A Personal Journey Through the Middle East

From Edward Said to Yasser Arafat

“I realized Arafat was standing next to me while his photographer took pictures…I had my camera around my neck so I handed it to the photographer.”

In 1978, Edward Said (pronounced sa-eed) published “Orientalism,” a seminal work accusing Western academics of imposing Western-centric bias when studying the Middle East.

According to Said, Western scholars criticized Middle Easterners as "backwards" in an effort to justify colonialism and Western domination. Middle Easterners needed to tell their own story.

There are, of course, Western scholars and government experts who genuinely grasp the languages, cultures, and complexities of the multi-faceted Arab and Muslim worlds.

But in my view, most Western observers bring a distinctly Western lens when evaluating the region. We project our own belief system—problem-solving through logic, risk management based on rational analysis, a modern worldview rooted in the scientific method, and a belief in impartial historical evaluation.

We struggle to understand thought patterns in the Middle East.

Bernard Lewis, my professor at Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies Department, often pointed out that in the Middle East, history is never “just history.” Events from hundreds of years ago influence today’s policy decisions and thought patterns.

The cocktail of ancient battles, triumphs, and humiliations—combined with a 1,500-year-old religion which never experienced a reformation--can lead to present-day actions which are hard for Westerners to understand.

Take Iran, for example—what Lewis called “a cause, not a country.”

Is Iran’s Islamic dictatorship rational in its efforts to retain and grow power? Or is the telling data point the plastic keys given to Iranian children during the Iran-Iraq war, so that when they ran through minefields to detonate explosives, they could use their keys to enter heaven?

Iran’s foreign and domestic policy channels the Quran, Islamic history, and grievances against the West, leading to repression at home and support for terrorism abroad.

I want to be careful to stay away from what Said might have called an “orientalist” approach to interpreting the Middle East. I am not saying that the Middle East is “inscrutable” or “behind a veil” and other silly stereotypes.

Rather, I’m saying that we shouldn’t “mirror image” our values onto Arabs and Iranians.

In a way, I’m agreeing slightly with Said: it’s hard for the average Western journalist or historian to grasp the various worldviews around the Middle East. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. And I would argue that Said in reality was a gifted polemicist who presented a sanitized view of the Middle East to his compatriots at Columbia and around the world.

As the journalist Eli Lake pointed out in his excellent recent podcast “Orientalism: How One Book Fueled 50 Years of Campus Unrest,” Said would omit inconvenient facts as mundane but significant as Ayatollah Khomenei outlawing dog walking in Iran. Said and his compatriots gave us an uncluttered view of the Middle East while ignoring fanatical behavior patterns.

Nevertheless, Said’s influence persists. In fact, Lake reported seeing a placard at a recent Columbia anti-Israel protest which read “Columbia, why require me to read Professor Edward Said if you don't want me to use it?”

An Encounter with an Iranian

I’ve only met one “real” Iranian in my life (I’m not including the many Iranians I’ve known who fled to the US and Europe).

In 1990, I’d just finished college at Wesleyan University and was teaching English in a city in Japan one hour south of Tokyo. During my year in Japan, I spent a lot of my free time at my city’s main karate school.

One day, a few months into my stay in Japan, a man showed up at the dojo, explaining that he was a black belt from Iran, that he was passing through our city for a day, and had heard about our famous sensei, Mr. Kawanabe.

Ever the gentleman, Mr. Kawanabe invited the Iranian to join our practice. Before we started, the Iranian and I put on our karate uniforms in the locker room and chatted. The Iranian pointed to black marks on his lower legs. “Injuries,” he said. “From fighting Iraq a few years ago.” We were just two years past the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Over one million people died.

The Iranian put on his karate uniform. On the back of the uniform I saw Farsi lettering alongside in English, “Obedient to Imam Khomeini.”

The westerner in me said “Why on earth would someone praise their political or religious leader on a karate uniform?” I realized that only in a few countries such as Iran would the leader have infiltrated every aspect of a citizen's life. It was Orwell’s “1984”: one man's “big brother” was another man’s “supreme leader.”

The Battle Between Lewis and Said

Said, erudite and with a made-for-TV persona, was a leading pro-Palestinian activist—and, in his spare time, a Columbia professor. He also started advising Yasser Arafat in the 1970s.

My professor, Bernard Lewis, had a long-running intellectual battle with Said over the nature of Middle East studies.

Said questioned whether a Brit like Lewis could accurately study and assess the Middle East. By the time Lewis passed away at age 101 in 2018, I think it’s fair to say Lewis had won that argument.

Lewis had an unparalleled command of the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey—linguistically, historically, and politically.

He served as a British intelligence officer in the Middle East during World War II, a role he would only acknowledge with a cryptic: “I worked for His Majesty’s secret service.” He was fluent in 15 languages including Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, and Hebrew.

He once told me that he learned Italian “over a few weekends.” That was shocking to me given that studying Arabic, Hebrew, and French at Princeton often felt like rolling a boulder up a steep hill.

Lewis also had an uncanny ability to anticipate future events in the Middle East. In 1976, just a handful of years before the 1979 takeover of Iran by Islamist zealots and the violent occupation of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamists later that same year, he published “The Return of Islam” in Commentary magazine.

Then, just before the 9/11 attacks, Lewis wrote a book which came out in early 2002: “What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam & Modernity in the Middle East.”

In both cases, Lewis anticipated the ascension of violent religious fanatics into positions of power in the Middle East.

A Personal Connection to Edward Said—and a Revelation

When I was an undergrad at Wesleyan, one of my classmates was Edward Said’s nephew, Ussama Makdisi. Ussama grew up in Beirut. His mother was Palestinian (and Said’s sister) and his father was an economics professor at the American University of Beirut as well as Lebanon’s Minister of Economy in 1992 (and a Phd recipient in economics from Columbia).

As an active member of Wesleyan’s Jewish community, I often found myself debating Ussama during our senior year. Surprisingly, we became friends.

After our graduation in 1990, Ussama and I traveled through Europe together for five or six days.

Unsurprisingly, Ussama had little good to say about Israel. But at 22 years old, I still believed that if two people like us could find common ground, perhaps peace in the Middle East wasn’t so impossible. Call it naïve, but it made sense to my younger self.

One night in Amsterdam during our Europe trip, we were walking out of a crowded restaurant after dinner. As we were leaving, a couple at the entrance asked the host for a table. The host apologized—the restaurant was full. The man smiled and replied, “It is said that miracles happen in only two places: Amsterdam and Jerusalem. We are hoping for a miracle and a table.”

Ussama looked at me and smiled when the man mentioned Jerusalem. In that fleeting moment, we connected—not as adversaries, but as two people who felt something for a city Ussama had never visited and where I had lived for a mere six months during my junior year. For once, Jerusalem wasn’t a zero-sum game.

Ussama, like his uncle, was a supporter of the PLO and Yasser Arafat. One of Ussama's favorite refrains was: “The Palestinians never support taking land by force.”

Then came the 1991 Gulf War which broke out during my time in Japan.

I remember watching on my black-and-white TV as missiles fell on Tel Aviv. Rumors spread that they carried chemical warheads. In the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians cheered, danced, and handed out candy.

When I returned home from Japan in July 1991, Ussama came to visit me at my parents’ house. We took a walk. I finally asked him the question which I’d repeated multiple times in my head in the months after the PLO embraced Saddam's invasion of Kuwait:

“How can Arafat and the Palestinians back Saddam invading Kuwait when you told me the Palestinians never support taking land through force?”

Ussama’s answer, 34 years later, still sticks with me.

“Arafat and the PLO didn’t support Saddam and Iraq. That was a creation of the Western media.”

If someone as intelligent and well-educated as Ussama—a Princeton PhD who later became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley—could be so detached from reality, what did that mean for future peace talks?

At least a partial answer came a few days ago at a congressional hearing on antisemitism. Congresswoman Lisa McClain, a Republican from Michigan, asked the chancellor of U.C. Berkeley, Richard Lyons, about a history professor at his school, none other than my Wesleyan and Princeton classmate Ussama Makdisi.

Makdisi, as I learned from watching the hearing, posted a comment after Hamas’ October 7th invasion of Israel: "I could have been one of those who broke the siege on October 7th."

McClain asked Lyons “What do you think the professor meant?”

Lyons stumbled through an answer before saying “I believe it was a celebration of the terrorist attack on October 7th.”

He went on to say that he’d talked with Makdisi and that “he’s a fine scholar.”

Meeting Yasser Arafat

From 1995-1997, I worked at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as a research analyst. I landed the job thanks to an introduction from Bernard Lewis.

Every presidential election year, my boss, Rob Satloff, took about 20 US foreign policy veterans—half Democrats and half Republicans—to the Middle East. The group consisted of a few former ambassadors along with various former senior foreign policy hands from the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Defense Department.

The trip gave the former officials a chance to meet Middle Eastern leaders. Whichever party won the presidency, some of the people on the trip would rise to being either a cabinet secretary or a #2 or #3 official at State, the White House, the Pentagon, etc.

My good luck: Rob took me along on the trip in ‘96. We met with Egyptian officials in Cairo, Israeli leaders in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and finally, Arafat in Gaza.

So, in July 1996, our group flew to Cairo where we met with the Egyptian foreign minister and top military officials.

The foreign ministry occupied a high rise in Cairo.

Brought with a flourish to a low floor—I think it was the second or third—I asked a member of our group, Roscoe “Rocky” Suddarth, the former US ambassador to Jordan and the then-president of the Middle East Institute (the “Arabist” i.e. pro-Arab think tank which was my pro-Israel think tank’s somewhat friendly rival), why the foreign minister didn’t have his office on the top floor some 20 or so stories higher.

“Some things are more important than the view,” said Rocky. “Let’s just say that the Cairo fire department isn’t that great and there are a lot of fires. So being able to walk down one or two flights of stairs can save your life.”

I remember we had breakfast the next morning at the residence of the U.S. ambassador to Egypt. I recall a structure with thick walls, and small windows. A fortress. We were greeted at the entrance by the ambassador's dog—I think a rather incongruous golden retriever or yellow lab—along with a number of stately male servants wearing white robes and white turbans (“they are from Sudan,” Rocky Suddarth told me).

From Cairo we flew to Israel.

In Tel Aviv, Netanyahu, newly elected as Israel’s prime minister, spoke to us at the Ministry of Defense. The setting was spartan—old, worn furniture, dusty bookshelves, and faded portraits of past Israeli leaders. No frills, no grandeur.

Netanyahu delivered an electric talk on economic development and the privatization of the Israeli economy. Even Daniel Kurtzer, a Netanyahu critic who later became the U.S. ambassador to Egypt and then to Israel, walked out shaking his head. “Wow. That was brilliant,” he acknowledged.

Next came dinner with Ariel Sharon in Jerusalem. At that point in 1996, I don’t think anyone in our group would have anticipated that he'd serve as prime minister in the aughts and would make the pivotal decision to withdraw from Gaza in 2005. Our group treated him as a bit of a fossil, someone who had last made headlines in 1982 and 1983 during and after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon when the IDF kicked Arafat out of Beirut and sent him to Tunisia.

Sharon walked into the restaurant with a young aide and no security. The slender young aide contrasted with Sharon’s bulk.

At one point, I remember Sharon saying “I lost so many men.” I noticed tears forming in his blue eyes.

The next day we went to Gaza to meet Arafat.

The moment we crossed into Gaza, uniformed Palestinian Authority (PA) soldiers ushered us onto a bus. With pickup trucks filled with armed men behind us and in front, we sped through the streets of Gaza. PA police stopped traffic for us, giving our motorcade an open road for our drive to Arafat's headquarters.

It felt choreographed, a performance designed to showcase Arafat’s power. Gazans watched us drive by. I remember after the trip talking with my mother about the spectacle. She pointed out that it didn't matter if our group was “important” or not—the key was that the Gazans would think that their leader was important because a group in a motorcade was heading to see "al-rais" the president.

At his headquarters, we entered a sleek, modern conference room—nicer, I noted, than Netanyahu’s office in Tel Aviv.

1996 was a bloody year in the Oslo peace process which began in 1993. Palestinian suicide bombers were killing civilians in Israel. Understandably, someone in our group asked Arafat how he planned to stop the attacks.

Arafat slammed his fist on the table.

“No! These are not my people!” he shouted in thickly accented English. “Everyone knows these bombings are done by right-wing Jews trying to make me look bad! I have proof—I have the identity cards of the bombers. They have Israeli Jewish IDs.”

This was the Ussama Makdisi school of thought—the idea that truth was malleable, that reality could be fabricated to fit a narrative.

If I—a junior analyst—could see through this, surely senior U.S. officials could too. Yet, American negotiators like Dennis Ross (and his Israeli counterparts) continued to embrace Arafat, treating him as a legitimate peace partner.

In fact, inspired by that meeting, I later published an article in Commentary magazine (“Arafat and the Uses of Terror,” May 1997) arguing that the PLO would continue unleashing violence against Israeli civilians unless its unrealistic demands were met.

I simply compared Arafat’s speeches in Arabic—full of threats and bombast—with his speeches in English—more conciliatory and reasonable.

At another point in the meeting, Arafat was asked by one of the members of our group a question about a West Bank Palestinian professor recently jailed by the Palestinian Authority for criticizing Arafat.

The U.S. State Department had publicly criticized the arrest, as did European governments and much of the western media.

Before Arafat could answer, his long-time aide Saeb Erakat said, “Mr. President, perhaps we should release the professor.”

Arafat looked at Erakat for a moment and then said, “Maybe I should have YOU arrested.”

I thought, “ok, at least Arafat has a sense of humor, joking about putting his right hand man in jail.”

I started to smile and looked over at Erakat.

Erakat sat still, jaw slack and with a vacant scared look in his eyes.

Arafat wasn’t joking.

After the meeting, our group talked for a few minutes with Arafat and his aides. As people talked and moved from group to group, I realized Arafat was standing next to me while his photographer took pictures.

Just over Arafat's right shoulder was a framed poster with the photos of about 30 men—below the photos I saw Arabic writing which said something about “martyrs.”

In other words, these were men who had died fighting Israel. Presumably most or all of them were killed while attacking Jewish civilians.

I had my camera around my neck so I handed it to the photographer.

I knew what I was doing was wrong. But I told myself no one needed to know about the photo. In fact, I’ve rarely shared it over the past almost 30 years.

I stood next to the Palestinian leader, our arms touching. My hand brushed the back of Arafat’s uniform. The fabric was starched. Immaculately pressed.

To borrow from the title of Lewis’ 2002 book, what went wrong? How did the U.S. and Israel end up with Arafat as their partner in the 1990s?

If we follow Said’s thesis, the Palestinian “victims” had no responsibility or agency as they killed Israeli civilians. Certainly, none of us in the west were permitted to render any kind of judgement.

This was in line with Ussama Makdisi’s denial that the Palestinians supported Saddam Hussein. So-called victims had a free pass to kill.

In 1996, Arafat was still seen as not only the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people but a leader who had the gravitas and credibility to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict.

I stood there beside him, thinking that at least I had moral clarity.

Maybe, I rationalized, the photo would become my warning, a reminder that just because the media and key government officials embraced a figure or a movement, I needed to think independently.

I realized I'd come full circle with Ussama’s “invention of the western media” comment.

Now I stood next to someone who U.S. and European leaders—and some Israelis—embraced. After all, just two years earlier, the Nobel committee awarded Arafat their peace prize.

Said and his nephew would no doubt have said that I couldn't judge Arafat.

Four years later, at the 2000 Camp David summit, Arafat would reject an offer of most of the West Bank along with a slice of Israeli land. President Clinton, Prime Minster Ehud Barak, and U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross all expressed their shock and sadness at the outcome.

Clinton was, in my opinion, one of the most talented men ever to be president; Barak was Israel's most decorated soldier; Ross was brilliant. Yet anyone who met with Arafat that July 1996 day in Gaza would know that the peace process was doomed.

I moved my hand from Arafat’s back to take my camera. Almost 30 years later, I still recall the crisp fabric of his uniform, sending a message of order, logic, and calm.

Today, Arafat’s Palestinian Authority still more or less functions in the West Bank, notwithstanding its lack of popularity and a reputation for corruption. Recently, according to news reports, notably by Elliot Kaufman in the Wall Street Journal, leaders in the West Bank city of Hebron proposed the start of an emirate which would join the Abraham Accords. Could this mean that local Palestinian leaders might bypass the PA and engage directly with Israel?

Yet even if Israel’s military victories convince local West Bank Palestinians to make peace—and even if Lewis won the intellectual battles with Said—perhaps it is not enough. Makdisi, Said, and Arafat’s rationalizations persist.