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“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.
The first round of voting in Egypt’s three-stage elections indicates that the new parliament will be dominated by Islamist parties. The areas that voted this week were more liberal than Egypt as a whole, and yet the Muslim Brotherhood appears to have upwards of 40% of the seats, or about what they were expected to do nationwide. More surprisingly, Salafis strongly overperformed expectations to win about 25% of the vote. As the New York Timesreports:
“If the majority proves durable, the longer-term implications are hard to predict. The Brotherhood has pledged to respect basic individual freedoms while using the influence of the state to nudge the culture in a more traditional direction. But the Salafis often talk openly of laws mandating a shift to Islamic banking, restricting the sale of alcohol, providing special curriculums for boys and girls in public schools, and censoring the content of the arts and entertainment.
“Their leaders have sometimes proposed that a special council of religious scholars advise Parliament or the top courts on legislation’s compliance with Islamic law. Egyptian election laws required the Salafi parties to put at least one woman on their electoral roster for each district, but they put the women last on their lists to ensure they would not be elected, and some appear with pictures of flowers in place of their faces on campaign posters.”
Egypt’s liberals are despondent, and there is concern for the future of civil liberties in Egypt if the Muslim Brotherhood decides to move in a more conservative direction to co-opt the salafis. My belief, however, is that the path forward is to establish a stable democratic system in which free elections become the norm. This means, in fact, supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in its efforts to speed the transition to civilian rule. Muslim Brotherhood leader Hassan al-Banna himself cited elections as something to admire about Western civilization, as it allows people to hold their leaders accountable, force those leaders to take into account the popular will and the condition of the country as a whole instead of just themselves and their own patronage networks.
Although Western political commentators assert as a given that all Islamist commitments to democratic principles is deceptive window dressing and that their true agenda is “one person, one vote, one time,” evidence for that is scanty. After the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini installed an “Islamic Republic” which still has lots of democratic features, and which even with its undemocratic elements happens to be what he stood for before the 1979 revolution. In Turkey and so far Tunisia, Islamist parties have maintained their democratic commitments. In Algeria and the Palestinian Territories, Islamist election victories were followed by chaos, but in both of those case the ruling powers acted undemocratically against the election results, cancelling them in Algeria and sharply curtailing their ability to do anything in the PNA. In other words, there’s no real precedent for Islamists suddenly acting on a hidden agenda, and plenty for fear of Islamists leading to rash, undemocratic actions damaging to the polities involved.
Given this history, the liberal parties, who are losing badly because they are simply badly underdeveloped and without a long history of arguing their message in society, should consider their common ground with the Muslim Brotherhood and the prospects for forming a coalition with them rather than leave the salafis are their only willing partners. The MB, for its part, has expressed an openness to this, denied rumors they are tacitly allied with the salafis, and even advertised their willingness to put Christians in high-profile positions. The way forward for those disappointed today is not to become political insurgents in league with the SCAF, but to accepts the results of 2011 so as to make sure they have a chance to do better in future elections.
My weekend was dominated by pre-Thanksgiving binge grading, and so I’m only now getting my mind around the details of the tumult taking place, not just in Cairo, but Alexandria, the Suez Canal cities, and elsewhere around Egypt. The direct chain of events leading to the current clashes came when Deputy Prime Minister Ali al-Silmi of the SCAF’s transitional government proposed a set of “supra-constitutional principles” which he asked Egypt’s political parties to sign on to in advance of the first round of parliamentary elections November 28. These included two controversial articles putting the military beyond the control and oversight of any elected civilian government. All of the Islamist groups and some of the leftist opposition refused these conditions, and on Friday staged a major protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to pressure the SCAF into accepting a civilian-controlled government as quickly as possible. Marc Lynch explains what happened next:
“The Islamists and most other participants in the demonstration left Tahrir at the end of the rally. A few hundred people, mostly (it seems) families of the martyrs of the January 25 revolution and veterans of past Tahrir occupations, decided to launch a new sit-in. This does not seem to have been coordinated with the political strategy of the day’s demonstration. The move risked going down the same path as the July 8 demonstration, an originally successful rally which squandered its gains with a wildly unpopular occupation of Tahrir.
“But then Egyptian security forces, acting on authority which remains murky, moved in with extreme force to drive out the small group attempting to occupy Tahrir. Their over the top violence, including massive tear gas and highly abusive police behavior, seems to have then attracted the attention of the core of Egyptian activists who came running to join the fight. Instead of rapidly clearing the square, the security forces found themselves locked in an epic running battle with thousands of protestors. The momentum shifted repeatedly, with protestors holding the square and then being driven out and then returning. The security forces used massive amounts of tear gas, brute force, and weapons. That battle rages on.”
Today, on the third day of protests, the crowds have become large enough and the demonstrations geographically widespread enough to recall the days of the revolution last winter. They are demanding an end of SCAF rule, and lethal fighting continues at the entrance to the street leading to the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior. The latter point suggests that the SCAF regime’s frequent resort to violence in the face of any street opposition is the major sore point, and that a critical mass of Egyptians see the failure to rebuild the government’s internal security apparatus as an important piece of unfinished revolution business.
Aside from the SCAF, the Muslim Brotherhood is the institutional political actor drawing the most scrutiny. MB leaders show a sensitivity to any slight against their potential influence, and seem to have, perhaps with some justification, interpreted the supra-constitutional principles as something akin to the Turkish tradition where the military stands on guard against Islamists. There is also muttering that this entire crisis might have been provoked deliberately to postpone the elections, in which their Freedom and Justice Party is expected to win upwards of 40% of the seats. Because of this, they are insistent that the elections go forward as scheduled, arguing that they represent the best way to bring a civilian government into power. The leftist opposition, however, seems to favor postponing the vote on the grounds the situation is too chaotic and the SCAF cannot be trusted to fairly administer it. The MB has been ambivalent towards the protests, expressing sympathy with the demonstrators grievances, refusing to participate as an organization, and yet highlighting the participation of individual MB members, especially medical personnel.
As a historian, I find it unsurprising that a revolution would traverse multiple phases, as that is simply what often happens. This is especially true when there is no ready made united opposition to assume the helm. Even in Tunisia, there were protests several weeks after Ben Ali fled to oust his prime minister, Muhammad Ghannoushi. In the Egyptian case, almost everyone seemed to put the regime’s flaws primarily on Mubarak, and so were content to leave the transition to the military. Even then, I’ve seen a steady stream of stories in which a large number of groups fight for different types of influences and changes in local communities, businesses, and other institutions. It would not surprise me if Egypt’s politics develop something like Kyrgyzstan did after the Tulip Revolution, with a steady ebb and flow of protest as groups with conflicting agendas that trust neither each other nor the system vie for influence.
Anthony Shadid fears that what’s happening in Homs could be a harbinger of things to come in Syria:
“A harrowing sectarian war has spread across the Syrian city of Homs this month, with supporters and opponents of the government blamed for beheadings, rival gangs carrying out tit-for-tat kidnappings, minorities fleeing for their native villages, and taxi drivers too fearful of drive-by shootings to ply the streets…
“Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, has a sectarian mix that mirrors the nation. The majority is Sunni Muslim, with sizable minorities of Christians and Alawites, a heterodox Muslim sect from which Mr. Assad draws much of his top leadership. Though some Alawites support the uprising, and some Sunnis still back the government, both communities have overwhelmingly gathered on opposite sides in the revolt…
“Fear has become so pronounced that, residents say, Alawites wear Christian crosses to avoid being abducted or killed when passing through the most restive Sunni neighborhoods, where garbage has piled up in a sign of the city’s dysfunction…
“Even as the death toll has dropped in Homs in recent days, the sectarian strife seems to have gathered a relentless momentum that has defied the attempts of both Sunni and Alawite residents to stanch it. One prominent Sunni activist, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, used the term shabeeha — an Arabic word that refers to government paramilitaries — to describe the situation evolving inside Homs.
“‘There are shabeeha on both sides now,’ he said.”
There is a relentless logic to these kinds of identity-based conflicts by which a small number of militants can pry apart larger communities that would otherwise get along. Where public order is weak, armed fanatics will target you just for who you are. How do you respond? By finding the armed fanatics who will protect you just for who you are. We saw this dynamic play out in Iraq, especially between 2006 and 2008, when mixed Sunni/Shi’ite neighborhoods were cleansed of one group or the other. As a result of the turmoil of post-Saddam Iraq, hundreds of thousands of mainly Sunni Iraqis remain as refugees in Syria and Jordan, an everyday reminder in those countries of what many Arabs see, not entirely fairly, but also not unfairly, as an ethnic tyranny that now controls Mesopotamia.
Much as Saddam Hussein’s regime was not overtly sectarian but disproportionately favored Sunnis based on personal connections, so Ba’athist Syria supports and is supported by the Alawite communities and other religious minorities. When Sunni/Shi’ite prejudices are already high because of the Iraq situation, the more recent developments in Bahrain, and Arab fears of Iranian influence, the ground is ripe for a repeat of sectarian civil war following the collapse of a Ba’athist regime. Based on the reporting out of Syria, I fear the worst.
This dispute over whether Tunisia’s Nahda party has a secret radical agenda briefly revealed in a leader’s comment about a caliphate is all about nothing:
“Talks on forming a coalition government halted briefly this week after a secular party questioned the motives of its moderate Islamist partner amid intense jockeying for power.
“The trouble began when Le Maghreb, a Tunisian newspaper, reported that Hamadi Jebali, secretary general of the Islamist Ennahda party and pick for interim prime minister, had likened post-Ben Ali Tunisia to a new caliphate.
“The secularist Ettakatol promptly suspended talks on forming a government, sending Ennahda scrambling to reassure its partners and public opinion of its commitment to democracy…
“‘Mr Jebali was talking to Islamists in the audience, people who think about the caliphate,’ said Said Ferjani, a member of Ennahda’s political bureau. ‘Mr Jebali said that if they want a caliphate, it’s what’s happening now: democracy.’
“Ettakatol has accepted that explanation and agreed to restart talks, said Abdellatif Abid, a co-founder of the party and member of its political bureau.”
The caliphate is actually a Qur’anic concept according to which humans are the regents of God on Earth, and probably did not become a title for an individual ruler until the Umayyad dynasty. In modern Islamist thought, the definition has gained new salience in calling believers to take upon themselves the task of setting the world to right. This is such a common usage that, particularly during a semester in which I’m teaching a course called “Islam and Politics in the Modern Middle East,” I thought of it immediately when I heard of the controversy, and therefore certainly believe Nahda’s explanation. That does not mean, however, that Arabs who are suspicious of public religious movements, and there are many among Tunisians who came of age under Habib Bourguiba, would immediately recognize that just because they’re Muslims. A comparison in American politics would be when a conservative Christian candidate speaks of God “calling” them to do something, and more secular people believe they think God is really talking to them.
“Thousands of Kuwaitis have stormed parliamentary buildings after police and elite forces beat protesters.
“The protesters marched earlier on Wednesday to Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser Mohammad al-Ahmad Al-Sabah’s home to demand his resignation, an opposition MP said…
“The demonstrators broke open the parliament’s gates and entered the main chamber, where they sang the national anthem and left after a few minutes.
“The police had used batons to prevent protesters from marching to the residence of the prime minister, a senior member of the ruling family, after staging a rally outside parliament…
“Some activists said they will continue to camp outside parliament until the prime minister is sacked.”
Kuwaitis have been protesting since March over a corruption scandal which has already led to the resignation of the foreign minister. Kuwaitis are not new to protests, having staged a successful 2006 “Orange Revolution” for election reform. The current prime minister’s saga shows the edges of Kuwaiti democracy, in that parliament has been inhibited from supervising him as a member of the royal family. The current political crisis has been accompanied by a wave of public sector strikes, but I haven’t been able to tell if the two are related.
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