Fouad Ajami Goes To Israel

Mosaic Magazine ^ | January 8, 22015 | Martin Kramer

[OddLane]

The scholar and public intellectual Fouad Ajami, who was born in Lebanon and died last summer in Maine at the age of sixty-eight, specialized in explaining to Westerners the complex and traumatic encounter of the Arab peoples with modernity. He didn’t write much about Israel per se, or claim any unique insights into its complexities. And yet, at a certain point in his life, he decided he would discover Israel for himself—not only by reading and meeting Israelis abroad, but by visiting the place.

As it happens, I witnessed several of the stages of this discovery, first as his student and later as his friend. Here I want to mark those stages, and then offer some observations on the crucial insight I believe he derived from his quest.

I start with a passage written in 1991:

At night, a searchlight from the Jewish village of Metullah could be seen from the high ridge on which my [own] village lay. The searchlight was a subject of childhood fascination. The searchlight was from the land of the Jews, my grandfather said . . . . In the open, barren country, by the border, that land of the Jews could be seen and the chatter of its people heard across the barbed wire.

[untenured]

I read a couple of Ajami’s books, and many of his essays in The Wall Street Journal. He was a man of a different era, the era when Arabs were blinded by mere delusional anti-Zionism rather than delusional Islamism. He was no blind supporter of Israel, but no stubborn rejectionist either. I grew skeptical of his belief in the ability of American blood and treasure to change the many and manifest ills of Arabia, but he diagnosed them very thoroughly, insightfully, and while pulling no punches. He also wrote beautiful English, far better than most native-speaker intellectuals.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

Glad to see that Ajami never became the anti-American, anti-Israel Marxist that Richard Falk became (or always was). He was an honorable man among the many false scholars of Princeton and American academia in general.

[bubman]

Wow the man passed! Amazing study in evolutionary thinking. Pragmatic and recognizing the inevitability of events. I read somewhere that when he understood the richness and depth of Israel and its people, and what they have done with the land, he wept for the arab people and what could have been. A magnificent gift squandered by the smallness of the arab mind. He felt the same way on the liberation of Iraq from Saddam by the US. Adjami you will be missed.