Arts & Culture
The Unmaking of the Middle East
By Joe Lockard / November 18, 2008
Imagine writing seriously about French intellectual history without speaking French. Consider publishing books on Mayan indigenous cultures without knowing their languages. The pretense of knowledge and political bankruptcy would be self-evident. Yet this sort of intellectual masquerade occurs much too often in contemporary scholarship of the Middle East. 
Scholars should be able to read or speak the languages of the human cultures they engage. Doing historical or cultural research in translation, or teaching from translated materials one cannot read, is to live within epistemological close confinement. Language-learning is the key to breaking through such confinement, and Middle East scholarship especially needs cross-cultural and multi-linguistic work if it is to function as a bridge between the multiple isolations of the region’s divergent nationalisms and their narratives. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that it is critical for scholar-teachers to set an example and learn the languages of the cultures, peoples, and governments they study and write about. Where scholars cannot select, read, and analyze primary sources in their original language, then their work is hopeless and can only be dismissed. Among scholars of the Middle East, from whatever political perspective they claim, such language-deficient authors represent repetition, albeit from a different source, of those non-Arabic-speaking Arabists who were the instruments of European colonialism. Scholars who do command the necessary languages to address the Arab-Israeli conflict have a major advantage. One thinks of Anton Shammas, fluent in both Arabic and Hebrew, and others who are able to argue their views articulately from within a full and commanding cultural knowledge. Apologetic defense of a non-language-based standard of historical or cultural scholarship often seems no more than an excuse for fundamental antagonism and social avoidance, not any serious engagement. A Middle East scholar at an Ivy League institution wrote me an e-mail message along these lines, claiming that that "many of the primary documents of Israeli history have always been composed in European languages; and a substantial number of Israel’s citizens have always written and expressed themselves primarily in other languages, including English, French and Arabic." Having done research in various Israeli archives, both government and private, I am profoundly aware of precisely the opposite. The vast bulk of those documents, almost to their entirety, is in Hebrew: they have never been translated into any other language. It says a great deal about a fundamental misunderstanding of the pre-state Yishuv or Israeli society that a scholar would even consider asserting that many of the primary political, legal, or social documents of Israeli society have been composed in European languages. That this sort of error passes for commonplace knowledge is perhaps an expression of an ideological and anti-historical predisposition to view Israeli society as thoroughly European, another profound and too-frequent error.
Let’s turn to Jeremy Salt’s The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) as an example of the dangers of language-deficient scholarship. Salt, based at Bilkent University in Ankara, whose major previous work concerns Armenian history, has produced this volume without evident knowledge of either Arabic or Hebrew. His lengthy bibliography contains only English-language sources (almost no translations from regional languages among them), mostly published in London or New York, as if the Middle East required Euro-American publishers for self-understanding. Salt’s historiographic method lies in weaving a skein of selected secondary sources that suit his theses, primary sources be damned. As if this were insufficiently problematic, the book has quite limited purchase on its expansive title, which promises an address to “the Middle East” and “Arab lands”. The volume begins with brief reviews of well-known histories of the end of Ottoman rule; the fate of the Armenians; and developments in Egypt, Syria and Iraq after World War I. The middle two-thirds of the book deal entirely with a history of Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts, after which it explores the Bush wars before concluding with another address to the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian situation.
This makes for a highly unbalanced book, one that treats Israel and Palestine while neglecting the remainder of the region. Entire histories of Western imperialism and economic exploitation disappear behind this focus. When formative diplomatic events such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement evaporate in the briefest of references, or the Arabian peninsula as a whole remains nearly excluded from discussion as a site of petro-imperialism, then the scope of absences renders the book unusable even as a general history. Since central drives of imperialism involve capital, labor and the profitability of colonial enterprises, it seems near-inexplicable that Salt includes almost no address to these issues – and to class – throughout the volume. On the real topic of this book, Israel and Palestine, Salt displays inexpert scholarship-from-a-distance. His lack of cultural and political knowledge sprinkles the text with errors such as where he identifies the killer-rabbi, Moshe Levinger, as “ultraorthodox”; in fact, Levinger emerged from the national-religious stream of the Mercaz Ha’rav yeshiva and such an error indicates Salt does not understand basic social differences. Salt’s problem is not simply misinformation, but persistent ideological blinders that disable his historiography. One would never know from his account of the events of 1948 that the Arab Legion was officered, trained and equipped by the British, as completely realized a manifestation of Western imperialism as existed in the Middle East.
Salt claims regarding 1948 that “The image of massive Arab armies descending on Palestine from all directions was a lie”; provides a wildly inaccurate account of the balance of forces at the beginning of the war; and describes ensuing events as one-sided conquest. Again, an uninformed reader would never know of southern kibbutzim overrun by the Egyptian army in bloody fighting, the Etzion massacre, the fall of the Jewish quarter in Jerusalem’s old city, or that the Iraqi army held the San Simon neighborhood of Jerusalem while the Egyptians held Bethlehem. This decisive period of conflict between Arab and Israeli forces was an immensely hard-fought and costly battle for all sides, not the rout that Salt describes. The same pattern of misleading history and absent consideration evidences itself elsewhere in The Unmaking of the Middle East, but there is little point in paying it more attention. Some books are masterful engagements with the communities and conflicts of the Middle East – for excellent treatments of Israel’s mini-empire in the Palestinian territories, see any book by Amira Hass or Eyal Weizman’s recent Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation – and there are books that will fade quickly and unremembered.
This weak effort lodges in the latter category. One formative difference separating out memorable scholarship lies in a capacity to speak local languages, to engage in primary research, and contribute new perspectives. This is not simply a matter of competent cultural knowledge, but rather it reflects a democratic ethos. A democratic scholarship, one that witnesses against class, racism, colonialism and imperialism, listens to the voices of peoples and stories told by the disenfranchised.
all images from Maya Escobar’s piece you and your friends vol 1
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Joe Lockard-
Let’s take your points in order:
First, you assert that knowledge of the languages in which primary sources are composed is an essential requirement for the historian. You don’t really argue this point, but instead simply declare its obviousness.
I think your insistence on this point is too global and ignores that historians engage in different sorts of projects that may or may not require fluency in the language of primary sources. If an historian is presenting original work, hitherto unknown, whose significance depends upon the exact meanings of documents not within the public sphere, she should be fluent in the languages involved. If an historian is challenging the received meaning of documents already in the public sphere, he should similarly be fluent in the relevant language.
But I take Salt’s work to be a different sort of enterprise than either of these. He is presenting a picture of the Unmaking of Palestine (and I agree that his choice of title wasn’t ideal, although taking him to task for this seems a bit excessive), the accuracy of which doesn’t really depend upon his fluency in either Arabic or Hebrew. Are you making the specific (and interesting) claim that there are particular instances of Salt’s mistaking the meaning of a Hebrew or Arabic word or sentence in such a way as to render his judgements suspect, or the vague (and less interesting) claim that there may be a possibility that a non-speaker of the relevant languages may be unaware of or mistaken about a feature of the subject he’s covering, based upon his linguistic ignorance? In any event, Salt’s thesis is that Western powers performed massive mischief in the formerly Ottoman lands-he relies on Western sources to buttress his claim, as he should.
Relatedly, if Salt were writing a deeply cultural study of a people and their worldview, knowledge of their language may be necessary. To use your example, a cultural examination of French intellectual history would require that the author be a francophone. A study of Napoleon’s miltary strategies? Maybe not so much. Salt’s book is explicitly political and resembles the latter more than the former.
After your prelude, you get to the specific’s of Salt’s book, which you term "…an example of the dangers of language-deficient scholarship." You then proceed to list a number of what you consider errors, not a single one of which turns on Salt’s innocence of Arabic or Hebrew. That is to say, your disagreements with Salt have nothing to do with language and a lot to do with your dislike of his politics.
You dislike his title-too expansive, and an undelivered promise. Fair enough. But nothing to do to do with Salt’s alephs or bets. You think the book is "unbalanced". This is code for "disagreeable to Joe Lockard", as far as I can tell. I’m always surprised that "balance" is taken to be an unmitigated virtue, as though the correct opinion on any subject is reliably to be found approximately midway between the extremes. Nice idea, but unconfirmed through observation. If I believe strongly in government-provided national health care and write an article defending same, shall I expect criticism for being "unbalanced"? Must I make the insurance industry’s case, too? (of course, I do so implicitly since that’s the position I’m criticizing, but I can be enthusiastic proponent of NHC without being criticized for lack of balance, right?) Pick any other issue you like-affirmative action, Somalia, slavery in the US, the teaching of evolution-is any work with a clear perspective on these matters to be denounced as lacking balance?
To put this another way, who says that a strong proponent of the Palestinian case must perforce be lacking in balance? Does the Owl of Minerva require that every historical analysis be equivocal?
Re the book’s omissions, you seem put off that a 350 page text (plus notes) doesn’t include expansive treatments of every ancillary element of the Palestine/Israel crisis. Sykes/Picot? More would be nice, but this is not a full history of the modern middle east. Salt mentions Sykes/Picot to make his larger point about Western perfidy in the region. He does not misrepresent its meaning nor misunderstand its consequences. As in all historical work, the interested reader may look further into those areas that capture her interest.
You declare that the book is "…unusable as a general history". Well, it’s useless for sponge cake recipes, too, but it purports to be neither a cookbook nor a general history. And Salt’s analysis lacks Marxian bona fides? Perhaps he’s not a Marxist (more’s the pity).
You are of course correct that Levinger and his deranged associates (uh oh-lacking in balance!) are not "ultraorthodox". But this is something for Salt to apologize for and correct in a 2nd edition (I can hope), not a fatal error which calls into question his capacity for sober and informed analysis. His larger point-about the colonization of Hebron and its effect on the overall settlement project, energized by religious Jews-is not vitiated because he mistakenly seems to think that all religious Jews are haredim.
Re 1948, you point out some small and temporary Arab victories as though this diminishes Salt’s point that the popular apprehension of numberless Arab armies descending upon a beleaguered Israel is a preposterous fiction. Do you imagine that Salt’s talk of a speedy rout of the Arab armies could be true only if there were not a single Arab success?
I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I suspect from your enthusiasm for the wonderful work of Amira Hass and Eyal Weizman re the occupation that you locate yourself somewhere along the left-Zionist spectrum, and accordingly view the occupation as regrettable but the establishment of Israel itself as largely wholesome and unproblematic. If this is so, I understand your discomfort with Salt’s analysis. If I misrepresent you, my apologies.
I recently skimmed a book by Ze’ev Chafets, in which he makes similar points. He says that Western coverage of the Middle East is heavily skewed for a few reasons:
— Only a handful of correspondents are fielded to cover the entire Middle East. You might have more journalists covering city news in London, than you have covering Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Saudia Arabia, Iraq, and Iran combined. Moreover, those journalists have no expertise in their particular country to cover; the journalist in Iran might cover Turkey next month and Egypt the month after that, and he never has a chance to become more than minimally acquainted with his country. Chafets tells a story of one journalist being sent to a given country, told to produce a story the next day. He got a pile of English-language newspapers, and gathered his wife and kindergarten-age child to help him sift through the papers, looking for any headlines on the topic he was to produce an article about. (His child was literate enough to be able to spot the keyword he was searching for.)
— These journalists do not speak the local language. Most speak only English, so they can interview only the English-speaking university students and professors, who may widely differ with the populace at large. I was speaking to a friend yesterday, who has a degree in Middle Eastern politics, and he told me that that at least half of Israel is semi-traditional Sefardic Jews, and semi-traditional Ashkenazim constitute another segment, such that the majority of Israel could be said to be semi-traditional, and yet Israel is represented to the West by ultra-left ultra-secular university academics in ivory towers, who have almost nothing in common with the John Q. Public. Similarly, Chafets notes that when Begin was elected, the journalists reported that he had almost no popular support, and that the government was soon to fall. Little did they know that the Sefardi half of Israel had almost universally voted for Begin!
— These journalists cannot report where their lives are in danger; Chafets brings some ten or twenty stories of journalists having to drop their beats, following death threats. The result is that news only comes from where there is no violence, creating a disproportionate reporting. Chafets notes that news of Israeli atrocities constantly appear in the West, and yet for years, almost nothing was said of Saddam’s crimes. Why? Because no one could get into Iraq and back out to report anything! So ironically, the worst news of atrocities comes from the most democratic and law-abiding states!
I’m most of the way through this propaganda text masquerading as a history. I’m not a historian, so I’m hobbled with lacking a mental file cabinet of facts and factoids to rebut point-by-point. Nevertheless I can see blatant bias when it 2x4s me in the punim.
Joe Lockard, I think you are far off base in ascribing the defects in Salt’s book to his lack of Arabic or Hebrew. Mainly it is his misuse of English that is the problem. This is a massive work of distortion and selective use of facts, some of which you mention. But the inflammatory and Israel- or Zionist-pejorative phrasing he uses extensively and throughout gives the lie to any claim of objectivity, and hence to scholarship in any useful sense.
Joe says: "….there are books that will fade quickly and unremembered. …"
AS: I disagree completely. This book will be used in college classrooms around the world, and cited as authoritative. It was published, not by some flyspeck outfit in Yemen, but by the University of California Press! Berkeley, not Istanbull (sic, intended)
Joe says: "….This weak effort [I infer he means "Unmaking" but the referent is not clear] lodges in the latter category. One formative difference … lies in [knowing] local languages, to engage in primary research, and contribute new perspectives…."
AS: Such nicety does not matter if your unspoken but clear purpose is abrasive diatribe. Salt’s effort is anything but weak. How can you even suggest weakness, when it is so meticulously, if selectively, researched and cited?
Joe: "….This is not simply a matter of competent cultural knowledge, but rather it reflects a democratic ethos. A democratic scholarship, one that witnesses against class, racism, colonialism and imperialism, listens to the voices of peoples and stories told by the disenfranchised….."
AS: Leftist pap and nonsense. Should focus on the real danger from a Salt, not the kumbaya. Get our your carving knife, Joe, not your tofu-spreader. You are up at 30k meters and having a problem with both the trees and the forest.
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