Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new right-wing Israeli government has quickly launched policies that take Zionism to new heights of cruelty and brutality against anyone it considers a foe. This primarily means Palestinians, but also anyone else who defies the new rules of exclusivist, ethno-nationalist Jewish supremacy.

Four parties among Israel’s foes and friends alike must decide if they will complacently watch this political freak show, or check Zionism’s accelerated leap to complete its colonisation of all Palestine. These four are Jewish communities globally; states and movements around the world that support Israel with no questions asked; the post-WWII, UN-based rule of international law and human rights; and, the Palestinian people, who are now essentially leaderless.

Netanyahu wasted no time to say that his government would operate on the basis that, “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.” The message was clear to Palestinians and many other targets of his racist views: His coalition’s members and supporters on the extreme right would enjoy full rights and freedoms to do as they wish with the Palestinian land and people.

Others who will suffer in Israel include anyone who raises a Palestinian flag or throws stones to protect themselves, African asylum seekers, and LGBTQ people. Israeli soldiers even beat up young Palestinians who were celebrating Morocco’s victories in the World Cup.

Israel’s policies that demean and dehumanise Palestinians living under occupation, ultimately aim to expel them from their ancestral homeland. The catalogue of these policies includes routine, almost daily, steps to arrest, wound, and kill children, detain thousands of men, women and youth without charge or trial, demolish scores of homes and occasional entire villages, allow out-of-control Jewish settlers to cut down Palestinian farmers’ olive groves, and expand Jewish settlements or even outright annex occupied Palestinian lands.

Alongside all this, hundreds of Palestinians were refused travel permits for urgent medical care; Christians in Gaza were denied travel permits to go to Bethlehem to celebrate Christmas; scores of farmers’ applications to drill water wells were denied; endless military check points humiliate people every day and add hours to their daily commutes; and Israeli soldiers dressed for combat routinely detain children or take their toys away from them.

Such brutality is now well documented by Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights and anti-apartheid organisations. Recent reports show that last year Israel arrested 7000 Palestinians, including 865 children; held 866 people in administrative detention without charges or trial; killed 146, including 54 children; wounded 958; demolished the homes of 960 Palestinians; and approved 4400 new Jewish colonial-settler homes in so-called ‘illegal’ settlements that were not formally sanctioned by the state.

It is important to bear in mind that all these acts are prohibited under existing international law and human rights regimes.

For what purpose? Not security, surely, but perhaps because this is the only way that settler-colonialists know how to behave in the face of a people they are trying to cleanse from the land.

In the first two weeks of 2023 Israel shot dead 14 Palestinians, ordered the eviction of a 1000-strong Palestinian community from its ancestral villages south of Hebron, imposed new travel restrictions on West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem residents, and provocatively sent a firebrand Zionist minister to visit Jerusalem’s Aqsa Mosque compound, the most sensitive political/religious spot in all of Palestine.

Yet, frightening as all this is, two other aspects of Israel’s behaviour reveal the full scale of today’s challenges.

First, the Netanyahu government’s vindictive measures are not new, but are only more intense variations of Zionist and Israeli policies since the 1920s. Zionism today simply reveals its full, true face that it had previously camouflaged under soothing lies and diversions – such as being the region’s “only democracy,” or turning a barren desert into a garden.

Second, for the past century, leading world powers have ignored, passively accepted, or actively supported Zionist and Israeli settler-colonial policies in Palestine, which are now routinely called out as apartheid by leading international, Israeli, and Palestinian human rights organisations. The Netanyahu government’s cruelty is not an aberration by just one part of Zionist Israel, but rather the culmination of over a century of settler-colonial ravages in Palestine at the hands of Israelis and their foreign supporters, especially the UK and US.

So in the months ahead, we will monitor if Israel’s behaviour elicits any tangible reactions from world powers and the United Nations-based system of international law and human rights, two critical parties that must react to ever more vicious Zionist extremism.

If Palestine continues to wither under Israel’s stifling occupation that intensifies by the week while remaining unchecked by global powers, then no people anywhere are safe from similar fates when foreign powers empower, arm, and protect a local colonial predator.

It might explain why this, rather than Ukraine, might be the actual moment of reckoning for any new global order. For Palestine captures, better than any other place in the world, the past 200 years of global militarised colonial assaults that persist today.

Any person who wants to observe how colonial violence subjugates and tries to remove from history another people can now watch live on television and social media Israel’s killings, mass arrests, beatings, expulsions, home demolitions of Palestinians, and continuing forcible expropriations of their land.

No wonder that large crowds across the world routinely march in the streets – or wave the Palestinian flag at sports events – to support the Palestinians. People throughout the South feel the same colonial wounds and pain that they see inflicted daily in Palestine, since many of them have experienced similar colonial assaults by the same global powers that have enabled Israel’s apartheid.

The world’s Jewish communities are the third pivotal actor that must respond to Israel’s vicious behaviour. Many Jews have already expressed concerns, including a few Israeli officials who resigned.

This community has repeatedly proven that it can influence policy in Israel and abroad. A century ago, European and American Jews mobilised effectively, if duplicitously and often behind closed doors, to win political support in London and Washington for the creation of a Jewish Israel in a land that was 93% owned and populated by Arab Palestinians. World Jewry’s prevalent inaction ever since, though, has allowed Netanyahu’s Israeli Frankenstein government to see the light of day, and to claim to speak for all Jews in the world.

Will Jewish communities once again mobilise powerful political coalitions in the West – but this time to halt Israel’s fascist tendencies, and perhaps to help spark a genuine peace negotiation that satisfies all?

Critically, we must keep in mind the continuing Arab and international consensus to negotiate a permanent peace that affirms equal rights and security for adjacent Israeli and Palestinian states and all their citizens.

The Palestinians are the fourth community that must respond to Israel’s new threats. Their best option to achieve a permanent peace that resolves their 75-year-long dispossession remains forming a single, strong, non-corrupt government that represents all political factions. This could join forces with a rejuvenated global rights-based order and millions of righteous Jews to harness the immense, but largely passive, international support for a sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel.

How these four groups react to Netanyahu’s government will shape the Middle East for years. Whether they work for justice and law, or sink in hapless acquiescence to long-term Zionist apartheid, will send a loud signal to other vulnerable communities around the world on a central question of our times: Will Western and other settler-colonial ventures, like Israel, finally transform into a new order that offers equal rights for all, like in South Africa? Or will others suffer the same degradation and pain that have plagued Palestinians for a century now, and that just took a frightening leap forward this month?

Rami G Khouri is co-director of the American University of Beirut’s Global Engagement Initiative and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. Follow him on Twitter: @ramikhouri
This article originated at The New Arab

Copyright ©2023 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 January 2023
Word Count: 1,296
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The mid-December clashes in Maan, in southern Jordan, in which four policemen were ultimately killed, along with a militant, are a troubling sign for the entire Arab world, because they are a stark reminder of three perpetual weaknesses in state-building, sustainable development and citizen-state relations throughout the region. These weaknesses plague all middle- and low-income Arab countries, and they continue to worsen almost every year. They have already shattered Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Libya, and if current trends persist, they threaten many more countries today, including Egypt and Tunisia under their resurgent authoritarian regimes.

These are the fateful forces of social, economic and political development that is inadequate, unequal and, in the eyes of many citizens, uncaring. They have not destabilized Jordan, because its government prioritizes stability above all else, and achieves it with significant foreign support, most of all from the United States.

But Maan is a flashing red warning light. Anyone who knows Jordan also knows, as polling confirms again and again, that while Jordanians have limited confidence in their state’s political institutions, they have much respect for the armed forces that they see as keeping their society safe, especially when compared to their neighbors. So when Jordanian citizens kill police and security officers — such a rarity in Jordan — what is driving that anomaly?

The immediate trigger for the unrest in Maan was an increase in fuel prices that hit truck drivers particularly hard, in a region where trucking is a major source of income. Striking truckers in southern Jordan were quickly joined by other strikers throughout the country whose families struggled to meet their basic needs. The strikes, which were initially peaceful, deteriorated into deadly clashes between protesters and police that resulted in the killing of a high-ranking police officer. When the government then sent in a security force to detain the suspected killers at their hideout, a shootout erupted that left one suspect and three policemen dead.

Previous strikes in Jordan, which occasionally led to clashes with police, have been triggered by similar economic pressure: the rising price of bread or milk, or higher fees on basic services. Jordanians in peripheral towns and cities like Maan have also long expressed their frustration over the central government’s inability to focus on their own needs while it builds grandiose neoliberal development projects in Amman.

Maan’s recurring bouts of rebelliousness and violence capture the central driver of discontent in the kingdom’s provincial towns and cities, from Mafraq and Tafileh to Karak and Dhiban, where rampant economic disparities and inequities have left Jordanians feeling angry and forgotten. This marginalization, both economic and political, is mirrored across the Arab world. That was why so much of the Arab uprisings of 2010 and 2011 — the greatest region-wide rebellion by disenchanted citizens in modern Arab history — also started in depressed provincial towns and cities from central Tunisia to southern Syria. Some of their names will always be associated with the uprisings: Sidi Bouzid, Benghazi, Daraa.

Maan was once a relatively prosperous crossroads and staging post on the pilgrimage routes to Arabia. But by the 1980s, with the construction of a new highway that bypassed it and other changes imposed by the central government, Maan lost its strategic advantages in regional transport, servicing pilgrims and being the administrative hub for the entire south of Jordan. Its few productive economic activities could not provide good jobs for young Jordanians graduating from high school or college. Investment beyond some state facilities was limited.

This is the legacy that now haunts much of the Arab region. Once-stable provincial areas like Maan used to offer their residents a decent life, especially when central governments expanded education, health care and other basic needs for its citizenry. But the post-1973 oil boom rapidly disoriented traditional economic patterns throughout the Middle East, including in Jordan. Established systems of semi-arid agriculture, including livestock farming, faded away, as youth went to the capital to find work with the government or burgeoning private sector. Most of them took informal, low-paying jobs that quickly sent them into the poor and marginalized quarters of society. A lucky few found decent jobs in the Gulf.

The neoliberal economic systems that swept over the region starting in the 1980s, burdening the state with massive foreign debt, favored privatized corporate efficiency and profits over equitable jobs and income for families. Modern Arab economies simply could not manage to combine growth and job creation with social equity. Things worsened after the chronic debt crises triggered by so-called structural adjustment programs from the International Monetary Fund, which further squeezed citizen well-being in countries like Jordan and Egypt, as prices for basic goods increased and governments curtailed their spending.

The warning signs in Jordan have been evident for decades, going back to the 1970s. Too many citizens have had their lives rocked from several directions at once. They faced more and more economic difficulty to meet their family’s basic needs; they were chronically frustrated by their inability to get meaningful aid or development assistance by the state or private sector; they did not have any credible voice in political institutions like parliament or state-controlled entities like the media; and they saw no hope in the future for themselves or their children if they did not have any private source of income or wealth, like land or family members working abroad.

Credible surveys and regional polls have repeatedly confirmed these trends, in all non-energy-producing Arab countries. In a report last August, the Arab Barometer noted that 77 percent of Jordanians listed the economy and corruption as their two greatest concerns. Trust in government has also dropped by 41 percent in the past decade or so; just three-in-ten Jordanians now say they trust their government. Their trust in parliament is even lower, at just 16 percent. The armed forces, by contrast, are by far the most trusted state institution in Jordan, with 93 percent of respondents telling the Arab Barometer they trust them.

This lack of trust in government is an extension of people’s marginalization based on their lived experiences. Inequality is seen as a problem by the vast majority of Jordanians — more than nine-in-ten, the highest rate in the region. And more than eight-in-ten Jordanians told the Arab Barometer that the wealth gap has increased in the past year — also the highest in the region. Widespread corruption further erodes trust in government. “Fewer than one-in-five say the government is responsive, which is the second lowest percentage in any country surveyed,” the Arab Barometer also noted. “When seeking solutions to the economic challenges, Jordanians want the government to create jobs, raise wages, and limit inflation.” Those are precisely the main weaknesses or outright failures of most Arab economies since the 1980s.

Fares Braizat, a respected Jordanian pollster and analyst, confirmed in an interview last week that his own studies have found that trust in government has been declining for many years. Jordanian citizens “speak out more but participate politically less,” for example by voting or joining political parties, he said, “and the low trust in political systems drives people into other systems,” meaning emigration, smuggling or drug rings, or in very few cases, militant groups.

In the recently published 2022 Arab Opinion Index, a regional survey conducted by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, 54 percent of citizens said the economic situation in their country is bad or very bad. Outside the wealthy Gulf region, this percentage rises sharply.

“The priorities of the citizens of the Arab region are varied, but the largest bloc (60%) said that their priorities are economic in nature,” the study concluded. “More than half of the citizens mentioned that unemployment, high prices, poor economic conditions, and poverty are the most important challenges facing their country.” High prices and the high cost of living are the biggest problems facing people of the region, according to the Index, with the highest proportion of respondents citing that as their main concern since the survey began.

These trends across the region have persisted over decades, among politically powerless citizens who have become even more disenchanted since the Arab uprisings failed to bring about peaceful political reform. In countries like Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan and Algeria, public protests continued until recently in attempts to bring down the ruling elites who have presided over this regional calamity. But entrenched regimes mostly ignored their fellow countrymen and women taking to the streets, and in some cases killed, injured or arrested hundreds of them.

It is no surprise that more and more Arabs express a desire to emigrate. Among the vast majority who stay in their countries, a few eventually gravitate into political radicalization, extremism and militancy. Failed or stunted economies with growing inequality under autocratic systems created the perfect conditions for opposition mainstream Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood to grow rapidly from the 1970s onward in many Arab countries; they were followed by militant Islamists like al-Qaida or the Islamic State, which exploited economic, political and social desperation to attract new adherents. This usually occurs among small groups of men or even within families, as happened with the militants in Maan who were all part of a single family.

Small groups of armed Islamists have emerged in Maan since the late 1990s. In the latest clashes last month, the government said “takfiris” were the ones who fought and killed the security officers — “takfiris” being the term that the Jordanian and other Arab governments use to describe militant Islamists. The state has also blamed drug dealers, smugglers and other such groups for attacks on the police and government targets in the past. All such groups can only take root when socio-economic and political conditions deteriorate so badly that once proud and contented citizens lose all hope and seek to change their world by the gun, even if means killing policemen.

This is the flashing red warning sign from Maan. But it is also coming from hundreds of small towns and villages on the periphery across the Arab world, and in the poor, marginalized urban quarters of the region’s biggest cities. They cannot be ignored forever.

Rami G. Khouri is co-director of global engagement at the American University of Beirut, a nonresident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative, and an internationally syndicated columnist. Follow him @ramikhouri.
This article originated at DAWN

Copyright ©2023 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 January 2023
Word Count: 1,682
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What should we make of the spat between the United States and Saudi Arabia, following last week’s announcement of a sharp cut in oil production by the Russian- and Saudi-headed cartel OPEC+? Shocked analysts and officials in the United States and Europe called the Saudi move a betrayal and a hostile act against the Western allies mired in the Ukraine war. Many see this as a personal humiliation for President Joe Biden, with Riyadh siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine — even after Biden fist-bumped with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at a meeting in Jeddah, in a complete reversal of his campaign promise to make the Saudis “the pariah that they are.” American officials are now considering a series of retaliatory measures, including stopping arms sales and even withdrawing all 3,000 U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia (and the 2,000 U.S. soldiers in the neighboring United Arab Emirates, another OPEC+ member; Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the UAE, had a friendly meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow this week).

As reports emerge of Saudi officials apparently ignoring U.S. warnings not to go ahead with the oil production cut, I can’t help but think of the lessons of history. A much longer time frame and wider context may be necessary to fully analyze this situation and accurately capture what it is all about. I’ve chronicled the modern Middle East and its links with the United States for the past 54 years, including two decades during which I also wrote books on archaeology and the Roman Empire in the region. With that much history in mind, the immediate issues here are no doubt important, evolving according to many factors beyond oil prices: Ukraine, the upcoming U.S. elections in November, Arab worries about Iran, and the roles of Russia and China in the Middle East. But they may not be the best frame in which to appreciate these furies.

A deeper tale here has lived in our region for millennia and is rearing its head now in the most dramatic fashion: imperial overreach. Going back to the Roman East, imperial powers have had expectations of their local clients that proved to be mistaken. Throughout the long history of the Middle East, the volatility of such relationships has been enough to tip the scales between total imperial conquest or retreat.

There are echoes of this distant past in Biden’s rift with Mohammed bin Salman. It is worth recalling a long-ago episode between a foreign imperial power and the dominant state in the Arabian Peninsula, as documented by the Greek geographer Strabo writing in the first century B.C.

In 25 B.C., a Roman military expedition set out from Egypt to control all of Arabia, especially the lucrative spice-trading states of Arabia Felix, in what is now Yemen. An expeditionary force of some 10,000 Roman and Egyptian troops set off from the Suez area to cross the Red Sea, accompanied by 1,500 Nabataean and Jewish troops. The Nabataeans, from their capital at Petra in modern-day Jordan, agreed to assist the Romans and sent a local administrator named Syllaeus to help guide them south through the Arabian desert.

But things did not go as planned, and after six months of mostly fruitless wandering through the harsh terrain, losing many men and supplies, the Romans retreated and never again tried to achieve their goals of conquering Arabia. They had been led in circles by a wily Nabataean whom they had thought was a trusted ally, ultimately thwarting Rome’s imperial aims.

Why did the Romans fail in Arabia? They were ignorant of Arabian realities, misjudging local personalities and assuming that Rome’s imperial wishes would be implemented obediently, even if they were not in the best interest of local rulers and kingdoms, like the Nabataeans, who did not want to lose their control of the spice trade (Rome was dependent on Nabataea for valuable spices like frankincense). As important as the failure of this one foray is in the ancient history of the Middle East, historians also see it as an early sign of the Roman Empire’s gradual retreat, in the following centuries, from distant lands and territorial ambitions.

The parallels with the United States in the Middle East today are intriguing. Intense American anger at the OPEC+ decision, and the Saudis’ equally firm insistence on pursuing policies they feel best serve their national interests, are signs of a dysfunctional relationship that has been exposed as such by both Riyadh and Washington. Since U.S.-Saudi relations were cemented in the 1940s, their various material and ideological drivers — oil, trade and investment, anti-Communism, militarism, maintaining autocracy in the insatiable but elusive quest for so-called “stability” — now no longer coexist easily.

To be fair to the Saudi leadership — which in my view has generally been a negative force in the region for decades — they have signaled since King Abdullah’s reign, from 2005 to 2015, that Riyadh and its increasingly assertive neighbor and ally, the UAE, would start taking initiatives on their own to protect their vital interests, without always asking foreign powers (that is, the United States) to agree or help. This trend accelerated rapidly after the Arab uprisings, when Gulf rulers feared popular revolts at home, and even included attempts to derail American foreign policy in the region, in their fierce opposition to the nuclear deal that President Barack Obama sealed with Iran and other world powers. But it has since reached reckless, even criminal, dimensions under the direction of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who recently made himself Saudi Arabia’s prime minister.

While serving notice that, in tandem with the UAE, it would not become a vassal state of the United States or anyone else, Saudi Arabia has taken aggressive steps that either mostly failed or generated international backlash: the blockade of Qatar, the war in Yemen, embracing surveillance authoritarianism, courting right-wing Western leaders like Donald Trump, detaining hundreds of prominent Saudis who were accused of corruption, killing Jamal Khashoggi, and detaining former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, to mention only the most severe. Washington and other foreign powers with close ties and influence usually tacitly accepted, or occasionally actively assisted, such transgressions.

This policy shift seems to reflect several driving forces for Saudi leaders. They could not rely on the United States to protect them when they were really threatened, such as during the 2019 drone attacks on key ARAMCO oil facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia, widely attributed to Iran. They could pursue their core energy, trade, technology and other interests with powers like Russia and China, while maintaining their close U.S. ties. And, they faced dangers if they relied too heavily on U.S. policies in the region that were both strategically incoherent and served American (and often Israeli) priorities above all else.

The furor over the OPEC+ cuts captures all these irreconcilable forces. Riyadh seems finally to have reacted to Washington’s attempts to dictate Saudi oil output. The kingdom — and, most of all, Mohammad bin Salman — also seems unfazed that its decision will hurt American and European economies, the war effort in Ukraine against Russia, and the Democrats’ election fortunes next month, while also helping Russia and perhaps even Iran.

Biden has pledged that “there will be consequences,” but how will the United States actually respond? Will there be any signs of American officials acknowledging the traps of history in the Arabian Peninsula and the apparently eternal lessons of failed imperial overreach?

Rami G. Khouri is director of global engagement at the American University of Beirut, a nonresident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative, and an internationally syndicated columnist. He tweets @ramikhouri.
This article originated at DAWN

Copyright ©2022 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 October 2022
Word Count: 1,239
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US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s simultaneous visits to the Middle East last month dramatically remind us that little has changed here since Alexander the Great marched his armies to the east in the 4th Century BC. Foreign and regional powers still  compete for strategic advantage in the region to re-configure the political landscape in their own image and interests.

No wonder so many people are confused by what foreign and regional powers actually seek. Global and regional partnerships and confrontations evolve almost seasonally: are Turkey and Israel friends or adversaries? What about Egypt and Qatar, the UAE and Iran?

Various powers scurry around mending old disputes and concocting bizarre new alliances for fresh confrontations — all the while sending arms and troops around the region with abandon.

Leaders of smaller, vulnerable countries desperately seek a regional or global power — any power will do — to protect and finance them. They preach freedom, equality, and economic development, but support authoritarian dictators, pervasive waste and corruption, and massive arms sales.

When two world powers visit in the same week, it amplifies the contradictions and confusion. It also clarifies and perpetuates old colonial traditions that view Arab- and Muslim-majority societies as tools for more powerful states to manipulate at will, with full complicity of local elites that are ever more eager for money and protection to survive.

This is not new. The United Kingdom in the Balfour Declaration promised Palestine to the Jewish people in 1917, when London had no legal claim to that land. A century later, Trump, and now Biden, have effectively given Jerusalem to Israel, when Washington has no legal claim to East Jerusalem.

This colonial legacy of self-serving foreign interventions that disregard the rights and aspirations of the indigenous inhabitants has now mutated into a more sinister local variant: established regional powers, from Turkey to Iran, UAE and Saudi Arabia, intervene unilaterally in nominally sovereign Arab states to gain strategic advantages. They use muscle and money to thwart any popular democratic transitions and to reinforce authoritarian regimes.

The simultaneous Biden and Putin visits occurred at a moment when around 70 percent of Arabs are poor or vulnerable to lifelong poverty, and very few enjoy any power to reform their mostly moribund national policies, either through peaceful popular rebellion or democratic elections.

Governments now also monitor their thoughts and movements, usually with the technical or financial assistance of the same regional and international powers interfering in their domestic affairs.

This Biden-Putin moment highlights old colonial practices and clarifies three great divides that define today’s Middle East — divides that also explain much of the area’s violence, instability, and nonstop military and political interventions.

The first is the divide between most Arabs, their leaders, and the institutions of governance. Trust in Arab government performance has declined in recent decades, outside the small wealthy oil producing states, according to regular polling evidence.

These polls also show that most populations see corruption as rampant and the rule of law as not applied or favouring certain groups; unsurprisingly, nearly 50 percent of young Arabs wish to emigrate. The erratic but ongoing uprisings in several countries — Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, most prominently — also reveal public discontent with the state’s performance, and the demand for a democratic system.

The second is the long-standing divide between Arab people and the apartheid state of Israel, which polling evidence consistently reaffirms. Even in states that signed normalisation agreements, most Arab citizens shun close ties with Israelis, as was confirmed again this month.

The third is the divide between most Arabs, Iranians, and Turks against Western and Israeli colonial arrogance and direct interventions, including military action and economic sanctions. Polls remind us year after year that a majority of Arabs see Israel and the US as their main security threats, reaching 66 percent of respondents in the latest regional surveys.

American and a few Arab leaders ignore this overwhelming evidence and continue to force-feed us normalisation with Israel as if we were a herd of goats — which is exactly how colonial powers view their powerless local subjects.

The US has now expanded this into an attempt to form a coalition of Arab states with Israel and the US to curtail Iranian, Russian, and Chinese influence in the region. This runs against the grain of all three of these profound divides that have been among the most consistent characteristics of the modern Arab world.

American recurring dreams to create such Arab-Israeli-US coalitions have repeatedly failed to account for what drives Arab people’s identities, self-interest, and dignity. Almost all Middle Easterners know in their hearts — more importantly from their lived experiences — that over the past century their torments have come from the three main (linked) forces of Western colonial manipulation, Zionist-Israeli apartheid, and home-grown Arab autocracy.

Not only have these combined to leave most of the region the wreck it is today — mostly poor, vulnerable, and subjugated by regional and world powers — but these powers now also cooperate more closely to tighten their authoritarian grip on the lands, people, and resources of the region.

The lives, values, rights, and sentiments of nearly 700 million Arabs, Iranians, and Turks are totally absent from the minds of foreign and regional leaders who meet routinely to determine our fate. The colonial and authoritarian eye does not see these people. They are invisible, inconsequential. They do not exist.

What matters at the Biden or Putin meetings are Israel’s security and technology exports, American politicians’ incumbency, the self-preservation of regional autocrats, US war merchants’ income, and carving up the region into spheres of influence — just the way the British and French did a century ago.

No wonder a majority of Arabs feel more and more alienated from their own leaders and have tried to overthrow them, while fearing the motives of Israel, the US, and other powers.

Colonial predators must open their eyes and see the rotten fruits of their legacies — not celebrate them by trying again to rearrange the region for their own domestic purposes.

Rami G. Khouri is Director of Global Engagement and senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative.
Follow him on Twitter: @ramikhouri

This article originally appeared at The New Arab.

Copyright ©2022 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 August 2022
Word Count: 1,002
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President Joe Biden often notes that he has 40 years of experience in dealing with global affairs, but he and Washington seem to be poor learners.

The four days he just spent in the Middle East confirm that his own views and U.S. policies there remain confused, contradictory, and often counter-productive — though very profitable for Israel, Arab autocrats and their cronies, and American arms manufacturers.

The amateurish nature of Biden’s trip was best encapsulated by the media attention focusing on whether he shook hands or bumped fists with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman, whom the CIA said was responsible for the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident.

Biden had no issues of substance to discuss with Israeli and Arab leaders that could possibly break new ground because of the many limiting factors that have been built into U.S.-Mideast policies for half a century. Even Biden’s easy request for greater Arab oil output to ease inflation in the West got nowhere because OPEC+ producers have very limited extra capacity to export oil right now, and most Arab leaders have been hesitant to line up with the U.S. against Russia when they are exploring closer ties with Russia themselves.

Biden’s overall agenda for this trip never had a chance, frankly, because of the five policy constraints that have shaped the violent modern legacy of American involvement in the region:

The Biden trip deepened these legacies, offering glib throwaway comments that purported to express Washington’s commitment to peace, security, democracy, and prosperity for all the people of the region. But does anyone take that commitment seriously today — particularly after decades of hearing Washington speak of rights and values while implementing policies that helped send the Arab region and most of its people into cycles of economic stagnation and regression (except for about 20 percent of the region’s citizens who are wealthy)? Most feel they remain as unofficial colonial subjects ruled by compliant satraps who see American and Israeli interests as superior to their own.

Ordinary Arab men and women recognize that American interventions in the Middle East have mostly promoted dynamics that ravage their lives: non-stop wars, extremism, authoritarian rule, runaway corruption, massive neglect of international law, fragmenting states, and, most recently, mass povertyimpacting a majority of people in Arab states today. UN other analyses in recent years show that multidimensional poverty and family vulnerability impact some 67 percent of Arabs, and conditions have worsened further due to Covid, the Ukraine war, and climate change. Arab Center regional surveys show that over 70 percent of families either cannot meet their basic monthly needs or can just meet needs with no income left for savings.

Most Arab economies are deeply indebted and unable to generate balanced productive economies (beyond the few energy producers). Several countries like Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Yemen are running out of water, and sometimes even electricity. Most governments appear to have forfeited their sovereignty to some extent because they can only make major decisions on buying arms or importing electricity and water after they get the green light from a foreign-power patron (the main ones being the U.S., Russia, and Iran, but also Turkey, Israel, and even Saudi Arabia.

This is why the majority of ordinary Arabs, were they allowed to express themselves freely, would cringe at Biden’s declaration to the Arab leaders’ summit in Jeddah Saturday that, “The United States is not going anywhere. We will not walk away to leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia or Iran. We will seek to build on this moment with active, principled American leadership.”

Say what? But Iran, Russia, and China keep expanding their relations with Arab and other Mideast parties, while the U.S. has tried to contain them. Some of those Arab leaders in Jeddah last weekend are even conducting their own bilateral talks to lower tensions with Iran, or even depend heavily on open or illicit trade with Iran.

Biden’s attempt to muster Arab and Israeli support to contain powers like Iran, Russia, and China is the latest twist in an established American pattern of trying to coordinate with local countries to push back perceived enemies of the U.S. or its Mideast allies. Such enemies have included the Soviet Union, the Muslim Brotherhood, Nasserism, Baathist Iraq and Syria, Palestinian guerrilla movements, Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, and — today’s flavor of the decade — Iran, Russia and China.

Why do Russia, Iran, and China keep expanding their relations in Arab lands? Any honest analysis would show it is the impact of American policies that have turned a blind eye or directly promoted the structural threats in the Arab region: greater Arab corruption and state incompetence, popular anger and often desperation, and a sense of hopelessness among hundreds of millions of people that causes many of them to want to emigrate. This opens the doors to any party that preaches to remedy their ailments.

American presidents have never grasped that it is impossible to get very far in trying to promote Israeli relations with Arab states, or serious Arab-Israeli-American coalitions to confront a third party, as long as Washington passively watches Israel continue its colonial annexation of occupied Palestinian lands and keeps offering cash and technology to maintain Israel’s military superiority in the region.

While many Arab leaders desperately seek U.S. and Israeli support to survive, the majority of Arab citizens still see Israel and the U.S. as their main security threats, 89 percent and 81 percent respectively. Another recent poll shows that the majority of Arabs surveyed in UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain now view normalizing relations under the Abraham Accords unfavorably.

So many in the Middle East worry when Biden says, as he did this weekend, “Let me state clearly that the United States is going to remain an active and engaged partner in the Middle East.” Many worry because active engagement and non-stop militarism by the U.S. have been a main contributor to turning the Arab region into a wreck.

Rami George Khouri is an internationally syndicated political columnist and book author, a professor of journalism and Director of Global Engagement at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. This article originated at Responsible Statecraft.

Copyright ©2022 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 July 2022
Word Count: 1,099
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If you are marking the New Year with the traditional review of what has changed and what is in store ahead for the Arab region, you are missing the greatest threats to the region’s people and their states.

Climate change, ideological conflicts, and active wars will continue to cause havoc in most states, but older and more corrosive dangers today endanger the wellbeing of families and the integrity of entire states, as a batch of new international reports last week reminds us: a big majority of Arab families — over two-thirds in some critical sectors like poverty and education — can no longer meet their basic needs, and slowly, quietly, they slip into destitution, desperation, or worse.

The flurry of new reports shows how the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the already alarming Arab condition in essential realms for a decent life: education attainment and its associated human capabilities, access to sufficient food, inequality among citizens and states, and the pan-Arab failure — after half a century of trying — to create sufficient decent jobs for citizens.

The most frightening new findings — in a report by UNICEF, the World Bank, and UNESCO on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on educational progress in Arab states — start with the bad news that nearly two-thirds of 5 to 14-year-old children in the region were unable to read with proficiency even before COVID-19. The new calamity is that this could soon rise to nearly 70% of all children due to their missing out on normal schooling in the past two years, and the proportion of 15-year-olds who perform badly in international standardised education test scores could rise from 60.1% to 71.6%.

This guarantees that several cohorts of undereducated Arab youth will not be able to contribute to their national economies beyond menial and manual labour in the informal economy. They will suffer lifetimes of poverty, vulnerability, and marginalization, with problems of mental health, socialization, and low wellbeing and self-satisfaction.

Many will likely become directionless and alienated young men and women who typically are prime candidates for radical and violent movements that ultimately shake the integrity of countries and social systems. Once strong, centralised states could polarise and fragment, with some ultimately shattering (usually with the involvement of foreign military action, as we have seen in recent years in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, Lebanon, Libya and others).

The minority of young Arabs who do get a good education will either dominate the private and government sectors or emigrate to find a better life abroad. This has been happening for the past four decades at least, as governments are unable or unwilling to fix the distortions in their policies and economies. This will further aggravate the existing inequalities gaps within and among Arab countries.

The World Inequalities Report 2022 issued last week confirms that the Arab-dominated Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is the most unequal region in the world. In our lands, the top ten per cent richest people control 58% of income (vs. 36% in Europe). It seems hard to get any more unequal, given UN studies in recent years that repeatedly show that poor and vulnerable Arabs account for over two-thirds of the total population – and the COVID-19 crisis has worsened this, too.

Arab poverty, vulnerability, and inequality continue to spread in part because young people are not trained to assume better jobs, and in part — a new paper from the respected Economic Research Forum says — because Arab private sectors do not create sufficient decent new work opportunities.

A majority of educated young Arabs end up taking low-paying informal jobs, because of state policies and private sector practices since the 1990s economic reforms — policies that have not generated sufficient decent formal sector jobs, but rather favoured informal work, low-productivity sectors, and corporate profits, which resulted in low labour force participation.

So it is no surprise that youth unemployment in many Arab countries reaches 40-50 %, and seems stuck there. These structural issues are the result of deeper and chronic dynamics like political instability, poor regulatory frameworks and labour market institutions, fiscal constraints, corruption, and lack of economic diversity.

The last two years of COVID-19 pressures have only tightened the screws of citizen helplessness and erratic state social protection responses. Even in Arab countries that offered some emergency assistance to needy families, another ESCWA expert working group heard in a September meeting, their cash contributions were inadequate in most cases, averaging less than 20% of average national income or spending. These experts came in like a chorus in a cathedral hymn, noting the harsh realities for Arab families are due to poverty and associated economic and social problems and longstanding structural barriers to wealth redistribution and equitable economic-political participation.

A UN Food and Agriculture Organization report issued last week revealed that the percentage of undernourished Arabs increased by 15.8% since 2014, and, more alarmingly, by 91% over the past two decades. COVID-19 has added another 4.8 million undernourished people, for a total of some 69 million. Moderate or severe food insecurity also has expanded in recent years, to reach 141 million.

The deterioration in access to food has impacted all sectors of society, including the shrinking middle class. The FAO report notes: “An estimated 32.3%, or nearly one-third of the region’s population, did not have regular access to sufficient and nutritious food in 2020.”

And, no surprise, that same old bell rings in our ears yet again, as the FAO says that hunger and food insecurity result from, “pre-existing vulnerabilities and exposure to multiple shocks and stresses such as poverty, inequality, conflict, climate change and many others.”

In other words, all these new reports tell us in slightly different ways that during the last 40 years or so most Arab societies and economies have been managed inefficiently, inequitably, and often incompetently.

These trends paint a stark picture of the hard years ahead, as more and more people lack the jobs, income, or health, water, food, and education services needed for a life of dignity. All Arab citizens also lack any credible power of political accountability to force their governments to stop this disastrous descent to national collapse, on an ever-widening base of human misery.

The long-term consequences of all this are all the more frightening because poor families today find it almost impossible to escape poverty and enter the middle class. Governments that lack the funds, expertise, or will to reduce poverty and improve overall citizen wellbeing these days react to their people’s distress predominantly militarily, and by clamping down on freedom of expression and other basic rights. Not surprisingly, angry, hungry, degraded, and increasingly desperate citizens across the region have erupted in uprisings against their ruling elites since 2010.

A few more reports like last week’s, reconfirming the worsening condition of most Arab citizens in the face of their uncaring states, suggest that more difficult days are ahead for both of them.

Rami G. Khouri is Director of Global Engagement and senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative.  Follow him on Twitter: @ramikhouri This article originated at The New Arab

Copyright ©2021 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 December 2021
Word Count: 1,145
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When The Daily Star, Lebanon’s leading English-language newspaper, ceased publication and laid off its entire staff earlier this week, my whole life flashed before my eyes — as did the history of the Arab world since the 1950s that the paper both chronicled and reflected in so many ways. The Daily Star bookended my entire journalistic career, which included my first job as a reporter there in 1973 and my most recent position in journalism as its executive editor from 2003 to 2005.

When I started that first job after college in 1973, I was itching to report and write stories that, I imagined, would bring peace and prosperity to the Middle East and the wider world. My initiation was not as I had anticipated; on my first day at The Daily Star, at its office just off Riad al-Solh Square in the heart of Beirut, the paper’s then editor-in-chief, Jihad Khazen, assigned me to write a feature about the problem of cockroaches in the city. World peace and justice would have to wait.

Eager to show what I could do, I researched cockroaches from every dimension of their creepy lives. I spoke with biologists at the American University of Beirut; representatives of foreign companies that sold the chemical weapons of mass destruction that killed household insects and pests; municipal officials for the city of Beirut in charge of sanitation; and fellow citizens who shared with me a common disgust with these hardy little beasts. I spent hours in the library and made several trips to the area under my apartment’s elevator, where our resident cockroaches found safety, expanded their families and planned terror sorties into our homes.

A week of research later, I wrote my first article as a full-time professional journalist that told readers everything they needed to know about cockroaches, and probably a few things they didn’t want to. It remains, I’m proud to say, a classic in the category of cockroach journalism. And now, as I recall my 50-year-long personal association with The Daily Star, it reminds me why that little newspaper played such an outsized role in the Arab public sphere from its founding in 1952 until this week. This was due to its location, its management, its language and the relentless drive of its mostly young staff.

Thanks to the force of personality and professional aims of the late Kamel Mroue, who founded it in 1952, and his widow Salma and son Jamil, who carried it through difficult days during and after the Lebanese Civil War, The Daily Star in its early years was able to transcend its peripheral status as a small, English-language daily in an Arabic-speaking country and region. The determined owner-publishers appointed highly qualified top editors like George Hishmeh, Jihad Khazen, Raphael Calis and others, who consistently motivated their staff to practice and produce the best possible brand of journalism they could.

They were not shielded from the constraints of money and ideology that shaped journalism — and mostly shattered it — across the Middle East, which has long been politically controlled by either conservative monarchs or mostly hapless soldiers who seized power in coups. But Lebanon, and Beirut at its heart, were an Arab anomaly. Power was not concentrated in the hands of a single man or family, but rather was defined by deep cultural and political pluralism that generated a lively press and an even livelier society.

Outside money, from Arab and other foreign interests, greased much of the media that could not possibly survive only on sales and advertising in such a small market of a few million people. The Daily Star always seemed able to minimize the pressure of external financiers, and because it was in English, it could publish material that Arabic-language media feared to disseminate, so as not to anger their backers. In fact, the Lebanese media — pluralistic, professional and relatively free in a region of autocracies — became the arena where rival Arab and other foreign powers could express themselves, stake out public positions and openly criticize their foes in print and, later, on the air, as satellite news flooded the region.

These factors all converged to allow The Daily Star to carve out a unique regional role for itself; for years, it was shipped to and sold the next day in numerous Arab countries. It provided foreigners in the region with news from their home countries, as well as deep insights into the Arab world. For foreign residents of Beirut and Lebanon, it also provided practical information for their daily lives, like the opening of new beach clubs and restaurants, a mega-world of cultural events, and, of course, updates on the ubiquitous cockroaches. (Note: For those who still suffer this dread, keep in mind that cockroaches fear humans more than we fear them, which is why they scamper away when they sense us in their presence. The best way to minimize them in your home is to keep spotlessly clean areas where food, warmth and damp converge, like underneath refrigerators and kitchen stoves.)

The Daily Star struggled and closed once during the civil war, but it came back with renewed vigor in the 1990s, after the war had finally ended. At one point, it published jointly with the International Herald Tribune and was distributed across the region, from Cairo to Amman to Doha. But it could not survive the impact of the twin ravages of the advent of digitized media that sharply reduced advertising revenues and readers, and a corrupt, uncaring political class that seized Lebanon after Syria withdrew in 2005, ending its 29-year occupation. That ruling sectarian oligarchy, which remains in place today, syphoned off state funds for their own private wealth, while allowing educational, water, transportation and energy infrastructure to all deteriorate, savaging the private banking system and finally driving the country into its current bankruptcy and near-total collapse.

By the early 2000s, other Arab countries also no longer needed mouthpieces in Lebanon, as every autocratic regime set up its own satellite television channel and hired digital henchmen to assault their enemies on social media, whether they were fellow Arabs, Iran, Israel or foreign powers like the United States. Like many newspapers across Lebanon and the region, The Daily Star was unable to overcome the new challenges it faced despite heroic efforts by its staff, in part because of the erratic ways of its newest owners, who are linked to the family of former Prime Minister Saad Hariri.

The demise of The Daily Star is a moment of sadness — a time to mourn a plucky and meaningful institution that launched the journalism careers of hundreds of young men and women in Lebanon, as it dared to report the news seriously and fearlessly in a politically unserious and fearful region. But this is also a moment of celebration — to recall and honor what The Daily Star did achieve against terrible odds of war, corruption, incompetent national management, and the global forces of digitization, globalization and polarization. The spirit and daring professionalism that always characterized the paper’s publishers, editors and staff have not died, but have been scattered again to the four corners of a turbulent world in constant change.

When it is quiet at night in Beirut, and I walk gingerly to not disturb any scheming cockroaches, I do not fret the inevitable demise of another Arab newspaper. Rather, I look around and see so many new online Arab publications and successful, determined journalists working in Arabic, English and French. I smile when I remind myself that so many of them stand on the shoulders of hundreds of journalists who once worked at The Daily Star and dozens of other Arab publications that dared, in their day, to try and create Arab societies where human dignity, justice, truth and the rule of law matter. You cannot ask much more than that from any journalist or citizen.

Rami G. Khouri is director of global engagement at the American University of Beirut, a nonresident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative, and an internationally syndicated columnist. He tweets @ramikhouri (This article originated at DAWN)

Copyright ©2021 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 8 November 2021
Word Count: 1,310
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The 9/11 attacks and subsequent U.S.-led “Global War on Terror” have massively degraded life conditions for most people across the Arab region, in almost every dimension of life, society, and governance.

The attacks and GWOT did not emerge from a vacuum, however, or mark a new stage in regional or world history. The destructive cycle of human suffering and state fragility they spurred should be seen more accurately as peak moments in a much longer historical trajectory — one defined by rickety Arab states and increasingly suffering citizens, within a world of endless militaristic imperialism and colonialism.

These last 20 years accelerated and aggravated negative trends that had already defined most Arab societies, sparked a few new ones that plague it today, and promise continued pain for years or decades to come. We better understand this if we recognize that 20 years ago the Arab region was already plagued by a historic cycle of six destructive trends that the post-9/11 era has rapidly and significantly worsened.

Citizen pauperization amidst obscene wealth accumulation by small regime-linked minorities. U.N. and other credible analyses indicate that around 75 percent of people in Arab countries are poor or vulnerable, which has increased and deepened due to COVID-19. Inequality among Arab citizens is the highest in the entire world — the middle class has shrunk in recent years from 44 to 33 percent. Poverty has widened and deepened; it is also now chronic and trans-generational, as poor youth today are guaranteed a life of poverty and deprivation like their parents, given the inability of economies or governments to help them enter the middle class, as they did in previous eras of sustained development.

Declining quality or availability of state social services has been a main reason why passive citizens often turned into angry opposition activists since the 1980s, when basic education, health care, staple foods, housing, transportation, fresh water, heating oil, and other critical family needs either became more expensive, harder to access, or of lower quality. Recent regional surveys show that about 80 percent of families cannot meet their weekly essential needs, largely because the expansion of corruption across the region. Ordinary citizens recognize corruption as a main cause of the lack of social justice and governance systems, erratic social services, and a lack of opportunities for quality education and employment.

The politically helpless Arab citizenry is unable either to choose or hold accountable its national leaders. Most leaders are military elites who seized power in a coup, or single families that rule based on hereditary identities or being chosen by former colonial powers, who help keep them in power. The feeling of total powerlessness by most Arabs who suffer daily indignities was (in 2001) and remains even more so today a big reason why many otherwise ordinary middle class young men turn to extremist movements, militias, and resistance and terror groups like al-Qaida or ISIS. They do so largely to escape their helpless victimhood and, in their desperate worldview, seek a better world for themselves and their families.

The ongoing expansion of politically neutered citizens who are economically vulnerable and marginalized leads to alienation from structures of society, the state, and government. This phenomenon first gained steam in the 1970s, when the Muslim Brotherhood and other (mostly nonviolent) Islamists attracted huge popular followings during the oil-fueled spree that also included high inflation, wider corruption, and more foreign penetration of Arab economies and privatized basic services.

The continuing alienation has led to deep fractures in citizen-state relations and the birth of major non-state armed actors (Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, Popular Mobilization Forces) that often share sovereignty with the state. Al-Qaida and ISIS are merely the latest and most violent manifestations of Arab and other citizens turning away from their states to assert new identities that also assume new agency that replaces their former helplessness.

The three largest identity movements across the Arab region throughout the past century — Arabism, tribalism, and Islamism — have all challenged the modern states that came into being mostly after World War I. This hints that the core weakness in the modern Arab state is itself, which was never fully anchored to the identities, needs, or allegiances of its citizens. Those structural weaknesses in many Arab states have increased since 9/11.

Foreign military interventions at will in the region, mostly by non-Arab powers, have plagued Middle Eastern societies for the past two centuries or more — since Napoleon’s attacks in 1798. Such militarism has increased sharply since 2001 and has either initiated or hastened the slow collapse of Arab states like Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan.

While the colonial-era U.K. and France were once the main foreign military invaders in the region, in the past 40 years, and especially since 2001, the United States has led the large-scale military penetration of Arab and South Asian lands, which has since opened the flood gates. Now it is common to see troops or hired mercenary proxies from Russia, Turkey, Sudan, Iran, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel active in many Arab countries. This perpetuates wars that continue to weaken national economies, increase poverty and emigration rates, destroy basic service facilities, weaken central governments, and hasten tendencies for secession or autonomy. The Iraqi Kurds, South Sudanese, and South Yemenis are the most distinct breakaway regions from existing Arab states, and others could follow.

Israel’s non-stop illegal colonization and annexation of Arab lands persists without protest by global powers that simultaneously wage war across the region in part, they say, to promote the rule of law. The core Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been among the most destabilizing and radicalizing forces in the Arab region since the 1940s, and its destructive wars and military spending among the biggest waste of Arab resources that should have gone into genuine national development. It also sparked the advent of Arab military coups and rulers, which have been a central source of Arab state mediocrity and economic mismanagement and corruption ever since. Israeli colonization and annexation of Arab lands have continued since 9/11, adding to the many reasons why many ordinary Arab citizens resent their governments’ weaknesses or explicit acquiescence in Israeli acts.

These six dynamics existed before 9/11, but they have all worsened rapidly and spread across Arab lands since the “war on terror.” The GWOT and its parallel world of militarism and corrupt local governments has directly led to some of the most dangerous new developments, like the birth and expansion of ISIS, the rebirth and triumph of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and al-Qaida’s survival and diversification across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

Perhaps GWOT’s most dangerous consequence, in view of the six major structural troubles within Arab societies, has been the U.S. reinforcement of authoritarian Arab and Asian regimes that have significantly weakened already thin human rights and freedom of speech conditions in many countries. As the U.S.-led wars resulted in the expansion of the number, reach, and activities of terror groups, local governments used U.S. and other foreign support to fight this threat by cracking down on political and media freedoms; this only exacerbated citizen anger against their state, and drove some men and women into joining ISIS, al-Qaida, or other such violent groups. The latest examples of states moving towards more top-heavy autocracies are Lebanon, Palestine, and Tunisia — which had shown glimmers of pluralism and personal and political freedoms in recent decades.

So, most Arabs link the U.S.-led “war on terror,” and Western political, economic, and military support, to their incompetent, autocratic, and corrupt governments. This has led, al-Qaida, for example, to diversify, diffuse its membership, and expand to new lands. It also incubated in Iraq and Syria the birth of new groups around the Middle East and Asia, like ISIS and its several branches, which emerged directly from ex-al-Qaida cadres that organized in American jails in Iraq.

Thus, the American-led drive to beat back terror threats in 2001 devastated once growing economies and sparked a massive wave of pauperization across the region — which in turn has fueled the growth of the very terror groups the United States initially aimed to contain. The containment effort succeeded in reducing attacks against the U.S. mainland, but massively increased the destruction in societies and the suffering of several hundred million people in the Arab-Asian region.

The last 20 years only confirm the combination of three or four main reasons that usually prompt an otherwise nonviolent middle class citizens to join a violent group like al-Qaida: socio-economic desperation, powerlessness to improve their condition through political action due to their government’s authoritarian rule, the presence of foreign militaries in lands they consider holy to them, and the destruction of life and property by the combined forces of their governments and the foreign militaries. We have witnessed this repeatedly in Islamist-led militant movements against the Soviets and U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, and by Islamist groups’ attacks that drove the Israeli occupation troops from Southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

After the so-called Islamic State came into being in 2014-15, credible public opinion surveys showed that in some countries, seven to eight percent of the population saw these movements positively. People were not going to join these movements, but they thought they were doing something that was righteous and justified in fighting corruption and foreign occupation.

The Arab region’s 11-year-old ongoing uprisings to remove their inept and corrupt government systems are perhaps the strongest testament to how people who have been degraded and humiliated by their own governments will fight back and use any means possible to achieve a normal life. Arabs across the region have tried to do this for decades, without success, due to the military force and foreign support of their governments.

We can trace this cycle back for several decades before the 9/11 attacks, when the levels of poverty, corruption, school dropouts, informal labor, ineptitude in delivering basic services like electricity and water to people all over the region were still manageable. Now they are completely out of control, given high rates of poverty, informal labor, school dropouts, poor access to clean water, poor social insurance coverage, and other basic life needs. Much of this deterioration happened in the last 20 years. The link between the “war on terror,” deteriorating life and security conditions in Arab lands, and the ongoing mass citizen rebellions is now clear. The American-led fight against terror by military force and supporting authoritarian governments in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa has ravaged the quality of governance and the lives of ordinary people. That is the fundamental equation that needs to be addressed.

Rami G. Khouri is the director of global engagement at the American University of Beirut, a nonresident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative, and an internationally syndicated columnist. Follow him on Twitter: @ramikhouri

This article originated at Responsible Statecraft

Copyright ©2021 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 September 2021

Word Count: 1,767

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It was once the exceptional Arab state that, despite civil war and constant political turmoil, still safeguarded pluralism and personal freedoms. But Lebanon now looks like a dozen other countries in the Middle East, in slow, seemingly inexorable decline into deprivation and autocracy. While too many Lebanese increasingly face poverty, lower living standards and diminished personal rights, entrenched ruling elites have embraced ever more militaristic and authoritarian ways to remain in power, continually rejecting reforms and condemning the country to further suffering.

Lebanon’s sad transformation over the past three years is significant for two reasons, at least. The first is that Lebanon’s pluralistic system, which allowed vibrant educational, media, business and cultural sectors to flourish in the country in the years before and after its 15-year civil war, also contributed repeatedly to the economic and social development of many other Arab countries in the same period. Whether in health care, education or private business, these other countries benefited from an influx of Lebanese enterprise and skills. But this signature Lebanese export is now declining and may ultimately disappear in due course, as the country’s economy collapses. The second reason is that Lebanon’s slide into pauperization and securitized governance seals the almost total retreat of Arab political rule into the club of autocrats, generals and dangerous young royals.

Lebanon has quickly turned into just another impoverished, troubled Arab country: Its citizens suffer more and more socioeconomic stress, while their political rights are seized by the heavy hand of a worried government that cannot seem to maintain social stability, except with battalions of police, soldiers and plain-clothed regime thugs wielding batons and throwing tear gas. One of the Lebanese government’s new favored tactics against its critics is to call in citizens for questioning by the security services — or, in some cases, to detain individuals and refer them to courts for allegedly “harming the state” through their activism or social media activity. This is new for Lebanon, but it has been common practice during the last decade in Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq and Jordan.

Lebanon’s decline has been mirrored in Palestine, where the inept and increasingly autocratic Palestinian Authority — answering more to Israel than to its own people — arrests or beats up protesters calling on President Mahmoud Abbas, whose original four-year term ended way back in 2009, to resign. The recent case of a Palestinian journalist, Nizar Banat, who died in the custody of Palestinian police sparked major street protests throughout the West Bank, which Abbas’ government met with heavily armed police and more plain-clothed security thugs.

These episodes, all too routine for countries like Egypt, rarely happened before in Lebanon or Palestine. Now that such repression is a reality for them, too, Lebanese and Palestinians are doubly angered by their inability to do anything about draconian state security forces. It also adds to the long list of cases, documented for too long by international and local human rights groups, of civilian protesters across the Arab world who are harassed, arrested, detained or even killed for simply demanding a better system of governance that protects their social, economic and political rights — especially the right to free expression.

Lebanon was for years a holdout in a region where too many states are defined by their crumbling economies, poverty-stricken citizens and militant governments. Now that Lebanon has joined that miserable club, it highlights a striking feature of the modern Arab political system that came into being a century ago, at the hands of European colonial powers and their favorite local elites: The entire region often seems to move to the beat of a common drum. This probably reflects the fact that most citizens share the same feelings of hope or frustration, because they seem to be governed by similar political systems that have never embraced genuine pluralistic democracy or political accountability.

The record on this is clear. The common struggle for independence from colonial rule in the early 20th century rippled through most Arab-majority societies. Then a shared focus on national development and state-building defined all Arab countries in the period roughly between 1930 and 1960. Starting in the early 1970s, the oil boom era funded a common rush toward brisk spending on both useful infrastructure as well as profligate, corruption-induced showcase ventures. This was followed by a two-decade period, from about 1980 to 2000, when most Arab countries saw erratic economic development that reflected fluctuating oil and gas incomes and ever-expanding corruption, in countries that never seriously built productive and balanced economies. At the same time, some states like Iraq, Syria, Tunisia, Sudan and Libya felt the pain of being governed by one-man military dictatorships that proved to be incompetent at both military action and national development.

Of course, by late 2010 and early 2011, spontaneous citizen rebellions erupted across half of the region. Some of them succeeded in toppling despots — most of all, in Tunisia and Egypt — while others morphed into civil wars—in Syria, Libya and later Yemen — that quickly attracted regional and international involvement. Despite various setbacks, this wave of uprisings and revolutions continues today — outside of the small, oil-rich sheikhdoms in the Gulf — because a majority of citizens despair of living a decent life or passing on any future promise to their children. Sudan, Algeria and Iraq — and Lebanon, too — have all experienced two years or more of nonstop popular protest, but in most cases with little or no sign of the ruling elites giving up the power they have long monopolized.

Unlike other Arab states that have seen these surges of protest, Lebanon has not had a tradition of a strong central government that monopolizes power and dominates all aspects of national life, from politics and the economy to security, the media and even popular culture and the arts. Lebanon has instead been broken by the persistence of the current sectarian power-sharing system that has ruled the country since the end of its civil war in 1990. Rather than a power-sharing system, it is really a power-hogging one by various sectarian warlords, supported by the single strongest actor in the country: Hezbollah. In the past few years, Lebanon’s sectarian leaders have collectively copied many other Arab states, whose deep-seated elites allow no serious political participation, zealously guarding their own interests.

The results are the multiple banking, foreign exchange and fiscal crises that have left Lebanon’s once vibrant culture and economy as a skeleton of its former self. The elites in Beirut that refuse to budge in the face of sustained street protests and public outcries — just like elites in Baghdad or Algiers — have robbed Lebanon blind and shattered its infrastructure. The evidence on the streets of Beirut is in the piles of uncollected garbage, the rolling power outages and the ruins of the city’s port. Nearly a year after last August’s devastating port explosion, investigations by Lebanese judges and prosecutors, which identified officials to be tried in court, have been repeatedly blocked, hindered or postponed by actors in the security sector, the presidency, the judiciary and parliament. Prices of almost everything in the country have tripled in the past two years, as the value of the Lebanese pound continues to decline every week.

About 60 percent of Lebanese now live in poverty, bringing the country closer to the average of nearly 70 percent of citizens in the Arab world who are either poor or vulnerable to poverty, according to U.N. data. Mirroring regional trends, the pauperized Lebanese continue to rise up in sustained and bitter public protest — to the point where demonstrators now carry nooses as a symbol of their desire to hang all leaders. The wealthy and holders of foreign passports steadily leave for other lands, but the vast majority cannot. They suffer and seethe with anger and a handful of other emotions like fear, humiliation, helplessness and, ultimately, dehumanization at the hands of their own leaders.

Protesters and ordinary citizens alike continue to search for a way out of this national trauma, having been unable through sustained protests or foreign pressure to force any concessions from those in power. Opposition and reformist victories in recent elections for professional associations and syndicates have prompted many Lebanese to organize for the 2022 parliamentary and presidential elections as a way to drive out the current rulers. Yet they are also all too aware that those same rulers can simply postpone the elections, as they have before.

Meanwhile, a strong spirit of communal solidarity and self-help has kicked in, with Lebanese all over the country aiding each other however they can — sharing food, water, medicine, electricity, gasoline and shelter. Many see it as setting the example for how a real and decent government should operate. But others fear that by meeting some urgent needs now, this communal solidarity will just let the government off the hook, so it can postpone any reforms.

Lebanon, like so many other Arab societies today, is now in an unfamiliar new zone where life for most of its citizens is a daily struggle for things as basic as food; no breakthroughs are on the horizon. The rest of the world, to most Lebanese, seems not to care, or in some cases even supports some of the sectarian leaders in the ruling oligarchy responsible for Lebanon’s collapse. Like most other Arab societies, the Lebanese now curse the political class that has made them suffer like this, and they cope as best they can. They keep searching for the magic key that will one day unlock the door to a better future. They insist they can and will become an Arab citizenry that defines its own values, rights and national policies — for the first time, perhaps, since the modern Arab state system was born a century ago.

Rami G. Khouri is the director of global engagement at the American University of Beirut, a nonresident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative, and an internationally syndicated columnist. (This article originated at DAWN.)

Copyright ©2021 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 August 2021

Word Count: 1,627

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Those who plunged the latest dagger into Lebanon’s reeling body are supposed to be the people leading it out of collapse and reviving its people’s vibrant role in the Arab region.

President Michel Aoun did not agree on Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri’s proposed cabinet, and Hariri resigned within minutes, ending a nine-month-old drama. This immediately triggered a drop in both the value of the faltering national currency and in people’s hopes for an end to their daily misery in all walks of life.

The Lebanese people are collectively holding their breath yet again, as they anticipate another drawn-out political crisis among the half a dozen leaders of the main political parties whose collective absolute rule has devastated the country in recent years. But these leaders appear determined to continue their selfish game of holding on to political power at all costs.

This cycle of political discord among self-serving sectarian leaders has intensified since the current crisis began two years ago. But political stalemates like the Hariri-Aoun butting-of-heads that bring governance to a halt have occurred regularly in recent decades.

The slow collapse of governance, the economy, and modern life as we know it across Lebanon — especially in big cities where most people live — signals that what we witness today is not just a political crisis among two ideological actors.

Rather, it reflects a deeper crisis of statehood that is not only tragic for Lebanon but also plagues other Arab countries in similar ways. It is time to acknowledge the structural faults in the system of Lebanese statehood and others in the region that have brought us to this low point.

The costs of the crisis have become clear to every Lebanese household — other than the clients, business partners, guards, and employees of the ruling oligarchic elite. Alongside Sunni leader Hariri and Christian Maronite leader Aoun, this elite includes House Speaker Nabih Berri, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, and a few less powerful men who nevertheless play the deadly Lebanese political game with the same determination and catastrophic results.

They are all men, many of them are ageing, most of them inherited their positions from family or comrades, and all of them have given the Arab region its most spectacular example of how to run a once decent state into the ground and plunge its five million inhabitants into instant poverty and despair.

Daily reports from Lebanon depict how families suffer at every turn — electric power has almost vanished, meaning air conditioning, internet, refrigerators and elevators work only sporadically; gasoline is difficult to find and more expensive every week; food prices rise steadily while the value of the lira declines in tandem; essential medicines for infants or the elderly are almost impossible to find; clean water is supplied erratically; the banks with people’s life savings are forbidden territory.

Even when a cash withdrawal is possible the exchange rate set by the Central Bank means a depositor actually gets about 20 percent of the value of their original deposit. The education system is mostly in freefall, and decent new jobs do not exist.

More and more essential businesses will only accept cash dollars, which are beyond the reach of most ordinary Lebanese. Many increasingly survive by resorting to communal kitchens, charity handouts, borrowing, growing their own food in their ancestral mountain villages, or engaging in barter economy activities.

Those who can emigrate do so as fast as possible, but most cannot. The result is millions of angry, frustrated, fearful, and helpless Lebanese and foreign refugee families that feel so vulnerable and degraded that they find it hard to articulate their pain in words. Many have been stunned into a state of dehumanization, feeling that their own political and national leaders have treated them like animals.

This extreme situation is most dramatic for not being the consequence of war, but rather the result of the ruling elite’s sustained mismanagement, corruption, and disdain for the wellbeing and rights of fellow citizens.

The current crisis, as last week’s Hariri-Aoun show reconfirmed, reflects the convergence of several separate crises (political, economic, fiscal, banking, energy, environmental) that all are due to poor or absent decision-making by the ruling elite that has controlled the state since the end of the civil war in 1990.

The truth, though, is that this elite has controlled the state for much longer than that, in fact for most of the past century of statehood. The current collapse does not only reflect the ruling elite’s selfish incompetence; it also reveals the unsustainable structures of Lebanese sectarian statehood itself.

The timeline of an entire century since 1920 is important to keep in mind, for it reveals several threads that contribute to the weakness and slow implosion of the Lebanese state and economy.

Many contributing factors can be traced back to four dynamics that all have run their course over the past century: 1) the delayed consequences of European colonial decisions around 1920 that manufactured many Arab states; 2) the consequence of the Arab-Israeli conflict (also a century old); 3) the lack of genuine citizen participation in political decision-making or accountability in Arab states; and, 4) the non-stop interference in Arab countries by neighbouring or foreign powers, making Arab state sovereignty a common fiction.

Over the last 100 years, these four dynamics have brought us to the point where Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, and Libya, to mention only the most obvious, experience severe national distress that ultimately brings a state to its knees and citizens to despair or emigration.

Across the Arab region, a common picture emerges that now also plagues Lebanon: a majority of citizens are poor, vulnerable, and politically helpless, and their governments and state institutions increasingly hold citizen anger and rebellion in check by using military and security measures above all else.

Lebanon was born in the regional tumult of Arab independent statehood after 1920; it is imploding today within the continuing pressures of its own and other nearby Arab lands’ dysfunctional statehood, usually due to the same quartet of causes that date back a full century.

Lebanon reminds us that stable, democratic, productive, and genuinely sovereign Arab states remain an elusive goal, as we enter the second century of statehood and citizenship.

Rami G. Khouri is Director of Global Engagement and senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. Follow him on Twitter: @ramikhouri  (This article originated at The New Arab)

Copyright ©2021 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 July 2021

Word Count: 1,035

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