The American who dreamed of peace for the Arabs – but was murdered in their midst

‘Arabist’ is fast becoming an archaism. Perhaps it is already one. These days the word conjures up enchanting visions of racy manuscripts examined over sharbat in the great domed residences of sympathetic chargés d’affaires and lone camels bumping along like single-masted cutters on a sand-dune ocean. At the age of six I dreamed of becoming one after watching David Lean’s great film for the first time. (A few weeks later I saw Jurassic Park on video and decided that I fancied palaeontology instead.)

It is tempting, even for those of us who take an Israeli line, to think that had the creation of a massive pan-Arab state followed the Paris Peace Conference, the last 100 or so years would have been much the better for it. Today’s jihadist ideology is very much a 20th-century beast. The barbarous anti-Semitism that pervades much of the Middle East today and the general backwardness into which the Arab-speaking world has fallen are the unfortunate consequences of a people’s having long been under the spell of the wrong leaders — not, as certain hawkish intellectuals have hinted, the default condition of anyone who considers the Koran the word of God.

While the partitioning of the Ottoman empire may have broken T.E. Lawrence’s heart, it did not spell the end of Arabism in the English-speaking world. Among the most distinguished Arabists after Lawrence was Robert Ames, a CIA man whose career overlapped with the Munich assassinations, the Iranian revolution, the civil war in Jordan, and the rise of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). I say ‘distinguished’ though I realise that Ames’s is far from a household name. If he is remembered at all these days it is as one of the 63 people killed when a Hezbollah terrorist drove a delivery van armed with 2,000 pounds of explosives into the American embassy in Beirut in 1983.