THE FERTILE CRESCENT

By EDWARD HODGKIN

IT seems to have been Professor Breasted who first used the expression "The Fertile Crescent" to describe the populated perimeter of the great Arabian Desert. He was speaking as a geographer, but today when the phrase turns up in conversation in Damascus, Baghdad, Beirut and Amman, it is used to describe a political project. The coast lands of the Eastern Mediterranean and the twin rivers of Iraq meet in an apex under the Anatolian mountains where the Euphrates bends west towards the Orontes, and it is thus possible to travel from Gaza in the south of Palestine, up to Aleppo in north Syria, across into Iraq and down a thousand miles to the port of Basra, without ever losing sight of cultivation. This is the Fertile Crescent, whose two horns enfold a huge desert which separates one from the other more effectively than any ocean. It is a tract of land which contains many climates, many races and many religions, but it has also a basic homogeneity derived from the fact that most of its inhabitants are settled Arabs, and that within its limits are to be found almost all the centres of the Arabs' former glory and present wealth. One of the most mriking results of the upheavals and disasters of the past twelve months has been the growing agitation within the Fertile Crescent for some closer form of union among the peoples who live in it.

Today four States, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Transjordan, divide the Crescent between them. The boundaries which separate them were drawn by the Allies when they carved up the Middle East into British and French mandates at St. Remo in 1920, and it is super- ficially strange that these divisions, which have always been pointed to by good nationalists as shocking examples of imperialist technique, should have been preserved now that the Atli's have won inde- pendence. In the days of conspiracy against the Turks, Arab independence and Arab unity were understood to be synonymous ; it was on behalf of the whole Fertile Crescent that Iraqi officers and Syrian officials fought and that King Hussein negotiated with the British Government. All, therefore, that is required to achieve unity in the Fertile Crescent is to scrap the mandatory-frontiers, and that is exactly what the coffee-shop politicians (who are not neces- sarily more foolish than their elders and betters) would like to see done.

But the obstacles in the way of this ideal are formidable. In thirty years four States have grown up, and a generation has been long enough to harden separatist tradition as well as to entrench vested interests. Two monarchs and two Presidents, four Parlia- ments, four capitals, four armies, four civil services, four currencies and four tariffs—to say nothing of the local stresses and strains within each unit—are not amalgamated overnight ; or, if they are, it must be as the result of a greater urgency than even the Zionist cataclysm can provide.

Many advocates of the plan prefer therefore to talk in terms of federation rather than union. This limited aim has been expounded in a book recently published in Beirut by Musa Alami, who was at one time Attorney-General in Palestine and in 1945 was the only Palestinian delegate to the Inshass conference at which the charter of Arab League was signed. In his book, The Lessons of Palestine, Musa Alami recognises the failure of the League as an effective military or political machine for meeting the Zionist threat, and argues that the only way in which to avoid a similar or worse disaster in the future is for the four States most directly threatened —the four States, that is of the Fertile Crescent—to come closer together politically and at the same time to embark on a vigorous programme of social betterment, without which new political groupings would be pointless. This is, in essence, the old appeal for union and progress which echoes through the last half-century of Middle Eastern history ; an appeal which has been the source of tremendous hopes and bitter disappointments.

For the present, at any rate, there is little sign of the prerequisite reforms, though there is some sign of an instinctive closing of the political ranks. The loss of part of one province to alien invaders has brought little but bewilderment and near-bankruptcy to the rest of the Fertile Crescent. There remains a vacuum of faith and will which could be filled by almost anything. In these circumstances it is as easy to imagine the Arabs being forced into unity by a Bismarck as persuaded into a unity by a Cavour. But the analogies of Prussia and Piedmont are misleading in one important particular. It is the

smallest of the four States, Transjordan, which commands the most efficient army ; nowhere is there the combination of physical strength and moral leadership which could make a Diktat possible. But, if no one State is marked for ascendancy, the hour may yet call forth the man. There is today in all these countries an almost messianic longing for a man, for a hero and guide to obliterate the divisions between States and individuals. When the news of Husni Zaim's coup d'etat in Damascus first spread in the neighbouring

countries, there were many Arabs, particularly among the young, who waited by their radios expecting that among the first announce- ments of this unknown colonel would be some dramatic statement of unity. No such statement came. But the belief that somewhere must be hidden a Saladdin, an Ataturk, is becoming as strong among the Arabs as the belief among the Tibetans that somewhere, after the death of the Dalai Lama, his successor is to be found.

But even the strongest saviour would have his work cut out. Perhaps the easiest of his tasks would be to create a unified

military command in anticipation of the moment, which nobody believes to be distant, when Zionism becomes an actively aggressive force again. Many of his other troubles would have more deeply seated origins. He would have to reckon with the traditional

rivalry between Baghdad and Damascus, which dates back to the days of the Abbasids and Omayyeds ; he would have to face the

profound fear of the Lebanese Christians of becoming absorbed into a Moslem majority ; he would have to overcome the tendency towards bickering over inessentials, such as has been manifested in the past couple of weeks by Syria and Lebanon who, as the result of a shooting incident on the frontier, have been busily .imposing what amount to economic sanctions on each other. He would, most difficult of all, have to tax the rich.

This hypothetical strong man would also have to reckon with at least the passive hostility of Egypt, where all talk about the Fertile Crescent has been received with a marked lack of enthusiasm. The prospect of an Arab State eventually arising on her borders, greater in area and population than herself, is a challenge to the leadership which Egypt has exercised in the Middle East since the war years. There are, it is true, many Egyptians who are so disgruntled by the whole Palestine episode that they would be content to turn their backs on Asia and concentrate on a new future in Africa. The normally'cordial relations between Egypt and her fellow members of the Arab League have been ruffled on more than one occasion recently. While Egypt believes that she was let down militarily by her allies, they on their side feel that they have been politically misled by Egypt. The Foreign Minister of Iraq has

gone so far as to accuse the Secretary General of the Arab League, himself an Egyptian, of behaving like an independent potentate and not as the servant of the alliance. A bitter exchange of notes on this issue has culminated in Iraq's threat to resign from the League.

All the latent tendencies towards disunion, which have come to the surface as a result of the Palestine war, are the best advocates of the need for unity. In spite of everything the vision is not unrealistic. Twice in little more than a century it has been on the verge of achievement ; once under the leadership of Egypt, when Mohammed Ali and Ibrahim Pasha were only checked by the intervention of Europe from establishing an Arab empire, and later, just after the last war, when for a few months at the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920 King Hussein and his sons seemed without serious competitors for the rule of the provinces which had been liberated from the Turks. And if an analogy for success must be sought, the best is the contemporary analogy of Western Europe. Here a group of States even more profoundly individualist than those of the Fertile Crescent have taken the first practical steps towards union. The impetus which activates them is the threat of Russian Communism which, like Zionism, is the threat of an alien system of life as well as a military danger. In Western

Europe, while the advocates of immediate union are not lacking, a start is being made on ad hoc problems of defence and economics. The analogy, avany rate, is one which has not gone unnoticed in the Fertile Crescent.