The Palestine Conflict and the Militarization of the Middle East—John Gee

Parts of the Arab world remained under direct colonial rule of Britain and a large part of the armies of the rest were not deployed in the Arab armies’ fight against Israel. Their retention within their home countries was due both to their governments’ anxieties about internal security and, in most cases, only half-hearted governmental commitment to support for the Palestinian Arabs, and only that meager effort in response to public sentiments. Yet, even if a more determined commitment had been made, the outcome in 1948 would most likely have been little different. The fact was that the Arab armies were relatively small, poorly equipped, and primarily suited to internal security uses.

Egypt’s army was the Arab world’s largest, with an effective force of 29,000 troops, followed by Iraq’s with 21,000. Transjordan (later Jordan) had what the Israeli military regarded as the most effective army among its neighbors, in the form of the Arab Legion, but it was led by British officers and numbered 7,400 men in all. The Syrian and Lebanese armies were small and Saudi Arabia did not have a regular army. In the aftermath of the 1948 war, a trend toward ever greater investments in armaments and the expansion of the region’s armed forces was initiated.

Many of the soldiers and officers who experienced defeat in Palestine in 1948 felt that they had been let down by the political leaderships in their countries. In The Philosophy of the Revolution, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser wrote of how, in 1948:

“We were fighting in Palestine, but all our thoughts were concentrated on Egypt. Our bullets were directed at the enemy behind the parapets of his trenches, but our hearts were hovering over our distant motherland, left an easy prey for hungry wolves to ravage it.”

Later, he writes of how, in a position surrounded by Israeli forces, “I often said to myself: “Here we are besieged in these dugouts. We have been duped—pushed into a battle for which we were unprepared. Vile ambitions, insidious intrigues and inordinate lusts are toying with our destinies, and we are left here under fire, unarmed.”

Nasser was not alone in such feelings. The Free Officers Movement, which overthrew the Egyptian monarchy in 1952, took shape during the 1948 war in Palestine. In other Arab states, the disaster of 1948 brought discredit upon existing regimes and fuelled internal rivalries and opposition to them. Syria entered a period of chronic instability with a military coup on March 30, 1949, by Husni alZaim, who was himself overthrown a mere four and a half months later.

Militarization has brought little benefit to the peoples of the Middle East

Subsequently, several regimes which were regarded as being aligned with the Western countries that supported Israel, were destabilized after large-scale Israeli attacks upon neighboring states (which is not to say that other issues played no part). In 1955, Iraq joined with Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Britain in the Baghdad Pact, a Middle Eastern counterpart to NATO, which pursued a hostile policy toward the Soviet leaning Egypt, which did its own government no good. Within two years of Britain, France and Israel colluding to attack Egypt in 1956, the Iraqi monarchy (installed by Britain) was also overthrown in a coup. Following the 1967 war with Israel, in 1969, the Libyan monarchy was overthrown in a military coup, by Colonels Muammar Qaddafi and Abdel-Salam Jalloud, and the civilian government of Sudan was overthrown in a military coup by Jaafar Numeiry.

In each of these cases, the new regimes sought to assert their nationalist credentials and distance themselves from their colonialist past, in order to gain popular support and, not surprisingly, expanded the armed forces and promoted military personnel within the apparatus of government to ensure their own longevity. The existing old (mostly monarchist) regimes responded by devoting increased resources to their militaries, while seeking to tighten control over them by the promotion and appointment of officers whose loyalty was considered reliable.

Meanwhile, from the late 1960s onward, successive U.S. governments undertook to ensure that Israel was supplied with weaponry that would sustain its military superiority over all the Arab armies. Within Israel, the army maintained a status as a revered national institution and “security” provided legitimization for discriminatory and repressive practices toward Palestinian citizens, as well as the quelling of Jewish dissent.

There were certainly disputes between Arab countries, as well as between Arab and neighboring states that fueled militarization and not solely the conflict with Israel. Indeed, over time, these other conflicts assumed a greater relative importance; the Iran-Iraq war, for example, consumed more lives than Palestine-related wars ever have. However, the creation of Israel as a belligerent settler state kick-started regional military expansion. It also influenced governance and decision making, as did Israel’s “peripheral strategy” of cultivating ties with regimes and movements that were in conflict with Arab states (Turkey, Iran, Ethiopia, Kurdish and South Sudanese nationalists).

The enhanced power of the military and, in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya and Sudan, the representation of military leaders as the embodiment of nationalist values, operated to suppress dissident opinions and weaken civil society. This allowed Israel’s partisans to frequently portray it as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” and yet Israeli actions over decades did much to create conditions for repressive regimes to maintain power regionally. Israeli leaders were clearly disturbed in 2011 when the Arab Spring uprisings seemed poised to establish governments more accountable to their people.

Militarization has brought little benefit to the peoples of the Middle East but has done tremendous harm by sustaining repressive elites, allowing the dispossession of the Palestinian people to continue, recycling oil revenues to arms-supplying countries (including Israel) and diverting national resources into weaponry and armies. It seems certain that change for the better will entail a shrinking of military forces, arms expenditures and military participation in states’ economies and political lives. ■