Jalal Al-e-Ahmed and the Garden of Zion - II

Given that he is one of the two most important revolutionary intellectuals of the 20th century from Iran, as we have already discussed last week, Jalal Al-e-Ahmad’s writings on his travels to Israel are worth examining in some detail.

His second chapter details the writer’s visit to Yad Vashem, the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Here he informs us for his fascination with the Israeli kibbutz, which according to him, was modeled on Russian social democracy, and not on any notion of the Stalinist kolkhoz (collective farm). In fact, Al-e-Ahmad is keen to distance himself from the latter, given his abandonment of the Tudeh Party (Iran’s mass communist party). Here he once again launches into an extended diatribe on the great Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and questions his leadership of the Muslim world, before defending Iranian “barbarism” against Arab and Western “civilization”:

I, a non-Arab Easterner, have been beaten by the Arabs’ stick in the past and I am still taking a beating now […] And I, who suffered this way at the hands of these rootless Arabs, am happy with the presence of Israel in the East. With the presence of an Israel that can cut the sheikhs’ oil pipeline […] in order for me […] to be able to be freed from the tyranny of the puppet petro-regimes [...]”

Now, knowing Al-e-Ahmad’s egalitarian politics, which forced him out of the Tudeh and into organizing for the regeneration of the party of Iran’s deposed premier Mohammed Mossadegh, it is difficult to reconcile his blind hatred for Nasser, who despite coming to power through a military coup in 1952 was literally the most charismatic and popular Arab leader of the 20th century, his prestige restored by his miraculous survival even after an attempt by a combined Western-Israeli alliance to topple him by war in 1956. After all, Nasser too followed the same radical social democratic policies which led to the ouster of Mossadegh in Iran. In fact, it seems that his contempt for Arabs and admiration for Zionist Israel blinds the writer to the fact that the Arab world was and still is a tapestry of various nations: the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Jordan and North African states like Tunisia and Morocco (which “pioneered” Arab diplomatic contacts with Israel in the 1950s) were pro-Western while the remainder more or less had revolutionary regimes opposed to the West and allied to the Soviet Union or were non-aligned. Secondly, it also obscures his vision as to the fact that the creation of Israel was achieved by a wanton process of ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s original Muslim and Christian Arabs and by stealing their lands.

Title: The Israeli Republic
Author: Jalal Al-e-Ahmad
Translated by: Samuel Thrope
Publishers: Restless Books, New York
ISBN: 978-163206139-3
144 pp.

Of course what can be said in his defence is that Al-e-Ahmad is also here using his polemics against the gas stations of the Persian Gulf as a metaphor for his own native petro-state of Iran ruled by the Shah – which he could not do openly since even while he was alive and afterwards, both his books and correspondence were heavily censored. In addition, since his visit to Israel was sponsored by the Israeli government, which was no doubt very keen to get in the good books of Iran’s towering intellects like Al-e-Ahmad, the latter only observes and experiences what he is allowed to see by his hosts.

The fourth chapter recounts the writer and his wife’s stay on a kibbutz. The report is positive, but Al-e-Ahmad can see problems and contradictions developing in a society which, though inspired by Russian social democracy, cannot become self-sufficient. He sees it relying on arms and shelters to defend itself against the people whose land it took. The rest of the chapter is devoted to giving a background to Jewish immigration to Palestine.

As the reader turn towards the fifth and final chapter of the travelogue, there is a marked change in the tone of the writer. Yes, the polemic and provocation is still there, but its target now is not the Arabs any more, but the very country which had hosted him for two weeks. A lot has been speculated regarding the authorship of this chapter, which was written after Israel’s victory against the combined Arab armies in the disastrous June 1967 Arab-Israeli war; indeed Al-e-Ahmad gives a cheeky disclaimer at the beginning of the chapter that the text was written as a letter from a Parisian friend to which the former had made some additions. In his own words “the nonsense and beard-pulling is mine; the reasonable speech his.” As to the “nonsense and beard-pulling”, Al-e-Ahmad takes the French Left to task for failing to stand up to Zionism and blindly kowtowing to Israel: Jean-Paul Sartre, the Nobel-Laureate Eugene Ionesco, Daniel Mayer and Claude Lanzmann are not spared. In fact – and it is possible that Al-e-Ahmad might not have known, or would have passed away by then – some of the most well-known French revolutionary intellectuals also censured Israel for its expansionist designs in the 1967 war and refused to toe the Zionist line, among them the well-known Jewish Marxist Maxime Rodinson, who later theorized Israel as a colonial settler-state; Regis Debray, and the writer Jean Genet who wrote his searing testament Prisoner of Love while in the Palestinian refugee camps of Shabra and Shatila devastated by Israel during the Lebanese Civil War in September 1982.

Throughout the chapter, Al-e-Ahmad’s invective against Israel gets stronger, variously describing the state as “the Middle Eastern branch of imperialism and the CIA”, “the direct puppet of capitalism and Western colonialism in the Middle East”; the Zionists as “Nazis”; and Zionism as “the other side of the coin of Nazism and Fascism.” There is even a grudging acknowledgment of Nasser, as well as appeals to anti-imperialist pan-Islamism by pointing out that Iranian oil powers Israeli tanks and planes, while Saudi and Kuwaiti oil is used in American tanks and helicopters in the Vietnam War. In fact, when Al-e-Ahmad  remarks that “the experience of Cuba and Algeria and China has shown that the hand of colonialism can only be severed with an ax”, he is anticipating what another of his illustrious contemporaries, the African-American activist Malcolm X advocated publicly after his return from the Hajj pilgrimage in 1964 – just a year after Al-e-Ahmad wrote these lines!

For this scribe, the most rewarding part of the chapter comes at the end when in answer to his question of “what is to be done?”, Al-e-Ahmad proposes a series of measures designed to stem the rot in both the Arab world and Israel: a federal government of Arabs and Jews in Palestine; the end of Israel as a Zionist state; the end of dependence of the revolutionary Arab states on Gulf oil and largesse; and the beginning of Islamic cooperation and solidarity.

What can be said in his defence is that Al-e-Ahmad is also here using his polemics against the gas stations of the Persian Gulf as a metaphor for his own native petro-state of Iran ruled by the Shah – which he could not do openly

It can be said that in more than fifty years after these words were written, much has changed in Iran, the Middle East, Israel and the world.

Israel is still a Zionist state, bent on expansion of Jewish settlements, in fact the incumbent Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu promised to annex the disputed West Bank territories as part of his campaign pledge before the Israeli elections. The idea of a bi-national state in Palestine is still attractive for a certain generation of leftists, but at the moment even a two-state solution in Palestine seems suspect.

Meanwhile one wonders what Al-e-Ahmad would have made of the fact that the three revolutionary states he named in his aforementioned prescription have become a byword for dictatorship and disorder – certainly Egypt and Syria, and a lot of uncertainty in Algeria.

Revolution in his own native Iran did not cross Al-e-Ahmad’s mind, neither did he predict a revolution in Riyadh. As regards Islamic fraternity, in was incidentally in August 1969, an arson attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque was carried out, to widespread condemnation in the Muslim world, and a few weeks later, 24 Muslim countries met in Rabat to lay the building blocks of what would become the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). Of course Al-e-Ahmad did not live to see this development, he had passed away just two weeks before this milestone in transnational Muslim cooperation.

Revolution in his own native Iran did not cross Al-e-Ahmad’s mind, neither did he predict a revolution in Riyadh

It is difficult to romanticize about Israel today the way Al-e-Ahmad did for those two weeks he was in that country in the 1960s. What one realizes while reading these observations today is how conflicted Al-e-Ahmad himself was about where his own society was going; and his own place in it. Perhaps his change of heart about Israel after 1967 was a way to “expiate for his sins” of admiring the Zionist state in the not-too-distant past as a way forward for his own country.

Some of our own so-called liberals and “realists” in Pakistan are ready to recognize Israel today, if only in order that it will offset India’s clout in Kashmir. But perhaps more than that, taking a leaf out of Al-e-Ahmad’s books, would it be too much to acknowledge that like Israel and Iran in the 1960s, Pakistan and India need not be in conflict but rather in concert and do not need a moment like Al-e-Ahmad’s terrible post-1967 epiphany – the “beginning of disgust” as he called it – to be caught in each other’s long-simmering internal tensions and struggles?

Raza Naeem is a social scientist and an award-winning translator currently based in Lahore. He has been trained in Political Economy from the University of Leeds in the UK and in Middle Eastern History and Anthropology from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, USA. He is also the President of the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) in Lahore. He may be reached at: razanaeem@hotmail.com