THE TABLET, March 10th, 1956. VOL. 207, No. 6042

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

MARCH 10th, 1956

NINEPENCE

P resid en t E isen h ow er’s D e c i s io n: A Second Term through Dangerous Years

Portrait o f G lubb P a sh a : Eminence Grise from Amman. By David Walker

‘‘C hristians o f th e Left” in F ran ce : A Survey. By Frank Macmillan

Crim e and D e t e r r e n c e : The Case against Capital Punishment. By F. H. Lawton

A M ed ie v a l is t Thinks Tw ice: Professor Barraclough’s Book. By Michael Derrick

H o ly W eek R estored : IV : Good Friday (i). By Lancelot C. Sheppard

The Future o f M a l ta : A Statement from the Archbishop

C r itic s’ Colum ns : N o te b o o k : B ook R ev iew s : Letters : Chess

MOSCOW AND CAIRO

T HE House of Commons debate on the Middle East came the day after another Parliament, that of Israel, had debated whether a terrible mistake had not been made in failing to wage a preventive war against the Arab States long ago. If Israel had done that it would have found itself in a war with no end, going on and on without decisive result against an enemy so greatly dispersed. On the other hand, the danger of war against Israel is exceedingly grave and is becoming yet more grave with every week that passes, and with every consignment of arms that reaches Cairo from the Soviet Union.

“Hatred of Israel,” wrote The Times last Saturday, with an access of plain speaking as it sought to explain the dismissal of Glubb Pasha, “is not merely the paramount but virtually the only consideration in Arab minds today.” This was an overstatement of an important truth which for a long time was hardly stated at all. The real reason for the dismissal of General Glubb was that the Arab Legion, recruited more and more from Palestine Arab refugees, could hardly be used against Israel with him in command. He was a restraining influence, and therefore had to go. King Hussein said almost as much on Tuesday, giving the Press his own authoritative version of what happened.

“Neither fear of Communism nor even inter-Arab rivalries plays a major part in their calculations,” The Times went on to write of the Arabs. “This is a fact which the West has sometimes been slow to grasp.” Hatred of Israel overrides all else. But the considerations mentioned by no means exhaust the motives in the Arab minds, of which the crudest and chief is omitted. There is hatred of the Jews, but there is also a growing hatred of the Gentiles of the Western world ; a resentment of Europeans and, in Jordan, of the British in particular, which we are discovering now with the same startled surprise with which we discovered it only a few years ago in Egypt. This hatred is a product not mainly of Communist propaganda in the present but of West European propaganda in the past ; and it springs not from religious sentiment stirring in Islam but, on the contrary, much more from religious sentiment dying and yielding place to a crude nationalism, aped from Europe, grounded in the study of European writers, and essentially the same in the Near and Middle East and North Africa as it is in India or Indonesia or anywhere else east of Suez, whether Moslem or not.

In this movement among the Arabs Egypt is the leader and exemplar, with Colonel Nasser the sovereign guardian of £200 million worth of British military equipment in the canal zone as well as the possessor of increasing stocks of wax material from the Soviet Union. It is he who goes with the tide, not the Iraqi promoters of the Baghdad Pact. The reasons why the Jews are hated are not in general religious, or even racial. It is because they have come from Europe to make their homes in the Levant ; and there is little real distinction between the hostility towards the Jews in Israel and the hostility towards the French in Algeria. The same voices call upon them to go, and microphones to amplify the voices are provided in each case by Egypt and Soviet Russia, in partnership against the West for their different reasons. Egypt, declared M. Soustelle, the former Governor-General of Algeria, in Paris last week, lies at the heart of a grand conception of Arab empire which stretches from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic. The adversary of France and the adversary of Britain is one and the same ; it is, in M. Soustelle’s phrase, “the aggressive scheme of pan-Arabism under Egyptian direction.”

But those who are involved most directly can seldom see the problem whole. It is a common experience. Those involved see only their own little sector, in isolation, and then complain bitterly that they feel isolated. The British in the Middle East complain that they are left to play a lone hand ; the French in North Africa feel exactly the same thing, but