Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) –
Juan Cole interviewed by Martin Asser at Tamooda : “The Making of the Modern Middle East: Juan Cole on History, Politics, and Today’s Turmoil”
According to LinkedIn, “ TAMOODA is a new digital, independent, liberal, and secular platform in the Arab world for opinion. It is is a non-profit initiative created jointly by a group of intellectuals and citizens – supported by eminent personalities – determined to inspire and inform.”
Martin Asser, an old Middle East hand, moved to the American University of Beirut in 2015 as AVP for Communications. Before that he spent 20 years as a journalist at the BBC.
From January 20, 2025. Auto-generated transcript cleaned up by ChatGPT; Caveat Emptor:
Martin: Juan Cole is a distinguished historian and public intellectual. He’s the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He was a pioneering blogger on the Middle East since the early 2000s, which is basically the beginning of blogging. He had—and still has—the assertively and appropriately named Informed Comment, which I first came across in 2003 or 2004, I think.
Of course, Juan, you’ve written many books and translations on a huge range of topics related to the Middle East and the world of Islam. Your works include Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires (2020), Engaging the Muslim World (2009), and among your historical work on modern history, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (2007). There’s been a bit of invading the Middle East that’s been happening.
So, welcome—this is the first Tamooda English video podcast that we’re doing. I can’t think of a better person to be doing it with.
Juan Cole: Ahlan wa Sahlan: Thank you very much, Martin.
Martin: …How are you doing today?
Juan Cole: Well, it’s a lovely day in the Midwest from every point of view —- except the advent of a new regime in the United States that has some pretty horrific edges to it.
Martin: I wanted to start—you’ve got such a wide range of scholarship—I wanted to reflect that a little bit in how we approach things before we dive completely into modern politics. So we will spend a little bit of time talking about history.
Let’s start with the decades—the years—leading up to the First World War. Can you help us understand what kind of place the Arab world was then, from a historical perspective? And leading on from that, can you account for the huge, massive changes that happened after the First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire—imposed from outside to a great extent? Can you give our audience your perspective on that?
Juan Cole: Sure. I’ll push back a little bit against the idea of an “Arab world.” The Arab nationalists will be peeved at me, but if we take, say, 1900, most of what we now refer to as the Arab world -— the Arabic-speaking areas of the Middle East -— were under the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, or the French Empire.
So there was no political or, I would argue, even necessarily conscious unity among Arabic speakers. Just as there are lots of people who speak Persian in Central Asia, but aren’t politically identified with Iran in any way, it was the same. The regions under the Ottoman Empire were divided into eleven states -— or provinces, I mean to say. There was an arrangement for the Christians in what is now Lebanon, as part of Ottoman Syria. There were various administrative units—we don’t need to go into all the equivalents of counties, provinces, and states—but all were ruled from Istanbul.
Martin: So when you say we can’t call it the Arab world—but geographically, there is an Arabosphere that existed?
Juan Cole: Yes, geographically. But it didn’t feel as though it was any kind of unity. It didn’t cohere in any obvious way. It didn’t trade with itself -— it traded north to Europe. Its political priorities were set in distant capitals: Istanbul, London, and Paris.
And because of still-low literacy, I think most Syrians probably couldn’t have had a conversation with most Moroccans. The language of Modern Standard Arabic hadn’t been promulgated. So, you know, we historians are very suspicious of national narratives. Eric Hobsbawm, the great historian, pointed out that in 1800, the Sicilians and Venetians were not Italians together—they couldn’t understand each other and weren’t part of the same polity.
I think that Italy before unification in the late 19th century is an interesting way to think about the Middle East before the modern period.
Martin: I didn’t mean to make a national narrative -— that was unintentional. So how did the Arab world then take shape as an Arab world? And also, if you could take the question further—is that why it was so susceptible to the changes that came from the outside, in the aftermath of the First World War?
Juan Cole: What happened in the First World War was that the Ottoman Empire made a very substantial error in joining Austria and Germany -— the losing side. That might not have mattered so much, but the war in Europe was so horrible, and so many lives were lost -— a single battle could result in 800,000 casualties at that time.
The European powers were shaky and afraid of their own publics, because of this. Frankly, it was a public relations disaster -— the lack of progress in the war in Europe in the first two years. So they decided, in order to get some victorious headlines, that they would attack the third party -— the Ottoman Empire -— because that presumably was something they could pull off much more easily than defeating Germany.
The British invaded Iraq from British India. But their initial invasion underestimated the Ottomans, who had good advice from German generals and had recently bought a lot of good German arms. The Ottomans fought them off, so the British had to invade again the following year. This time, they actually took Mesopotamia. This is how we get the country of Iraq —- it is what the British Indian troops were able to conquer in the course of World War I. It doesn’t cohere in very many other ways.
Likewise, Churchill had the bright idea of trying to land near Istanbul and just march on the capital -— because if you take the enemy’s capital, you win the war. So he had the New Zealanders and Australians attempt to take the isthmus of Gallipoli. That didn’t work out. It was a huge failure —- and a costly one.
But in the end, the Ottomans were defeated -— partially, as you suggest implicitly, because the Arabic-speaking peoples of the Ottoman Empire turned against them and began yearning for an Arab state that was not under Istanbul’s rule. This was spearheaded by fairly remote provinces like the Hejaz, in western Arabia, where the Ottomans had built a railroad and become more assertive, which had annoyed local elites.
T. E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia.” Public Domain.
So those local elites allied with the British and marched on Damascus, ultimately chasing the Ottomans right out of what is now Syria. In the aftermath, however, the Arabs were stabbed in the back by the victorious powers -— France and Britain. The British Arab Bureau in Cairo had very clearly promised Sharif Hussein in Mecca an Arab state after the war, which would include Syria. But London promised Syria to the French.
Meanwhile, there were British interests who wanted Iraq -— particularly Mosul, which had oil. It ultimately had oil, developed in the late 1920s.
The imperial powers double-booked -— you know how an airline sometimes sells your seat to someone else as well? They double-booked Syria. Then they didn’t allow what is now Iraq to develop as an independent country. They colonized it themselves.
Very significantly, the British took what they named Palestine. During the war, they had made a promise to the Jewish Zionists in London that they would create something they called a “national home” in Palestine —- assuring the locals that this would not in any way inconvenience the people of Palestine. This was the Balfour Declaration of 1917. It was made at a time when the British didn’t control Palestine yet.
After the war, there was enormous dejection in the Arab capitals and in the Arabic-speaking provinces of the former Ottoman Empire -— Damascus, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Beirut. They hadn’t achieved true independence, and they had been led to believe that President Wilson’s Fourteen Points—and the idea of national sovereignty, the end of the old empires (which happened with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, resulting in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and so forth) -— would also apply to them.
That didn’t happen in the Middle East. The region entered a new phase of colonialism, which, since it was under the League of Nations, was termed “mandates.” It was an extremely paternalistic regime. The general discourse was that people in the Middle East -— unlike Czechs and Hungarians -— were not quite ready to rule themselves. They were adolescents; they were wards of a guardian. They needed to be grown up to the point where they could stand on their own feet.
This was the kind of discourse that was used. It reemerged during the Iraq War -— George W. Bush once said that the Iraqis were about ready to take off the training wheels. He imagined them as small children who couldn’t quite ride a bike yet, and he was going to help them mature to that point.
This betrayal of the aspirations of many intellectuals in the region was very significant. Many had hopes for liberal democracy, of a Wilsonian sort. They increasingly felt that the entire prospect was a chimera, and that they might as well turn inward.
So you get the beginnings of a hardline Muslim fundamentalism—the Muslim Brotherhood. You get people, later on in the 1940s, turning to interest in the mass movements in Central Europe, mixing together fascist and communist themes with Arab nationalism. You get the Ba’ath Party, which became consequential for Syria and Iraq.
These were all, I would argue, reactions against the Mandate “scam,” in which people were not given their independence after World War I and were subjected to a form of colonialism.
Martin: It seems an extraordinary series of events to have kicked off from an embarrassment about failure in Europe -— and how that then just set off these, I would call them dominoes. I guess history is like that, right? I’m not a historian, but how unusual do you think that duplicity was -— the double-dealing by the British, the disrespect for the local population, the ability to just treat them as so many children, as you say? Was that par for the course, or can the Middle East, 100 years later, look back and think, “Wow, we were particularly badly treated”?
Juan Cole: Oh no, and I don’t think it has anything to do specifically with the British or the French. When you’re at war, you’re desperate to win. The consequences of defeat are dire. So you pull all kinds of operations -— covert and otherwise -— if it wins the war.
If it helps to tell the Syrians that they’ll be independent, then you tell them that. It may be an inconvenient position after the war, when things look different and you’ve won.
So I think it’s structural. It has to do with the way that empires work. It is also undeniable that some imperial officials in London and Paris did not see locals as proper human beings, as full political partners. But it wasn’t a universal sentiment. You see it with Lord Curzon.
… Actually, Churchill, I think, had a lot of respect for, say, the Ottoman Muslims. In France, there was a big debate about whether Algerians were capable of being civilized or not. Those who believed they were had what was called a “civilizational mission.”
So I think there was a superciliousness involved in those deals that were made. There’s an anecdote about one of the things that came out of that maelstrom of World War I: the creation of the country of Jordan. Originally, it was part of the territory that the British conquered and thought of as British Palestine, but they hived it off across the Jordan River and gave it to Abdullah, the son of Sharif Hussein. It was kind of a booby prize, because Abdullah was supposed to be part of a dynasty that ruled the whole Arab world, but he only got this postage-stamp country that became Jordan.
Years later, when Churchill was Prime Minister, Jordan objected to some policy that Churchill had adopted. Their diplomatic mission in London sent over a sharp note to him. He was having lunch with friends and looked at the note from Jordan objecting to his policies. He smiled broadly and told his luncheon companions, “We made it up on the back of an envelope over an afternoon.” He couldn’t take Jordan seriously as a country.
Are Today’s Crises Rooted in the Imperialist Era?
Martin: The seeds of conflict today -— how many straight lines can you draw from these topics you’ve been talking about? How many can we link now to the various disasters we see in the region?
Juan Cole: They’re intimately linked. I would argue that European imperialism in the 20th century set the terms of debate. The Europeans had not taken the Levant in the 19th century, in part because the Ottomans allowed free transit to the British and French Empires, and were thought of in Europe as perfectly reliable in that regard. In fact, the Europeans much preferred a continued Ottoman Empire to Russian expansionism. They didn’t trust the Tsars to let them get to India through the Suez Canal and so forth.
The Middle East wasn’t seen as a big source of wealth. It’s an arid zone, aside from the river valleys like Egypt, where cotton began being grown and which the British did take for 40 years. Much of the Middle East was arid and wasn’t rich. We have to remember that in the agrarian era, India -—what is now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh -— was rich because it had lots of rainfall and could produce lots of crops. Crops were the source of wealth. The Middle East was dry; it was arid. A third of its population in 1850 was probably pastoral nomads, wandering around raising sheep, goats, and camels, without firm boundaries to their property.
So why would you want to bother yourself about taking these places if you’re an empire? It’s not like they had gold. They were left alone and under Ottoman rule until World War I, when the logic of the war dictated that it was now desirable for the Europeans to rule these places.
Emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood
Martin: Tell us about the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood. It might have been an unexpected—or maybe an expected—outcome of that foreign interference. How did it emerge, and how did it develop?
Juan Cole: It was founded in 1928 in Ismailia, which is a port town. It arose in the aftermath of the so-called independence of Egypt in 1922 from the British. It was a veiled protectorate, as they called it—they didn’t admit that they colonized Egypt; they said they were protecting it.
During that 40-year period, administrative law was made in London or by London’s viceroy in Egypt. Lord Cromer -— Evelyn Baring, from the banking family -— was a long-ruling viceroy in Egypt. Local customs and Islamic law were all set aside in favor of bureaucratic efficiency from a British point of view. People’s lives were shaped by British rule.
Cities like Ismailia, with a lot of foreign sailors, were cosmopolitan and somewhat chaotic. A schoolteacher, Hassan al-Banna, founded a Muslim reform movement which aimed at turning back the clock—repealing all of the regulations and laws put in by the British. It had a nationalist element to it, but the nationalism was not Egyptian nationalism per se. It was Muslim nationalism -— a kind of pan-Islam.
There was a yearning for a central Muslim figure. In the medieval period, Muslims had a caliphate -— a papal-like institution -— which was both temporal and religious. Over time, it lost its temporal power. In the high medieval period, it lapsed, but the Ottomans occasionally, in flowery language, referred to themselves as caliphs. They were sultans -— secular monarchs -— but their courtiers would flatter them with the title of caliph.
Since they ruled Mecca and Medina -— the two holy cities, with Mecca being the site of pilgrimage for the Muslim world -— they had some Muslim aura to them. But most Ottoman law was made by the sultans through imperial decrees and often differed from traditional Islamic law.
In the late 19th century, as a reaction against European encroachments, the Ottomans began pressing this claim to be caliphs. The Europeans had adopted Christian or other minorities in the Middle East as their protégés. The French adopted the Catholics and Maronites of Lebanon. The British were at a disadvantage, because there weren’t large numbers of Anglicans in the Middle East, so they adopted the Jews and a Shiite offshoot called the Druze. When I was in Beirut, I noticed that to this day, the guard outside the British embassy was a Druze. It’s an old tie.
The Europeans would call the Ottoman ambassador on the mat if there were riots against minorities. So the Ottomans turned the tables. The British ruled 300 million Indians -— a quarter of whom were Muslim. The French ruled Muslims in North Africa. The Russians had large Muslim populations in Central Asia under the Tsars’ rule.
The Ottomans began claiming to be caliphs and began propagandizing to these Muslims who were living under European rule, making assertions of authority. It was effective. The British in India were petrified of pan-Islam and Ottoman influence. The French in Algeria didn’t like it at all either.
Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II, 1867. Public Domain. Pycryl.
The claim of being caliph became well known. There was a whole caliphate movement in British India in the early 20th century, which pressed for greater rights for Muslims. During World War I, this is how Mohandas Gandhi got involved in politics -— he allied with these Muslim pro-caliphate forces, who were anti-imperial in nature.
After World War I, the Ottoman Empire collapsed. The sultanate was abolished. For good measure, the new Turkish parliament abolished the caliphate in 1924 and declared French-style secularism as the ideological basis of the new Turkey. This dismayed conservative Muslims who had bought into the Ottoman claims of caliphal authority.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in the 1930s, often urged the reestablishment of a caliphate. There was a desire for an Islamic order: that Muslim law should be applied, and that modern colonial accouterments should be thrown off. It was a kind of nationalism -— but it was religious nationalism. We have the equivalent in contemporary America with Christian nationalists, who don’t believe in the separation of religion and state and would like to have the Bible be the Constitution. That’s a very similar set of attitudes as you had with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Later Development and Connection to Modern Islamist Movements
Martin: How did it develop? Did it develop underground because of its subversive nature in the eyes of the authorities? How far did it get? Can we draw a line between that process that happened in the 1920s in Ismailia and what we see today in various political Islamist movements?
Juan Cole: The Brotherhood established a Gaza branch in 1936, which is the ultimate background of Hamas. There were other fundamentalist movements besides the Muslim Brotherhood that hearkened back to an ideal Islamic society. They were rivals rather than allies.
There was something called the Salafism. The word refers to the first generation of Muslims around the Prophet—so they aimed to go back and reestablish the kinds of attitudes and polity of that first generation. Ironically, initially, the Salafis were relatively liberal. Muhammad Abduh, one of the founders, corresponded with Tolstoy, learned French, and was interested in European science.
But over time -— especially after the colonization of the Levant and after World War I -— some important Salafi thinkers turned very conservative. They came under the influence of the Saudi branch of Islam, which outsiders call Wahhabism, and which Saudis refer to as “unitarianism.”
That branch began in the mid-18th century. It was extremely puritanical. It believed that Muslims weren’t living up to Islamic values and had a very rigid definition of what those values were. The melding of Wahhabi ideas with Salafi ones created the contemporary Salafi movement.
Some Salafis are political quietists and don’t get involved, while others are violent. Western observers sometimes call the violent ones “Salafi-jihadis.” HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) in Syria comes from that Salafi stream. In fact, it was militarily allied with some Muslim Brotherhood groups in Syria -— but it’s not clear who will come out on top.
Viability of Post-Colonial States Like Syria
Martin: Let’s stick with Syria. How viable is Syria as a postcolonial concept? Can I ask that question to you?
Juan Cole: I think all of these postcolonial states have some problems, inasmuch as they weren’t formed organically over time and they didn’t have the advantages of a long organic formation. European states like France were also very diverse ethnically -— you had Bretons, you had Provençal -— but the Bourbon monarchy gradually spread Bourbon French throughout the country, especially in the 19th century. There was a national school system developed.
Over time, as Eugen Weber argues in his book Peasants into Frenchmen, they were gradually absorbed into France as citizens. This process is much foreshortened in a place like Syria, and in many ways, there hasn’t been time to form a Syria in the same way.
There continue to be ethnic and religious differences. Ten percent of the population is Kurdish and doesn’t speak Arabic at home. Fourteen percent of the population are Alawite Shiites -— a kind of folk Shiism to which the elite of the former Ba’ath regime belonged. You have Druze, maybe 3%, and there are still Christians.
Then among the Sunni Arabs, there are great internal differences in identity: urban people, rural people, Sufis, and Salafis. Sufis are kind of mystical Muslims -— if you think in Catholicism of St. John of the Cross and that kind of mystical tradition -— versus Salafis, who are kind of like radical Protestants.
These kinds of ideological, sectarian, and ethnic divisions are consequential in a country like Syria in particular. I think the genius of liberal democracy is that -— assuming a good economy -— it has an ability to absorb various groups and make them feel as though they have a voice. Because they have elections, they can lobby for legislation. Most liberal political regimes make it inadvisable for an elected official to be punitive toward a particular ethnic group, because it’s going to cost that person votes.
But in Syria, you’ve never had any substantial period of liberal democracy. There was an experiment right after World War II, but, as you say, the military coups began and continued soon thereafter.
So somebody’s going to be on top if you have a more dictatorial system. Whoever is on top is going to be punitive toward others and will be nepotistic. That’s one of the reasons the Ba’ath regime fell. Sunnis -— Sunni Syrians -— will complain to you endlessly that the good jobs went to the Alawites. Now there is going to be some revenge taken over all that.
Expectations for HTS Rule of Syria
If the Salafis who’ve taken over Syria are smart, they’ll go to a national assembly and they’ll have elections. But they’re saying they won’t do that for four years. If you rule by fiat for four years, when would you ever give it up?
The indication seems to be that this relatively hardline Muslim fundamentalist group that’s taken over the country is going to try to impose its will on the nation. Almost no Syrians are Salafis, so they don’t have strong grassroots. They’re already at daggers drawn with the Alawites, with the Kurds, with the Druze. The Christians are kind of watching nervously to see how they’re treated. The urban people are worried about their values and lifestyles. Urban women don’t want to be shuttered in the house and made to veil completely.
Martin: People question: is this going to be a kind of Taliban-style regime?
Juan Cole: So far, the leaders of HTS have been pressured, I think by Turkey in particular, and perhaps Qatar as well, not to show the world a Taliban-like radical face. For instance, they announced that Christian women wouldn’t have to veil. Well, that’s good for the Christian minority, but are they going to make the Muslim women veil?
All of these things are being looked at, and they’re consequential. Syria was under very severe U.S. and European sanctions, which are still in place. The fall of the Ba’ath regime did not automatically remove the sanctions. It’s very clear that Europe and the United States will bargain with the new leadership in Damascus about the conditions under which the sanctions might be removed.
The German Foreign Minister went to Damascus, and I think she made it clear that treatment of women and minorities would have a lot to say about how Europe would respond to the request that these sanctions be lifted.
So I think Syria is a huge question mark. If it’s handled badly, it could fall apart and go into civil war. Certainly, there could be a Kurdish-Arab war. We saw this happen in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, when the country essentially fell into a Sunni-Shi’a civil war under the nose of the Americans. Imagine how severe such a conflict could be in Syria with no foreign troops in the country. There could be massive reprisals against Alawites.
So it depends on the wisdom of the new leadership -— whether they can form a state that incorporates the vast majority of Syrians, or whether they’ll try to form a state that pleases themselves and their small circle, but which will inevitably cause conflict with large segments of the population.
Do Western Powers Want a Strong, United Syria?
Martin: Do you worry that the Western powers—America and the European countries—don’t really have Syria’s best interest at heart, and they’d rather see it weak and divided than strong and united?
Juan Cole: I think there’s certainly that kind of thinking in some quarters. On the other hand, I think there’s a big difference between the United States and Europe in this regard.
I don’t mean to be too cynical, but a lot of Middle East policy in Europe is driven by fear of immigration. If Syria went into another round of civil war -— because, of course, it had one in the 2010s, which produced large numbers of immigrants to Europe, maybe a million or so to Germany alone, and four million to Turkey -— there might be another such wave.
European countries feel that these waves of immigration from the Middle East are destabilizing. There seems to be a lot of resentment against immigrants in Italy, and in some parts of Germany. It’s an impetus to the rise of the European right, and some of those characters are really scary.
So I think one of the lenses through which Syria is viewed in Europe is that it would be desirable for Syria to attain at least some kind of fragile stability, so that you don’t have a big outflow of the population to Europe.
For the United States, this is not so much a problem, especially under the new Trump regime, which will simply not allow asylum seekers in. For Washington, I think one of the things they’ll be looking at is treatment of minorities. There’s Christian nationalism in the Trump administration, so they’ll be concerned about the Christians of Aleppo and so forth.
Another concern will be what kind of relationship the new Syrian government will have with Israel. I think there will be enormous pressure from Washington on Syria to recognize Israel, to join the Abraham Accords.
It’s quite ironic that HTS, which is this hardline Salafi movement -— they were called jihadis -— so far has attempted to avoid bad relations with Israel. Even though Israel has invaded Syria, taken advantage of the fall of the regime, destroyed much of the Syrian military material, taken territory, and taken control of a dam estimated to provide 40% of Syria’s water -— which is very serious in an arid zone like the Middle East -— despite all of these provocations, which any one of them could cause a war in ordinary times, the HTS leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has signaled that he doesn’t want problems on that front.
So far at least, he’s taking a very soft line toward Israel. I don’t know if this government is ideologically capable of recognizing Israel without being killed by their own people -— which happened to Anwar Sadat, it should be remembered.
I think the U.S. pressures on Syria would be destabilizing, whereas the European pressures on Syria would aim at stabilizing.
Takeaways from the Gaza War
Martin: We have to hope. So, let’s get into Israel. They’ll certainly be looking at the situation in Syria with a lot more satisfaction than they’re looking at the situation in Gaza.
We had the ceasefire come into force yesterday. We’re speaking on January 20th. We’re not going to be publishing immediately, but just to check the date—yes, the guns fell silent, the first hostages and the first prisoners were released, and we are at the beginning of a very shaky-looking ceasefire.
I’m not going to ask you whether you think it’s going to hold or not—because, I mean, who knows? Opinion is divided. Unless you’d like to stick your neck out on that one.
But what are the big learnings from this war? I mean, it’s clearly unprecedented in terms of scale, the time it took, the savagery of it, the death toll. In terms of Israel and its wars with, mainly, the Palestinians—it’s a new level.
What have we learned? And where do we go from here?
Juan Cole: I think that the Israeli war on Gaza is a turning point in modern history. After World War II, attempts were made to establish a set of institutions: the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention, and subsequent treaties and protocols—many of which were incorporated into national law through treaty signatures.
Then, in the late 1990s, there was an attempt to establish an International Criminal Court. The Rome Statute came into force in 2002 and has gained, I think, 124 signatories. It was an attempt to establish what has been called international humanitarian law—laws of war, laws of basic human rights—and to gradually attempt to give those laws some teeth.
Up until the International Criminal Court was established in 2002 at The Hague, the leaders of the world could suffer reputational damage from violating international humanitarian law, but there was no prospect of legal action against them. That has been a post-war movement of some significance, aimed at making it much more difficult to repeat the atrocities of World War II, in which some 65 million people are thought to have perished.
The post-war generation was shocked to their core by the sheer carnage, the viciousness, the lawlessness, and brutality of many of the actions that were taken -— including the Nazi genocide of the Jews, the Roma, gays, and others. International humanitarian law was intended to outlaw aggressive warfare -— taking territory by military means from a neighbor -— and deliberately targeting the civilian population.
The Nazis did this right at the beginning of the war, against Warsaw. It’s often forgotten that the Nazi air force destroyed Warsaw. It’s not that the Allies were necessarily always better -— you have the U.S. nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Bomber Harris and Colonial Precedents
Bomber Harris of Britain, for example, got his start in Iraq. The British hold on Iraq was very fragile, so they quickly decided they couldn’t hold it by infantry and began bombing Iraqi villages into submission. Bomber Harris was in charge of that campaign throughout the 1920s. He used what he had learned there to firebomb later on. There’s a colonial background to some of this.
The Gaza War and the Fate of International Law
In any case, I think the Gaza War raises the question of whether there is now a determination -— in Washington, D.C., and in the capitals of Europe -— to destroy international humanitarian law, to undo it, to go back to 1939 by giving the Israelis impunity.
Where will that leave them?
The logic of it, apparently -— though I believe it’s irrational—is that the United States and Europe are increasingly enthralled with white nationalism and a kind of fascism. Fascism is all about humiliation. If you go back and look at the speeches of not just Hitler, but many leaders in the interwar period, they’re all about being supine, being stepped upon, being humiliated by the outside world. “The outside world is looking at us and laughing at us,” and so forth.
As the power of the United States and Europe has declined -— relatively, not absolutely, because they’re still very powerful -— there are new players on the block. China is emerging. India is emerging in ways that most geopolitical analysts don’t take into account. It’s now a $3 trillion-a-year economy. It’s a bigger economy than Britain’s, ironically enough, even though per capita there’s no comparison. But if you just want to talk about the sheer concentration of capital in a country, India is emerging as a very major player.
It’s a multipolar world now. It had for a long time been a bipolar world -— with two superpowers after World War II -— and then, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it’s been a unipolar world in which the United States got its way. It could rampage around, invading Iraq and Afghanistan, face down Putin and the Chinese leadership, and make its word stick.
Now, the ability of the United States and Europe to dominate is increasingly in question. Because of immigration, there’s a new multiculturalism that is very unwelcome in white nationalist quarters, which then syncs with the anxieties about geopolitics.
Israel as a Symbol of Western Dominance
I think Israel is seen in many Western capitals as the bulwark against the “barbarian hordes” of the Global South -— hordes tinged Muslim, even though that’s unfair to Muslims in so many ways. But that’s the way it’s configured. If you let Israel go under, then you have no shield. Then you’re vulnerable to those hordes.
If it means destroying the edifice of international humanitarian law -— or at least carving out this enormous black hole of an exception in which the Israelis are allowed to do things that Vladimir Putin is not allowed to do -— then I don’t think it can stand. The hypocrisy is too severe. Nobody will take it seriously.
As it is, when U.S. politicians or ambassadors go and address countries in the Third World and talk about the importance of upholding international law, they’re greeted with hilarity. Because what the Israelis did to Gaza was illegal every which way from Sunday -— or Saturday, as the case may be.
Public Reactions and Cracks in Democratic Norms
Martin: I think those extraordinary scenes in the State Department briefing room -— with Antony Blinken’s last press statement -— were unprecedented.
Sam Husseini, the journalist, asked Blinken when he would be tried at The Hague and was hauled out. There wasn’t any real ground to haul him out of the room. It was a deterioration of the norms of democratic society. And it’s not a partisan deterioration—it happens among many parties.
Juan Cole: I think it may be a mortal wound to the post-war edifice. One of the reasons that countries typically, in warfare, didn’t violate the Geneva Conventions about the treatment of prisoners of war and occupied populations was that it was mutual. They didn’t want their people to be treated that way. So destroying that framework is always a self-inflicted wound. But I think that’s what’s happening, for all of these reasons.
Israel’s Position and the Risks of Impunity
The Israelis are being given impunity because they’re seen as a symbol of the last stand of white nationalism -— ironically enough, because the white nationalists viciously discriminated against Jews for most of the 20th century and genocided them. So why they’re picking that symbol, I couldn’t tell you.
Martin: It’s something to do with Islam, isn’t it?
Juan Cole: Yes. And that point that you made -— that Israel is a bastion against it. That’s the way it’s being configured. But all of these things are irrational. Most of the people who live in the Global South are not Muslim. There are lots of anti-imperial Christians in Africa and elsewhere. Islam is being deployed in a particular kind of way -— as a symbol of Global South resistance to continued dominance of white nationalism.
Our new Secretary of Defense in the United States wrote a book that has the word crusade in the title and is all about the need to fight Islam. It’s quite frightening that people like that are being put in high office in the West. And it’s not only in the United States that people talk like that.
Is Israel Undermining the Institutions That Uphold It?
Martin: That element of mutuality —- of observing the treaties in order to be treated well—raises the question: is Israel sowing the seeds of its own destruction in doing this?
Juan Col: I don’t think it’s sowing the seeds of its own destruction, but it’s undermining one of the edifices that upheld its existence. It’s a member of the United Nations and makes a lot of claims on its national rights as a member of the United Nations. But if the UN Charter is a dead letter, then what good does it do Israel to be a member of the UN?
There are even discussions in the UN General Assembly about expelling Israel from the United Nations.
More Than Just Israel
Martin: So, what you’re saying is that it’s a lot bigger than just Israel?
Juan Cole: Enormously. It has to do with the entire legal structure of our lives as global citizens. The Gaza War has much diminished us all.
Strategic Success and Regional Implications
The other thing to say, though, is that it’s been highly successful. The United States has built Israel -—and Europe has, too -— into a kind of regional superpower with the ability to bomb everybody in the region. It can reach Iran now, especially since Syria has fallen. There are no anti-aircraft batteries in Syria to stop Israel from violating Syrian airspace to get at Iran.
Iraq is weak. The Israelis have been bombing Yemen, including many facilities that damaged the lives of civilians. The Yemenis have been firing ballistic missiles at Israel, but Iran has been revealed to be a paper tiger. It is much diminished. It couldn’t defend itself from the Israeli air force or Israeli missiles.
Hezbollah suffered a dramatic defeat -— not a total defeat, but a dramatic one. The Iraqi Shia militias are nonentities. Iran’s fabled Axis of Resistance showed itself, when push came to shove, to be irrelevant. They were minor irritants. They were mosquitoes.
The Yemeni Attacks
Martin: How successful was the Yemeni, the Ansar Allah, effort?
Juan Cole: Again, I think they were just minor irritants. They did hit Israel several times, and sometimes caused damage or wounded people. They interfered with the functioning of Israel’s port on the Red Sea and disrupted shipping through the Red Sea. That probably added some cost to international trade -— some percentage of inflation would be attributed there.
But it’s inconsequential. It’s not that it had no effect, but it didn’t have a dramatic effect. It didn’t have the desired effect of making the Israelis more cautious. The Israelis were able simply to destroy Gaza.
Targeting Civilians in Gaza
Yes, and I’m going to say this: they targeted civilians. Their self-analysis —- their own story about themselves -— is that they were trying to get at al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas militants, and the civilians got in the way, and that’s why there are so many dead.
But this is simply not true. They targeted the civilians.
The United Nations did a report that looked at the dropping of 2,000-pound bombs -— these are enormous bombs -— on civilian residential complexes. Yes, it’s true they were trying to kill al-Qassam Brigades personnel who were in those complexes, but they were full of women, children, and non-combatant men, it should be remembered.
To deliberately destroy a residential complex with hundreds or thousands of people in it, and to kill -— it’s estimated that the true death toll of the kinetic military actions is probably a good 70,000 once all the people are pulled out from under the rubble.
They destroyed the civilian infrastructure of water, food, medicine. The Lancet estimated that, already, it’s baked in that over time some 300,000 people will die from this campaign.
I mean, since the end of World War II, what liberal democracy has behaved in this way? Maybe the United States in Vietnam. But the sheer scale -— if you think about 2.2 million people in Gaza and eight or nine million in Israel -— and if you projected that onto the world stage and compared it to the size of the United States in Vietnam, Gaza is much worse.
And it was done with impunity, before the world’s eyes. Reporters kept asking the State Department, “Aren’t you going to ask the Israelis about this?” They said, “No, we’ll let them investigate themselves.”
If you watched Matthew Miller and the State Department briefings, after a while they became darkly comical and very discouraging. The same thing was true of the German Foreign Ministry and the UK.
So, the Israelis seem to be getting away with this. They have now become, I would say, hegemonic in the Middle East. There is no other power that can stand up to them. They can do as they please. They can take parts of Syria. They can take over Syria’s water. They can destroy all the buildings in Gaza. They can inflict hundreds of thousands of casualties on people -— with impunity. And the West is all right with it.
Historian’s Perspective on Israel’s Long-Term Future
Martin: As a historian, how do you look at this? How long can this go on for? How does it end?
Juan Cole: Well, as a historian, I would say that the advantages of the Israelis are short-term—medium-term at best. Will all the people in the Middle East forever have worse technology than the United States and Israel? How long is it before they reverse-engineer some of this drone technology or computer chip technology?
They’re already very good at cyber espionage. So, it’s a constant race for the Israelis to stay ahead.
The U.S. has been fairly successful in using economic sanctions to keep countries like Iran -— which won’t play ball, which are on the “wrong side” —- much more economically weak than they otherwise would be. But that’s pushed Iran into China’s arms. If China continues to grow economically, and Iran is under that penumbra, then Iran may benefit from Chinese efflorescence.
The Iranians and the Russians now have a much stronger alliance than in the past. So yes, the Israelis are on the top of their game. But can they stay there? It’s a constant race.
The other problem is that Israel itself is unstable. The only way that Benjamin Netanyahu could come back to power in 2022 was to let into his cabinet the Israeli equivalents of neo-Nazis -— people to the far, far, far right. These are people who would never be allowed in any government in Western Europe. Ideologically, they want to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians and were behind what was done to the Palestinians of Gaza.
For all his faults and right-wing ideology, Netanyahu has in the past proved himself occasionally capable of some pragmatism. But he didn’t want his government to fall. These far-right elements kept threatening to withdraw from his government if he stopped the war. So they kept it going. It was deliberate on their part. They wanted to starve people. They said so. And they took steps to do so.
They are not good for Israel proper. They want to make women sit at the back of the bus. They want to institute a kind of Jewish Talibanism in Israel. They accuse gay people of bestiality. They want to give privileges to Israeli squatters on the Palestinian West Bank, which annoys Israelis inside Israel and diverts resources to them.
Before the Gaza war, there were increasing tensions inside Israeli society—large demonstrations against this far-right government, the most far-right government that Israel has ever had. That internal division was heading not toward a civil war in the armed sense, but toward a very deep societal split.
There is real question about whether Israeli Jews want to live in a Taliban-like Jewish state. Many might just leave. Israelis don’t have to live in Israel. They’re mostly well-educated. They have good skills. There are about a million Israelis outside the country at any one time. People go off in their late 20s and stay abroad for a couple of decades and then come back.
There’s some evidence they’re not coming back at the same rate. There’s also evidence of tens of thousands of young Jews engaged in out-migration. Some of this is the war. But the war hasn’t touched the average Israeli all that much. A lot of it is the threat of the far right taking over the country.
So that’s another question. Obviously, the Israelis can defeat all of their enemies in the region fairly handily, apparently. Whether that will be true 50 years from now, I cannot tell you. But the other question is whether Israeli society itself can hold together.
Genesis and Legacy of Informed Comment
Martin: Juan, I first came across you as the man behind the brainchild Informed Comment, which was a pioneering blog. There weren’t many people writing about the Middle East with such authority and with a historian-scholar’s perspective. What made you start it up? How have you kept it going? And what do you feel the impact has been?
Juan Cole: I began it as a direct result of the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the United States by al-Qaeda. I had lived a lot in the Middle East -— unlike a lot of U.S. Middle East experts who maybe have a one-year Fulbright and then build their careers on that. I lived out there for many years.
I lived in Egypt when we saw the rise of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. I lived in Pakistan at the time when the predecessors of al-Qaeda were gathering there to fight in Afghanistan against the Soviets.
When 9/11 happened, I had context for it. I had been following al-Qaeda. I used to give a lecture on it at the end of my Middle East class every year. People didn’t know about al-Qaeda. After 9/11, the whole country’s focus was: Who are these people? Why did they do this to us? And I knew. I could tell them. I didn’t even have to look it up -— I could just tell them.
At that time, the major form of communication was the email round-robin or listserv. I was on some scholarly ones. People would ask me my opinion about al-Qaeda, and I would answer an email. Those emails -— little essays, really -— got spread around. People would forward them to their friends. I would get fan mail from Denmark: “I liked your message of November 20th.” People started asking me for back issues. “I heard you wrote something very interesting on such-and-such a date—could you send it to me?”
At the time, we were using Outlook for email. It wasn’t convenient to go back and find a message and send it out. So it occurred to me, as blogging arose, that I could just archive the messages -— which I thought of as public -— on a website as a blog. Then I could just direct people to the universal resource locator, the URL, instead of searching through my email archives.
That’s how it started. If you look at the first few entries in 2002, they’re emails -— reprinted emails. Over time, I started making original entries at the blog. The internet had spread to the Arab world. I was able to see Arabic newspapers in real time. I could do keyword searches, find things about al-Qaeda, and report back to the American public about this issue.
Then Bush invaded Iraq. I had written about Iraq in my dissertation. I was one of the few Americans who had written some Iraqi history -— especially about the Shiites of Iraq and their history, which became very consequential to the story. People asked me to write things. The blog went viral at that point.
I went from having maybe 1,000 visitors a day to some days 40,000. If you calculate that out over a year, it’s millions. I had never had a million of anything.
Sustaining Informed Comment Over Time
Martin: I’d love to know what it looks like after 23–24 years.
Juan Cole: It goes up and down depending on the crises in the region. It’s a crowded market now. The algorithms are also bad for the blog. Facebook deprecates news -— it doesn’t like links outside the platform. Traffic is down because of these algorithmic kinds of censorship. Palestine is deprecated on a lot of the algorithms.
But I think people still copy it and send it out by email, which nobody can censor. So I sense it’s still widely read that way —- in email newsletters. Every city has these little peace groups. They’ll reprint my work for their members. So I think it has an impact.
Back in 2009, when the Obama administration was coming in, my book Engaging the Muslim World was allegedly widely read among State Department people as a kind of primer for people coming into the new administration -— on how to avoid the mistakes of the Bush administration.
So, at some points, I think it’s gotten the ear of some people with foreign policy power. But I don’t do it for that reason. I’m a democrat with a small “d.” I feel that in a democracy, foreign policy is often forwarded to the central government -— to the federal government -— and that’s a mistake. It creates a foreign policy dictatorship. Everybody should be involved in the foreign policy decisions of the country.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
Martin: Well, I view it as the original and best. It deserves our respect and admiration.
Juan Cole: Thank you very much.
Martin: Thank you so much for your time today. It’s been a real pleasure talking to you and hearing your ideas. We’ve covered a pretty good range of topics, and thanks for staying with us so long.
Juan Cole: My pleasure. Thanks for having me on, Martin. All the best.
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