In pruning my files I came across the newspaper reports of British journalist Graham Turner from the Middle East in 2002. They could almost have been written yesterday.
Turner travelled widely. ‘Everywhere, whether it was in Cairo, Beirut or Damascus, there was the same torrent of fury against American (and British) policy,’ he writes, ‘the same resentment at the perceived demonising of Islam, the same helpless outrage about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.’
In Lebanon the author was told, ‘If you don’t solve Palestine, Kashmir and Chechnya, you will have a million bin Ladens in a few year’s time. The culture of hate is growing, and an American invasion of Iraq would only make matters worse…The Jews seem utterly blind to the irony that they were now doing to the Palestinians exactly what their own persecutors had done to them…driving out thousands of young Palestinians into the same kind of diaspora as had once been inflicted on them.’
Last week I watched ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ on TV. Born of a Jewish mother, my sympathies were with the Jews, and the horrors of the holocaust. Yet when the continual Hamas rockets finally provoked Israel’s retaliation, I blanched at the gross overkill.
Revenge – as it looks to me – may be sweet to some, but where does it get you? Archbishop Tutu entitled his account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Without Forgiveness there is no Future. What a stupendous challenge. Forgiveness is surely the highest price we can pay for peace. But nothing less will really do. Mandela showed that.
If only we Europeans could understand the grievances and feel the humiliation that Arabs experience. As David Clark wrote in 2005 in The Guardian, ‘The war on terror is failing…and this terror will continue until we take Arab grievances seriously. We must start by acknowledging that their long history of engagement with the West has left many Arabs feeling humiliated and used.’ We reneged on our promises to them in the 1917 Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, and we failed them in 1947 when we abandoned the mandate over Palestine. We also made incompatible promises to the Jews.
And that is true not just of my country, but of me. When I was serving with the Air Force in Egypt in 1949 I treated the local people as inferior. I never got to know any except our char and dhobi wallahs – who supplied our tea and did our laundry. Nor did I ever visit a home. At the shops I haggled, but there was never any real conversation. And to my deep shame I recall my disappointment that, when guarding the airfield at night, I never shot an ‘intruder’.
Humiliation is the ‘nuclear bomb’ of feelings. I experienced that as a child in foster care. My dignity and self-respect were continually violated. I felt angry but powerless, useless and second class. Some people retreat and become closed-up, depressed and passive. Many seek violent revenge. Others convert their anger into an intense drive to change the situation. If I’d been living in Palestine these last forty years I too would have been driven to extremism.
A 32-year-old academic in Beirut told Turner: ‘The mood in the Muslim world is one of depression and apathy, because people feel they can’t change anything and they despair of their pusillanimous leaders. We feel such an inheritance of being persecuted, oppressed and colonised. If the Americans invaded Iraq, that would be just the latest example.’
So we in the West bear a terrible responsibility. Isn’t it far past the time when we should make public reparation for our assumed superiority? That’s the first step in getting back respect. As Turner concludes: ‘We have exploited and manipulated them to serve our own interests. We have regarded their inhabitants as troublesome children when they chose to put up the price of their only valuable commodity, oil. And we have written them off as undemocratic, dangerous and backward, a cradle of civilisation whose children have still not climbed out of the cradle.’
And yet the largest and oldest university in the world is in Cairo, founded 300 years before Oxford. So let’s have proper humility – the salve for humiliation. Honest apology is the ointment that heals hatred, costly but necessary.
The author is a typographer, calligrapher and publisher who worked with Blandford Press, Oxford University Press and Nelson. He has also worked as a social worker in the US & UK (he holds dual nationality). Though officially retired, he is still publishing with Initiative of Change.
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