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An American’s Middle East Story
Relating to the 1967 Israeli Occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights
I’m a native-born American of European ancestry, who found himself becoming very much aware of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict while living and working in Saudi Arabia during June 1967. I had joined the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) as a chemical engineer ten years earlier.
Prior to joining Aramco, I was completely unaware of the complex Middle Eastern culture, history, and geography. My limited exposure consisted of Sunday School lessons relating to ancient Israel as a young boy at the small Protestant Church of my grandmother and mother. This early impression left me with a general simplistic sense that the early Israelites held strong ethical imperatives towards humanity (notwithstanding some violent passages in Deuteronomy about what they should do to the original inhabitants of the Promised Land!).
In 1960 I arrived with my small family at the American Camp of the Saudi Arabian Oil Refinery and Marine Terminal called Ras Tanura on the western shore of the Persian Gulf. It wasn’t long before I became very interested in learning about all things concerning this part of the world, a world at once so completely peculiar to my Western experience.
Before long, my wife, Margaret and I took advantage of occasional opportunities to explore the surrounding desert and the few nearby Arab villages. Sunday through Thursday was the workweek with Friday the Muslim holy day and Saturday completing the weekend. Saturday was a popular shopping day for the Aramco wives who could take the free company bus to nearby Al Khobar. There, Arab merchants offered useful household items imported from Europe in addition to interestingArabian artifacts like coffeepots, antique chests, brass trays, etc. Newly arriving wives soon learned that it was de rigueur to display an Arabian coffee pot and chest in their company sitting room.
In the early 1960s, Aramco’s job training program was graduating young Saudis to replace American refinery and terminal operators. Without any exceptions, all the young Saudis that I met were well mannered, respectful, and of a serious disposition—eager to meet Americans, to learn about American life, and to prove that they could handle their new jobs. During the late 1960s, young Arab engineers, recently graduated, began to arrive to work alongside their older American counterparts. Some of these Arabs were my first contacts with Palestinians. While I knew that they and their families had suffered hardships during 1948, we never discussed details.
Of course, I read the weekly international Time and Newsweek magazines, and listened daily to the BBC to keep abreast with world news, especially from the Middle East.
I soon became aware that there was an ongoing Israeli-Palestinian Conflict with its roots going back to 1948 when the new state of Israel was founded. My knowledge of the founding of modern Israel was limited to the little that all Americans learned at that time from their news media. Additionally, I was aware of the Holocaust, and had carefully followed all relating news reports during World War II. While mentioning The Holocaust, one must emphasize that only Europeans were responsible for this tragic occurrence; but, as Primo Levy has said, “the Arabs have been made to pay for it.”
Just before the outbreak of the Six Day War in June 1967 Aramco had given each of its Arab employees a small transistor radio as a safety reward for helping the company meet an accident-free period. When the war began, these radios were very much in evidence throughout the refinery. While I understood no Arabic, the martial music and strident speech coming from stations in nearby Arab nations was ominous. I later learned that American naval vessels were stationed in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and gave justified cause for Arabs to believe that the US was providing military cover for Israel’s preemptive attack against Egypt. As it turned out, Israel attacked the USS Liberty, a Sixth Fleet intelligence-gathering ship, resulting in the killing of 34 American servicemen. This shameful Israeli and US cover up dates back to the Johnson Administration.
I recall the looks of confusion, of “how could you do this” that filled the faces of my Saudi fellow workers during the first day of the War.
I remember thinking at that time that Israel then had its chance to demonstrate its moral fiber––from a position of strength––by returning their recently occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights. However, this was not to be.
Aramco’s work routine returned to normal after a few weeks.
Now forty years later, it has become all too clear to the rest of the world—if not yet to the majority of Israelis and Americans—that Israel tragically missed an historic opportunity!
I’ve recently learned that even Israel’s then Prime Minister Ben Gurion advocated a “conditional withdrawal from the territories just won.” (1) “He understood what holding on to those lands, and the Palestinian people who lived in them, would mean: a mortal, political and moral disaster [my italics] for the state he had founded and loved. The mortal threat is clear to this very day. The victory of 1967 turned Israel into a military occupier, and occupied people will always fight back eventually, as the Palestinians did in earnest with the first intifada that erupted in 1987, through the suicide bombings of the 1990s and the second intifada that began in 2000. Of course the forty years since 1967 have been most painful for those who have lived their lives under occupation: the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. But the inevitable consequence of that pain has been danger and perpetual conflict for the people of Israel [my italics]. The political threat is less visible but just as obvious. Ben-Gurion understood what even Ariel Sharon would see three-and-a-half decades later: that if Israel was to live up to its own ambition of being a Jewish democratic state, it could not rule over a Palestinian Arab population that would one day be its numerical equal. Yet that is the statistical situation today, with equal numbers of Jews and Arabs in the historic land of Palestine.” (1)
After leaving Aramco and Saudi Arabia in 1974, I moved with my family to Ahwaz, Iran where I worked two years as a senior engineer in the area’s oil fields for the Oil Service Company of Iran (OSCO). Again I experienced a marked respect as an American. This deference was coupled with sincere friendliness from all my Iranian work associates, especially the younger ones. I find it now very depressing to realize how America has (since 9/11) squandered the strong goodwill that I found so freely given by Middle Easterners in the 1960s and 70s.
We left Iran in the fall of 1978 just ahead of the violent overthrow of the Shaw and the shutdown of the Iranian oil facilities.
I had retired and no longer lived overseas when the 9/11 attacks occurred. However, by this time I understood how Arabs had come to perceive US Middle East policy as support for Israel’s cruel and unjust occupations of Palestinian lands.
Considering the true facts and a balanced history of the region, I found it very troubling that so many of my American friends had closed minds concerning the Arab justifiable anger toward Israel’s 1948 ethnic cleansing and 1967 occupations in Palestine. I interpret this as due to the average American’s ignorance and apathy with this subject. I have attempted to correct my friends’ prejudices by relating my experiences and my understanding of the complex historical, racial, political, and religious dynamics of the Middle East. This led me to write a Position Paper, and put it up on the Web along with other material that I searched out. You may visit my Website at the following address:
http://hometown.aol.com/positionpaper/myhomepage/index.html
In addition to my Position Paper you will find material concerning The Nakba, the Six Day War, and much more in Addenda II at the following Web address:
http://www.members.aol.com/positionpaper/A-I-P_Addenda_II
It must be said that there has been a well orchestrated on-going program, especially since 1967 here in the US, to misinform (cover up) true historical facts and reasoned analysis behind the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
I have found this to be true with most of my friends, many of whom have begun to close their minds on the subject. They are unable to place themselves in the position of an average Arab––to understand how Arabs view the reality of Israel’s colonization, occupation, and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. This reality includes America’s strong financial, military, and political support for Israel’s Palestinian policies.
Is it too much to hope that there now seem to be more people speaking out to right this shameful miscarriage of humanitarian justice? Consider these examples: the Walt & Mearsheimer Paper published last fall that discussed the powerful lobby called American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its influence on the US government; Jimmy Carter’s new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid; and in particular, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s (2006) book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. For me, it is this last book that finally connects all the dots. Pappe lays out the factual details that explain the fundamental cause of deep-seated and long-evolving Arab anger against Israel and its primary supporter—the US. Of course, the US’ and Britain’s preemptive attack and occupation of Iraq have only added fuel to the smoldering fire in the Middle East.
To balance my abovementioned perceived small positive change—that more influential people are now speaking out about the tragic injustices done to the Palestinians (including generations of refugees and the 1.4 million people presently living on the edge of starvation in the Gaza Strip which has become the world’s largest open-air concentration camp)—it is appropriate to quote from the current Report On Israeli Settlement In The Occupied Territories, May–June 2007, published by The Foundation for Middle East Peace, Washington, D.C.: “Now they [Israeli Pro-Settlement Forces] are on the offensive, aiming to take command of the settlement agenda and to bury the idea of [Israel’s] withdrawal from the West Bank.”
The Western World must first recognize and understand this sixty-year racial injustice for what it is (ethnic cleansing, colonization, and occupation) before remedial action can begin. These are indeed crucial times for all of us on the planet. Hopefully, our nations’ policies and actions will soon begin to redress the injustice done to the Palestinians in 1948, in 1967, and continuing to this day, and allow us all to pull back from the abyss. The Jewish-American academic, Prof. Richard A. Falk, in his article entitled, Slouching Toward a Palestinian Holocaust presciently states that we are indeed now at the edge of an abyss. [Click on the title link to read the article.]
This conflict is a double tragedy, obviously for the Palestinian People, but also for the Israelis themselves.
My Middle East experience has become a part of who I am. If my sharing my story and my understanding of what I see as a double tragedy can in some small way help ameliorate this conflict then my effort will not have been in vain.
I have found no better statement of what must now be done to begin to end this horrible conflict than the recent written words of Stephane Hessel: “It is time for the leaders of Israel to adopt a policy that the wisest and bravest Israelis (alas, still a small minority) have been urging for a long time: one that leads to a State of Israel with a strong Jewish majority on three-fourths of the former British Mandate, democratically governed and granting liberal civil rights to its Arab minority; and a sovereign State of Palestine on the remaining fourth of the land, getting trade and financial support from its Israeli neighbor, communicating freely with its Arab neighbors and having its capital in East Jerusalem.” (2)
Reference Sources
1. “Six Day War Has Never Ended,” by Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian Weekly, Comment & Debate, and
p. 17, 1 June 2007. [Freedland is a British journalist who belongs to the Semitic race.]
2. “Israel’s Choice,” by Stephane Hessel, The Nation, pp. 6–7, 2 July 2007. [Hassle, who fought with the
French army and the resistance in World War II, was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp at
Buchenwald. After the war he served as a French and UN diplomat and was named a Grand Officer of
the Legion of Honor in 2006.]
Tags: middle east story, middle east, conflict, peace, israel, israeli, palestine, palestinian, saudi arabia, ras tanura, sixday war, six-day war, ethnic cleansing, israeli occupation, east jerusalem, gaza, gaza strip, golan heights, west bank, uss liberty, aipac, slouching toward, palestinian holocaust, richard falk, stephane hessel, primo levi, ilan pappe
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