times indeed been a religious dimension, especially in recent years with the rise of Hamas in the Palestinian Territories and the religious right in Israel. But this has always been fundamentally a conflict over land, as was shown in the years following Israel’s independence. Governments – from the Baath parties of Syria and Iraq to Nasser’s Egypt – invariably framed their demands in purely secular terms.
It again became clear after the formation in 1964 of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Although opposed by Jordan, which was itself keen to carry the banner of Palestinian leadership, the PLO enjoyed the support of the newly formed Arab League. The Palestine National Council (PNC) was established within the PLO as its executive body – the closest thing to a Palestinian government in exile. The PLO served as an umbrella organisation for an extraordinary roll-call of groups that ranged from purely military wings to communist ideologues. Militant Islamic factions were, at the time, small and drew only limited support.
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Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, by Robert Fisk, ranges far beyond Lebanon’s borders and is a classic account of the issues that resonate throughout the region. His The Great War for Civilisation is similarly outstanding, although not everyone agrees – Fisk’s polemical style has made him a controversial figure, especially among right-wing Israelis.
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Just as the PLO was at risk of dissolving into an acrimony born from its singular lack of a united policy, an organisation called the Palestine National Liberation Movement (also known as Al-Fatah) was established. One of the stated aims of both the PLO and Al-Fatah was to train guerrillas for raids on Israel. Al-Fatah emerged from a power struggle as the dominant force within the PLO, and its leader, Yasser Arafat, would become chair of the executive committee of the PLO in 1969 and, later, the PLO’s most recognisable face. Despite paying lip-service to Muslim tenets and invoking the help of Allah, the PLO was more concerned with fighting to recover Palestinian land than waging holy war. Moderates the PLO’s members were not, preaching fire and brimstone retribution upon the Israelis and their allies. But nor were they religious fanatics.
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Arafat, by the Palestinian writer Said K Aburish, is a highly critical look at one of the Middle East’s most intriguing yet flawed personalities. Arafat: The Biography, by Tony Walker and Andrew Gowers, is also good.
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But Islam as a political force was starting to stir. Nasser may have been all-powerful, but there was a small group of clerics who saw him, Egyptian or not, as the latest in a long line of godless leaders ruling the country. Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian radical and intellectual, was the most influential, espousing a return to the purity of grassroots Islam. He also prompted the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, who would withdraw from society and prepare for violence and martyrdom in pursuit of a universal Muslim society. Qutb was executed by Nasser in 1966, but the genie could not be put back in the bottle, returning to haunt the region, and the rest of the world, decades later.
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