Allahu Aklbar.
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Robert Fisk’s World: Arabs have to rely on Britain and Israel for their history
There is no Public Record Office in the Arab World, no National Archive
Saturday, 1 November 2008
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In Damascus, a massive statue of the late President Hafez al-Assad sits on a
mighty iron chair outside the 22,000sq m Assad Library, a giant book open in
his right hand.
Behind him lie the archives of his dictatorship. But not a single state paper
is open to the people of Syria. There are no archives from the foreign ministry
or the interior ministry or the defence ministry. There is no 30-year rule –
for none is necessary. The rule is for ever. There is no Public Record Office
in the Arab world, no scholars waiting outside the National Archives.
It is the same in Cairo, in Riyadh, in Beirut and in Tripoli. Dictatorships and
caliphates do not give away their secrets. The only country in the Middle East
where you can burrow through the files is called Israel – and good for the
Israelis. But the result is obvious. While Israeli scholars have been able to
deconstruct the traditional story of little Israel – proving that there were no
Arab radio stations calling for the Palestinians to leave their land, that the
Arabs were indeed ethnically cleansed from their towns and villages by Irgun
and the Hagana – there is no Arab scholar who can balance the books by drawing
on the archives of his own history. They must go to the National Archives in
London to read General Cunningham's dispatches from 1948 Palestine, or quote
from Israeli books. The record stops there. Aside from the self-serving
biographies of Arab dictators and generals, that's it. Even Walid Khalidi's
huge tome on the destroyed
villages of Palestine relies heavily on the work of Israeli historian Benny
Morris.
Slowly, though, a little bag of history is being filled across the region. If
we can't read the private papers of the leaders of the lamentable Arab
Liberation Army of 1948, we can still hear the personal testimony of the
Palestinian survivors. Rosemarie Esber, for example, has put her degrees from
London and Johns Hopkins universities to good use by interviewing – in Jordan
and Lebanon -- 126 Palestinian men and women who lost their homes and lands in
1948 and 1949. Her soon to be published work (Under the Cover of War) helps to
balance documentation and diaries by one side with verbal recollection on the
other. The book does not spare the Arabs – least of all the Arab atrocities or
the Iraqi volunteers who turned up to fight for Palestine but didn't even know
their geography – yet the suffering of those who fled is all too evident.
Here, for example, is Abu Mohamed from the village of Saqiya, east of Tel Aviv,
describing what happened on 25 April, 1948: "Jews entered the village and
started shooting women, men, and old people. They arrested girls, and we still
don't know what happened to them. They came from the settlement that was near
the village... They used Bren guns. Then armoured vehicles entered the centre
of the village. Fourteen were killed that day... Two women could not run so
they were killed in the village... The villagers ran together in the direction
of al-Lid (Lod, the site of Ben Gurion airport in modern-today Israel). After
that families started to leave separately... We left everything in the
village... We thought it would be a short trip and we would come back."
In Lebanon, too, there is a flourishing market in books based on diaries and
personal archives. Among the most intriguing is A Face in the Crowd: The Secret
Papers of Emir Farid Chehab, 1942-1972, the private documents of Lebanon's
post-Second World War intelligence boss. Apart from proving that
Lebanese-Syrian relations could be as awful in the 1940s as they could be in
the 1990s, he was an assiduous spy, nurturing his agents in Jordan in 1956 to
find out why the young King Hussein had fired the British commander of the Arab
Legion, Glubb Pasha. "Glubb was a spendthrift, tightly controlled the army's
finances and secret expenses, and refused to share relevant information with
Arab commanders and officers," a still unknown informant writes to Chehab on 11
March, 1956. "His interference (extended to) ... control over various
ministries' telephone lines... A telephone employee in Amman admitted to me
that even the Palace's and Prime Ministry's
communication networks were under the army's surveillance. A secret communiqué
addressed by Glubb to all British heads of army units was recently discovered;
it said that in case of an Israeli attack they should retreat and not resist.
The free officers took this communiqué up to the King."
So goodbye Glubb Pasha. But did this also, perhaps, have something to do with
the equally secret Operation Cordage, first highlighted by Keith Kyle in his
excellent book on Suez and even more rigorously investigated by Eric Grove of
Salford University. "Cordage" was Britain's plan for defending its Jordanian
ally from Israeli attack if Israel assaulted Egypt. The plan, according to
Grove, included "an air campaign carried out by (RAF) Venoms based at Amman and
Mafraq in Jordan to knock out the Israeli Air Force in 72 hours... A fighter
wing of swept-wing aircraft (Sabres or Hunters) would be provided from Germany
to operate from Cyprus..." A parachute brigade group would be flown to Jordan
to defend British air bases and then – along with Glubb's Arab Legion – to
defend Amman against the Israelis. It was at the end of February 1956 that
Hussein dismissed Glubb; which, as Grove diplomatically puts it, "created
problems". So how much did Glubb know
about Operation Musketeer?
What really created "problems", of course, was Britain's own secret plan to
attack Egypt, along with France and Israel after which Operation Musketeer –
the Suez aggression – took over from Operation Cordage, and Britain's potential
Israeli enemies suddenly became their secret allies. But of course, all this
comes from British files. Alas, it will be many years before we know what is in
the book that the iron Assad is reading outside his library in Damascus.
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Jusfiq Hadjar gelar Sutan Maradjo Lelo
Allah yang disembah orang Islam tipikal dan yang digambarkan oleh al-Mushaf itu
dungu, buas, kejam, keji, ganas, zalim lagi biadab hanyalah Allah fiktif.
