Trouble in the Middle East

206 Pages·1972·12.133 MB·English

by  Webb McKinley

Trouble in the Middle East: two soldiers of the United Nations Emergency
Force stand guard in the Gaza Strip, between Egypt and Israel (1957).
Webb McKinley
TROUBLE IN THE
MIDDLE EAST
Illustrated with Photographs
FRANKLIN WATTS | New York | 1972
All photographs courtesy The Associated Tress
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
McKinley, Webb.
Trouble in the Middle East.
SUMMARY: A history of the Middle East
with emphasis on the causes and events of the
twentieth-century struggles between Jews and
Arabs.
1. Near East-Politics-Juvenile literature.
[1. Near East-History] I. Title.
DS62.8.M33 320.9'56'04 74-189119
ISBN 0-531-02582-9
Copyright © 1972 by The Associated Press
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2
DS
62
-8
M3 3
CONTENTS
Introduction:
The Two Vows 3
I What It’s Like 7
II And Oil 22
III The Ancient Past 27
IV Enter the Arabs 34
V The Ottoman Empire 52
VI Arabs and Jews 65
VII World War I 69
VIII Trouble in Palestine 85
IX The Birth of Israel 91
X Nasser and the Arabs 104
XI The Non-Arab States 136
XII Israel and the Arabs 144
XIII The Suez-Sinai War 154
XIV The Six-Day War 163
XV The Quest for Peace 174
Index 197
TZ Lll laky
® BIAS-SAUDI ARAB
TROUBLE IN THE
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL
Tripoli
AND ITS NEIGHBORS
Baalbek
LEBANON
Beirut
V SYRI>
" •Damascus
'Mt. Herman
I "GOLAN
v HEIGHTS"
I {from Syria)
Acre)* Sea of
Haifa Galilee
Nazareth
ISRAEL "LEFT
BANK"
Tel-Aviv-Jaffa (from
Jordan) •Amman
Ashdod^ Jerusalem?*
t Hebron
Gaza /
"GAZA STRIP"/;
(from Egypt) //
) Beer-Sheba ,, DEAD SEA
\ Sodom
/ JORDAN
, f
NILE DELTA (TRANS-JORDAN
Suez Cana!
Ismailiafe
Petra
Bitter Lake
Cairo
v Memphis
•> 'Aqaba
SINAI PENINSULA
(from Egypt)
Sharm-
el-Sheikh
RED SEA
Introduction
THE TWO VOWS
The vows were made two months and three days apart, but
they clashed like the sound of swords.
When the first vow was made, a few fires still burned in
Jerusalem, and smoke and dust from the battle hung in its
usually crystal air.
“We have returned to our holiest of holy places,” the sol¬
dier said, “never to be parted from it again.”
The words were spoken by General Moshe Dayan, defense
minister of Israel, as he stood for the first time in nineteen
years before the Wailing Wall. It was 2:00 on the third
p.m.
day of the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors,
and for Dayan they were words of triumph. Only four hours
previously, Israeli troops had broken through St. Stephen’s
Gate into the old, Arab-held city. It had been a punishing bat¬
tle. Jordan’s Arab Legion was the best of the fighting forces,
and the Legionnaires were fighting for a prize they, too, held
dear.
It was the sacred city and the sacred area prized by three
religions, and the Jews’ Wailing Wall was in the very heart of
it.
Three more days of fighting were ahead; thousands were
still to die in this swift war. Nonetheless, for Israelis, the emo¬
tional peak had been reached. They had taken all Jerusalem,
the city of God. For the first time in nearly two thousand years,
3
the Jews—not the Romans, Greeks, Arabs, or Turks, not the
British or Jordanians—were in control of the holiest of holy
places.
So, on June 7, 1967, Dayan stood there. It was at the west¬
ern wall of the holy area, believed to be the only remaining
part of the Second Temple, which the Romans had destroyed
in 70. First, in keeping with Jewish tradition, Dayan wrote
a.d.
a note—a prayer for peace in Israel—and inserted the paper in
a crack between the large, honey-colored stones. Then he
made his vow, . . never to be parted. . . .”
The second vow, an Arabian vow, was made the following
August 10, in a modest stone palace in Amman, the capital of
Jordan. On the eve of his fifteenth anniversary as ruler of this
desert state, Jordan’s King Hussein said: “We are determined
not to cede any part of our beloved land or any stone of our sa¬
cred Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the sacred city to Arabs, Moslems,
and all believers in the world. Jordan,” he said, “is determined
to die” to regain it.
These were words as defiant or desperate, as Dayan’s were
triumphant. Spoken two months after the end of the June war,
the words were uttered from the depths of humiliation. The
Jews had returned to Jerusalem, and the Arabs had, for the first
time since the Crusades, been denied it. Worse for them, this
was their third defeat in nineteen years at the hands of the
Israelis—and this time they had lost much more than their
pride. Not only was Jerusalem gone, but also Jordan’s entire
West Bank, the richest part of the country and the Arabs’ only
gain in the first Palestine War in 1948. Egypt had lost the Sinai
peninsula. The Suez Canal was closed. The Gaza Strip, with its
teeming refugee population, was in Israeli hands. So was Syr¬
ia s tactically favored Golan Heights, looking down on the Jor¬
dan Valley and the Israeli settlements beside the Sea of Gali¬
lee.
So, two vows were made: one to stay in Jerusalem and one
to regain it at all costs. Did these two men—the soldier and the
king, the Jew and the Arab—mean them? True, words are often
4
TROUBLE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Israeli soldiers crowd around General Moshe Dayan.
THE TWO VOWS 5
like the desert winds in the Middle East. They blow and are
gone. In the Arab world, in particular, they are often intended
only as local zephyrs to cool the home audience. But these
vows were made by men known for conviction and courage.
Their words had the ring of sincerity and the force of history
behind them.
Five years later, in 1972, the king backed away a little from
his do-or-die stand. He proposed a new status for Jerusalem
in which Jews and Arabs would share, or perhaps divide, sov¬
ereignty. But it was an empty-handed gesture, and Dayan scorned
it as “worse than absurd,” and other Arab leaders rejected it
angrily. The two vows were there, as if entrenched in history.
With their stark contrasts of aim and promise, they might
have symbolized, in a way, the story of the Middle East, its
hopes and tragedies, the deep split in its personality, the tre¬
mendous difficulties that have confronted the peacemakers,
and the dangers for the rest of the world.
They were only symbolic of the dangers, of course. The
peril did not lie so much in a showdown between Israel and
Jordan, but in another general Israeli-Arab war. Strife in the
Middle East continually becomes larger than itself. The super¬
countries—the United States and the Soviet Union—waited in
the wings, supporting the actors with varying enthusiasm,
whispering cues, and going quite frequently unheard.
6
TROUBLE IN THE MIDDLE EAST