The Foreign Service Journal, November 2011

Sept. 11. And this is by no means all! There are various reasons for the anger that some young Muslims, raised in the sterile hatcheries of the refugee camps, or the religious schools of Saudi Arabia, feel toward us. Most often men- tioned is our support of Israel. But this issue deserves a closer look. It is sad but true that America has never gotten much credit for what it ac- tually does for the Palestinians. For half a century, we have provided a plurality of the funding to the U.N.’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians. For nearly as long, we have led international efforts to advance the Middle East peace process. President Bill Clinton personally oversaw the intensive negotiations that led to the 1993 Oslo agreement and the creation of the Pales- tinian National Authority. He devoted two weeks, more- over, of his waning presidency to sketching out and attempting to cajole the parties to endorse the outlines of an imaginative agreement — only to have Yasser Arafat refuse even to accept it as a basis for discussion. And we rarely hear of U. S. efforts to succor Muslims in Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Yet once, when I appealed to Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud to give more assistance to UNRWA, he replied only that “You Americans created the refugee problem. You solve it.” In response, I asked if he could imagine, had a catastrophe driven half a million Canadians into North Dakota, Idaho and Minnesota, that three gen- erations later, those populations would still be held in refugee camps? How differently the half-million Jews driven from Arab lands in 1948 were received by Israel, compared to how the half-million Arabs driven from Palestine that same year, were received by their Arab neighbors! The truth is that for Arab governments, the Palestin- ian issue is — among other things — a convenient tactic. By “waving the bloody flag,” Arab gov- ernments can distract their subjects frommisrule, oppression and misery at home. In particular, Palestinians’ griev- ances against Israel have their match in the half-century of neglect and oppres- sion they’ve endured from supposedly “brother” Arab regimes. The Challenge of Modernity In fact, as things stand now, even if the Palestinian-Israeli dispute were quickly solved by ex- terior diktat, we would still be the target of alienated young ArabMuslims. Why? Because the Arabs’ dispute with Is- rael is only a symptom of a deeper problem, one that can- not be solved by shuttle diplomacy, special envoys or conferences at Wye Plantation. This deeper problem exists at two levels. Superficially, it has to do with the failure of Arab political and intellec- tual institutions to address the needs of their young pop- ulations. How can being a citizen of Syria, or Lebanon, or Egypt, or Algeria, or Sudan give young Arabs the sense of patriotic identity that we get from being citizens of the United States? Arab states have little emotional hold on the loyalty of their populations; most Arab regimes are cor- rupt and morally discredited. This particularly applies to Saudi Arabia, which has shored itself up externally through its ties to the U.S., while at home, it both has placated and suppressed opposition by giving “power of attorney” for social affairs to reactionary, xenophobic Muslim clerics (ulama). What personal at- tachment can Saudi Arabians — 60 percent of whom are under 18 — feel to their rulers? The king and many of the leading princes are in their seventies, and must seem more remote from most Saudis than, say, George Wash- ington is from us. Young Arabs, moreover, are failed by their intellectual leaders. Where are the Arab Reinhold Neibuhrs, Christo- pher Dawsons, Karl Barths, Martin Bubers? Where are the politically engaged intellectuals who can help a young Arab make coherent, responsible sense of a troubling modern world? They scarcely exist in the Arab world. The few that even try are threatened, jailed or flee to exile — or worse. In January 1985, I contacted the Sudanese Presidency to plead for the life of a free-thinking Islamic reformer, Dr. Mahmoud Muhammad Taha. During his trial for U.S. - I S L A M R E L A T I O N S N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 37 It is sad but true that America has never gotten much credit for what it actually does for the Palestinians. Hume Horan was an FSO from 1960 to 1998, serving as ambassador in Yaounde, Malabo, Khartoum, Riyadh and Abidjan, as well as deputy chief of mission in Jeddah and principal deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Con- sular Affairs. He is the author of To the Happy Few , a novel about terror and the Sudan (Electric City Press, 1996), and currently serves as a consultant on Middle East affairs for MSNBC, NPR and Fox News.