From: Lawrence DeBivort (debivort@umd5.umd.edu)
Date: Sun 15 Dec 2002 - 23:41:49 GMT
Hi Scott,
Yes, there is no intrinsic reason why Arabs and Muslims and Jews cannot get
along, as many hundreds of years of their history have shown. When I
answered that Israel was the difference, I am referring to Israel as a
political entity, not a religious one (though some Israelis would say there
is no difference. But in Arab and Palestinian eyes there is a world of
difference between the two.
The issue is pretty much about land, though there is so much mutual anger
now that I think it will take more than a 'mere' land settlement to really
put this conflict behind us.
More thoughts interspersed below...
> >I don't think Turkey ever felt they had a dog in that fight, so
> didn't have
> >anything to 'get over.'
> >
> Yet they have an Islamic underpinning, even if secularized after
> Ataturk's
> reforms. Israel didn't seem to have much trouble getting along
> with Islamic
> though secularized Turkey and IIRC there was a point in time when
> relations
> between Israel and Iran weren't all that bad, at least before the Islamic
> revolution and Khomeini rose to power after the fall of the Shah.
Israel has had a decent trade relationship with several countries off and
on: Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt.
Turkey was never Arab and did not feel the sting of losing Arab land when
Israel was founded. Indeed, the fact that the Arabs had revolted against the
Ottoman Empire made it doubly easy for the Turks to establish relations with
Israel. The secularization of Turkey under Ataturk drove the Muslims of
Turkey into a quasi underground role; they had their hands full dealing with
Ankara, Ataturk and Istanbul, and little to offer any Muslim brethren in
Palestine. Let us also remember that many of the Palestinians in 1948 were
Christian Palestinians and not Muslims. So the Islamic ties between Turkey
and Palestine were weak.
Iran did indeed have good trade relations with Israel: Israel received its
oil from Iran for many years, not withstanding the Muslim culture in Iran.
But Persians and Arabs have always had tension between them. Khomeini, IIRC
reversed this and identified Iran with the Palestinians, partly, I would
guess, as a part of his anti-American position. (See my post about US
support for the Shah and SAVAK. (Of course, this was a great shame, for the
US had done important socio-economic development assistance programming in
Iran (Point Four), and had US policy people not chosen to get in bed with
the Shah, we would probably have retained Iran as a genuine friend. The
Shah had a pretty effective PR campaign aimed at the US, and the emerging
suppression in Iran by the Shah came, I think, as a genuine surprise to us,
when we finally got around to noticing it. Also: the Iranian people
remembered our overthrow of the new and freely elected Prime Mossadegh in
1953 (Kermit Roosevelt, bags of money, literally, and the CIA)....
> Israel can get along with Muslims and/or Arabs. I suppose Turks
> and Iranians
> being non-Arab may have carried a little weight in Israel's
> better relations
> with Turkey and pre-revolution Iran. Not all Arabs seem to want
> to run Jews
> into the sea it seems. King Husayn stands as shining example of
> burying the
> hatchet, even if he was well...a King, thus making Jordanian claims to
> modern democracy tenuous at best. OTOH ibn Saud he wasn't.
Yes, agreed. I see no religious reason to think that a resolution could not
be fashioned.
Incidentally, even people like bin Laden frame their demands of the US and
the West in political and cultural terms.
Of course, the fundamentalist crazies on all sides are trying to convince us
that we are locked in mortal combat with other religions, but this seems
like patent nonsense to me.
Cheers,
Lawry
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