The
Long
View

I'm reading an interesting but tendentious book by James Reston, Jr.: Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade. The author has embraced the Palestinian position in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. His description of the downfall of the Crusader states in the Levant in the 12th and 13th centuries is couched more or less as an allegory of what is going to happen to Israel, which is still younger than the Kingdom of Jerusalem was when Saladin overcame it.

This implicit prophecy came to mind when a friend brought to my attention an article by Daniel Pipes that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on January 18, entitled "Arabs Still Want to Destroy Israel." Quoting the rhetoric of a Palestinian sheikh, the Pipes notes that militant Islam in general has never considered Israel to be anything other than a temporary phenomenon. He argues that concessions made by Israel in the 1990s were regarded by the jihadists as signs of a loss of nerve. Rather, he argues, the 1990s were a time "when Israel should have pushed its advantage, to get, once and for all, recognition of its right to exist."

Various objections are possible to this thesis, but consider this one. As David Pryce-Jones observes in his book, The Closed Circle, all Arab states have a legitimacy problem, as do all Islamic states to a greater or lesser degree. In his view, the only basis for government that can really be entirely satisfactory from an Islamic perspective is the Caliphate, the rule over the whole of the community of the faithful by the Follower of the Prophet. The Caliphate ended when the Ottoman Empire did after the end of the First World War, and the Middle East has yet to find a new basis for legitimate government.

If Pryce-Jones is correct, then the hostile powers of its region cannot grant Israel recognition of its right to exist. Those powers themselves have no such right. Indeed, they derive a certain provisional legitimacy precisely from their hostility to Israel.

For a long time, I had accepted a prognosis for Israel very much like that of James Reston, but his book actually makes me reconsider. In the Middle Ages, the Islamic society of the Middle East was culturally vibrant and militarily expansive. In fact, we should remember that the Crusades were essentially defensive; they were occasioned by the lethal threat to Byzantium posed by the expansion of the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor. It is therefore not surprising that the Franks of the Crusader States were defeated.

Nothing like this can be said about Islamic culture in any region today. Indeed, we see here the chief flaw in Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis. In order for civilizations to clash, they have to be comparably competent. In other words, every civilization must in principle be able to do everything at every point in its life history. (One may, of course, argue that civilizations do not have "lives," but the Huntington thesis does in fact assume Toynbee's ideas about the development of civilizations.)

The increasing importance in Islamic societies of purely reactionary movements like Wahhabism does suggest that Israel is not facing a living culture, one capable of the innovation and resilience that Islamic societies displayed in Saladin's day. Rather, post-Ottoman Islamic culture is increasingly fossilized. It can reassert what it became in the past, but it cannot become something new.

Fossils have a certain strength, but they also tend to be brittle. The problem for Israel may not be gaining recognition of its right to exist from its neighbors, but avoiding the debris when they shatter.