Truths and Lies in the Middle East

Eric Rouleau, Martin Makinson

Description

• More than a memoir, a uniquely nuanced history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the modern Middle East from one of the most celebrated journalists of his generation.
• Unlike other books on the Middle East, Rouleau covers an especially long time span from the 60s up until the 2011 Arab Spring with inside information based on iconic interviews with Gamal Abd al-Nasser, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon, and Anwar Sadat.
• An Egyptian Jew exiled in 1951, few others spoke fluent Arabic, Hebrew, English, and French as well as Rouleau did.
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Foreword. Éric Rouleau’s Empire, Alain Gresh xi

Introduction 1

1. Gamal Abd al-Nasser 7

2. Egypt to the Egyptians 29

3. The Indispensable Torah 45

4. My Brother Ishmael 67

5. The “Prussians” Win Out Over the “Jews” 91

6. The Six-Hour War 111

7. The “Liberal” Occupation 137

8. The Survivor 159

9. Missing Peace 179

10. The End of an Era 199

11. “De-Nasserization” 221

12. War and Diplomacy 237

13. Lost Illusions 255

14. Update and Renewal 271

15. The Oslo Deadlock 287

16. Cassandra 299

Index 309

Sujets

• Journalists
• Personal Memoirs
• Publishers
• Political
• Middle Eastern
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Lettres et linguistique
• Israelí
• Nasser
• Moshé Dayán
• Años 1960
• Torá
• Anwar el-Sadat
• Ariel Sharón
• Egipto
• Diplomacy
• Jews
• Egypt
• Biography
• Palestinian
• Yasser
• Near
• Ishmael
• General officer
• Oslo Accords
• Publishing
• Journalist
• Anwar El Sadat
• 1960s
• Politics
• Middle East
• Journalism
• Israeli
• Politics of Egypt
• Arab people
• World
• General
• Yassir
• Autobiography
• Éric Rouleau
• Diplomatie (homonymie)
• Le Monde
• Arafat
• Alain Gresh
• Editors
• Golda Meir
• Moshe Dayan
• Occupation
• Gamal Abdel Nasser
• Anouar el-Sadate
• Gaza
• Ariel Sharon
• Torah
• 1967
• 1973

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 03 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617979545
• Langue: English

Extrait

This electronic edition published in 2019 by The American University in Cairo Press 113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt 200 Park Ave., Suite 1700 New York, NY 10166 www.aucpress.com

Copyright © 2012 by Librairie Arthème Fayard First published in French in 2012 as Dans les coulisses du Proche-Orient: Mémoires d’un journaliste diplomate (1952–2012)

English translation by Martin Makinson

Copyright © by The American University in Cairo

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 977 416 802 4 eISBN 978 1 61797 954 5

Version 1
For Michèle Berrebi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Introduction

1. Gamal Abd al-Nasser
2. Egypt to the Egyptians
3. The Indispensable Torah
4. My Brother Ishmael
5. The “Prussians” Win Out Over the “Jews”
6. The Six-Hour War
7. The “Liberal” Occupation
8. The Survivor
9. Missing Peace
10. The End of an Era
11. “De-Nasserization”
12. War and Diplomacy
13. Lost Illusions
14. Update and Renewal
15. The Oslo Deadlock
16. Cassandra
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Alain Gresh for his pertinent suggestions during the writing of this book, to Michel Raffoul for his detailed and vigilant editing and his constructive remarks, and to Jean Gueyras for the information that has nurtured this work.
My most affectionate thoughts are for my children and grandchildren.
FOREWORD: ÉRIC ROULEAU’S EMPIRE
Alain Gresh
T he tramway has just left Heliopolis, “City of the Sun,” a newly built Cairo suburb. As on other mornings, the young man has sat down comfortably to ride to the prestigious Law Faculty. As the carriage runs past wide, flashy stores, he suddenly notices thieves breaking the front window of a shop. He jumps out of his seat, sees the crooks escaping by car, and flags down a taxi to try to catch up with them, but to no avail. Forgetting his lectures, he races to the head offices of the Egyptian Gazette , the English-language daily where he works in the evenings. The editor in chief, impressed—and somewhat amused—by his story, stops the rotary presses and changes the front-page headline to “Theft in Heliopolis,” by “our star journalist.” On that day in 1943, a star was born in Cairo.
The journalist is not yet known as Éric Rouleau, but as Élie Raffoul. He is only seventeen, an age which, for some, is the best time of one’s life. A few weeks before this incident, and despite his father’s advice, he had turned his back on a better-paid job for pen pushers in an insurance company, preferring to join the Egyptian Gazette while pursuing his law studies in the mornings. Tenacity, flair, and a stroke of luck—to be in the right place at the right time—leave their mark on his career.
He emigrated to France in 1952, worked at the Agence France-Press (AFP), and then joined the staff of the newspaper Le Monde . For several decades, during the years 1950–80, he was to cover not only all the Arab countries, but also Israel, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Africa in the process of decolonization, Ethiopia, and even faraway Pakistan, and would become the most famous journalist of the most illustrious French daily. His colleague and companion Jean Gueyras once remarked that “the sun never sets on Éric Rouleau’s empire,” just like over the British Empire or that of Charles V of Spain, who invented the expression.
But how does one land in the Rue des Italiens in Paris, when one is born in a Cairo suburb? How does one go from the Egyptian Gazette to Le Monde when the gap between them seems insurmountable? In fact, it was less than one might imagine.
Élie was a French speaker, as were many Egyptians at the time, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. Many of the other communities coexisting in Egypt: Greek, Italian, French, and Syrian-Lebanese. Egyptian literature in French, unjustly forgotten today, was at the height of its glory, with books written by Edmond Jabès, Albert Cossery, and Georges Henein. It had attempted surrealism and had been influenced by Paul Éluard and Max Jacob, using an unusual and sometimes bizarre form of French, rolling the ‘r’s and lifting expressions directly from Arabic.
It is difficult to imagine how love for France, their second homeland, would stir young Egyptians. On 10 June 1940, Élie could not believe what he saw and heard. At the family table, his father had broken into tears for the first time in his life, after learning on the radio that France had surrendered. For this man, born in Aleppo, educated in the French-speaking schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, France was the home of freedom and justice. Éric Rouleau recalled that “the great affair of his life” was the Dreyfus scandal, whose twists and turns and sudden developments he knew in detail. He often spoke frequently and at length about the matter; he would describe, with great pride, the public meetings and demonstrations he had joined to defend the Jewish captain wrongly accused of spying on behalf of Germany. He would recite the poems of Jean Jaurès, Émile Zola, and Victor Hugo, whom he worshiped. He would pepper his words with quotations borrowed from the fables of La Fontaine. A few decades later, Éric Rouleau was to be decorated with the French Legion of Honor: “My emotion was at its highest,” he remembered, “for it was President François Mitterrand himself who was rewarding me for ‘services rendered to France.’ I seemed to see my father standing in the first row, among the famous people who were attending the ceremony in the Élysée Palace.”
This passion for France was widely shared. At the same time, Henri Curiel and his brother Raoul, also Egyptians, Jews, and French-speaking, were in the French consulate seeking help against Nazi Germany, a commitment that the consular official rejected with disdain. In Cairo, people were listening to Radio London and to General de Gaulle, supporting Free France and not Marshal Pétain. In October 1943, Frenchmen and Egyptians of all creeds were creating the association Friends of France “to materially express their attachment to a country whose soul and destiny they had never ceased believing in.”
Élie Raffoul was not only an Egyptian citizen, French-speaking and Francophile, he was also a ‘Jew.’ But how can one define a ‘Jew’? Anti-Semites had tried to do so without success, by inventing a ‘race,’ but defining it solely in terms of religion. The State of Israel has not done any better, as it has put both believers and non-believers under the same umbrella, those who claim to belong to a more or less vague Jewish culture, and those who reject it. Is one a Jew by choice or, as Jean-Paul Sartre would write, in the eyes of anti-Semites?
Like many young people, Élie went through a teenage crisis and decided to become a rabbi, before giving up and losing his faith. The Talmud’s loss was journalism’s gain.
Although he was an atheist, Élie nevertheless did not reject his Jewish origins; he was only trying to understand their meaning. At the time (and this is hard to believe), Zionists had complete freedom of action in Egypt. The Jewish Agency was well established in Cairo, and the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, the National Jewish Fund founded in 1901 as an organization for the development of colonization in Palestine, was gathering donations in synagogues. Éric Rouleau recalled that “usually, donors lacked any political motivation, and believed that they were only contributing to charity.”
He then turned to the Hashomer Hatzair movement, literally ‘the Young Guard,’ a Zionist movement of the extreme left. “The hundred or so teenagers who went to the club participated in sports competitions, attended classes in Jewish history, and joined philosophical debates where ideologues of the workers’ movement were prominent.”
He began to focus on Marxist thought, but abandoned the organization after one year, irritated by their narrow-minded nationalism and their indifference to struggles carried out in Egypt, even against the colonial power controlling the country. He concluded that “I had trouble believing that the majority of Egyptians were anti-Semites, and I had no wish to live abroad.”
Jews of Egypt felt Egyptian and the sirens of Zionism did not enchant them particularly. Gilles Perrault, in his book Un homme à part (A man apart), said that “apart from the Zionist minority, no one felt the need for a Jewish state, and no one saw fit to chant ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ when one could take the 9:45 train to get there.” Only when the Israeli–Arab conflict later made their life impossible, and transformed them into victims of both an anti-Jewish wave in the Arab world, and material for the Israeli government to use them as a fifth column, would they be forced to migrate to France—the true Promised Land.
Nowadays, criticizing Zionism is often equated to hidden anti-Semitism. And yet during the first half of the twentieth century, the large majority of Jews throughout the world viewed the Zionist project with indifference, and sometimes even hostility. Élie thought of himself foremost as Egyptian and loyal to his fellow citizens, united beyond their religious divisions.
In 1943, the year when he began studying law and trying to be a journalist, Egyptian universities were mobilizing against the enemy hated by all, perfidious Albion, that is, the United Kingdom, which had been occupying the country since 1882 and controlled