For George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, the choke point was the “Barbary” coast of North Africa. Corsairs operating under the sanction of Muslim-ruled states, especially Tripoli and Algiers, put a stranglehold on American maritime commerce in the Mediterranean.

I draw revealing comparisons between that crisis and today’s Hormuz straitjacket, using the Founders’ pithy words and the Truth Social posts of the eminently quotable Donald J. Trump. Rhetorical style aside, were they really saying the same thing? You decide. Watch here.

(The occasion was the Weinberg Founders Conference dinner of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. No better or feistier audience.)

On February 11, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his case to Trump in the White House Situation Room. Haberman and Swan:

Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.

Besides, Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and—with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion—an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime.

According to the Times report, “Netanyahu delivered his presentation in a confident monotone. It seemed to land well with the most important person in the room, the American president.”

The next day, in a meeting with Trump, CIA Director John Ratcliffe called the Israeli regime-change scenarios “farcical”—a judgment Secretary of State Marco Rubio restated more bluntly as “bullshit.” But Trump signed off on the operation anyway, more drawn to decapitating and degrading the regime than to changing it.

Reading the Times report left me with an acute sense of déjà vu, as if I’d seen this exchange before. After a bit of digging, I found the reason: this conversation had already taken place. Specifically, on July 27, 2009, in Jerusalem, between Netanyahu and Robert Gates, then Secretary of Defense and former CIA director. The evidence is on the bookshelf: Gates’s memoir, Duty (published in 2014), and Netanyahu’s autobiography, Bibi: My Story (published in 2022). The parallels are uncanny.

In mid-2009, Iran had just experienced an aborted “Green Revolution,” which brought protesters into the streets and raised hopes for change. Barack Obama had been president since January, but Gates was not part of his original team. He had served as defense secretary under George W. Bush and was the first defense secretary retained by a president of the opposing party, carrying over into the Obama administration.

In his memoir, Gates called the July 2009 meeting with Netanyahu “our first no-punches-pulled discussion of Iran.” According to him,

Bibi was convinced the Iranian regime was extremely fragile and that a strike on their nuclear facilities very likely would trigger the regime’s overthrow by the Iranian people. I strongly disagreed, convinced that a foreign military attack would instead rally the Iranian people behind their government.

“All the experts can be wrong”

Netanyahu, in his autobiography, gives a slightly more colorful version:

“Besides,” [Gates] said, “all the experts tell us that an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would unite the Iranian public behind the regime. Can all the experts be wrong?”

“Yes,” I said, “all the experts can be wrong. They often are. Most Iranians hate this tyranny. They just tried to rebel against it. They’ll cheer when you deliver a knockout punch to the regime. It would be a tremendous psychological blow to the mullahs’ image of invincibility!”

I related to Gates what President Museveni of Uganda told me of the psychological effect of the [Israeli] raid in Entebbe [in 1976, to free hijacked passengers], that before the raid Ugandans had “believed Idi Amin was invincible” and after it they knew they could “bring him down.”

“You have the power to achieve the same result with the Iranian regime,” I said to Gates. “You are Gulliver.”

The conversation shifted to how Iran might respond to an attack. Gates:

Netanyahu also believed Iranian retaliation after a strike would be pro forma, perhaps the launch of a few dozen missiles at Israel and some rocket salvos from Lebanese-based Hizballah. He argued that the Iranians were realists and would not want to provoke a larger military attack by the United States by going after American targets—especially our ships in the Gulf—or by attacking other countries’ oil facilities. Closing the Gulf to oil exports, he said, would cut the Iranians’ own economic throats. Again I disagreed, telling him he was misled by the lack of an Iraqi response to Israel’s destruction of their Osirak reactor in 1981 and the absence of any Syrian reaction to destruction of their reactor in 2007. I said the Iranians—the Persians—were very different from Iraqis and Syrians. He was assuming a lot in anticipating a mild Iranian reaction, and if he was wrong, an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities would spark a war in the region, I said.

Netanyahu’s account of this exchange is brief in comparison and frames it more as a disagreement over whether Iran would rebuild its nuclear program after an attack:

Gates argued that the delaying effects of any Israeli military action against Iran’s nuclear capabilities would be short-lived. I noted that the same thing was said of Israel’s strike on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor, referring to our successful 1981 operation against a nuclear facility that never resumed operation. Gates countered that an Israeli strike would result in a full-scale war.

To which Netanyahu added this aside: “Whether it would or not, I was willing to sustain a conventional war with Iran in order to avoid a war with a nuclear-armed Iran.”

For at least sixteen years, Netanyahu’s arguments—regime fragility, decisive action, and limited retaliation—failed to carry the day in Washington. They were countered by U.S. objections: regime resilience, the rally effect, and the risk of escalation. At any point, Netanyahu might have left the political stage without achieving his prime objective. But he held on to power long enough for the churn of American politics to finally produce a president willing to take the leap.

^{Header image: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the Prime Minister’s Office, Jerusalem, July 27, 2009. Photograph: Moshe Milner / Government Press Office (Israel).}

In the meantime, I seek insights in the wisdom of mentors now gone. Bernard Lewis was one; I wrote about Lewis and Iran the other week. This time, I’ll consider Uri Lubrani (1926-2018), an Israeli diplomat and defense official.

Lubrani, who served the state from its founding, had the unusual distinction of being posted, time and again, to the epicenters of crisis. From 1967 to 1971, he served as ambassador to Ethiopia, which positioned him to play a crucial role in the emergency emigration of 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1991 (Operation Solomon). It was his greatest achievement.

But he was also known for serving as head of the Israeli mission to Iran (with ambassadorial rank) from 1973 to 1978. His claim to fame: he anticipated the rise of religious extremism and the Shah’s fall before anyone else did.

As early as 1975, he warned a U.S. senator visiting Tehran that “the most serious problem that the Shah had domestically was from the religious elements who were hostile and very difficult for him to deal with.” The U.S. diplomat who accompanied the senator later recalled: “I never heard anyone say that in the American embassy. I never heard any journalists say it or any Iranians say it. This was the first time that I heard that analysis.”

Lubrani remained ahead of the curve. In a June 1978 dispatch, he reported to Jerusalem that the Shah’s position was undergoing an “accelerated process of destabilization… a process from which there is no return and which will ultimately lead to his downfall and a drastic change in the form of government in Iran.” Again, he was alone. The State Department at the time estimated that the Shah had “an excellent chance to rule for a dozen or more years,” and the CIA held that “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.” Lubrani emerged from the Iranian revolution as an acclaimed oracle.

I got to know him in the mid-1980s, when he ran an office for Lebanese affairs at the defense ministry. Israel was occupying much of South Lebanon and rubbing up against Hezbollah, Iran’s Shi‘ite proxy. I was beginning to work on Hezbollah myself, and we had much to discuss. Lubrani was also an old friend of Lewis, and I often found myself at dinner with both of them. I wish I’d taken notes.

“We have to try”

Lubrani was renowned for his persistent assertion that regime change in Iran was not only feasible but inevitable. Initially, like Lewis, he hoped a strongman might overthrow the ayatollahs. “I believe that Tehran can be taken over by a relatively small force, determined, ruthless, cruel,” he told the BBC in 1982. “I mean the men who would lead that force would have to be emotionally geared to the possibility that they would have to kill 10,000 people.” (In retrospect, the number seems modest.)

But Iran wasn’t his formal brief, and only after Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 did Lubrani devote himself almost entirely to the country. Trading on his reputation for feeling the pulse of the Iranian people, he insisted that they would overturn the regime, but that it would happen sooner if they received a boost from the outside. From a small office in the defense ministry, on a minimal budget, he tried to stitch together a network of Iranian dissidents and informants who might one day deliver the goods.

By then, he had passed the formal retirement age, and the political and defense establishment viewed him as a holdover from the distant past. In Washington and Jerusalem, they’d concluded that the regime wouldn’t fall, neither now nor later. Policy focused instead on behavior modification. Lubrani admitted he’d come to be seen as an “alte kaker” (an old fart) who “doesn’t know what he’s talking about… I’ve become the village idiot.” He had a license to whisper to exiled Iranians in hotel lobbies and trawl Washington in pursuit of allies, but not much more.

Yet his faith never flagged because he believed the Islamic Republic was fundamentally alien to the Iranian character. “I believe that there’s a popular basis for a change in Iran,” he said in 2006.

The Iranians do not want to be a nation that has religion forced upon it. It’s true that this is a nation with a profound connection to religion, which incidentally includes antisemitic overtones. But the Iranians do not want religion to be forced on them.

Lubrani put the percentage of Iranians who wanted a change of regime at 80 percent “at least.”

The problem was that Israel’s intelligence agencies weren’t detecting signs of a resistance that could be mobilized. Lubrani replied that he had a “gut feeling,” just as he had in 1978. “On the matter of Iran, with all possible humility, I haven’t been wrong…. My feeling is that there is a green movement. It’s mature. It’s ripe. It ought to be helped. And it’s going to do the job.” As for intelligence, he acknowledged its absence: “I have no proof. But when they tell me that something is not possible, that I’m a dreamer, I reply that as long as the opposite cannot be proved, we have to try what I’m recommending.”

Just what did he recommend? In the first instance, good old-fashioned Cold War-type Psychological Operations:

What is required is an international effort to topple the regime. Exactly as the United States under the leadership of Ronald Reagan did to topple the Soviet Union and the communist Iron Curtain in Europe…. I am talking about propaganda, about psychological warfare, about financial assistance.

In particular, he wanted to create an anti-regime media outlet on a large scale:

I once dreamed that Israel would be strong enough and wealthy enough to set up an Israeli version of Al Jazeera, without visible Israeli fingerprints. It would cost a great deal [elsewhere, Lubrani put the cost at £50 million a year], but only small change compared with our total defense budget. The hub should not be in Israel, but in London or Cyprus.

Alas, he couldn’t find any takers in the Israeli establishment. “There is no senior official in Israel’s finance ministry who would understand this and approve the budget. They would think Lubrani had lost his mind.” Instead, he had to make do with a modest Persian-language radio station that aired only two hours a day.

Lubrani had another idea, this one for the Americans: “Pay [oil] workers [in Iran], in money and food, to stay home instead of going to work. It would make not going to work worth their while…. The United States has spent a hundred billion dollars on Iraq so far [2006]—and with just a fraction of that sum, the objective could be achieved.” The Americans didn’t bite.

Doomsday weapon

The one alternative Lubrani ruled out was military action. First, it would kill any chance of a popular uprising: “Any military action will only rally the Iranian people—a proud people with a developed national consciousness—around the regime.” Second, Iran would acquire a nuclear weapon anyway: “Unfortunately, I estimate that Iran will eventually reach nuclear weapons. Even if you bomb them, you will postpone the end by a few years until they once again achieve the capability.”

Lubrani regarded military action as “a doomsday weapon. Only if all ends have been exhausted…. I do not accept the talk as though there is only a military option in order to prevent Iran from getting the bomb.” At a 2010 conference of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “they asked me about the military option. I said I oppose the military option. For me as an Israeli, it should always be on the table. But that’s only for the end of days. When the sword is at my throat, I’ll use it.” (Watch him here calling military action “the very, very last resort for Israel, and I wouldn’t use it.”)

This made Lubrani a dissenter. It wasn’t just that he doubted the efficacy of military action. He thought highly of Iranian persistence and concluded that they would get a nuclear weapon sooner or later anyway. The only way to neutralize the threat was to change the regime itself:

People focus on the danger of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons and argue that everything possible must be done to stop it. In my view, they will get such a weapon whether we like it or not. But the real issue is not the weapon itself, but who has their finger on the trigger. The answer is not one agreement or another, nor destroying the nuclear reactors, but replacing the current regime with a rational one.

This led him to a logical conclusion: “Practically, I’m much more concerned about regime change than about the nuclear matter. I’m absolutely convinced that the nuclear matter will resolve itself once there is a regime change.”

Unlimited patience

Years turned into decades, and Lubrani eventually became Israel’s oldest civil servant. In 2009, the press reported that his office was slated for closure. Lubrani received a reprieve when the Green Movement filled the streets of Tehran the following month. In 2015, he retired at 89 and died less than three years later. No representative of the Netanyahu government attended the funeral. “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country” (Matthew 13:57).

In the rare instances when Lubrani’s name comes up today, it’s often as a synonym for Don Quixote. Yet Lubrani posed the key questions the present war must answer. It’s not whether to resort to military force: that train has left the station. Would Lubrani have approved? Who knows? Iran’s nuclear program wasn’t as advanced in his day, and its ballistic missile program wasn’t even on his radar. Perhaps he would have thought that “doomsday” had arrived, though he wouldn’t have taken any politician’s word for it.

Lubrani challenged conventional wisdom in a more profound way. He argued that any military campaign would only delay the regime’s nuclear program; that no negotiated agreement would permanently block its path to nuclear weapons; that “a rogue regime” combined with nuclear weapons was a “lethal” combination; that only regime change could neutralize the threat; and that the Iranian people could overturn that regime, provided the United States and Israel had their backs.

Has Lubrani’s premise finally taken hold in Israel? Last spring, Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, flagged “a sea change with respect to how Israel sees the Iran issue today. And I think for the first time ever in Israeli history, they’ve made maximum support for the Iranian people a central pillar of their strategy. And it’s not just rhetorical.” Just the other day, Mossad chief David Barnea doubled down: “Our commitment will only be complete once this extremist regime is replaced. This regime that seeks our destruction must pass from this world. This is our mission.”

That will take substantial resources, political finesse, cultural understanding, and steady resolve. Above all, it will require a virtue that’s in short supply. “The Iranians have a quality that we and others lack,” Lubrani once said. “Patience. Unlimited patience.” Whether Israel has it will determine whether this war is remembered as a turning point or a prelude to another round.

_{Header image: Uri Lubrani, 1991. Dan Hadani Collection, The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, National Library of Israel. CC BY 4.0.}

^{Uri Lubrani (left) and Bernard Lewis at a conference in Jerusalem.}

My thoughts instead turn to my mentors, and the question of what they’d think if they were still among us. One comes especially to mind. 

Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) is best known as a historian of the Arab lands, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. But from the very outset, he had a particular interest in Shi‘ite Islam and Islamic Iran. He first visited Iran in 1950. “I traveled extensively around the country for a few weeks and found it a fascinating and hospitable place. The people were most tolerant of my fragmentary Persian.” He made several subsequent visits and attended the 1971 Persepolis celebrations as an official guest. He had a few audiences with the Shah, one in the year or so before the revolution.

^{Lewis meets Mohammad Reza Shah, early 1970s.}

Later, he wrote much-discussed articles on the Iranian revolution, particularly for the New York Review of Books in the 1980s and 1990s. (These can be found in his two collections, Islam and History and From Babel to Dragomans.) He never visited the Islamic Republic, despite receiving an invitation to participate in a conference on religious dialogue. “The subject is a very interesting and important one, but I did not feel inclined to discuss it under the auspices of the current regime.”

I was his student at Princeton during the Iranian revolution, and Lewis shares a revealing story about that time, which I remember well. Few in the West knew much about Ayatollah Khomeini, and neither did Lewis, so he went to the university library to see if Khomeini had written anything. There, he found the Arabic and Persian texts of Khomeini’s lectures in exile, now known in English as Islamic Government. This would later be called Khomeini’s Mein Kampf, a fitting comparison according to Lewis. 

It was a work of unrelenting extremism, promising a harsh and purifying Islamic regime. Lewis struggled to get Washington and the New York Times to take it seriously: many wanted to believe that Khomeini would fade away if the monarchy fell. You can see a youngish Lewis on TV here, eloquently warning of what would happen if Khomeini gained power. He was right, and Iran ended up with a clerical dictatorship. The Iranian revolution brought Lewis into the American spotlight for the first time, although it was 9/11 that later catapulted him into the stratosphere.

If Lewis were here, I think the media would ask him the now-ubiquitous question: Is regime change possible, and will foreign military action accelerate it? From time to time, the media did ask him that question, so we have his past answers spanning twenty years.

Lewis repeatedly insisted that the regime couldn’t last. In 1993, he told Le Monde:

The regime is firmly in place, but sooner or later it risks being replaced by a new Reza Khan. Regional centers that have become stronger could emerge, and Tehran’s power could be diminished. Some general might come with his army into the capital to restore the unity of the nation. This may be how the Islamic Revolution in Iran will end; it could happen tomorrow or in fifty years.

This speculation relied on Iran’s own history for a precedent. Reza Khan was the generalissimo who seized power and made himself shah in 1925. But in 1997, Lewis offered a different analogy, from Europe’s repertoire. The “aging and tiring” regime

faces mounting discontent among ever larger sections of the population at home. The Iranian revolutionaries are in many ways following the path of their French and Russian predecessors—the struggle of radicals and pragmatists, the terror, the Thermidorian reaction. It is not impossible that the Iranian Revolution, too, may culminate in a Napoleon or a Stalin. They would be wise to remember that Napoleon’s career ended at Waterloo and St. Helena and that Stalin’s legacy to the Soviet Union was disintegration and chaos.

Yet, while these analogies from the 1990s differed, Lewis anticipated a strongman would rise, centralize power, and break the fever of the revolution. 

After 9/11, Lewis began to speak of a different engine of regime change: not a man on horseback but the Iranian people. In 2001, he was asked if any country in the region was moving toward democracy. He gave a surprising answer:

I would say Iran is moving in that direction. They do have elections of a sort, it’s true, under a whole series of constraints. Nevertheless, it has been possible in Iran for the electorate, the people in general, to express an opinion. It’s indirect, it’s ineffectual, but it’s not unimportant because of that. And what you have, in effect, now in Iran is two governments: an elected government, which has no power, and a ruling government which was never elected and is not answerable. And that sets up tensions, which may well lead to the development of more democratic institutions.

Not only were Iranians moving toward democracy. They were moving toward America. In 2002, he noted that “after the events of Sept. 11, great numbers of people came out into the streets in Iranian cities, where, in defiance of the authorities, they lit candles and held vigils in sympathy and solidarity with the victims in New York and Washington. This contrasted markedly with the scenes of rejoicing elsewhere.” 

From this, he developed a thesis he repeated again and again: “While the citizens of supposedly ‘friendly’ Arab nations sometimes harbor deep anti-American resentment, the populations living under fiercely anti-American dictatorships—most notably Iran and Iraq—often hold strongly pro-American sentiments.” Indeed, they saw the United States as potential liberators. “You remember the scenes of rejoicing in Afghanistan,” he told an interviewer in 2002, after the United States brought down the Taliban regime. “I’ve been told by Iranian friends that that would look like a funeral compared with the rejoicing in Iran, if America would step in and help them get rid of their government.”

At about the same time, Lewis participated in an independent study group convened at the Pentagon’s behest. Its report, “Delta of Terrorism,” co-signed by Lewis and twelve other people, is remembered for advocating regime change in Iraq. But it also included a section on Iran. Not surprisingly, the Iran discussion followed lines of argument Lewis made elsewhere: Lewis was the senior figure in the group with knowledge of the Middle East, and the other two were his self-described disciples. 

Iran was presented there as “the most populous, developed, sophisticated society in the Muslim Middle East,” and “the region’s universal joint.” Its people were “increasingly pro-American, seeing the United States as the counterforce to a tired and calcified regime.” Thought of “any deals or accommodations” with the regime should be banished; the American goal should be “to undermine and eventually replace” it.

But this would happen from within. The United States “should begin contingency planning now for a U.S. response to a spontaneous popular revolution in Iran,” encouraged by “a Reagan-style information campaign of the kind we waged successfully in Poland and Serbia. Iran constitutes the new Eastern Europe for us. A liberated Iran—like a liberated Eastern Europe—transforms the regional power equation. ” 

Indeed, so powerful were the internal forces for change that they required only encouragement. “I realize I am sticking my neck out,” Lewis said in 2003, “but I would say that the prospects of a reasonably easy transition to democracy are better in Iran than in Iraq, because the regime in Iran, with all its faults, was not as destructive as that of Saddam Hussein.” Easy? In 2007, he discerned “a level of discontent at home, which could be exploited. I do not think it would be too difficult to bring it to the point when the regime could be overthrown.”

In 2011, he added another element: fracturing within the regime. He told the Wall Street Journal:

There is strong opposition to the regime—two oppositions—the opposition within the regime and the opposition against the regime. And I think that sooner or later the regime in Iran will be overthrown and something more open, more democratic, will emerge. Most Iranian patriots are against the regime. They feel it is defaming and dishonoring their country. And they’re right of course.

Lewis didn’t specify a timeline for this process, but he still framed it as an internal one.

Alas, the nuclear program made waiting problematic. Lewis had a strong view on Iran’s program. “There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons,” he wrote. “This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran’s present rulers.” Famously, he said that for Iran’s regime (under Ahmedinejad in particular), Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was “not a constraint; it is an inducement.” (In 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu quoted Lewis before the UN, adding this flourish: “Iran’s apocalyptic leaders believe that a medieval holy man will reappear in the wake of a devastating Holy War, thereby ensuring that their brand of radical Islam will rule the earth.”)

Even so, Lewis repeatedly ruled out a military “invasion” to change the regime. He said this in 2006:

I don’t think it’s a good idea to launch an armed invasion. There is a great deal one can do short of that to indicate displeasure, to make things difficult and to encourage resistance among the subjects of the Iranian government. And there is ample evidence of widespread unhappiness and discontent among the people of Iran. I think we could do more to encourage and help them in a number of ways.

In 2007, he reiterated his objection. What Iranians wanted was “not a military invasion. My Iranian friends and various groups are unanimous on that point. They feel a military invasion would be counterproductive.”

He also hesitated about military action short of invasion. In a lecture given sometime between 2009 and 2011, he insisted that other options hadn’t been exhausted.

What are the possibilities in dealing with this threat from Iran? I think one can divide them into two: one is the obvious military one. It may reach a point when there is no other; I do not personally believe that we have reached that point yet, and I believe that, even in talking about it, it is very important not to give the regime a free gift of something that they do not at present enjoy, that is, the support of Iranian patriotism…. I think one has to handle this very carefully and before deciding that the military option is the only one that remains. There are possibilities internally within Iran, opportunities which I think have been underused or totally neglected.… It seems to me that, for the moment, one should aim at disruption rather than a military action.

He immediately followed this with a caveat: “I must, in concluding, admit the possibility that one may, at some time, reach a situation when there is no other option available.” But for the rest of his life—he died in 2018 just shy of age 102—he never publicly stated that such a “point” or “situation” had been reached. In 2012, when asked whether he supported military action against Iran, Lewis said: “I don’t think it’s the right answer…. We should do what we can to help the Iranian opposition. We could do a lot to help them and we’re not doing a damn thing, as far as I know.” “It may come to [military action],” he added, but it hadn’t yet. 

So Lewis didn’t completely rule out using force, but he viewed it as a last resort that, if mishandled, could spark a patriotic outpouring and turn into a “free gift” to the regime. 

Would he have made the same argument today? It’s a question that cannot be answered, as events since his death would have shaped his perspective. The most significant of these are progress in Iran’s nuclear program, which was less advanced in the 2010s, and the regime’s growing ruthlessness. Lewis lived a very long life and saw historic shifts in power. He stayed relevant for so long because he understood and explained change. So we don’t know how he would have responded to changing conditions in Iran, and we can only regret that no one of his caliber has replaced him.

Still, revisiting Lewis helps us frame the questions that will occupy us moving forward. Is there a foundation for democracy beneath the battered shell of the Islamic Republic? If so, can foreign military and clandestine actions help expand it? If there are two oppositions, inside and outside the regime, could they unite? Or will the war only strengthen the regime? It’s probably fair to say that the threat posed by Iran’s regime has been diminished. The key question now is, will the promise of Iran’s people also be fulfilled?

^{Header image: An official travel permit issued to Lewis in April 1965 for a trip across Iranian Azerbaijan starting in Tabriz. This followed a lecture series delivered by Lewis in Tehran, organized by the British Council.}

^{Below: covers of Lewis’s books in Persian translation. Left to right, top row: The Origins of Isma‘ilism; The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam; What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Middle row: The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror; The End of Modern History in the Middle East; The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. Bottom row: The Muslim Discovery of Europe; Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East; The Jews of Islam.}

The following day, February 28, Bush made this entry in his diary:

It’s now early Thursday morning on the 28th. Still no feeling of euphoria. I think I know why it is. After my speech last night, Baghdad radio started broadcasting that we’ve been forced to capitulate. I see on the television that public opinion in Jordan and in the streets of Baghdad is that they have won. It is such a canard, so little, but it’s what concerns me. It hasn’t been a clean end—there is no battleship Missouri surrender. This is what’s missing to make this akin to WWII, to separate Kuwait from Korea and Vietnam.… The headlines are great. “We Win.” The television accurately reflects the humiliation of Saddam Hussein and it drives the point home to the American people. But internationally, it’s not there yet, at least in the Arab world that has been lined up with Saddam.

The fact that the enemy refused to acknowledge defeat troubled Bush. “Obviously,” he comforted himself, “when the [Iraqi] troops straggle home with no armor, beaten up, 50,000 … and maybe more dead, the people of Iraq will know.” But if they knew, Saddam regime’s made sure they never showed it. In 2003, Saddam shared his perspective with American television journalist Dan Rather:

In 1991 Iraq was not defeated. In fact, our army withdrew from Kuwait according to a decision taken by us. Yes, it withdrew, but when we were back within our boundaries, the boundaries of Iraq, the Iraqi army was not defeated. Nor was the people of Iraq…. It was [Bush’s] decision to…. stop the fighting. And, consequently, Iraq was not defeated.

No one knows how the current Iran war will end, but two things seem certain. The Supreme Leader will not send his representative to sign an unconditional surrender on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. And whoever leads the regime will declare victory for Iran, regardless of how much damage the U.S. and Israel inflict. In that respect, the Islamic Republic is no different from Saddam’s Iraq.

Iran has not experienced a military victory against a foreign enemy since the 18th century. As a result, its leaders are skilled at presenting defeats as draws, and draws (like the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s) as victories. This is a coping strategy that allows Iran to preserve some dignity as the inheritor of past empires, which once thrived on legendary military triumphs and territorial conquests. A self-soothing narrative hides from Iranians the simple truth that Iran isn’t a global power. It’s not even the leading power in the Middle East. It’s too poor, corrupt, mismanaged, and divided to enjoy such a high status, no matter how much the regime tries to rally Iran’s people into sacrifices.

It’s now being said that if the regime remains in power, it’s somehow a triumph. “To survive would count as victory for Iran’s regime,” announces the Economist. But that’s Saddam-think. Survival isn’t victory unless it’s accompanied by a strategic gain that outweighs military losses. Since 1978, the Islamic Republic has aimed for Iran’s dominance of the Persian Gulf and the broader Middle East through ambitious weapons programs and support for proxies across the region. Survival is a poor substitute for losing all that, and most of it is already gone.

In 1991, George H.W. Bush had people around him who reassured him that it didn’t matter what people in the streets of Amman or Baghdad thought. What mattered was the objective achievement of defined war aims. They understood then, and we know in retrospect, that the war finished off Iraq as a pretender to regional power. Mission accomplished.

Thirty-five years later, Operation Desert Storm is remembered as the last decisive victory the United States won in a regional war—even though, at the time, America’s president thought it wasn’t a “clean end.” If that war didn’t end cleanly, the Iran war won’t either. The question is whether those who launched this war have the wisdom to realize it.

_{Header image: President Donald J. Trump attends transfer of remains of six US soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait, March 7, 2026, at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. Official White House photo by Daniel Torok, public domain.}

When the revolution (or uprising, or insurgency) started in Syria in 2011, many people saw it as the obvious continuation of the so-called Arab Spring. There had been revolutions in Tunisia, then Egypt and Libya—countries with Mediterranean shorelines. When conflict broke out in Syria, analysts initially read it as an extension of the same process.

In retrospect, it was not. The countries of North Africa are fairly homogeneous and overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. There are regional and tribal differences in Libya, and Egypt has an important Coptic Christian minority. But revolutions in these countries did not involve the transfer of power from one religious or sectarian or ethnic group to another.

In Syria, political transformation threatened to do precisely that. And so what evolved in Syria wasn’t an extension of the “Arab Spring,” but a continuation of another series of conflicts, far more devastating in their effects. Going back from the present moment, chronologically, its predecessors included the post-2003 Iraqi civil war, the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey, the Lebanese civil war from 1975 through 1989, and, still more remotely, the Armenian genocide of 1915. These might conveniently be called the wars of the Fertile Crescent.

What is the Fertile Crescent?

What the Arabs somewhat laboriously call “Iraq and Sham” or “Iraq and the Levant” (from which derive ISIS and ISIL) has a perfectly serviceable English name. It was invented by James Henry Breasted, an American Egyptologist at the University of Chicago, and popularized in his 1916 book Ancient Times. Breasted defined the Fertile Crescent as the expanse of territory set between the desert to the south and the mountains to the north—a place constantly under pressure from invaders, precisely because it is sustaining of life (Breasted called it “the cultivable fringe of the desert”). He marked it as a zone of “age-long struggle … which is still going on.”¹

“Fertile Crescent” gained popularity in the West because it seemed fertile in another way, as the site of the earliest biblical narratives and the birthplace of monotheism. It was the presumed locale of the Garden of Eden, which generations of early cartographers sought to place on a map.² It was the site of the Tower of Babel, which purported to explain the emergence and diffusion of different languages. It was the stage for the wanderings of the patriarch Abraham, who crossed it from east to west—a migration in the course of which he came into communion with the one God. The Bible, before it linked the Holy Land to Egypt, linked it to Mesopotamia. And while the peoples of the Fertile Crescent may have been many, and of many languages, they were the first to imagine God as one.

The Fertile Crescent thus came to signify diversity amidst unity: a multitude of peoples believing in the existence of one God. This was in contrast to Greece and Egypt, which were cases of single peoples of one ethnic origin and language believing in many gods. It was in the Fertile Crescent that Islam would be tested as a unifying force for diverse populations. Only after passing that test did it expand across the globe. The Fertile Crescent itself then would be folded into the great Islamic empires. In the last of them, the Ottoman, it sometimes flourished and more often languished as a single, borderless expanse.

Sykes-Picot

But in 1916, the same year that Breasted popularized the phrase Fertile Crescent, Britain and France concluded the Sykes-Picot agreement for the partition of the Ottoman Empire, dividing this zone into states and drawing straight borders through the desert. Within those borders, Britain and France imposed one faction over all others in political orders that depended to some degree or another on coercion. Power in Iraq and Syria coalesced around minorities. In Iraq, a Sunni minority was imposed over a Shi‘ite majority; in Syria, a Shi‘ite-like minority, the Alawis, over a Sunni majority. (The Kurds, minorities in both countries, were at the bottom of the heap.)

In Mesopotamia, Britain imported a Sunni monarchy from Arabia and bound it to the indigenous Sunnis of Baghdad and its surroundings, giving them dominion over a vast territory unified under the name of Iraq. The French initially tried a very different approach in Syria. Whereas the British sought to unify, the French originally intended to divide: for a period in the 1920s and 1930s, what would become Syria was in fact divided into an Alawite state, a Druze state, the states of Aleppo and Damascus, and Lebanon. In 1937, the French acceded to the demands of Syrian nationalists, and also unified Syria (excluding Lebanon). But at the same time, the French worked to empower minorities, above all the Alawis, by recruiting them into the military, in order to keep Arab nationalism in check. After independence, the Alawis parlayed that advantage into their own dominion.

While the rulers of Syria and Iraq stood, from a sectarian point of view, on opposite ends of the spectrum, they were both cases of post-colonial minority-domination in states engineered from the outside. Still, there was a difference. Syria’s ruling minority was much more of a minority. The Alawis in Syria are probably no more than twelve percent of the population whereas the Sunnis in Iraq are probably about twice that percentage. And while the ruling Sunni minority in Iraq had an integral connection with the wider Sunni majority in the region, the ruling Alawis in Syria had no such backstop, and ended up relying on distant Iran.

Perhaps Breasted would have warned us that this order couldn’t last. That it lasted as long as it did was the result of ruling minorities modernizing their repressive machinery in ways the ancients could never have imagined. But this machinery was discredited and dismantled by the United States in Iraq, and it has broken down from within in Syria. Power is now shifting from one religious or sectarian group to one which happens to be larger or more powerful or more connected to sources of outside support. Or it is fragmenting altogether.

From Strength to Weakness

There is much irony in the contraction of Iraq and Syria. Both states, at their twentieth-century high watermarks, were strong enough to project their power beyond their borders, and they even tried to redraw them. Iraqi nationalists believed that Iraq should have been awarded still wider borders, especially along the Persian Gulf littoral. Syrian nationalists likewise claimed that “greater” Syria should have been incorporated within Syria’s borders. The 1919 General Syrian Congress passed this resolution: “We ask that there should be no separation of the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine, nor of the littoral Western zone, which includes Lebanon, from the Syrian country. We desire that the unity of the country should be guaranteed against partition under whatever circumstances.”³

But it wasn’t to be. A separate Lebanon and Palestine came into existence. For this reason, Syria refused to reconcile itself to its own borders. Indeed, for three years, from 1958 to 1961, Syrians readily agreed to dismantle their own independent state, and incorporate Syria into a union with Egypt called the United Arab Republic.

Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, when he thought he had the opportunity, attempted to redraw Iraq’s borders by force, through his invasion of Iran and his occupation and annexation of Kuwait. Syrian president Hafez Assad likewise occupied Lebanon and gave safe haven to the Kurdish PKK, which was headquartered in Damascus. Iraq and Syria seemed to have become powers in their own right. In the case of Syria, in particular, American secretaries of state and even presidents came to Damascus as supplicants, hoping to win its ruler over to their geopolitical concepts of regional order.

Now all that has been reversed. Not only is Syria no longer capable of projecting its power beyond its borders; others are meddling inside Syria, to advance their own agendas, in alliance with the various domestic factions, while Syrian refugees flee the country in the millions. Syria’s elites once regarded the state’s external borders as inadequate to Syria’s great historical role, but Syria is now incapable of preserving unity even in its “truncated” borders. Syrians were educated to believe that the state of Syria was the nucleus of a greater Syria, itself the nucleus of a greater Arab unity. But in practice, Syria itself could not resist imploding into a de facto partition, driven by deep internal divisions.

Now it is not Syria’s power, but Syria’s weakness, that threatens the region. Albert Hourani, the historian of the Middle East, once wrote this: “Even were there no Syrian people, a Syrian problem would still exist.”⁴ That is exactly where the Middle East is now stuck. There is no Syrian people, but there is still a Syrian problem, and it will continue to dominate the region and worry the world, perhaps for years to come.

Since this disorder has no name—certainly none as succinct as “Sykes-Picot”—I propose to call it, for now, the Breasted Fertile Crescent. This would be a Fertile Crescent made up of shifting principalities, subject to occasional intervention by surrounding powers, characterized by variety and diversity, essentially without fixed borders—a place where Shi‘ites struggle against Sunnis, Arabs against Kurds, the desert against the sown. The Breasted (dis)order will persist, until some great outside power or group of regional powers proves willing to expend the energy needed to restructure the Fertile Crescent in accord with their interests—something the Ottomans did for four hundred years, Europe did for fifty years, and America has not yet attempted at all.

Notes

1. James Henry Breasted, Ancient Times: A History of the Early World (Boston, MA: Ginn, 1916), 100–1.
2. See Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
3. J. C. Hurewitz, The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, vol. 2: British-French Supremacy, 1914–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 181.
4. A.H. Hourani, Syria and Lebanon: A Political Essay (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 6.

I was drawn as much to the aesthetics of the poster as to its content. The Giza Pyramids, the Sphinx, an obelisk, and green palm trees dominate the background, evoking the exotic landscape of Egypt. The poster features a limited palette of pastel green and black on a white background, now yellowed with age. The pastel green complements the palm tree imagery. A riot of fonts and typographical elements in all three languages—along with misspellings and unusual spellings—further enhances its charm.

Mordechai Golinkin was a trailblazer for opera in the Yishuv. Born in the Russian Empire, he displayed exceptional musical talent from an early age and earned widespread acclaim as a conductor. Inspired by the Balfour Declaration, Golinkin founded a Jewish choir that toured Russia to raise funds for establishing an opera in Palestine. In 1923, he arrived in Tel Aviv and founded the Eretz-Israel (Palestine) Opera. Despite precarious finances and makeshift venues, he staged eighteen Hebrew-translated productions during the Opera’s four years under his leadership. When the funds were exhausted, opera largely disappeared from Mandatory Palestine. However, in the 1940s, Golinkin encouraged the revival of the genre by successors, and at the age of 73, he conducted the inaugural performance of the Israel National Opera in 1948.

The 1924 performance advertised on my poster was held at the Eden Theater, then a silent movie house in Tel Aviv’s Neve Tzedek neighborhood. Opened in 1914, the original (“winter”) theater was a concrete marvel of its time, seating 800 people under one roof. (The long-abandoned Eden is now slated to become a luxury hotel.) The poster’s warning that the performance would begin at 8 p.m. “sharp” was no mere formality. Golinkin later lamented that Tel Aviv’s residents were “unused to punctual theater attendance,” arriving late and having to stand in the corridor behind the doors for the entire first act of the Opera’s premiere performance.

I attempted to find information about the performance of Aida at the Eden Theater but couldn’t locate a review. However, I did come across an amusing piece in the Ha’aretz daily, published the morning after the November 18 performance, offering readers tips on how to enjoy the next performance for free. The advice appeared in an “About Town” column, credited to a pseudonym I couldn’t decipher. My translation follows.

Aida on the Cheap

Anyone who cannot afford three liras for a room, a penny for an egg, pennies for a glass of milk, a few coins for a loaf of bread that doesn’t quite meet weight standards, a lira for a minor luxury, or earns 25 mils a day in torn trousers, or generally anyone who either wishes but cannot or can but does not wish to buy a ticket for the opera Aida and listen to Radamès, is invited to come tomorrow to the Eden (but not all the way in) and secure an appropriate spot around its perimeter. The grounds are expansive and welcoming, the walls of the Eden are thin, its upper windows are wide open, and the voices of the singers are powerful enough to reach every heart. The visitor will assuredly hear the opera in all its precision. And if the cries of the boy hawking the daily Do’ar Hayom don’t shake the foundations of the temple while the priests are performing their rituals, the ballet is dancing, and the trumpets are blaring, it will still be possible—even for an untrained ear—to distinguish between the cracking of sunflower seeds and the shelling of pistachios in some discreet corner of the Eden, or hear the sound of the libretto’s pages being turned by the audience, and even the beating hearts of the new singers making their debut in Tel Aviv for the first time—not to mention clearly hearing, very clearly indeed, the tapping rhythm of Golinkin’s right foot or his soft whisper, like a pssst, directed into an ear:

“Play forte, my friends. Softly now, thieves.” In moments of anger: “Pianissimo, you devils!”

Those who wish may also bring ladders (as is customary), lean them against the walls, and climb higher and higher to the small windows, enhancing the experience by adding sight to sound.

The opera management may rest assured that this reverent audience will examine every detail with a precision finer than a hair’s breadth, interpreting everything beyond the strict letter of the law. The gathering will arrive at the Eden an hour before eight and remain outside until midnight, even though the press of people will be great, the winds cold, and the rains dripping—and, of course, no one will have a raincoat.

Source: Ha’aretz, November 19, 1924. Header image: Original Eden Theater in 1914.

The accession of Goldziher’s library marked a triumph for the Hebrew University. Several generations of students and scholars would rely on the collection to maintain their competitiveness with the highest research standards. This centennial offers an opportunity to remember Goldziher and reflect on the journey and impact of his books.

Making of a master

“The Great Goldziher,” as admirers called him even during his lifetime, laid many of the modern foundations for scholarly Islamic studies. Born in the Hungarian town of Székesfehérvár to the son of a leather merchant, he received rigorous schooling in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud from an early age. He completed his philological studies in Leipzig in 1870, and then traveled further through Europe and the East. He even studied at Cairo’s famed Islamic university, Al-Azhar.

Goldziher’s Jewish faith precluded a professorship at the University of Budapest, and from 1876 he earned a living as secretary to one of the Jewish communities in the city. Only in 1905, at the age of 55, was he finally appointed to a salaried chair at the university. This meant that Goldziher had to pursue his studies on Islam after hours, following long days spent on menial tasks that he detested. His interests ranged widely, from the development of Muslim sects to Arabic poetry. But his most renowned contribution was his study of Islam’s oral tradition, the hadith, which he viewed not as a record of the Prophet Muhammad’s deeds and sayings, but as a window into the first centuries of Islam.

In the 1890s, as Goldziher’s reputation grew, foreign universities such as Heidelberg and Cambridge attempted to recruit him. But he refused to leave Hungary for personal and patriotic reasons. Nor did he consider relocating to Palestine. Goldziher, while an observant Jew, was not a Zionist. In 1920, his old schoolmate, the Zionist leader Max Nordau, encouraged him to join the planned university in Jerusalem—the future Hebrew University. Hungary had just fallen under the rule of Admiral Horthy, whose regime enacted sweeping antisemitic policies, including strict quotas on Jews in higher education. Goldziher declined Nordau’s proposal: “Parting with the [Hungarian] fatherland, especially at this time, would demand a heavy sacrifice from a patriotic point of view. This is also why I resisted moving to German or English universities in my younger years.”

Alongside his research and writing, Goldziher assembled an astonishing private library. Budapest lacked great collections of books and manuscripts from the Muslim East, so Goldziher had to acquire them himself. Foreign visitors to his home were awestruck by the scope of his collection. A young Hungarian rabbinical student, Leopold Grünwald (Greenwald), recalled visiting Goldziher’s home in 1910 and the emotional effect of seeing his library.

The room was his study, a large room filled with several thousand books and hundreds of manuscripts that did not appear to be arranged in any systematic way. Some forty books, for example, large and small, rested on a stool. It was as though a whirlwind had transported me to a Jewish ghetto of several hundred years ago, where the Jew was isolated from the entire world and enjoyed no pleasures except for the four ells of halakhah. Only among his books was he at ease; there alone he found peace. Even the air there was clear of physical desires and pleasures. All was spiritual. I thought to myself, would that I could remain in this ethereal state for as long as I live! Would that I could reject all the vain pleasures and find joy and comfort among books alone!

Floor to ceiling

Goldziher died in November 1921. Lore has it that he wished for his library to go to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, but there is no record that he made any specific provisions for it. His widow and son, pressed for cash, sought buyers, with serious offers coming from as far away as Japan.

However, the most persistent offers came from Jerusalem, where the newly established Hebrew University was eager to expand its library collections to an international standard. The detailed history of the Zionist Executive’s acquisition of Goldziher’s library has been expertly recounted by Samuel Thrope, curator of the Islam and Middle East Collection at the National Library (here and here). It’s a tale of negotiation, bureaucracy, and competing claims for credit, to which I have nothing to add.

Instead, I’ll share the vivid account of Israel Cohen, the British Zionist official and journalist who traveled to Budapest to finalize the deal and arrange for the library’s shipment to Palestine. In August 1923, he visited the library in situ, at Goldziher’s home at 4 Holló Street. Cohen described the street as “a long, dreary, narrow thoroughfare, flanked on either side by tall somber buildings, in which the two most homely features are a modest little bethel and a frowsy kosher restaurant.” Remote from “the majesty of the Danube,” Holló Street was “a haunt of unrelieved desolation, where nobody could be expected to dwell by choice; but as the Jewish Community owns Number 4, this has always formed the residence of some of its officials,” of whom Goldziher had been one.

Cohen wondered “what was it that fettered [Goldziher] to this somber dwelling,” when he had received all manner of “luring invitations” and “tempting material prizes” from around the world.

When I first went to visit his home in August 1923, and, later ascending a dim, circular flight of stone steps, found myself on the railed gallery that led to the door, and from which I looked down upon the dirty hand-carts and the rubbish-heaps in the courtyard below and at the lofty, grimy wall opposite, which seemed to shut out the light from heaven, I could not help wondering. For forty-two years, I reflected, this world-renowned savant, from early manhood until his death at the age of seventy-two, was content to tread up and down that dim, stone staircase, pace along the narrow, stone gallery that ran round three sides of the building—the fourth being bounded by the gloomy wall—and live in the humble flat that was entered by a door with chequered and bar-protected window-panes. No more drab and depressing surroundings could be conceived—and to be doomed to such neighborhood for forty-two years! ‘Such is the Torah, and such its reward!’

But when I was admitted by the gentle, gray-haired widow, and taken to the room where he had worked, the riddle was solved. For in this room was the wonderful library covering the walls from floor to ceiling and overflowing on to extra shelves, which he had thoughtfully and laboriously gathered together from all the regions of the Near East, and wherein he quarried night and day in quest of new truths. It was his passionate attachment to this library, in and for which alone he lived, that made all the glittering offers from other cities, with their promise of superior ease and comfort, appear but phantasms, and its removal seemed to him unthinkable. Here were arranged the well-thumbed tomes in all the Semitic tongues, which he had either bought or which had been presented to him by their authors or by the erudite societies that published them. The works given by their own writers all contained an inscription of homage and often of gratitude, and not a single Orientalist but considered it a duty and honor to send him a first copy. Many of the books were rare, and those that came from Moslem scholars were probably the only copies on the Continent. And Goldziher enriched most of them with his own notes and glosses, written on the fly-leaves and the margin, or on slips of paper, which form a mine of suggestions for those who will delve into them.

Since Cohen never met Goldziher, he couldn’t possibly have known the scholar’s reasons for staying in Budapest. Still, Goldziher could not have achieved much without his massive library of rare, hand-picked books, and the daunting task of moving them likely reinforced his reluctance to leave. For what it’s worth, Abraham Shapira Yahuda, Goldziher’s mentee and a Zionist, claimed that he had urged Goldziher “to come to the Land of Israel and dedicate the last years of his life to raising a new generation of scholars.” Yahuda regretted that Goldziher “never went to the Land of Israel, partly because he didn’t believe he could bring his books with him.”

For Goldziher’s widow, Laura, parting with her husband’s books was no small thing. Cohen gave this poignant account:

The twenty-two cases were ranged in the library and the adjoining rooms in two rows, between which the frail widow slowly passed, touching each case in turn, as though to retain contact until the last possible moment with the possessions of her husband. They must have seemed to her like coffins, as they were borne out of the dwelling, nor was the sorrow that followed them any less profound than that which accompanies many a real bier. At last they had all been taken away, and she gave a wistful look at the library—bare and desolate. ‘Ichabod—the glory is departed,’ she said, ‘and there is nothing more for me to live for.’

‘The glory is gone from here,’ I replied, ‘to the Holy Land, where it will become more glorious still, and where it will confer an untold blessing by bringing Jews and Arabs together in the peaceful pursuit of scholarship, and thus pave the way to a friendly understanding between the two peoples.’

The following day the Goldziher library was transported to Trieste, whence it was shipped to Palestine.

Books at war

In reports in the Hebrew press about Goldziher’s library, Cohen’s hopeful idea that it might bring Jews and Arabs together appeared frequently. Yahuda was the main promoter of this notion:

Imagine a library where a delightful and wonderful treasure from the finest Arabic literature and key Islamic texts is found. This place could become a center for Arab and Jewish scholars alike, where they would come together as brothers in wisdom and friends in the pursuit of knowledge. The spirit of enlightenment would dwell upon them and inspire our neighbors, who are close to us in both kinship and thought, with the same spirit of tolerance, broad-mindedness, and generosity of soul that once distinguished the Arabs in ancient times.

The poet and writer Kadish Silman attended the opening in Jerusalem, and struck exactly this note:

Besides Jewish scholars and teachers, dozens of English and Arab locals with an interest in scholarship came to the opening. All the editors of Jerusalem’s Arab newspapers were there, as well as the Mufti, the Qadi, and others…. Dr. [Nissim] Malul translated [Weizmann’s speech] into Arabic. The speech made a strong impression. A feeling of unity—and possibly even friendship—was achieved. Afterward, in the library, all the guests from various backgrounds mingled, and Dr. Weizmann gave explanations to everyone. He parted from the Arabs and the English with handshakes and warm wishes. Since we started our local political efforts, never has there been a moment of unity as strong as this one.

Close to the rented Arab house that served as a temporary home for Goldziher’s library, across a rocky expanse, stood a mosque’s minaret. Goldziher’s library had traveled far from Holló Street to fulfill its mission of peace.

Alas, no number of books could have achieved that. In the years that followed, Jews and Arabs collided. Efforts to appoint an Arab to the faculty never bore fruit. In 1936, during the “Arab Revolt,” Lewis (Levi) Billig, the first lecturer in Arabic literature at the Hebrew University, was shot dead at his desk by an Arab assailant. “The manuscript he was preparing,” reported the Palestine Post, “a Concordance of Ancient Arabic Literature, and a large Arabic tome on which he was working, were spattered with blood.” The murder stunned the faculty.

In 1945, the librarian who had organized Goldziher’s collection faced hostility from Arab book dealers in the Old City: “Something like this has not happened to me even in the worst of times.” Then came the 1948 war, when the library salvaged (critics have claimed, looted) as many as 9,000 Arabic volumes from homes abandoned by Palestinian Arabs who fled the fighting. “The number of books brought to the library in this way,” wrote the university’s keeper of Oriental books, “exceeds the number of Arabic books we have gathered over the entire history of the institution.”

Ideas shape history, but the physical books and libraries that contain them have always been subject to its tides.

Spirit and method

The Goldziher collection didn’t change the course of Jewish-Arab relations. But it reached Jerusalem at the right moment, as Israel prepared to establish itself in the face of Arab opposition. By the time Israel gained independence, the Israeli school of Islamic studies was well-established, largely led by scholars who, like Goldziher’s books, had migrated from Central Europe to Jerusalem.

As one such scholar, Martin Plessner, remarked, “Goldziher’s library is one of the most valuable assets of the Hebrew University. His spirit lives among us from the earliest steps of our research into Islam.” But it wasn’t just his spirit that influenced them—it was also his method. “Goldziher used to write many notes in his books,” wrote S.D. Goitein, “especially on the blank pages at the beginning and end of the books. Anyone wishing to see his handwriting and get a glimpse of the working methods of a great scholar need only request an Oriental book printed before 1914 from the library, and they will almost certainly find what they are looking for.” Goldziher’s example, reinforced by the physical presence of his books, set exacting standards for interpreting Islam and Arabic within Israel’s universities, but also far beyond them.

Goldziher’s books are now dispersed throughout the broader library collection. Over the last century, their influence likewise has spread in ways that can no longer be traced—trails left from the big bang that occurred in a drab Budapest walk-up.

His students now work in intelligence services, media outlets, and universities: Werner Ende, who profoundly influenced modern Islamic studies in Germany, has passed away. 

In Germany, research into contemporary issues of the Middle East doesn’t have a long tradition. Philologists and cultural scholars were often too afraid of being co-opted for political purposes. For a long time, they preferred to focus on ancient manuscripts and retreat into the academic ivory tower. When the world became interested in the Islamic world after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, there was little from the Orientalist departments that could explain what was happening in neighboring regions. This has changed; today, Islamic studies as a branch of Orientalism is no longer seen as an obscure or irrelevant field. 

This shift is thanks in part to Werner Ende, a pioneer in modern Islamic studies.

It was this role that drew me to Ende, the German scholar with whom I had the closest relationship. By the time I met him in 1986, he had moved beyond his early work on Arab nationalist historiography to establish himself as a leading expert on Salafi Islam and Shi‘ism in its Arab contexts. Sunni-Shi‘ite polemics became his special field of interest, and he approached them from both sides with the factual and philological precision characteristic of the German scholarly tradition.

Like my mentor, Bernard Lewis, Ende insisted that the politics of Islamic movements could not be understood without a profound grasp of early Islamic history. Only Ende could explain, with absolute authority and clarity, how today’s Saudi-Iranian dispute over a cemetery in Medina encapsulated centuries of Wahhabi-Shi‘ite rivalry. His study of the Shi‘ites of modern Medina is a typical gem, all the more remarkable since, as he admitted, he had “not been able—and most probably never will be—to do research on the spot.” These deep dives into difficult texts revealed him as a virtuoso researcher, whose resourcefulness was truly astonishing.

In 1986, I went to Freiburg im Breisgau, where he held the chair in Islamic studies, to spend a month under his tutelage. Ende became my guide to many things that summer: the revival of the German Orientalist tradition after the devastation of the Second World War, Shi‘ism in Lebanon (where he had spent several years before that country’s civil war), and Wahhabi ideology. His tutorials over Kaiserstuhl wine atop Freiburg’s Schlossberg were unforgettable.

We stayed in touch; I last saw him over breakfast in Berlin in 2016. He had retired by then and moved to the reunited capital. (In his youth, he had lived in East Berlin near the Wall and escaped to the West in pursuit of freedom. Life under communism made him wary of all forms of indoctrination.) I last corresponded with him in 2023, when he told me he had fallen seriously ill and had returned to the care of family in Freiburg, where he passed away.

Ende was largely unknown outside the German-speaking world. He published some articles in English, but not a book (apart from two co-edited volumes), and he didn’t attend conferences in America. However, he exhibited a keen and mischievous curiosity about the battles over Middle Eastern studies across the Atlantic. While he kept his distance from the Arab-Israeli conflict, he did not distance himself from Israel or Israeli scholars. His most accessible summary of Sunni polemics against Iran’s revolution appeared (in English) in an Israeli conference volume—an article that is more relevant than ever today.

More important than international renown, he was a devoted mentor to many students, who attest to his lasting influence on their work and careers. They compiled a fine collected volume in celebration of his 65th birthday, the title of which takes on a different meaning today. It played on his name: Islamstudien ohne Ende (‘Islamic studies without end’). Now Islamic studies in Germany are without Ende, but hopefully not without his standards of rigorous scholarship.

In 1988, he reviewed my first book, Islam Assembled, published in 1986. I reproduce it at this link (translated from German) not because it flattered me. My book was a revised doctoral dissertation, and from my present perspective, I’m embarrassed by its flaws. It’s also true that by the time Ende wrote his review, we were already on friendly terms. But it reflected his generosity of spirit, and his emphases suggest why we connected. Rereading it now, almost forty years later, it strikes me as a model of how a senior scholar should review the work of a promising junior one. There is always fault to be found, but it should be weighed against the value of unqualified praise for someone launching a career. I shall always be grateful for his kindness.

^{Header image: Baqi‘ cemetery in Medina. Source: Wikimedia Commons.}

Malik was a Christian, but not a Christian Zionist. Yet he understood the historical forces that led to the creation of Israel and saw Israel as a reality that should be accepted. In a 1982 interview, he noted that in a state of peace, “there will be a creative interaction between the Lebanese and the Israelis that will stun the world on all levels of human endeavor.”

In a lecture for the Charles Malik Institute, I compare the views of Malik and Edward Said (to whom he was related by marriage). Said is venerated on the American left, while Malik is largely forgotten in the United States, even on the conservative right. I explain why this is the case, highlight the differences between the two thinkers, and also identify a common driving force.

They had one more thing in common: I met them both—Malik in Beirut in 1982 and Said in New York in 1986. I recount those stories in the preface.