Palestine In The “Fatal Triangle”

Palestine In The “Fatal Triangle”

Michel Chiha is one of the most prolific Lebanese writers on the Palestinian problem, surely the most prolific among the Christians. Yet he substantially differs from the tenants of the Christian ‘autonomists’ hardly reconciled to their adherence to Greater Lebanon and to Independence from France. Those saw in the possibility of the creation of a national home for the Jews in Palestine the golden opportunity for the establishment of a “Christian homeland” in Lebanon. The vision of this influential minority among Lebanese Christians was based on an identification between two minorities (the Jewish and the Christian) both seen in search for their autonomy and protection vis-à-vis a hostile Arab-Islamic environment.^[1] Chiha’s vision, was rather based on the economic similarity between the role of the Lebanese, especially the Christians, and that of the Zionist Jews in Palestine, a similarity bound to engender bitter competition. Chiha’s vision is thus mainly differentiated from that other Christian trend because of the importance he assigns to the economic factor and to the class interests of the financial commercial bourgeoisie.

In this chapter we will discuss Chiha’s positions on the Palestine question and the Arab-Israeli conflict in the light of the principles that Chiha sets for himself in international relations and as they developed and changed in the context of the ‘fatal triangle’- the Arabs,Israel and the West.

1. Zionism, the Power of Money and of Revolution

Chiha’s first writings on the suject consist of a number of polemics rejecting the Zionist claims and the Western justifications for the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine. Will a Jewish homeland solve the Jewish Problem? No, he answers, a Jewish State would not resolve the Jewish Problem because Palestine could not possibly contain all the sixteen million Jews in the world.^[2] Though he agrees that those responsible for the mass killing of Jews during World War II should be punished, he asks: why should that punishment fall on another nation?^[3] As for the “historic rights” of the Jews in Palestine, he rebuts: according to the same logic, America should be given back to the Red Indians!^[4] The religious argument against the Jewish homeland is expressed in his rejection of the transformation of the Christian and Muslim religious sites into a “laboratory for the intrigues and machinations of Israel”.

In fact, it is these “intrigues and machinations” that raised so many questions in the minds of Chiha and the ruling classes of the Arab East in that period. How to explain to oneself, and to others, this form of Western colonization which spells out unexpected challenges on religious, cultural, political, economic, territorial and military grounds? How to explain the power and victory of the Zionist minority and the defeat of the Arab majority? What part of responsibility should Western powers take for their role in the creation of the State of Israel? What role should they play in the solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict? How to explain the fact that the two protagonists of the cold war- the USA and the Soviet Union- joined hands in the creation of the state of Israel and in its immediate recognition? How to make the emerging Arab-Israeli conflict fit in Chiha’s manichean vision of a world which was until then neatly divided into two camps, the “free world” and “the empire of evil”? How to explain to this “free world” the new “danger” threatening it from Israel? Finally, how to deal with this new discord between the Arab countries and the West concerning Zionism and the State of Israel, at a time when the task was to work for the adherence of the Arab states to the Western military pacts against communism ?

Those are some of the many questions raised by and within this tripartite relationship – the Arabs, the West and Israel- in which the West was “the object of dispute, the adversary and the arbitrator”, as the great Arab poet al-Mutanabbi put it for other circumstances.

Michel Chiha answered these poignant questions under the influence of the intellectual arsenal of the European extreme-Right and its twin notions of the ‘international Jewish conspiracy’ and the ‘Bolshevik Jew’. His writings about Zionism and the State of Israel follow the same methodology that guides all his thought, that of appropriating its object by denominations and definitions. Zionism is thus defined as a “world power” and the State of Israel, the “spearhead of the power of money” in the world, a power aiming at a colonial project of economic, industrial and commercial domination, encompassing all the Jews of the world.^[5] Thus, Israel acts as the metropolis of “International Judaism”, defended by an “army of foreign Jews”, which commands great influence in the USA and Great Britain and musters enormous resources and connections all over the world. Systematic emigration and accelerated settlements are the founding blocks of its expansionist policy.^[6] All this is well served by what Chiha considers to be a strong Jewish inclination for politics.

On the other hand, Chiha remind us that Jews are not foreigners to Marxism (Marx’s Jewish ancestry), to class struggles or to the 1917 October Revolution in Russia.^[7] The amalgam between Socialism and “Jewish Sociology” is what disturbed Chiha most:

Socially speaking, all of Israel is a laboratory, a field of experiences for those whose intellectual activity and Jewish sociology -based on the past and on the future- are an infamous specialization.^[8]

Israel is thus presented as much the “spearhead of Revolution” as it is the “spearhead of the power of Money”; for Revolution favours Israel and serves its ultimate aims.^[9] Here are the Arabs and the West united, symbolically at least, in the face of a common danger threatening every one, for the Zionists and the Israelis, spearheads of the powers of Money and Revolution, harbour designs of universal domination, and “they will content themselves with no less than the whole planet as their national homeland.”^[10]

2. Israel and Lebanon: a double competition

For Lebanon, the “creeping danger” of Zionism is mainly an economic one. Indeed, the development of the Jewish economy in Palestine had upset the balance of trade between Lebanon and Syria on one hand, and Palestine on the other, the latter having been a privileged market for the agricultural and industrial products of the former. With the creation of the State of Israel, the economic threat is even more formidable :

On the one hand, Israel cannot survive economically without a powerful industry; and if it becomes industrialized, using the technical and financial means at its disposal, it will invade all its neighbours and will crush everything. On the other hand, without an intensive commercial activity, Israel cannot breathe ; but its commerce benefits from relations, contacts, influences, trading posts, credits and all kinds of facilities throughout the world. You can easily imagine the privileges and advantages which are engendered, and will continue to be engendered, by a solidly built commonwealth of race, ambitions and interests. Israeli commerce, government-backed, will constitute in the Eastern Mediterranean a fatal challenge to all enterprises, ports, businesses, agencies and professions based on the provision of one service or the other.^[11]

There could be no clearer formulation of the danger. The economic challenge is perceived as a competition by a European minority capable- by virtue of its financial power, world connections and superior technology- of overcoming, even crushing, its local competitor, the Lebanese services economy in its privileged role as an intermediary between the Arab hinterland and the Western markets. Commenting on the part played by this economic competition in the Lebanese awareness of Israel’s threat, Kamal Junblatt observed, not without a pinch of irony, that

a large section of the Lebanese, Christians in particular, began to feel the competitive threat that the creation of the State of Israel represented for the Lebanese economy. Because the Lebanese – especially the merchant and producer- possesses a sharp intuition when it comes to profit and loss, a language that usually leads him to patriotism and duty.^[12]

Years later, the economist and former minister Elias Saba, explaining that Lebanon would be the biggest looser of peace with Israel, refers to this competition of equals between Israel and Lebanon in which both “sell the same goods and deploy the same temptations”.^[13]

A double competition, we should say, because the Lebanese-Zionist competition also involves conflicting political models. Long before Fateh, the Palestinian liberation movement, adopted its solution to the Palestine-Israeli conflict based on the co-existence between Christians, Muslims and Jews in Palestine, Chiha had already opposed to the Zionist project of a Jewish State the Lebanese model of the “associated confessional minorities”. Zionism, considered “the very school of racism” where a citizen’s vocation is “defined on religious grounds”, is deemed to be the antithesis of “the decisive example of Lebanon…where confessions and minorities are in equilibrium because they all obtain their rights.”^[14] The comparison seems quite shaky. Racism is not the appropriate term to designate a State in which the citizens’ vocation is “defined on religious grounds”, despite the fact that the Zionist identification of the Jews as a national identity and their discrimination between Jews and Arabs can be termed as racism. Further, if defining the citizens’ vocations on religious grounds implies racism, wouldn’t that also apply to the regime of “associated confessional minorities”? As for saying that the confessions and minorities in Lebanon are “in equilibrium because they all obtain their rights”, it is a highly debatable matter, not only because it is questionable whether the Lebanese system of confessionnal representation ever managed to grant its “minorities and confessions” their rights, but also because it raises the question whether you can ever achieve the presumed equilibrium among 15 religious communities defined as such.

3. The Suspect Responsibility of the West

During the Arabs’ struggle to resist the establishment of the State of Israel, Michel Chiha was an irredentist. When the partition plan was passed at the General Assembly of the United Nations, he rejected it in conformity with the popular and official Arab positions and predicted that the plan would lead to war.^[15] The Arab-Israeli war declared, Chiha urged to continue fighting in Palestine. After the first cease-fire, he defended the idea of a Palestinian government and later criticized the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank as well as the Egyptian annexation of the Gaza strip.^[16]

In all cases, during that period, Chiha unmistakably considered the West responsible for the creation of Israel. He blamed Britain for abandoning the Palestinian Arabs and denounced the collusion between the USA and the Soviet Union in recognising the Jewish State and supporting it. In allotting responsibilities, he primarily blamed the US:

What presided on the birth of Israel was really an American decree. What was earlier the responsibility of Britain links up with what is now the present responsibility of the United States.^[17]

Still writing in the first months after the creation of the state of Israel, Chiha considered the US as the natural mother of the newborn State, exclaiming: “What political monster did [America] carry in its womb?”^[18]

But, as soon as the fighting subsided, Chiha’s positions on this issue radically changed and his version of facts and responsibilities was reedited to comply with his “hierarchy of perils”. To begin with, he differentiated between two types of responsibilities for the creation of Israel among the protagonists of the Cold War. While the Soviet Union was deemed to want Israel as an instrument of war, the USA was described as seeking peace and the existence of the Israeli State at one and the same time.^[19] Reviving the notion of Israel’s universal project of domination, which harnesses for its purposes the powers of both Money and Revolution, Chiha now renders the West powerless vis-à-vis the Jewish minority that dominated it. He wrote in 1954: “We and England are the prisoners of Israel.”^[20]

The West is described as simultaneously guilty and innocent for its role in the creation of the State of Israel. In fact, the West is held responsible enough for the creation of Israel in order to be given the exclusive role (i.e., to the exclusion of the Soviet Union) in finding a solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet, this same West is not really responsible for the creation of Israel, that is, it is innocent of any hostile act vis-à-vis the Arabs, because it is Israel’s ‘captive’. Therefore, the only way to reach a solution to that conflict, Chiha urged, was to help the West. How could that be done? It could be done by establishing the best relations with the West and eliminating any obstacles, problems, conflicts that could harm Arab-Western relations. More, an Arab World tied to the West, by military pacts, is an Arab World which has maximized its chances to solve the Palestinian problem and the conflict with Israel.

If the countries of the [Arab] League made life easier for the West (starting with England) would they not be better equipped to resolve the Palestinian problem and that of future relations with Israel ?^[21]

Therefore the West, “prisoner of Israel”, remains sufficiently influential in order to impose on it a ‘just’ solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict! More, this “prisoner of Israel” is strong enough vis-à-vis its jailer to militarily defend the Arabs against it. Israeli-Western relations, thus represented, show the West simultaneously as impotent victim and omnipotent master of Israel.

4. The “Hierarchy of Perils”: the Arabs, Israel and Military Pacts.

The exaggeration of the danger of Israel’s might and expansionism has another function other than clearing the West of any responsibility in the creation of Israel. It aims at driving the Arab countries to seek protection from Israel by joining the Western military pacts. The Palestinian question and the Arab-Israeli conflict are thus introduced into the heated deliberations between the Western powers and the Arab countries concerning the defense of the region and the definition of the main threat that faces it.

At the end of 1949, the U.S. made it known that, in application of the Truman declaration of March 1947, it intended to play an active role in the Middle East, on England’s side, to counter the communist ‘menace’. For that purpose, it proposed to arm Turkey and Greece in order that they defend themselves against an eventual ‘Communist aggression’.

On April 13,1950, the members of League of Arab States (the Arab League) signed the Treaty of Collective Arab Security (TCAS), and asked Europe and tthe US for weapons to reinforce their defenses against Israel. The demand was rejected. As for Chiha, he was opposed to the very idea of collective Arab defense.^[22] When Greece and Turkey were admitted to NATO, Chiha asked that the three independent Arab and Mediterranean countries – Lebanon, Egypt and Syria- be likewise admitted. “The real foreign policy of the Arab countries is that of geography”, he wrote, “The natural allies of the countries of the Arab League are all to be found around the Mediterranean, among the users of the Suez Canal”.^[23] Talking of the three Mediterranean Arab countries, he said: “Our ports are on the Mediterranean, our freest breathing comes from there; it is in the Mediterranean that the Nile ends its course; it is through the Mediterranean that we import the products with which we supply the Orient.” ^[24] In early 1951, was launched the project for the Common Defense of the Mediterranean against Communism, (including the USA, Great Britain, France and Turkey). Egypt, invited to join, refused on the grounds that it will not adhere to any Western alliance as long as the British maintain their military bases in the Suez Canal zone. It equally rejected a compromise solution- which proposed that the British military bases be put under the military command of the Pact- and unilaterally revoked the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian treaty. During the Anglo-Egyptian Suez Canal crisis, Chiha wrote dozens of articles in order to conciliate the conflicting positions, constantly urging Egypt to join the Collective Defense of the Mediterranean.^[25] He defended the proposed compromise, explaining to the Arabs the requirements of Europe’s defense against communism and urging them to accept Western protection. In return, he required the West to take into consideration the “difficulties” which the Arabs have with Israel.

Zionism, initially conceived as a project to conquer the whole of our planet and satellize it, was thus reduced, a few yeras later, to a number of “difficulties”.

The American, French and British tripartite declaration of May 1951, guaranteeing the borders of the Middle East, was, in a way, a response to the Treaty of Arab Security. It emphasized the defense of the region against Communism and opposed the arms race between the Arab countries and Israel. The three signatories asked for guarantees that Western arms sold to the countries of the region would not be used in aggressive acts among those countries and that all would respect the international borders as defined by the 1949 armistice agreements. In their collective response of June 1951, the countries of the Arab League singled out the declaration’s opposition to the use of violence to solve the region’s problems or to modify the armistice lines and rejected all the rest of the declaration. They insisted on the defensive aim of Arab armament, rejected all pressures to maintain the status quo along the frontiers and to impose negotiations with Israel on the Arabs. They reiterated their demand for the implementation of the UN resolutions on the right of return for Palestinian refugees and the payment of fair compensations for their lost goods and properties. The note of the Arab leaders concluded by insisting on their attachment to the sovereignty and independence of their countries.

Chiha clearly distinguished himself from the official Arab position to which Lebanon subscribed. He had criticised the Tripartite declaration, not because of its content but because it was unilateral and revocable and demanded that it become contractual, permanent and signed by all the concerned States of the region.^[26] In fact, Chiha’s position amounted to what the countries of the Arab League feared most from the declaration, namely the recognition of Israel by the Arab countries without prior peace negotiations, at a time when they insisted that such negotiations take place under the auspices of the UN and have for agenda the application of the UN resolutions.

Criticizing the Arabs’ refusal to sign peace with Israel, Chiha advised them to work instead to secure Anglo-American guarantees for their security against Zionist expansionism.^[27] Insisting on the priority of the struggle against Communism, he rejected Arab neutrality and warned the Arabs not to be deceived by the Soviet Union because it “mistreated its Jewish citizens” and had broken its diplomatic relations with Israel. In return, he considered the old colonial powers as “the natural allies and the guarantors of the future” against the “new imperialism”, Soviet imperialism. A “hierarchy of perils” should be established, he repeated over and over again, because if Zionism is a “creeping misfortune”, there is a greater danger threatening the world, Communism. Compared to that danger, the conflict with Israel becomes secondary:

“ Politics towards Israel, no matter how vital we consider it, is not the most important matter. The most important matter at the moment are the politics of the collective defense of the indivisible Mediterranean.”^[28]

Two days later, he was even more precise:

“Undoubtedly, we are on bad terms with Israel, maybe incorrigibly; but the dispute with Israel should not exclude the collective defense of the Mediterranean. We can still be on bad terms and face a common misfortune. The armistice treaties that we are living under, for better or for worse, can be extended till there”.”^[29]

Chiha juggled with phobias as arguments. Nothing was spared to push the Arabs to join the Western military pacts. At one time, Israel was relegated to the second place in the “hierarchy of perils”, at another, the dual danger of “both enemies” – Israel and Communism – was brandished to bring the Arabs to seek Western protection, because “between the Communist peril and the Israeli threat, the only chance of salvation left for the Arabs is collective defense.”^[30]

Chiha’s solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict was then reduced to three demands: i) the internationalization of Jerusalem; ii) a “humanitarian settlement” of the refugee problem; iii) an international guarantee of the Arab-Israeli borders.^[31] He does not mention anymore the application of UN resolution number 149 on the right of return for Palestinian refugees and on compensations. Everything has changed in this hierarchy of perils. Chiha accepts Israel as a fait accompli. For him the problem now is Israel’s expansionism and not its existence.^[32] Finally he settles for the internationalization of Jerusalem as the only condition for the Arabs to sign the Pact of Collective Defense. As for the Palestinian refugees, he proposed to settle them in Syria, Jordan and Gaza and asked the Syrian government to relieve Lebanon of the majority of those who are on Lebanese territory.

For Chiha’s Lebanon, the war was over. Economic Lebanon had begun to reap the positive results of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Arab economic boycott of Israel: the end of Palestinian industrial and commercial competition, the transfer of maritime traffic from the port of Haifa to that of Beirut, the influx of Palestinian capital to Lebanon, etc. However, in as much as Chiha had become an advocate of a peaceful political settlement with Israel, with minimal conditions, he remained vehemently opposed to any form of economic peace or normalization with the Hebrew state. On that matter, he did not mince his words.

“Economic peace with Israel would lead to Lebanon’s ruin.”^[33]

In one of his last articles, he recommended that an Israeli offer to exchange its industrial products for Arab agricultural produce be flatly rejected. He further warned that “the over-equipped Israeli industry cannot maintain itself and grow except at the expense of the Arabs and their industries.”^[34]

For the first and last time, Michel Chiha defended industry…

1. Cf. Eliyaho Eilat, “Phoenician Zionism”, in The Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 24, Spring 1987, pp. 39-56. ↑
2. Le Jour, April 19, 1945. ↑
3. Le Jour, November 27, 1945. ↑
4. Le Jour, September 26, 1945. ↑
5. Le Jour, July 5 and 18, 1948. ↑
6. VPL, pp. 127-28. ↑
7. Palestine, p. 122. ↑
8. VPL, p. 129. ↑
9. Le jour, May 19, 1948. ↑
10. Palestine, p. 209, May 30, 1953. ↑
11. VPL, pp. 128-9. ↑
12. Kamal Junblatt, Haqiqat al -Thawra al-Lubnaniya, Beirut, 1959, p. 151. ↑
13. Elias Saba, “Dawr Lubnân fi al-Iktisad al-`Arabi”, Al-Nahar, April 28, 1974. ↑
14. Le Jour, October 7, 1946 andVPL, pp. 127-30. ↑
15. Le Jour, September 5, 1947. ↑
16. Le Jour, October 27 , 1948. ↑
17. Palestine, Arabic translation, pp. 102-3, June 11, 1948, English translation, p. 71. ↑
18. Palestine, Arabic translation, p. 147. ↑
19. Chiha’s amalgam between Israel, Zionism and Bolshevism had many adepts among the Lebanese and the Arab Right. One such adept is Michel Eddé, Lebanese minister of Information during the ‘six-days war’ of June 1967. In an article analysing the Arab defeat in that war. Eddé drew one basic lesson: while the Arabs were fighting with Soviet arms, Israel had used a more formidable weapon, the Leninist tactic on the ways in which a minority can vanquish and dominate a majority. The writer goes on to remind us that the “main founders and leaders of the international communist movement were Jews”, citing the names of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek and others. Of course, Mr. Eddé failed to mention that the above-mentioned leaders were all avowed anti-Zionists and that they had all died by 1948 when the Soviet Union recognised the State of Israel under Joseph Stalin, a Greek Orthodox by birth and an ex-seminarist at that! Whatever, the Minister of Information warns the Arabs against applying the “principle of collective sanctions” against the USA for their support of Israel in its war, for that would only mean falling into the Zionist trap, as the cherished aim of Zionism is to drive a wedge between the Arabs and the USA. (Al-Nahar, July 16, 1967). A similar argument has been used by businessman Emile Bustani who maintained that Israel’s function is to keep the Arabs and the West apart. (Desmond Stewart,Orphan With a Hoop. The Life of Emile Bustani . London, Chapman and Hall, 1967. pp. 196-7). ↑
20. Le Jour, November 6, 1954. Philosopher Kamal Yussef al-Hajj repeated Chiha’s argument after the June 1967 war when he said: “I think that the Arab peoples are wrong in thinking that the West is primarily responsible for Zionism… The West has been duped as much as we have been.” (Kamal Yussef al-Hajj, Hawla Falsafat al-Suhyuniya, Beirut, 1969, pp. 127-8). ↑
21. Le Jour, August 18, 1951. ↑
22. Le Jour, February 2, 16 and 25, 1951. ↑
23. Le Jour, April 5, 1951. ↑
24. Le Jour, May 12, 1951. ↑
25. Le Jour , contains many articles by Michel Chiha on this theme, see: February 23, May 1st, August 17, 18 and 28, October 6, November 8, 13, 17 and 20, 1951; March 5, December 13, 1952; May 19, 21 and 28, 1953; January 5, July 30, 1954 and others. ↑
26. Le Jour, May 11, 1951. ↑
27. Palestine, pp. 249-50. ↑
28. Le Jour, May 12, 1951. ↑
29. Le Jour, May 14, 1951. ↑
30. Le Jour, November 12, 1952. ↑
31. Palestine, p. 182. ↑
32. Palestine, December 10, 1952. ↑
33. Le Jour, December 3, 1952. ↑
34. Le Jour, October 13, 1954. ↑