Posted 9:14 AM by extinct

The "Effendi Theory" & Iraq Policy: Leon Uris Lives On

One of the main people morally responsible for the mess in the Middle East, author Leon Uris, died several weeks back ironically not long before his writer-nemesis Edward Said, who died just a few days ago. But Uris is the topic here, however. For he successfully pioneered a romantic and sanitized version of the founding of modern Israel in his novels that reinforced prejudices and misinformation influencing many Americans in evaluating the broader issues of the entire region today. But instead of his myths' being cast aside by age and greater understanding, they appear to resonate and thrive in the Iraq policy thinking of current Administration advisers, particularly the neoconservatives and also the President himself. The influence is manifest most clearly in the oft-stated belief that somehow the act of simply eliminating Arab dictators, as was done with Saddam in Iraq, is the ready one-step key to uprooting terrorism emanating from the area.

Uris' major works like “Exodus” and “The Haj” influenced Americans who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s and who now are running the show. Indirectly, he introduced into popular culture a theory of Arab society that seems to fuel the idea that terror and violence in and from the Middle East is not an outgrowth of any real complaints or problems or complex interactions but only a matter of trouble-making petty Arab leaders "stirring up" the dim-witted peasantry against assorted infidels in order to distract from their own misrule.

We can give this old-new doctrine a name: the "Effendi theory." The term "Effendi" was a title for landowners who formed a semi-feudal lesser nobility in Palestine and other parts of the Near East at the time of World War One and the end of Turkish rule over the region. In the Israeli romantic myth promulgated by Uris, Arab resistance to Zionist-sponsored Jewish settlement in the early part of last century, as well as resistance to post WWI Western rule, was rooted primarily, if not solely, in some kind of backward religious xenophobic anti-Semitism and anti-modernism cynically incited by the "Effendis" who feared losing their power.

We encounter an amplified echo of this theory in the Iraq policy thinking of the Administration through FoxNews, MEMRI, and the National Review. We hear it when it is proclaimed that local Arab dictators are manufacturing out of whole cloth hostility to things Western and Israeli. Or when we see people overly obsess on the content of al-Jazeera or Arab textbooks, noxious though that content may sometimes be, as if to say that that rhetoric is the "real" root of regional trouble, Arab-Israeli hostility, and anti-Western sentiment.

It is sad that our foreign policy hopes are descended from a fiction emerging from the pop-rationalizations of one side of a local turf conflict. Those rationalizations in turn were developed by now discarded and discredited empires, like the British and the French in the Middle East. And then translated through hyperbolic and, frankly, simplistically bigoted writers like Uris.

Actually, Arab resistance to the founding of Israel and Western rule rested on far more than just nervous nasty Effendis. Despite the actual existence of such demagogic grandees and their machinations, particularly the repugnant Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who became a Nazi collaborator, Arab objections to Jewish settlement and Anglo-French colonization was pretty much the same as anyone's would be if foreigners were injected into one's country, or injected themselves, with the express unratified intent to take it over for their own purposes.

Other issues, like local anti-Semitism, backwardness, religious and ethnic chauvinism were and are all there, and they do matter, but the basic picture has been that of one group being settled upon by others who did not take them into sufficient or honorable account. And then the receiving group getting riled about it in ways fair and foul, something which happens all the time in our species. Whether or not hostility to the West and Israel among Arabs has been kept in rational proportion to the claimed grievances, and whether it is riddled with prejudice and misunderstanding, present fair questions. But we need not accept that hostility and terrorism are all a matter of incitement by local plutocrats. In fact, such a theory of plutocrat manipulation sounds a little like a theme of anti-Semitism itself.

Nevertheless, as President Bush's recent address indicates, we Americans are resting our whole multi-billion dollar and multi-American-lives strategy of regional anti-terrorism and pre-emptive warfare on a bogus theory requiring a vast campaign of dubious social engineering. That is dangerous enough alone, given that top-down social revolution is rarely likely to work. (Japan is not a valid counter-example for reasons too long to get into here.) But it also remains the case that the idea of imposed social improvement curing terrorism is predicated on the false assumption that there are no understandable or valid grievances against the USA, the West and Israel (however wrongly they may be pursued at times), and that the fears and resentment are all a chimera manufactured by the modern Effendis, who today are said to be the Saudi "Wahhabis", Saddam Hussein, the (non-Arab) Iranian mullahs, the dictator of Syria, etc.

And that's hooey, or at least not wholly true. And even if it weren't mostly false, nevertheless the measures required to forcefully implement such a social revolutionary change -- the requisite warfare and repression and related inevitable mistakes -- would most likely create those grievances, especially when ""liberation" is undertaken by inept hands. At that point, it won't be a matter of Effendis, sheikhs, and dictators but of populations and armies and terrorists confronting each other in ever greater violence. As has happened between Arabs and Israelis.

But it should not happen to us though it appears to be starting.

Leon Uris wrote his first popular Middle East romance in the late 50s. Since then, there have been many more Middle East wars, more destruction, more terror. And more Leon Uris novels. Obviously he failed fundamentally at getting something right. Romances like his, and their underlying theories that Arab societies are simply dictator-manipulated automatons of hate, have not worked in any helpful way. Let's not compound the idiocy: those raised on this mythology, including leading government officials and think-tankers, should be able to break their own programming.

If we are to end terrorism from the Middle East, perhaps it is better to work not to exacerbate the mutual crimes between Arab and Israeli, now degenerated into suicide-murder and indiscriminate raids. It is best to regard the peoples of the region as worthy of their own internal mistakes and development. Prosecute and kill those who attack us, sure. Stop aiding dictators and military occupiers, definitely. Approve reasonable international norms, including the legitimacy of Israel and the basic rights of occupied Palestinians, undoubtedly.

And start minding our own business, absolutely.

In any event, let's try to avoid sending our kids and others' to die based upon bad and outdated social theories spread by hack writers and internalized through pop fiction.