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    Untangling the Middle East: A Guide to the Past, Present, and Future of the World's Most Chaotic Region
    Untangling the Middle East: A Guide to the Past, Present, and Future of the World's Most Chaotic Region
    Untangling the Middle East: A Guide to the Past, Present, and Future of the World's Most Chaotic Region
    Ebook460 pages8 hours

    Untangling the Middle East: A Guide to the Past, Present, and Future of the World's Most Chaotic Region

    By Ori Z Soltes

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    A lucid and engaging breakdown of the history, culture, and politics that define today’s Middle East.

    Untangling the Middle East is a layman’s guide to the historypolitical, religious, and culturalthat led us to the current challenges plaguing the Middle East. It covers the major interests and actors in the region, and helps to spin a narrative of the evolution of violence and conflict in this age-old hotbed of unrest.

    There are no easy answers or simple explanations to be found here, only a clear-eyed and engaging recounting of the many factors that have brought this region to where it is today. Whether he is discussing the history of the Semitic peoples or the birth of Islam in the region, Soltes brings insight and much needed context to the people, places, and things that make up the inheritance of today’s Middle East. He possesses the historian’s appreciation for detail and the teacher’s knack for fashioning coherence out of complex material. This book should be a go-to resource for a solid foundation in understanding the Middle East and a bulwark against the disinformation regarding this region that is often found on cable television or in speeches on the campaign trail.

    The Middle East may be a mess but it need not be a mystery, with the help of this indispensable guide.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateAug 22, 2017
    ISBN9781510717817
    Untangling the Middle East: A Guide to the Past, Present, and Future of the World's Most Chaotic Region
    Author

    Ori Z Soltes

    Ori Z Soltes teaches at Georgetown University across a range of disciplines, from art his­tory and theology to philosophy and political history. He is the former Director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum.

    Read more from Ori Z Soltes

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      Book preview

      Untangling the Middle East - Ori Z Soltes

      Cover Page of Untangling the Middle EastHalf Title of Untangling the Middle EastTitle Page of Untangling the Middle East

      Copyright © 2017 by Ori Soltes

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

      Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com.

      Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

      Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

      Cover design by Rain Saukas

      Cover illustration by iStock

      Print ISBN: 978–1–5107–1779–4

      Ebook ISBN: 978–1–5107–1781–7

      Printed in the United States of America.

      In loving memory

      of my mother-in-law, Judith,

      who never stopped inquiring

      into this web,

      among so many others.

      CONTENTS

      Preface

      Acknowledgments

      Maps

      Timeline

      Introduction

      Part One: Definitions

        1.   Semites and Arabs

        2.   Muhammad and the Birth of Islam

        3.   Arab, Muslim, and Jew; Israeli and Palestinian

      Part Two: Historical Associations and Aspirations

        4.   The Era of the Crusades

        5.   Nationalism among the Arabs

        6.   Jewish Nationalism

        7.   Aspirations, Interferences, and Conflicts into the Twentieth Century

      Part Three: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Remaking of the Middle East

        8.   World War II, the Holocaust, and the Transformations of Israel-Palestine

        9.   Governance Issues in the Middle East—Before and After 1948

      Part Four: The Paradoxes of Israel/Palestine

      10.   Israel and the Palestinians

      11.   The Palestinians and Israel

      12.   The United States, the International Community, and Israel-Palestine

      Part Five: Cross-Regional Issues and the Future of the Middle East

      13.   The Larger Arab Contexts of Peace and War

      14.   Wider Contexts of Peace and War

      15.   Unfinished Epilogues—Hope and Despair; Memory and Forgetting

      Afterword

      Appendices

      Bibliography

      Index

      Endnotes

      PREFACE

      Let me begin by saying what the reader of this volume will not walk away with: a solution to all the problems of the Middle East. Some suggestions that point in that direction are offered, but no unequivocal road map. On the other hand, what you will come away with is a sense of why there are no simple answers; of how extraordinarily complex the region is—and has been, for millennia. And as a bonus, you will understand that any politician or pundit who offers a simple solution—If X only did this! or If Y only did that!—either has no idea what s/he is talking about, or is simply lying.

      All too often, the Middle East is considered from too narrow a viewpoint, even by those not trying to be political or clever. Many are the experts and authorities who understand the ins and outs of Arab culture or of Islam or of the Israelis or the Iraqis or the Egyptians. But rarely does one encounter a discussion that encompasses the extraordinary array of complications that interweave one another to yield an answer to two essential questions: why is this region so riven by conflict and why is it so difficult to understand for outsiders? The intention of this volume is to make accessible to an intelligent reader an answer to these intertwined questions.

      In so doing, its goal is primarily to make its readers wary of any authority—academic, journalistic, or political—who glibly asserts that the problem is simply this or the solution simply that. Thus, its intention is to function as a primer: each of the areas encompassed can be studied in much greater detail in other works mentioned in the endnotes and bibliography.¹ Its goal is not to propose a given solution, in fact, but to follow the lead offered in Athens more than twenty-four centuries ago by Plato’s Socrates. In dialogue after dialogue he asserted that, if the truth on any given matter were not easily attainable, the only hope for even coming close to it would be through elengkhos—cross-examination. Socratic-Platonic elengkhos is a close and continuous multilayered dialogue engaged in by determined intellectual explorers. What follows is also an elengkhos of sorts.

      Moreover, I must stress that the focus of this volume is to explore a very complex past history that is full of paradoxes and contradictions—as opposed to emphasizing the present and the future. While I do bring the discussion up to the present day and even offer a few ideas for dealing with some of the issues in the region that look toward the future, (such as a three-state Israel-Palestine solution), the reader and I must recognize two absolutes in the discussion that follows. The first is that my primary goal is to approach the present-future with a solid grounding in the layers and intertwinings that define the past, so much of which is typically ignored as the politicians and pundits hold forth.

      The second is that the region is so extraordinarily volatile that changes can and do occur—and certainly have occurred—with breathtaking speed. A situation that I might discuss in these pages as part of the present may well have been superseded by the time this volume hits the light of day and ends up in the reader’s hands. Thus, the concluding parts of my discussion are intended to be understood as tentative and temporary, even as the verities of the past encompassed in most of my chapters are so painfully enduring.

      To this I must add that I began writing this narrative in 2004, when Ariel Sharon was still physically healthy and serving as the prime minster of Israel, and Yassir Arafat was alive and in charge of the Palestinian Authority. A good deal of water has passed under the myriad bridges of this discussion since then, from the eclipse of these two figures and the concomitant changes—multiple changes—in the leadership structures of those they once led, to the Israel-Gaza explosion; from the advent of ISIS to the so-called Arab spring to shifts in Iran’s position in the world, to say nothing of the expanding number of real and imagined, potential and actual flash points, from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iraq and Syria and Turkey to Yemen and the Sudan.

      I have continued to update in accordance with new developments, even as current events continue to corroborate the essential themes and issues that I discuss through the majority of the text. By the time these words are being read there will have been further events and changes that will shift current nuances and perhaps future consequences but will further validate the time spent trying to understand the layered and interwoven past that has fed into the layered and interwoven array of presents in which we find the region and ourselves.

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      It is my pleasure to acknowledge several individuals who were essential to the writing of this narrative. My first explorations of this topic were limited to the Arab-Israeli Conflict, which was the name of a course I was given the opportunity to teach many times in the 1980s at Siegel College (then known as the Cleveland College of Jewish Studies), for which opportunity I am grateful to David S. Ariel, then-president of the college. My colleagues, Moshe Berger and Bernie Steinberg, and my students were invaluable in helping me to think more clearly and hone my ideas. It was in preparing that course for the first time that I realized that one could not understand the Arab-Israeli conflict without understanding the much larger arena of the Middle East in which such a range of conflicts was taking place—and had been taking place for centuries. I also began to realize that the vast array of materials on the topic always seemed to include parts of it and exclude other parts.

      In the 1990s, I was privileged to lecture on the broader aspects of the Middle East and its complexities under the umbrella of a number of organizations, particularly Hadassah, the Conference on Alternatives in Jewish Education, and Washington and Lee University’s Summer Alumni College, which provided further opportunities to research and think about this subject. I thank their leaders (particularly Rob Fure of W&L) for such enriching opportunities.

      Most significantly, my good friend Mark A. Smith, more forceful than others in the past had been, pushed me to write things down, and read and commented on the first draft of the manuscript. His encouragement and more importantly his astuteness were essentials for turning verbal observations into written ones. Another good friend, Allison Archambault read the next draft with her usual sensitivity to nuance of both style and content. I am extremely grateful to both of them: to Mark for pushing me to the starting line and to Allison for pulling me toward the finish line.

      Finally, I am grateful to Jeremy Kay, both for his editorial acumen and for his decision to get me to the finish line by entering a very crowded arena with this publication in its first iteration, in 2009; and to Jerrod MacFarlane, for his pulling it into the astonishing realm of Skyhorse Publishing in this second, expanded version of my narrative, to say nothing of his extremely astute editorial recommendations.

      Summer, 2016

      Washington, DC

      The Sykes-Picot agreement projecting a division of the region between British and French spheres of influence after World War I.

      The 1947 UN proposal—one of half a dozen between 1930 and 1947—for dividing Western Palestine into two states: one Jewish and one Muslim/Christian Arab.

      Sunni Arab, Shi’i Arab, and Kurdish population areas in Iraq and its environs; since 2003, the strife among these three groups has been constant.

      TIMELINE

      BCE

      CE

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