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Trouble in the Middle East PDF

206 Pages·1972·12.133 MB·English
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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

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