[History News Network/Sandbox] Philip Carl Salzman - Palestinians and their partisans explain their unfortunate situation as a result of Western imperialism and colonialism. Yet there is a certain inconsistency in the Arab and Muslim narrative about imperialism and colonialism. About the period of the 7th to the 18th centuries, when the Arab Muslim Empire spread by the sword from Arabia across all of the Middle East and North Africa to Morocco in the west, to Sicily, Portugal, Spain, and France in the north, and to Central Asia and India in the East, followed by Ottoman conquests in Europe, the narrative of imperialism and colonialism is triumphalist. Endless slaughter, forced conversion, slavery, and wholesale expropriation of property were all good, because God chose Muslims as his True Followers and, as such, they have a right - no, a duty - to dominate. The Arabs in 1948 refused compromise with inferiors; they refused to divide and share, rejecting a UN settlement. Instead, they strove for complete victory, as their ancestors had. However, the Jews they faced did not cower; against the odds, and with little outside help, they fought and won. The "Nakba" was self-induced by the Arabs. They demanded all or nothing, and got nothing. The writer is professor of anthropology at McGill University.
2008-10-29 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive