Page 219 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

216 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

peculations of their northern Arab mentors. The northern Arabs, however,
were not the sole agents of change, or even the most effective. Every Gulf ruler,
either because he felt so inclined or because he believed it to be expedient, gave
voice to bellicose sentiments of one kind or another, or made conspicuous
donations to the war chests of the Arab states in direct conflict with Israel. The
only one who remained silent was the sultan of Muscat, Saiyid Said ibn
Taimur, who, closeted in his palace in far-away Salalah, ignored the entire
furore.
As far removed from him in attitude as he was in distance was the late King
Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia. Austere in his personal life, stern in his
administration of his people, and intensely aware of his position as imam of the
Wahhabiya, Faisal abhorred Israel and all that it represented, religiously and
politically. To him the conflict with the Jewish state was a jihad, a holy war.
Delenda est Judaea, and the land which the Israeli state had usurped must be
restored to the dar al-Islam (Muslim territory). Incapable of intervening
militarily in the fighting in June 1967, Faisal had expressed his anger by cutting
off oil shipments to the United States and Britain. He afterwards subsidized
Egypt’s economy and helped to re-equip its armies. Because of the preponder­
ance of Saudi Arabia in the politics of the peninsula the Gulf rulers were forced
to take their colour on the Palestinian issue from Faisal. Hence the air in the
Gulf became clamorous with denunciations of perfide Israel and demands for
Palestine irredenta. Propaganda poured forth from government-controlled
radio stations up and down the Gulf, branches of the Arab Boycott Office were
opened in the various shaikhdoms, organized demonstrations of the type
depressingly familiar in the Levant cities were mounted at frequent intervals,
and the bravoes of the Palestine Liberation Organization were feted as heroes
and given large subventions - as much, it should be added, to dissuade them
from threatening the established order in the Gulf as to support them in their
operations against Israel. Yet for all the late Saudi ruler’s implacable hatred of
Israel, and for all the agitation created in the Gulf by the emigre Arabs anef their
local disciples, the Arab-Israeli conflict remained an artificial one so far as the
people of the Gulf were concerned. Their real interests were unaffected by it
and would remain unaffected until the day that they were placed in hazard by
the utilization of the Gulf’s oil as a political weapon in the conflict.
Because the dispute was extraneous to their lives the arousal of popular
sentiment against Israel among the Gulf’s inhabitants depended, and still
depends, almost exclusively upon the stimulation of Muslim or Pan-Arab
feeling. Islamic beliefs and practices, needless to say, have long regulated
society in the Gulf states, but far greater prominence is now given in public life
to the observance of Muslim occasions and the expression of Muslim sentiment
than in years gone by. One sign of the increased emphasis upon religiosity is the
presence of a growing number of Muslim Brethren (al-ikhwan al-muslimin),
most of them Egyptians who fled to Saudi Arabia some years ago after the