James Barr, A Line in the Sand: The Anglo-French Struggle for the Middle East, 1914–1948 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012), 464 pp., $29.95.
THERE’S A knotted strand of Arab conspiracy thinking that goes roughly as follows: The modern Middle East is a plot hatched by colonialists and Zionists. Israel was implanted in Palestine by Western imperialists for their own cynical reasons. The Arabs have been manipulated and deceived by the West at every turn. Their history is a narrative framed by spies and saboteurs.
I’ve been listening to versions of this paranoid story during more than thirty years of traveling in the Middle East. Often, such Arab complaints of perpetual victimization seem part of a broken political culture. Not to mention that it’s tedious listening to so much whining about plots by outsiders.
But here’s the strange thing: This theme of victimization is surprisingly accurate, at least in terms of the early twentieth century. Life for Arabs has, in fact, been shaped by the conspiratorial plots and schemes of Western imperialists. If the Arabs are passive and sullen toward Israel and the West, it’s partly because they have been objects of history rather than its subjects. Their narrative, or at least its early twentieth-century chapters, was written in secret, by others.
