About the Middle East

                                                                                         

The Middle East is a region whose enduring and conflicting passions invite the luxury of lazy generalizations. But sooner or later most who study the extraordinary complexity and nuance of its modern history and politics come to the conclusion that its problems are not given to simple solutions.

Part of the reason, they learn, is that for thousands of years the people of the Middle East have suffered the almost constant imposition of outside power and outside ideas. Yet within the Gordian knot of alternative histories and contending claims in the broad sweep of its lands from North Africa to Saudi Arabia to Iran, Iraq and Turkey, there are core issues that may respond to fresh analysis in the search for solutions.

For example, the apparent intractability of the Middle East’s most vexing problem may be illuminated when examined through the familiar though underutilized prism of identity studies. According to Shibley Telhami and Michael Barnett, “No student of Middle Eastern international politics can begin to understand the region without taking into account the ebb and flow of identity politics” (Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East).

The contemporary heart of the region’s great geographic and cultural arc is the center of the more-than-100-year conflict between the Arabs and the Zionists. Henry Kissinger has characterized the conflict as an anachronism—a seventeenth-century-style religious war three hundred years too late.

Europe’s last religious war spanned thirty years (1618–1648); though the Arab-Zionist conflict has lasted much longer, its vicious dynamic relies on similar intransigent attitudes and approaches. And while the conflict has religious elements, the Palestinian and Israeli people of the early twenty-first century are caught up in not so much a religious war but more precisely a clash of two personal and collective identities (to be continued).

About the author:
Dr. David Hulme holds a doctorate in International Relations from the University of Southern California with an emphasis on the Middle East. He's the author of "Identity, Ideology and the Jerusalem Question" and the blog, Causes of Conflict. He is president of Vision Media Productions and chairman of Vision.org Foundation. Please email at dhulme@vision.org.

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