Liberating the Fellah
A new Iraqi blog has appeared, which, like others of its type, seems to be essential for gaining a proper perspective on what is going on there--essential because no information like this comes from the media. The blogger makes it clear that, whatever motives you may wish to ascribe to it, the USA is a truly revolutionary force in the region: a force for liberation (my mind keeps turning to comparisons with revolutionary France--possibly the last time that nation stood for something).
This perspective also shows how closely the USA and Israel are allied in their historical meaning for the Arab world. Both are agents of freedom in that world and are opposed by its privileged classes. The situation in Israel is now obscured by layers of tragedy, but we need only turn to solid historical evidence to uncover what has happened there. In a chapter entitled Liberating the Fellah found in a collection of works by Maurice Samuel (The Worlds of Maurice Samuel)written circa 1931, one finds the following as part of the discussion of the effects of Jewish immigration into what the Arabs then called southern Syria,
There is only one way out for him [the Arab peasant], and that is bound up with the entire work of Jewish colonization. An increase in immigration creates a larger demand for vegetables, eggs, poultry, etc. The capital for the introduction of these new features can be provided only by a sale of part of the land at the prices which the Jews are willing to pay for it.
But Jewish immigration is opposed by the Arab leadership on political grounds. And emergence of an independent fellaheen class is felt properly to be a danger to its rule. After his visit to Palestine, Ramsay MacDonald [future PM of the UK] wrote:
In studying Zionism in Palestine, I found changes with which I was familiar producing reactions with which I was equally familiar. The land of Palestine is held by large owners, and the same class has concentrated in its hands the ownership of towns, the employment of labor and trade. More than that, it has ruled, collected taxes, led an obedient people. All this is threatened. Palestinian social economics has had its foundations removed by the ending of the Turkish occupation.... The winds of Europe are blowing in upon them and they cannot stand the cutting blast. They see the coming shadow of a cultivator protected in his labor and property, they see the end of unjust exactions, and they see their power vanishing and they are fighting for their lives.... The Arab leaders are in possession. They are conservative and their interests are wrapped up in their conservatism. They have power over their people, they are still leaders; they can get their people to believe foolish things and to act against common interests ....
What these foolish things are we have already seen: that the Jew wishes to occupy the Moslem sanctuaries; that the Jew, disguised master of most of the world, wishes to extend his sinister sway to Palestine; that the Jew wants the land, the houses and (yes!) the wives of the fellaheen. There is nothing strange in the fact that many simple Arabs can be led to believe these and crazier things. What is exceedingly strange is that outsiders, Westerners, have also been led to accept, by and large, the stories of the Arab leadership.
For the West, of course, the accounts have been cooked a little, in both senses of the phrase. A species of argument has been employed, backed with fantastic figures, which appeals not to the mind but to the vague emotions. It is made to appear that there is a deep-going clash of interest between the Arab and Jewish peoples; that against the Jews, with their money, initiative, ability, and acquisitiveness, the backward neglected Arab has no chance; that the Arab people is faced with a type of conquest roughly similar to that which disinherited the American Indians and the Negroes of South Africa.
It makes one weep!--each and every word is applicable today, from the origins of opposition to Jewish immigration by the privileged classes to the last paragraph, the cooked accounts, the appeals to vague emotions, and the poor Arabs as disinherited "American Indians and … Negroes of South Africa". What history shows is that the economic situation between Arab and Israeli was just the opposite of that presented by modern leftists who are nothing less than tools (aka 'running dogs') of the Arab privileged classes. Those same classes--Baathists in Iraq, the Saudi princes, the Syrian Alawites--are now subsidizing sabotage of American efforts, and world-wide anti-Semitism.