Our Story with Russia
Eyad Abu Shakra/Asharq Al Awsat/March 31/16
Despite the zeal of some ultra-nationalist Russians who shun and ignore Soviet heritage, others still feel the USSR, the mammoth that competed with the USA for the leadership of the world, was an effective tool in promoting ‘Russian’ interests, regardless of whether ‘internationalist’ Bolsheviks had intended it or not. I reckon this particular argument is still far from being settled, within Russia or outside the great country the Arabs and Muslims came to know for the first time through the travels of Ahmad Ibn Fadhlan in 922 AD, during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Al-Muqtadir, who sent with him a letter to ‘the King of the Slavs’, including the ‘Rus’ people. On the other hand, I think we as Arabs have failed to get to know the Russian people, their culture, their history as well as their interests, in spite of the fact that they have been among the most interactive ‘European’ peoples with the Arab and Muslim worlds. Without dwelling too much on the subject, it would be beneficial if we keep the following in mind:
Firstly, the Russian ‘geographic’ environment has put them sometimes in a state of positive exchange, but more frequently in a state of confrontation with both Muslims and Arabs since the armies of Islamic conquest reached the foothills of the eastern Caucasus at Derbent (Bab Al-Abwab, i.e. ‘the gate of gates’ in Arabic), and began to deal with the local population. In those days the Muslims and Arabs called the Caucasus massif the ‘Mountain of the Tongues’ (Jabal al-Alsun) denoting the multitude of languages spoken in its inaccessible valleys inhabited by different minorities without a single dominant majority. In fact, a large portion of that region is called Dagestan meaning the ‘Home or Land of mountains’. Before that, some historians linked the Jews to the Khazar people living on the northern shores of the Caspian Sea, claiming that the then King of the Khazar, already on bad terms with Christian Slavs but unwilling to accept Islam brought by invading armies from the south, decided to adopt Judaism as the religion of his people. Throughout history the lands of the ‘Rus’ witnessed several waves of invaders and settlers, perhaps the most important of which were the waves of Turkic (Altaic or Turanic) raids, which resulted in the settlement of many Turkic peoples in today’s Russia. These include the Chuvash – western Russia’s only major Christian Turkic people –, the Tatars, the Bashkirs and the ‘old Bulgars’.
Secondly, Russia remains Europe’s largest country and certainly the leading bastion of Slavic culture. Indeed, when European powers began to show interests in the Middle East, bolstered by the never severed religious connections with the holy places in Palestine, Russia was one of these powers which established a strong ecclesiastic, educational and cultural presence. This presence was best reflected in what were known as ‘Moskovian’ seminars and schools. The remains of that presence are still there despite the ‘spiritual retreat’ in the face of ‘revolutionary thought’ during the Soviet decades. I still recall during my school days in Lebanon, namely in the town of Choueifat, the strong Russian ties with the area including the marriage of Aleksei Kruglov, the last Russian consul in Palestine to a Christian Orthodox lady from Choueifat. A grandson of consul Kruglov is a very dear friend and schoolmate.
Furthermore, in a study conducted by the Syrian academic Dr Joseph Zeitoun, he mentions that Russia’s interests in the ‘Mashreq’ go back to the early 19th century during the reigns of Emperor (czar) Alexander I and his successors. Zeitoun claims that the first steps in that direction were founding convents, caravanserais and hospices to serve pilgrims and visitors to the Holy Lands, particularly Jerusalem, but also including the Syrian town of Saydnaya, not far from Damascus, due to the significance of its ‘Convent of Our Lady’, regarded by many Christians as the ‘third pilgrimage’ after Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
In the 1830s Russia’s consul in Beirut instructed his council to travel through greater Syria (Bilad Ash-Sham) and prepare a report about the overall situation of Orthodox Christians. This report in turn led the Russian Synod to ask one of its bishops to travel to Palestine in a fact finding mission. The bishop indeed prepared an extensive report about the conditions of the Orthodox Church and its people, and stressed the urgent need for a ‘spiritual, social and educational renaissance’, as well as the need to establish a large Russian mission to provide relief not only to Greater Syria but also Egypt. Actually, as a fruit of such an endeavour, the prominent Lebanese intellectual and man of letters Mikhail Naimy was one of the Syrio-Lebanese graduates of Russo-Ukrainian institutes, and so were the prominent Palestinian author and educator Khalil As-Sakakini, and three members of the Arab ‘Pen League’ of New York, Raschid Ayyub, Abdul Massih Haddad and Nasib Arida. In addition to those, there was the noted Jerusalemite intellectual and academic Bandali Al-Jouzy who studied and taught in Russia.
According to Dr Zeitoun, the first school the Russians founded in Palestine was in the village of Al-Mujaidel near the city of Nazareth in Galilee in 1882. It was soon followed by other schools in the villages of Ar-Rameh, Kufr Yassif and Ash-Shajara in 1883 and 1884.
From my own personal experience, I remember reading two good books covering Russia’s interests in the Middle East; the first ‘The Lebanon and the Lebanese’ written in the 19th century by consul Konstantin Petkovich covering the affairs of ‘Mount Lebanon’ autonomous district between 1862 and 1882 (later translated into Arabic); and the second ‘Peasant Movements in the Lebanon’ during the first half of the 19th century written later during the Soviet era by Irina M. Smilianskaya.
These two books give a clear idea about how seriously the Russians took our region, both in Imperial and Soviet periods. Yet we seem to be unable to understand the motives behind Russia’s intentions. We even do not know, or forget, that the USSR was the first country to recognise the founding of Saudi Arabia! The fact of the matter is that Russian gas never ceased to see itself a major and influential player on the world stage; let alone with regards to its often problematic historical relations with Islam and Muslim peoples, its geo-political interests in the midst of global competition, and its economic and oil concerns in a world of conflicts and integration. Today, we as Arabs need experts in Russian as well as Chinese affairs at the same level with those who have studied European and American history and cultures. This is a challenge for us, and we – very simply put – need to know about the Russians and Chinese as much as they know about us!
“Excuses” for Terrorists
Douglas Murray/Gatestone Institute/March 30/16 http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/7718/terrorists-excuses
The facts show is that all these “excuses” for terrorism are incorrect. Israel is not, for instance, carrying out the “war crimes,” “apartheid” or “genocide,” which propagandists have persuaded Europeans that Israel is engaged in. Israel is fighting an enemy that breaks every rule of armed conflict, and Israel responds in a manner so precise and so moral that allied nations are concerned that they will not be able to live up to the Israeli military’s moral standards the next time they go to war.
Well, what a shock the rest of the world will one day have to undergo. Because if you allow an “excuse” for one false narrative of Islamic extremists, you will then have to allow it for the others. You will, for example, have to accept the word of ISIS that Belgium is a “crusader” nation, deserving to be attacked because it is involved in a “crusade.”
The question is not why it took over 24 hours for the UK to find Belgian-colored lights to project in solidarity, but why after 67 years of terror, it still has not found the simple blue and white lights to project the flag of Israel onto any public place.
The day after the Brussels terror attack, landmarks in the UK were lit up in the colors of the Belgian flag. Portions of the press in Britain excoriated the country on this. Why, they asked, had the now-traditional, mawkish ceremony occurred the day after the attacks rather than on the evening of the attacks themselves? Why were we a day late with our lights when other cities had managed to do their “solidarity” gesture straightaway? Such are our times. And such are our questions.
The night after last week’s terror attacks in Brussels, public buildings in Britain, such as the National Gallery in London (left) and Manchester town hall (right) were lit up with the colors of the Belgian flag.
tion in all this, it is not why it took more than 24 hours for the UK to find its Belgian-colored lights, but why after 67 years of terror, it still has not found the simple blue and white lights it would need to project the flag of Israel onto any public place.
It is not as though there haven’t been plenty of opportunities. Israel’s enemies have provided us with even more opportunities for light displays than have now been offered to the light-infatuated by the followers of ISIS.
You could argue that in the last seven decades, public attitudes have changed; that today futile gestures of “solidarity” are all the rage, but in generations past they were not. It might have been unheard of for any British institution to beam the colors of the Israeli flag into buildings in 1948, 1956, 1967 or 1973. But when sentimentalism came to Britain, it came in a big way. If it had not struck us by the time of the first intifada (1987-1993), it certainly had by the time of the second one (2000-2005).
During that period, thousands of Israelis were killed and wounded by Palestinian terrorists. Yet there were no projections of the Israeli flag onto public buildings. Again, during the 2006 Hezbollah War, landmarks went unlit — the same as after each salvo of rockets launched into Israel from the Gaza Strip, freshly evacuated by Israel to allow the Arabs there to create the Singapore or Côte d’Azure of the Middle East.
When Israel is attacked, the steps of the Israeli embassies in London and other European capitals are not littered with flowers, teddy bears or candles, or scrawled notes of sympathy. Indeed, whenever Israelis are attacked and murdered, there is a response at Israel’s embassies. It tends to be less teddy-obsessed; it consists more of crowds roaring in rage against Israel and having to be held back from further antagonism by the local police.
It is possible that there are those who believe Israel is simply on a different continent from Europe and that, despite being an essentially Western society, it is not one to which we feel sufficiently close. Whenever a terrorist outrage occurs in a Western capital these days, there are always those who ask why the mourning for Paris or Brussels, say, is stronger than the mourning for Ankara or Beirut.
But the Paris/Brussels question for Jerusalem rarely, if ever, gets asked. One could take the lowest road and say it is because in Israel the victims are Jews. But there is also an explanation just as true. It is that Israel is seen as different because when Israel is attacked by terrorists, it is seen by a great number of people in the West not to be an innocent victim. It is seen as a country which might have in some way brought the violence upon itself.
Supposed excuses for this view may vary, from objecting to farms on the Golan Heights to Israel’s refusal to allow weapons intended to annihilate it to be poured into the Gaza Strip. Others include Israeli “settlements” in the West Bank, while at the same time disregarding that to most Palestinians all of Israel, “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea,” as they put it, is one big “settlement” — to be exterminated, as openly set forth in both the Hamas and PLO charters. Neither charter has ever been renounced. If you look at any map of “Palestine,” it is actually a map of Israel, but with “al-Quds” instead of “Jerusalem” and “Jaffa” instead of “Tel Aviv.” For these Palestinians, there is, in fact, just one underlying offense: the existence of the State Israel itself.
This piece of land, however, as Canaan, the Fertile Crescent, and Judea and Samaria, has been home to the Jews for nearly 4000 years — despite Romans, Saladin, the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate.
What remains are facts. And what the facts show is that all these “excuses” for terrorism are incorrect. Israel is not, for instance, carrying out the “war crimes,” “apartheid” or “genocide,” which propagandists have persuaded Europeans that Israel is engaged in. Israel is, quite the contrary, fighting an enemy that breaks every rule of armed conflict, and Israel responds in a manner so precise and so moral (as the High Level Military Group concluded in its assessment of the 2014 Gaza conflict) that allied nations are presently concerned that they will not be able to live up to the Israeli military’s moral standards the next time they go to war. Israel, like the rest of the West, is trying to find a legal and decent way to respond to an illegal and indecent set of terrorist tactics. It is also not true that Israel’s enemies have some righteous territorial dispute. They already have the whole of the Gaza Strip, and if they wanted most of the West Bank, they could have had it at almost any time since 1948, including at Camp David in 2000. On each occasion, it was the Palestinians who turned down all offers — without even proposing a counter-offer.
Even so, in the eyes of many Europeans, Israel is seen to have done something for which suicide bombers are thought to be an understandable response. Whether said or unsaid, this is the rationale that makes terror against Israel a lesser offense than terror everywhere else.
Well, what a shock the rest of the world will one day have to undergo. Because if you allow an “excuse” for one false narrative of Islamic extremists, you will then have to allow it for the others. You will, for example, have to accept the word of ISIS that Belgium is a “crusader” nation, deserving to be attacked because it is involved in a “crusade” against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). You will have to accept that for standing up to the Islamic extremists in Mali and Syria, these Islamic extremists have the right to attack the people of Belgium, France, Sierra Leone, Canada, the United States and Australia.
You will have to accept that Europeans can be killed for publishing a cartoon, simply because a foreign terrorist group says so, and then accept that the cartoonists brought it themselves.
The enemies of Israel and the enemies of the rest of the civilized world have some minor differences, but there is far more that they have in common. They are both driven not only by the same jihadist ideologies but by the insistence that their political and religious view of the world is relevant not just for them, but needs to be implemented against all of the rest of us. It may take a while to realize it, but we are all in the same boat. It also may take a while until European cities reach for the blue and white bulbs; but if we start to question where those bulbs went, we might get closer not only to understanding Israel’s predicament, but to understanding the predicament that is also now our own.
**Douglas Murray is a current events analyst and commentator based in London.
