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Much like me, Yoav Peled and Horit Herman Peled don’t see much future for the two-state solution in the Arab-Israeli conflict. They argue, however, that a single state already exists:
“Instead of pursuing the mirage of a two-state solution, would-be peace makers should recognize the fact that Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories in fact constitute one state that has been in existence for nearly forty-five years, the longest lasting political formation in these territories since the Ottoman Empire. (The British Mandate for Palestine lasted thirty years; Israel in its pre-1967 borders lasted only nineteen years). The problem with that state, from a democratic, humanistic perspective, is that forty percent of its residents, the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, are non-citizens deprived of all civil and political rights. The solution to this problem is simple, although deeply controversial: establishing one secular, non-ethnic, democratic state with equal citizenship rights to all in the entire area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.”
What’s striking is how intuitive this is. U.S. Presidential Rick Santorum recently committed a gaffe by saying that all the inhabitants of the West Bank were Israelis because they lived under Israeli rule. The Israeli government refuses such a formulation because giving Palestinians in the Occupied Territories citizenship would, in fact, mean that Israel is no longer “the Jewish state” as that has usually been defined. However, the fact that Santorum’s is a mistake commonly made tells you a lot about the political configuration in practice on the ground.
“The two-year grant has three components and different individuals will work on the components simultaneously. Their initial visit will be to assess the present situation. Kooti has no illusions about the state of colleges and universities in Iraq as ‘higher education has suffered significantly since the 1980s and it has continued to decline until recently.’
“The first component will be to conduct a feasibility study on establishing a center for excellence in finance and banking. ‘We will work with the government, the ministry of higher education in Iraq, as well as the private sector banking and financial (businesses) to see how we will be able to establish the center in Baghdad.’
“The second component will be to establish a center for excellence for Iraqi colleges of management and economics. ‘The objective is to improve the business programs in selected universities to improve their curriculum to update and upgrade their programs. We will look at capacity building, working with their faculty and their staff to determine what resources are needed. It will be a center for teaching excellence.’
“The third component will be to use the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) standards to assure quality of the programs, the development of administrative capacity and guidance. Grove College has long held AACSB accreditation. By employing the process that AACSB provides, Kooti believes Iraqi colleges and universities will provide a high caliber education, which will be needed as Iraq transitions into a new government, economy and way of life.”
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who served as Iran’s president from 1989-1997, lost to Ahmadinejad in 2005, and was a behind-the-scenes mover of Mir Hussein Musavi’s 2009 campaign that led to the Green Movement, has been taking major political hits for at least a year, possibly as payback for his 2009 actions. Tehran Bureaureports:
“Two websites connected to Ahmadinejad and the security forces claimed that when the current term of the chairmanship of the Expediency Discernment Council expires next month, Khamenei will not reappoint Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as its Chair. Bultan News, a website linked with the security forces, speculated that Hassan Rowhani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator during the Khatami administration, will be the new Chair of the Council. Rowhani is a member of the Council, as well as the head of its Center for Strategic Studies.
“Then Shabestan News Agency, run by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, analyzed the possibility that Rafsanjani might be assassinated, but dismissed the notion, pointing out that he is no longer an influential figure after losing the Chairmanship of the Assembly of Experts and control of Islamic Azad University. He also no longer serves as the Friday prayer Imam of Tehran. It then speculated that he will not be reappointed as the Chairman of the Council.
“Since the June 2009 presidential election, the hardliners’ pressure on Rafsanjani has increased tremendously. In addition to losing all his influential posts, the website that reflected his views has been blocked, his daughter Faezeh Hashemi has been sentenced to six months in jail, and his 16-year-old grandson is under investigation. The family of one his sons has also been barred from leaving Iran.
“As a result of a quasi-coup, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has finally succeeded in taking control of the Islamic Azad University, Iran’s largest university system, one of the largest of its kind in the world. It happened at the end of a meeting of the board of trustees of the university, which Rafsanjani leads. After the former president and his supporters left the meeting, the representatives of Ahmadinejad’s camp on the board announced that Farhad Daneshjoo, a brother of the Minister of Science, Research and Technology, which overseas the universities, has been elected by the board as the new president of the university, replacing Rafsanjani’s ally Dr. Abdollah Jasbi, who has led the university since its inception in 1982. Rafsanjani said that he will not sign the order for Daneshjoo’s appointment, but Daneshjoo has said that he will not back down because the Supreme Council for Cultural Revolution, an extra-constitutional body that control cultural affairs, has confirmed him as the new president of the university.”
Some of that is unconfirmed or still being battled over, but the trend is clear. Leadership of Islamic Azad University is a big deal financially as well as politically, as it has well over one million students. It has been the scene of political fighting at least since mid-2010.
“The Assad regime insists that the opposition protests that have rocked the country since March are being driven by ‘armed terrorist groups’ and ‘Islamic militants.’ It has blamed Al Qaeda for three suicide bomb attacks over the past month against security offices in Damascus, which left 70 people dead.
“Analysts say there is little proof – at least for now – that suggests that Al Qaeda, or its militant affiliates, are seeking to play an active role in the Syrian uprising…
“(However,) as the violence has steadily worsened, some commentators on jihadist websites are openly calling for waging a jihad against the Assad regime. In November, Osama al-Shehabi, the leader of Al Qaeda-inspired Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon, called for an armed struggle in Syria.
“‘The regime’s brutal oppression of the Syrian people proves that it is time to change direction and use real weapons against the regime,’ he wrote in an article that was published by the Shumoukh al-Islam online forum. ‘The revolution is a jihad; it is a war; prepare for jihad for God; scrutinize your intentions and take up arms, for they are your obligation.’
“Last month the jihadist website Minbar al-Tawhid Wa al-Jihad posted a fatwa, or religious edict, by an influential Salafist cleric, in which he sanctioned the use of violence against the Assad regime.
“‘Why do you insist on confining yourselves to peaceful protests?’ wrote Sheikh Abu Mundhir al-Shinqiti. ‘Is it a disgrace to kill those who kill us?… It has come to a stage where nothing will avail except taking up arms.’”
The answer to the question probably depends on the meaning of “al-Qaeda.” The intelligence coup from the Bin Laden raid revealed that al-Qaeda central did have a larger coordinating role over al-Qaeda branded groups than most scholars had previously suspected. However, all these local groups still had their own levels of affiliation, as well as favored local causes. The Libyan Islamic Fighters Group was always primarily interested in their struggle against Qadhafi, and now that he’s gone, there’s been no evidence of their attacking other topics. It sounds like Lebanon’s Fatah al-Islam has an interest in the Syrian cause, as well. Even then, however, if Syria did rank high on the agenda of the al-Qaeda movement as a whole, I’d expect to see more happening in Aleppo, which as I recall had an underground jihadist community which supported foreign fighters en route to Iraq.
One year ago yesterday, I noticed a news item about protests in southern Tunisia. Although I had intended to take a blogging break until after the new year, I sensed in these protests a new social movement of some significance, and so put up a post, and continued following the story the next two days (1, 2, 3). I definitely did not expect them to succeed in toppling the regime, and even when they did I was skeptical that they would lead to similar movements elsewhere. They did, however, and the result was what many have called the “Arab Spring,” a year of popular activism which toppled old regimes and led to a rebirth of hope across the Arab world.
As a historian, I recognize the hubris in the title of this post, since we can only speculate what the immediate consequences of these uprisings might be, much less what will stand out about them after decades or a century. At most, we can say that these events will continue to be contested in political rhetoric, secondary education classrooms, and public history displays, as politicians and various social forces strive to shape their legacy and place themselves within it. Nonetheless, it seems worthwhile to offer some thoughts about aspects of these ongoing events that, to me at least, seem early candidates for consideration.
One of these aspects may lie in their origins. Leaving aside Kuwait, where popular protests have been having an impact for years, we can look at a group of countries where monarchies with colonial ties were, in the name of national independence, replaced by regimes based in the military or other security services. This also usually led to different social classes gaining power and influence in society, as the old urban notable and landowning families saw themselves targeted as a rival power center. Something like this also happened in Iraq in 1958, although the 2003 Anglo-American invasion meant that the successor regime of the 1958 “revolution” was gone before the year started. The exception which proves the rule is Syria, which had not had a king since 1920, but where the governing National Bloc was still based on the power of the old notables and landowners. As others have noted, the states which did not have these upheavals, which means those that remain monarchies today, as well as Lebanon and Algeria, have also seen little “Arab Spring” action. This is enough of a pattern that it could point toward some interesting socio-political roots of what we’ve seen in the past year and are seeing now.
Those regimes which had the least social basis fell most swiftly. Tunisia’s wealthy elite wasn’t going to take up arms to defend Ben Ali, and Egypt’s military chose to manage the transition rather than prop up Mubarak. Other countries have seen tribal or sectarian groups who stood to lose a benefactor fight on behalf of the old system, as happened with the Sunni insurgents in Iraq. A key issue going forward will be the ability of new government forms to have a broad constituency among the populace, ideally through elections providing for a rotation of power.
This, however, is tied to another issue. One framework we have seen the past year is that “the nation,” meaning the people, is rising up against internal oppressors so as to establish a new government on its own behalf. One question now is how the “nations” will be defined, or what identities will be on people’s minds as they act politically. In Iraq, probably moreso than under Saddam Hussein, loyalty to a community of Sunnis, Shi’ites, or Kurds competes with that to Iraq as a whole. Those “Arab Spring” countries with religious differences will face the question of deciding if those differences preclude national unity. This issue might be most explosive in Syria, but for the moment, it is also a subject for discussion in Egypt, where salafis see Christians not as equal citizens, but as a subject population under Muslim rule.
2011 also shows signs of introducing new norms into Arab political life, as the Arab League is now willing to at least pretend to be upset by rulers oppressing their people, especially if those people are Sunni Arabs. In addition, peaceful mass protests have become for many the preferred form of political action, even affecting Hamas rhetoric. This still doesn’t work if the government shoots back too much, but then it never has. This development, along with the death of Osama bin Laden, may have completely eliminated the already marginal al-Qaeda-like voices from the Arab political landscape, and could become a thorn in regimes’ sides for decades to come.
I have mostly ignored Bahrain in this because it really doesn’t fit the pattern, but I don’t think interferes with it, either. Although its activists joined in the “Arab Spring” wave, their models are more Kuwait and Iraq than Tunisia and Egypt, and unfortunately, it is a country where mass protests appear to have been successfully contained, though they continue in rural areas. Bahrain shows the effects of the troubling sectarian political framework emanating from Iraq which may prove the region’s biggest challenge in the 21st century.
All this is not to proclaim the “Arab Spring” over, especially in the cases of Syria and Bahrain. As I said, it is simply a pause for reflection on the past year, thinking about where it might have come from and what challenges and opportunities might lie ahead, as the Arab world enters what will clearly be a new phase of its political history.
“Nousseibeh suggested (in a recent book that) the Palestinians relinquish their struggle for statehood. He even asked them to accept that, for a long time, they would not have full political rights, and that they should settle for civic and human rights to make life as bearable as possible. His deeply pessimistic conclusion was that, given the realities, the human cost of continuing the struggle for a Palestinian state was too high…
“From a historical perspective, the two state solution’s demise was, maybe, inevitable. Except for six years, the Likud has been in power for the last thirty-five years, and the Likud never relinquished its dream of the greater land of Israel. When Rabin won elections for Prime Minister in 1992, both he and Peres felt that this was a last chance; they believed that what they would not achieve in Rabin’s term would not be achieved at all.
“Rabin had to govern, with a minority of the Knesset supporting him, and Israel’s right never felt that he had a mandate for the Oslo process. Netanyahu spoke at demonstrations where crowds held posters depicting Rabin as a Nazi. He was later recorded taking pride in having killed off the Oslo process.
“Now he can take partial credit for having killed the two state solution. The other half goes to the Palestinians: As Mahmoud Abbas said more than a year ago, the Palestinian’s greatest mistake was the second Intifada. Indeed, together with Hamas’ win of the elections in 2006 and the shelling of southern Israel, the Intifada’s horrible violence has made Israelis averse to taking further risks for peace.”
I am not the one to say whether Strenger is right. I would still like to believe it could work, but do not see a realistic chance of it happening under Netanyahu’s leadership. Whether two states remain possible depends on the combination of facts on the ground and the political will to alter them. I cannot judge the former, and perhaps given the latter, it might be better to say that it has entered a persistent vegetative state from which no recovery is foreseeable.
How one apportions blame depends largely on what you think happened in the diplomacy under Ehud Barak in 2000. I’m not even going to attempt to untangle that mass of conflicting assertions. Strenger is right that the Second Intifada strangled the Israeli peace camp, but that in turn flowed from a belief in Israeli perfidy during negotiations. The uprising’s most violent aspects were also the terrorist attacks on civilians inside Israel, and in the history of the conflict’s violence, one should not forget that Hamas only turned to those tactics and made them a key part of its struggle after Baruch Goldstein committed the Hebron massacre in 1994, a massacre which stemmed directly from the inclinations toward ethnic cleansing on the part of many in the settler movement which the Israeli state tries to control, but also supports with defense and infrastructure. What Hamas did, in other words, was escalate dirty warfare in the region, not introduce it.
“Our long-term task is to develop new models of dealing with the emerging reality. I wish I could say something clear and constructive, but for the time being I can’t. I have not yet seen realistic models other than the two state solution.
“The one state solution, at this point, is an empty concept, so is that of an Israeli-Palestinian confederation. For neither case can I imagine how the parliament of the greater Israel-Palestine would function, or how equality of all citizens with respect to security could be achieved: I agree with Sari Nousseibeh that Jewish history from the Pogroms through the Holocaust, from the 1948 war to that of 1973, is too traumatic for Israelis to relinquish control of security for a long time to come…
“I am afraid that Israel will lose many friends in the gradual process of finalizing its sovereignty over the West Bank. Netanyahu and Lieberman have already aggravated many politicians and supporters of Israel, ranging from Hillary Clinton to Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. And they have deepened the alienation many Jews in the Diaspora feel towards the current government’s policies that they cannot accept.”
I actually think that what will happen is that, within 10-20 years, Israel will impose Netanyahu’s vision of disconnected cantons with nominal sovereignty under Israeli domination. The path toward any one-state solution depends on demographics and, perhaps, the fate of the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan.
Shortly after the official end of U.S. military involvement in Iraq, Shi’ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki moved against high-ranking Sunnis in his government:
“On December 18, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki requested the dismissal of his deputy, Saleh al-Mutlaq…
“The next day, December 19, an arrest warrant was issued for Iraqi vice-president Tariq al-Hashemi, also a Sunni, on terrorism charges.
“On December 20, Mutlaq was prevented from entering the cabinet building in Baghdad. The same day, vehicles in which two Sunni politicians were travelling in the west of the capital came under fire, apparently from members of the Iraqi security forces.
“Although Mutlaq and Hashemi are the two most senior Sunni Arabs in positions of power, the authorities insist the proceedings against them have nothing to do with sectarian politics.
“State-run television last week showed what purported to be the confessions of Hashemi’s bodyguards, in which they said they assassinated health and foreign ministry officials and Baghdad police officers. They alleged that Hashemi paid them 3,000 US dollars for each attack…
“Hashimi left Baghdad and went to the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in the north after security forces raided his home and office and arrested some of his staff…
“On December 21, the prime minister made it clear he no longer felt bound by the power-sharing agreement in which posts are shared out among Iraq’s various ethnic and confessional groups. Instead, he announced, he would be setting up a new majority-based cabinet.”
The story here is that while Iraq today is politically freer with far more democratic features than it had under Saddam Hussein, the game being played is still one of which faction will dominate the state and the webs of government patronage that makes possible. In the decades prior to the 2003 Anglo-American invasion, the nation was ruled through the Ba’ath Party, which was dominated by military officers from the Sunni regions around Baghdad where power was concentrated under the Ottomans and British. After the complete collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, power passed to militias, either Shi’ites trained by Iran or Sunni units rooted in the old Iraqi army and augmented by foreign salafi fighters. The Sunnis wound up losing that civil war, which was at its peak from 2006-2009 and saw the end of mixed neighborhoods as people were forced to join their co-religionists for their own protection.
Prime Minister al-Maliki came to office through elections, but his power also rests on his dominance of a government which controls much of the economy and security services dominated by veterans of those same Shi’ite militias. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Sunnis live as refugees elsewhere in the Arab world, and al-Maliki’s government is in no hurry to repatriate them. This is why Iraq’s government is widely perceived, not as democracy, but as control by a sectarian strongman, and why those elsewhere in the Arab world always cited it as a negative example rather than a model. This is also why, over the past few months, Sunni regions have begun seeking autonomy:
“In recent months, Anbar, Salahuddin and Diyala Provinces have each pushed for a public vote on creating their own regional governments…
“Early Friday morning, Iraqi police commandos arrested a leading advocate of Salahuddin Province’s push for regional status and seized his computer and reams of documents, security officials said. They did not say why he had been detained.
“The provinces are not seeking a total divorce from the rest of Iraq, just a wider separation in the mold of Kurdistan, the relatively prosperous and safe area in northern Iraq. The Kurds, who have lived for decades as a people apart from the rest of Iraq, have their own Parliament and president, command their own security forces and have signed lucrative oil deals with foreign companies without Baghdad’s approval.”
American forces have withdrawn, but the future of the country remains undecided. Its leaders treat their posts as fiefdoms through which to build their own power bases, and the general public fears a collapse of the security situation should competition among those leaders get too out of hand. Furthermore, the empowerment of a previously disadvantaged Shi’ite population has come at the direct expense of Iraq’s Arab Sunnis, and that fact, kept firmly in Arab consciousness by the refugee problem, has been perhaps the most significant ingredient in a spike in anti-Shi’ite attitudes among Sunnis throughout the region. I will not say the country was better off under Saddam Hussein, but no one should pretend for political reasons that the U.S. has mid-wifed a stable democracy rather than a weak yet abusive state in a battered society which serves, not as a model of freedom, but a source of instability.
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