Field of Fire: Fifty Years in Middle East Studies

[Valin]

Clarity with Michael Oren

Part I: The Article That Altered My Life.

Michael Oren
Apr 11, 2024

This is Part I of a three-part series on the radicalization of Middle East studies. Over the past five decades Middle East studies have had a profound impact on the region. It has long been less an academic field than an ideological battlefield— and here is my report from the front. Stay tuned for Part II.

The magazine was The Middle East Journal, the edition: Spring, 1983. It was lying on a table, together with other recent publications, in the Near East library of Princeton University’s Jones Hall. As a graduate student, I practically lived in that library, ensconced in a burnished wooden carrell and surrounded by books related to my thesis. The topic, “The Origins of Lebanese Christian Nationalism,” fit in perfectly with my field of Modern Arab History. There was also a personal connection, as I’d recently fought alongside Phalangist Christians in Israel’s ill-fated Lebanon War. My academic career lay before me, linear and controversy-free, once I completed my doctorate. Then I saw the article.

“Conflicting Approaches to Israel's Relations with the Arabs: Ben Gurion and Sharett, 1953-1956,” was its title and its author, Avi Shlaim, an Israeli professor teaching in Britain. While still focused on Phalangists, I couldn’t resist picking up the journal and retreating to my carrell, eager to browse through Shlaim’s piece.

Historians read articles backward. First, we look at the endnotes—the equivalent of a computer program’s code—to assess the researcher’s sources. Shlaim’s were scarcely diverse. Ninety percent of them, it seemed, were drawn from the diary of Moshe Sharett. In charge of international relations for the Zionist movement before the founding of the State, Sharret served as its first foreign minister and briefly, from 1953 to 1955, as prime minister. Though Ben-Gurion, too, was an avid diarist, his entries were sparsely noted. Weird, I thought, that a study of the policies of two men would be based almost exclusively on the writings of only one.  My curiosity quickened as I flipped back to the article’s opening and began to read. And my curiosity turned to discomfort.

Israelis and Arabs could have made peace in the early 1950s had not Ben-Gurion undermined the efforts of Sharett—or so Shlaim argued. Israel’s founding father, he contended, though a polyglot, never bothered to learn Arabic or to understand Arab culture and viewed Israel’s neighbors as irredeemably bent on its destruction. Sharett, by contrast, was a fluent Arabic speaker and as much at home with village muqtars as he was with American secretaries of state. He was a man of peace, Shlaim concluded, and might have attained it if not for Ben-Gurion.

I was dumbfounded. Though no expert on Israeli history, I couldn’t understand how any serious historian could advance such a far-reaching thesis based largely on one, highly subjective, source. Right then and there, I resolved to go downstairs to tell my advisor that I’d changed my thesis topic. No more Lebanese nationalists, no more Phalangists—no, my new subject would be the relations between Israel, the Arab World, and the Great Powers in the period before the 1956 Suez Campaign.

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By the time I returned to the American campus as a visiting professor, between 2006 and 2009, the process begun in the early 1980s was near-complete. Pro-Israel Columbia students complained of receiving poor grades from their anti-Israel professors and, at three hundred other universities, faculty members called for boycotting all Israeli academic institutions. The Middle East Studies departments at both Harvard and Yale totally shunned me. Later, at Georgetown, I had to step over the “bodies” of student demonstrators lying prostrate in front of my office, each with a sign saying, “Dead Gazan,” in a protest openly sponsored by the university’s program in Arab Studies.

What began in Middle East Studies, and what altered my professional trajectory from academia to diplomacy and authorship, ended up devastating entire canons. The campuses on which they were taught have become archipelagos of calcified thought. But the damage didn’t conclude there. Rather, as I’ll discuss in the next section, many of the graduates of these institutions—and especially the most elite among them—became the navigators of their nations’ foreign policy. The results, as we’ll see, were disastrous.

[Valin]

Field of Fire: Fifty Years in Middle East Studies (Part II)
Fantasy and Faith
Michael Oren
Apr 16, 2024

This is Part II of a three-part series on the radicalization of Middle East studies. Over the past five decades Middle East studies have had a profound impact on the region. It has long been less an academic field than an ideological battlefield— and here is my report from the front.

Read Part I here. Stay tuned for Part III.

If the head of a corporation consistently failed over the course of forty years to even once turn a profit, he would certainly be fired. He would definitely not be regarded as an expert in his field, interviewed in the press, and consulted by decision-makers. Or, to take a more radical example, a brain surgeon who lost every patient she operated on over the course of decades, would not be someone whom anyone would turn to for lifesaving surgery. No one would consider her the go-to source for medicine.

It is only in Middle East diplomacy that individuals can claim to be experts and, for the most part are recognized as such, in spite their record of egregious, amateurish, and serial failures.

Let’s look at that record. Prior to 2020, the last great American success in the Middle East occurred in 1979. That year, through the intensive mediation of President Jimmy Carter, Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David Accords. That same year, Iranian revolutionaries overran the US embassy in Tehran taking 54 hostages and triggering a crisis that lasted 444 days. Three years later, President Reagan sent the Marines into Lebanon in a peace-storing mission only to withdraw them ignominiously after a suicide bomber murdered 241 American servicepeople. A semblance of success occurred in 1991, when US-led coalition forces drove the occupying Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and in 1993, when President Clinton concluded the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. But the First Iraq War inexorably led to the Second, which turned into a quagmire. The Oslo Accords concluded in the mass bloodshed of the Second Intifada (2000-2005) and the emergence of a terror state in Gaza.

These debacles were the result of decisions by senior American officials from both parties, Republican and Democrat, and from a variety of social, educational, and economic backgrounds. Common to them all, though, was a sense of American noblesse oblige toward the world and to the Middle East in particular. This unique characteristic of American thinking did not begin in 1979 or even in 1949, when the Cold War came to the region. Rather, it was hardwired in the American worldview since colonial times and, after independence from Britain, became a dominant feature of U.S. foreign policy.

That worldview was the subject of my book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present. Over the course of nearly 800 pages (!), I sought to show how American’s involvement in the area traditionally reflected three themes. There was power, military or economic, projected to protect vital interests such as the U.S. merchant ships that fell prey to North Africa’s Barbary pirates from 1776 to 1815. Next, there was faith, meaning initially the religious faith of the thousands of American missionaries who moved to the Middle East, and died there young, in order to infuse it with American-style Christianity. But, failing in their evangelizing task, the missionaries began preaching a different faith—democracy—and established institutions such as the American universities of Beirut and Cairo to propagate it. And finally, I maintained, and most influentially, there was fantasy. This was popular American image of the Middle East, expressed in myriad books, plays, and films, as a realm of sensuality, mystery, and wonder, the precinct of genies and flying carpets.

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Those revisionist historians who set out to debunk the myths surrounding the Middle East ended up embracing new ones. Purveyors of those myths—Martin Indyk, Aaron David Miller, Robert Malley, just to name a few—became the experts who tried and repeatedly failed to act on them. The fact that they, unlike bankrupt businessmen or fumbling brain surgeons, are still regarded as experts says much about the inability of other scholars, guided by a thorough knowledge of the region’s history and a mastery of its languages, to promote alternative policies.

Signing of the Abraham Accords Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2020 (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)

Not surprisingly, the greatest single achievement of American diplomacy in the Middle East since 1979, the Abraham Accords, was accomplished without input from the region’s scholars. They, like the U.S. policymakers they taught, hewed to the belief that no further peace agreements between Israel and Arab states could be forged without first creating a Palestinian state in almost the entire West Bank, in East Jerusalem, and in Gaza. Relations between Arab states and Israel could never be normalized prior to concluding the two-state solution. The agreements Israel signed with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco in 2020 totally upended this assumption. Normal relations were established not only between the signatory governments but also between their peoples.

Its dismal record notwithstanding, academia’s role in the creation of Middle Eastern fiascos is difficult to quantify. Not so the degree to which academia has in turn been colored and often tainted by the Middle East. Organizationally, philosophically, and financially, Middle Eastern Studies has been corrupted by its subject-matter. The field has been mortally poisoned.