BEIRUT — The thousands of Arab demonstrators marching in the streets of an Arab capital city this week demanding political reform and the release of their jailed leaders were met with riot police firing tear gas and stun grenades. These events on Wednesday and Thursday nights were typical for a hot summer evening in today’s Arab world, and occur regularly in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan and other Arab lands. These events are especially noteworthy, however, because they happened in Kuwait, and because they keep happening there every few months.

The importance of the Kuwait situation in my mind is enormous, for several reasons that transcend the borders or sentiments of Kuwait itself. Kuwait continues to reveal the fundamental political grievances of citizens in a small, quite homogeneous, and wealthy Arab country that has also enjoyed a relatively lively public political sphere for many decades, including an elected parliament and a boisterous press sector. For several years now thousands of Kuwaitis have regularly taken to the streets to demand a more rigorous government response to their allegations of corruption, favoritism, mismanagement and an unrepresentative parliament. Demonstrators also represent several different discontented groups in society, such as youth, tribal groups, Islamists, nationalists and leftists, and not only the tribal followers of the jailed leader — in this case former member of parliament Mussallam Barrak.

The particularities here are that the Kuwait public prosecutor earlier this week had ordered the detention of Barrak for 10 days after he was questioned and accused of allegedly publicly slandering and insulting the supreme judicial council. His hearing in court is set for July 7. Barrak and others accuse former senior officials, including ruling family members, of stealing and laundering tens of billions of dollars.

The charges have led to street demonstrations rather than vigorous parliamentary debates because most opposition groups are no longer represented in parliament, which they boycott in protest against an amended electoral law that they feel favors pro-government majorities. The citizens who demonstrate, and who are gassed, sometimes beaten, and in some instances jailed, represent a critically important dynamic that has defined the uprisings across the Arab world in recent years: the insistence by ordinary citizens that they have rights, that they can peacefully demand those rights in public, that they can achieve those rights through political action, and that they can engage their national leaderships in a political debate that touches even sensitive issues like official corruption by members of ruling families.

Kuwait highlights the new reality that Arab citizens now demand rights from their governments simply on the basis of their being entitled to those rights, and not necessarily because they are poor, suffer uneven access to social services, or have been politically abused and oppressed, as was the case with citizen uprisings in countries like Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Syria.

Kuwait also speaks of deeper discontents among other citizens in oil-rich Gulf states who can only express their grievances through web sites and social media statements. This is evident in Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, all of which, like Kuwait, try to suppress public political accusations and grievances, even by jailing individuals who Tweet their sentiments critical of state policies.

The demonstrators in Kuwait are not calling for the overthrow of the regime, but rather for constitutional political reforms. The demonstrators this week chanted their demands to reform the judiciary. When such basic, reasonable and non-violent demands are almost totally ignored across most of the Arab world, citizens have only a few options, including expressing themselves through digital social media or via pan-Arab satellite television, or taking to the streets. As with almost every other public protest throughout the world, the actual number of citizens on the street is not the most important factor.

It is irrelevant if 500 or 15,000 demonstrate one night; what matters is that groups of citizens speak out in public on a regular basis, and address their complaints directly to the national leaders. It is likely that those who do take to the streets — for instance, recently in Ukraine, Turkey, Thailand or Burma — represent much deeper and wider legitimate grievances in society that require a political resolution through dialogue, negotiations and credible representation and accountability.

Kuwait remains for me the most fascinating country in the Arab world today because the contestation its citizens pursue is purely political, rather than ethnic, sectarian, economic or social. This contestation also reflects grievances that have defined the entire Arab region for several generations now. Kuwait should be the breakthrough country in the Gulf that mirrors the constitutional advances that Tunisia achieved in North Africa — a peaceful transition to constitutional democratic pluralism that others will applaud and emulate across the region. Until then, Kuwait is an important country to follow and understand.
Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 July 2014
Word Count: 802
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BEIRUT—Any analyst or citizen of the countries of the Middle East quickly becomes dizzy these days in trying to find the start of a thread of ideas that could help explain the now cataclysmic chain of developments in Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Palestine-Israel, Egypt, Libya, Kurdistan and many other fractured and violent lands.

Well, seeking a single pattern that could explain all these different regional upheavals is a futile endeavor. Relevant markers—like Sykes-Picot, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the modern Arab oil-fueled, security-based development—explain some aspects of the current Arab turmoil, but they do not clarify how events may unfold in the years ahead.

There is no single thread that explains the turbulent Middle East today, no single map being redrawn, no one dominant force that motivates the actions of hundreds of millions of agitated people. The drivers that make individuals behave in certain ways are multiple and fluid, including economic needs, social stresses, sectarian fears, nationalist aspirations, material greed, religious protective actions, anti-colonial and anti-occupation resistance, and others.

The predominant lens of fragile statehood since the Sykes-Picot agreements fails to capture the two dominant dynamics that have shaped people’s behavior in this region for about 5,000 years—from the Early Bronze Age era when cities, city-states and regional proto-states started to take shape and provide individuals and families anchorage in larger units that ultimately became nation-states, empires or caliphates. I see these two dynamics as local interactions among tribes and sects for a stable political-economic order, and the disruptive impact of armies from abroad.

The prevailing impulse for individuals and families across the Middle East is elemental and universal (and secular, to boot): to survive, protect themselves, and provide for their family’s future well-being. For thousands of years—almost 10,000 years to be precise, since Natufian-era hunter-gatherers started to settle down into small, permanent year-round communities—families and larger communities have constantly done this by negotiating coexistence relationships with neighbors and foreign powers alike, or fighting them when needed.

Events in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon best capture how communal groups or individual families (as in central Iraq or northern Lebanon) make daily decisions on how they survive and increase their prospects for a better future. So alliances shift, enemies change, and solidarities and power relationships evolve month by month (e.g., the flexible political positions of the Druze community in Lebanon or Sunni tribes in central Iraq, who do what they must to survive local tensions or foreign invaders).

So one day a family takes up arms against American troops in Iraq, the next day the same family accepts cash from the American armed forces in order to fight a different foe—for a while. Down the road, the same family allows the vicious Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) to enter town, then turns against ISIS, or joins ISIS in fighting the Iraqi government, while being bombed by Syrian, Iranian, Iraqi and American troops. History and state sovereignty do not impress such actors. Millions of Arab, Kurdish and other families in this arena aim neither to reverse nor cement Sykes-Picot, but to make it through the day alive and to wake up tomorrow with some water and food within walking distance of their home. Late Stone Age Natufian rules never die out, it seems.

This week’s events of American President Obama sending another 200 troops to Iraq, or Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu bombing Gaza, or everyone in the region attacking ISIS are passing moments in this larger picture of the forces that will shape the future of this region: the micro-motivations and survival strategies of tens of millions of families and hundreds of thousands of communities that work to make it through the day, as they have made it through the millennia, by cooperating with both ISIS and American troops with the same ease, for the same purpose.

There is no single explanation or thread to insights into our future, other than this eclectic, unpredictable, wildly gyrating human will to survive that treats borders, invading armies and local rulers as just one more threat to resist or one more party with which to make a deal. The only new factor today is that we feel the impact of this collective will among hundreds of millions of people whose sentiments had been suppressed and ignored for centuries by the stifling rule of local, regional or foreign powers — sometimes all at the same time (as in the case of Palestinians or Kurds, for example).

The most useful and accurate analysis of Middle Eastern developments must be anchored in the force of its own people’s living legacies, rather than in the lingering orientalist and colonial fascination with long-dead, cognac-filled European amateur map-makers.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 July 2014
Word Count: 784
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BEIRUT—U.S. President Barack Obama’s latest request to Congress to provide $500 million in equipment and training to “appropriately vetted” moderate Syrian opposition forces will provoke lively debate on two issues: on whether this is too little, too late to influence events inside Syria, and on what exactly defines a “moderate” opposition force. These are both valid questions related to how non-Syrian powers work to bolster or topple Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime, and also how everyone deals with the growing threat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS).

One of the important recent developments in our region has seen the lingering, and very broadly Saudi-Iranian-led, ideological battle that has defined the Middle East for some years now transform into a single military battleground that stretches from Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Iran. The Iran-Syria-Hizbullah alliance—aligned with Prime Minister Noori Maliki in Iraq—has emerged victorious in recent years, which is why the Assad government remains firmly in place, if only in about one-third of the country.

That alliance is under pressure today, as Iran’s three partners in Arab Western Asia all face challenging new realities. Assad continues to hold onto power only by bombing and destroying parts of his country, Maliki’s incumbency in Iraq is in deep trouble and unlikely to persist, and Hizbullah is fighting inside Syria and may have to go to the aid of the Iraqi prime minister, creating new logistical and political challenges to a formidable organization that forged its credibility, legitimacy and power by defending Lebanon from Israeli aggression, not by fighting in other Arab countries.

All three of these Arab parties depend heavily on Iran for logistical, financial and political support, and all four of them face new vulnerabilities now that did not exist a year ago—or even three months ago, when considering the challenge to them all by the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS).

The sudden renewal in the past week of American military assistance to the Iraqi government and the anti-Assad Syrian rebels will do what foreign military interventions in Arab West Asia have done for millennia—they will exacerbate the political equation and intensify military action all around, leaving the region more scarred and brittle than it was before the fighting started, without resolving the underlying problems of incompetent and criminal governance that generated conflict in the first place.

Neither the United States nor Iran and their allies can control foreign lands for very long by relying primarily on military power; and despite their determination and large armies, neither of them can prevent the rise of militant fanatics like ISIS when prevailing governance and living conditions follow the pattern we have seen in recent decades across much of the Arab world. Every power has learned this lesson over and over again, including Syria in Lebanon, and the United States and Iran in Iraq.

The United States, Iran, Syria, Hizbullah and the Iraqi and other Arab governments will now effectively work together militarily to contain and push back ISIS troops, while simultaneously working politically to weaken each other. The weakness in the policies of both regional ideological camps is their misguided conviction that local actors in places like Tripoli, Lebanon, or Deir ez-Zor, Syria, or Fallujah, Iraq define themselves and respond politically to the same impulses that shape identities and interests in places like Qom and Kansas City. When Hizbullah and Iran move quickly to support their friends in Syria, and the United States and its allies move slowly, the result is what we have seen in Syria: Assad regime consolidation, but in ever-smaller territorial parts of the country, along with the birth of new and more dangerous fighting groups such as ISIS. Syria is not a victory that Iran and Hizbullah can brag about very loudly.

The critical criterion for success lays in the second issue I mentioned above, which is, from the United States’ perspective, how to define a “moderate” opposition group to support. This is a truly childish approach to waging ideological and military battle abroad, and guarantees failure, as we have seen in the recent trends in Syria-Iraq during the last three years.

The critical criterion for supporting a foreign group of fighters or politicians is local legitimacy, not “moderation” defined in distant lands. But legitimacy is an issue that the United States, Iran, Arab powers and all foreign armies ignore as they march into battles in foreign lands. This is why they leave behind such ravages and chaos when they march home a few years later, staggered and bewildered at the furies they encountered and the sandstorms and cultural forces that momentarily blinded them.

Moving decisively to bolster legitimate local forces breeds success; moving gingerly to identify people who will friend you on Facebook is really stupid.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 June 2014
Word Count: 800
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VILNIUS, Lithuania — In my desire to get a fresh perspective on the Middle East and also enjoy a white Christmas and New Year’s eve full of snow, my wife and I traveled to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and succeeded in achieving both aims, along with seeing some dear old friends. The view of Vilnius in the snow is enchanting, but the view back towards the Middle East is frightening. An end-of-year glance around the region suggests that — hard as it may be to believe — political conditions have deteriorated to a large extent in many parts of our region, and very few countervailing improvements can also be noted.

While existing conflicts and tensions in Palestine-Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, Sudan and Lebanon continue to plague those lands and ripple out to neighbors, I have no doubt that the single most troublesome new development during the past year has been the escalation of the fighting in Yemen. Almost imperceptibly, with little international media coverage, Yemen has transformed itself into a place where three different political or military contests are underway: the government vs. the Houthis, some secessionists in the south, and a growing Al-Qaeda network. Meanwhile the Saudi Arabian and American armed forces are directly engaged in warfare against two of them — Houthis and Al-Qaeda — and the Iranian government is increasingly weighing in on the side of the Houthis.

Here in one package, at the end of this year we have all the major tension points of the contemporary Middle East converging in a single time and place — Al-Qaeda vs. everyone in the world, Iran vs. Arabs, the United States vs. Al-Qaeda, Shiites vs. Sunnis, rich Arabs vs. poor Arabs, and the failing centralized modern Arab security state vs. it indigenous tendency to disintegrate into tribal or regional units.

Just when we thought things could not get any worse in the Middle East, they do. This should not surprise anyone, because this has been the pattern for over three decades — ever since the combination of the 1967 war results and the advent of the oil boom in the early 1970s cemented the modern Arab security state order, Israeli colonial policies, direct American military involvement to protect the global energy reservoir, and the slow disintegration of Arab citizens’ expectations that they had rights provided to them by their state and government.

The fighting and ideological confrontations in Yemen are only the latest and most glaring examples of the wider underlying forces of tension that continue to plague the Middle East. The year now ending is not only a sad one that generates concern; it should also be a learning experience to help us probe why the Arab world persists as the only collectively turbulent and non-democratic region in the world. In that respect, 2009 highlights the three principal issues that drive the conflicts that continue to proliferate across the region.

In my view, these three vectors of turbulence and conflict are, in their order of importance:
1) the brittle states that define the modern Arab order, with their fundamental autocracy, occasional illegitimacies, prevalent corruption and mismanagement, and widespread mediocrity in meeting citizen needs;
2) the persistent direct or indirect interference of foreign powers, militarily, economically and politically; and,
3) the impact of the Arab-Israeli conflict on public opinion and state policies alike.

It is not mere coincidence that the year ended with an attempted attack on an American civilian airliner over Detroit, committed by a Nigerian former student in London who apparently prepared for his crime via links with an Al-Qaeda-related group in Yemen. The gravity of the attempted crime and the complex web of relationships that allowed it to reach implementation point cannot be explained by any single or simple reason, whether related to the psychology of a single young man, the foreign policy of a single country, or the pressures on citizens of any one Middle Eastern or African country.

The end of 2009 sees the United States actively involved in four wars — in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. If this is not a wake-up call for Americans, I do not know what is. But it is a greater wake-up call for the people of the Arab world themselves, who remain fractured and in disarray due to their own domestic national incoherence and also the persistent need among many to actively resist American-Israeli policies and those of some allied conservative Arab governments.

This year ends with Yemen and Detroit beckoning us to try harder and act smarter in understanding the root causes of our wars, conflicts and profound irrationalities and excesses, reflected in our common savageries: Arabs oppressing and killing each other and trying to kill civilians in distant lands, Israelis colonizing and killing Arabs, or American armed forces attacking and killing simultaneously in four distant lands. Unraveling the madness starts with connecting the dots, because these are not isolated, unrelated dynamics.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 December 2009
Word Count: 812
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BEIRUT — A year after the Israeli attack on Gaza, a scorecard of “winners and losers” suggests that nobody won anything, but Israel has probably suffered political losses that it could not have envisioned when it decided to invade Gaza. I count seven main aims that Israel had in mind when it launched its war a year ago and tightened its siege of Gaza; one of them was achievable without a war, and the six others have not been achieved, or have turned things to Hamas’ and the Palestinians’ favor.

Here is my review of where things stand a year after the Gaza war:

1) Israel’s first aim was to stop the small projectiles fire that was directed at southern Israel from Gaza. Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups had twice stopped firing projectiles at Israel from Gaza in the two years before the war, according to the terms of truce accords that had been negotiated. The idea that a war was needed to stop the attacks is Zionist lying and deception at their worst, given that the attacks had been stopped through nonviolent agreements that saw Israel also cease its much more vicious and destructive attacks against Gaza.

2) Israel’s second unaccomplished aim was to try and destroy much of Hamas’ military and political infrastructure, and weaken it as a movement to be reckoned with. Hamas remains firmly in control of governance in Gaza, and a major national and regional actor. The greatest irony is that Israel has intensified its negotiations with Hamas, through German intermediation, to release the Israeli war prisoner Gilad Shalit.

3) The third Israeli aim was to force a weakened and chastened Hamas to release Shalit on terms advantageous to Israel, but the opposite is happening now. Israel’s stepped-up negotiations to release Shalit only strengthen Hamas’ credentials as a movement that resists Israel and thus generates more respect and credibility for itself. The imminent prisoner exchange will be a tacit admission by Israel that its military tactics failed, and it must engage Hamas politically instead.

4) Israel’s fourth aim was to weaken Hamas’ standing in Palestinian society and strengthen the standing of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The war resulted in exactly the opposite effect: Abbas has been grievously weakened by his Fateh movement’s behavior during and after the war, to the point where he has had to admit that he will not run for re-election.

5) The fifth Israeli aim was to re-establish its deterrence power and political supremacy over the Palestinians and other Arabs, as it had tried to do in attacking Lebanon in 2006. Israel assumed that unleashing its massive military power to kill and maim thousands of civilians and destroy normal life would cause frightened and chastened Palestinians and fellow Arabs to comply meekly with Israeli demands. This has not happened. The Arabs even refused to make even symbolic gestures of coexistence to Israel when US President Barack Obama asked for these in exchange for an Israeli settlement freeze.

6) Israel’s sixth aim was to reassert its self-confident political posture and sense of supremacy in the international community. The exact opposite has happened in the past year, as reflected in five dynamics: The international movement to boycott and divest from Israeli investments has gained steam; Israel is increasingly ignominiously compared to Apartheid South Africa; the Goldstone Report by the UN Human Rights Council struck a severe blow to Israel’s sense of invincibility and exemption from complying with international law dictates; Israeli officials are more hesitant to travel abroad for fear of being detained and indicted for war crimes; and, hardline pro-Israeli lobby groups in the United States and Europe are increasingly being challenged and subjected to public scrutiny.

7) Israel has tightened its strangulation siege of Gaza, hoping to force the Palestinians to surrender. The opposite has happened. The most important new development during the last year has been the world’s repeated negative assessment of Israel’s behavior, and calls for international political action to rein in Zionist military and colonial excesses. The latest example of this was the report three days ago by 16 British humanitarian and human rights organizations (including Amnesty International, Oxfam International, and Christian Aid) asking the European Union to commit itself to ending the blockade of Gaza and to put its relations with Israel on hold to achieve this.

Israel militarily attacked and laid siege to Gaza, but a year after its war Israel now finds itself under political siege by much of the world. Some Israel political and military leaders should not only be investigated for war crimes; to judge by the balance sheet of Israel’s standing a year after it attacked Gaza, they should also be held accountable by the Israeli and Jewish people for massive political incompetence and outright stupidity.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 December 2009
Word Count: 796
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BEIRUT — The coming week will see the close of one of the most dramatic decades in recent global history, and much of the action — mostly for worse — has taken place in the Middle East region. A journalistic colleague from Europe asked me the other day whether I agreed that nothing much had changed in the Middle East since 2001, because the region continues to be dominated by autocratic and dictatorial leaders and the rippling tensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict persist.

I disagreed, suggesting that the events of Sept. 11, 2001 and their aftermath had brought about significant changes in the region, and mostly negative ones.

The most important single policy change, which has impacted many other sectors, has been the normalization of foreign military powers entering the region and attacking at will, under the guise of responding to the 9/11 terror attack against the United States. American and British armies lead the way in Iraq and Afghanistan. The militarization and globalization of local tensions in Palestine, Lebanon, Somalia and Yemen in recent years reflect the latest phase of this process.

Parallel to Anglo-American militarization of the region has been deep Western acquiescence in Israel’s aggressive and deadly policies towards Palestinians and other Arabs. The two savage wars Israel launched against Lebanon and Gaza in 2006 and 2008 are central episodes in the new regional landscape of the past decade, which now includes Israel’s continuing siege of Gaza.

Western militarization in our region also translates into broad support for local autocrats and security-minded regimes that run roughshod over their people’s rights. This hardening of Arab security regimes and political dictatorships responds to short-term foreign aims, but betrays the hollowness of the Western (and occasional Arab) rhetoric about promoting democracy and human rights in the Middle East.

This American-led militarization of Middle Eastern policy reflects a deeper problem, which is the broad inability of the United States and other Western powers to develop a coherent policy towards the scourge of terrorism. As the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan now show, anti-American sentiments have increased among many people in those lands where American troops have attacked and stayed for years. The terrorism problem is also bigger today than it was in 2000, and more difficult to defeat, due to the proliferation and localization of terror groups that are often inspired by Al-Qaeda types but also motivated by the presence of foreign armies.

The natural military resistance against invading armies spills over to aggravate political threats to the integrity and stability in some countries, where the legitimacy and efficacy of the central state and its government may not resonate deeply with all citizens. Many Middle Eastern countries are now much more polarized than they were ten years ago, as tough security-minded governments tend to concentrate their controls on smaller areas of the country. The cumulative integrity and stability of Middle Eastern countries are less impressive now than they were a decade ago.

A third major change in the past decade has been the expanding influence of Iran throughout the region, which was seriously accelerated by the Anglo-American destruction of Iraq’s Baathist regime. Iran’s penetration of the Arab world has made it a major player in the region, and has helped shape a new regional Cold War that has sharply divided the Middle East into two ideological camps that occasionally battle each other militarily — either directly (Lebanon, Palestine) or through proxies (Yemen, Somalia, Iraq).

A fourth important development has been large-scale popular and political resistance to American-led policies that often include Israel and conservative Arab regimes. The massive use of American military power and political arm-twisting has triggered an equally meaningful response by once docile Arab, Iranian and Turkish populations that reject being victims of foreign militarism and neo-colonialism. Islamist groups like Hamas and Hizbullah tend to lead such forces, but others are also involved. This resistance helps define the regional Cold War. It has also triggered counter-resistance against it from many quarters of society that do not relish an Islamist-, Iranian- or Syrian-led Arab world — resulting, for example, in the Saad Hariri-led election victory in Lebanon last summer.

The fifth significant new factor in our region is the expansion of Turkish influence and contacts, which is mostly a positive development. Government policies and public opinion in Turkey both reflect key trends in the Arab world, including rejecting American and Israeli policies when these are seen to be inappropriate for Turkish national interests.

Our region has changed significantly in the past decade, mostly for the worse. This is a good time to reflect on the causes of our deterioration, so that we and our leaders do not collectively act like buffoons and simply perpetuate the mistakes that have defined our inauspicious start of this third millennium.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 December 2009
Word Count: 796
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BEIRUT — An important global dynamic today bridges the worlds of politics, morality and violence. Societies are grappling with the challenge of how to hold accountable the political leaders who are accused of various degrees of criminal behavior, including war crimes, torture — even genocide or crimes against humanity. The most outrageous cases are tried in special international tribunals or at the International Criminal Court. Other cases reflect more contested situations and raise critical issues of the universality of ethics and law.

Two cases last week in the United States and Israel are interesting in this respect, because these two countries remind us twice a week — and more often in war time and on patriotic national holidays — that they are democracies whose values should be spread around the world. Well, the world at the receiving end of their moral munificence frequently asks an important question to which it has yet to receive a clear answer:

Are the United States and Israel subject to the same standards of accountability for their behavior as everyone else in the world, or do they operate at a higher plane of impunity when it comes to using violence to kill, torture, and invade or occupy other peoples?

The relevant Israeli case saw Kadima Party leader Tzipi Livni cancel a trip to London because an arrest warrant had been issued for her by pro-Palestinian activists. They accused her of war crimes and crimes against humanity for her alleged role during Israel’s military assault on Gaza one year ago, when she was foreign minister. They want her to stand trial on charges that her decisions led to the deaths of over 750 Palestinian civilians.

Livni’s cancellation follows a similar case two months ago, when Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon did not travel to London on the advice of legal experts in his government, who warned him that he could possibly find himself arrested and put on trial for his part in a 2002 Israeli bombing raid against Gaza that killed 15 people (when he was armed forces chief of staff). Some Palestinians petitioned a court in London in September to arrest Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak for his role in the Gaza war, but that court decided that Barak enjoyed diplomatic immunity.

The fact that senior Israeli officials think twice about traveling abroad for fear of being indicted on war crimes charges is a positive development — if they are given a fair trial, and if the same standards of criminal culpability are used to assess the behavior of leaders in all other countries.

In the United States, courts similarly are weighing whether officials can or should be held accountable for their actions during the George W. Bush administration in cases of alleged torture and mistreatment of prisoners that the US captured during the “global war on terror.”

A US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco this week considered a case that claimed five victims of “extraordinary rendition” and torture were criminally mistreated. The court will decide whether to allow a full trial to take place, or accept arguments of the Bush and Obama administrations that the executive branch can stop any such legal cases on the basis of “national security” concerns.

Critics of the US government’s behavior argue that the courts are the last resort for limiting or ending the government’s use of kidnapping, secret detention, abuse and torture to address national security issues. Accountability, they argue, not impunity, is the appropriate response in this case. Various court levels in the United States offer slightly different responses. The Supreme Court seemed to support the government last week when it let stand a federal appeals court ruling that had dismissed a lawsuit by four British citizens at the Guantánamo Bay prison who accused the US government of wrongly arresting, detaining and mistreating them.

This line of thinking suggests that “enhanced interrogation techniques” can be used when the government feels the need to do so in the battle against terrorism. The charges accused the US government of using procedures like prolonged sleep and food deprivation, forcing prisoners into stress positions, sexual humiliation, death threats, simulated drowning (water-boarding), repeated beatings, extremes of hot and cold, forced nakedness, interrogations at gun point, menacing with unmuzzled dogs, and religious and racial harassment — actions that have been clearly documented in congressional reports and Justice Department memos. The issue is whether they are acceptable behavior, or criminal actions for which the officials who ordered them should be held accountable.

If strong, aggressive military powers like the United States and Israel remain above the law, then the law becomes meaningless for everyone else. Holding the US and Israel accountable like everyone else, according to a single, equitable standard of justice and behavior, is the best way to spread the democratic values they otherwise disdain when they claim to be immune from such accountability.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 December 2009
Word Count: 807
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BEIRUT — A brief news item in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) a few days ago made depressing reading. It was entitled: “State Department blames Goldstone for stalled peace talks.”

“Wow!” I thought to myself, has it really come down to this? The United States and Israel, who do not hesitate to toot their horn about their democratic credentials, now blame the stalled Arab-Israeli peace-making process on the publication of the report on the potential war crimes of the Gaza war issued in September by the UN Human Rights Council enquiry commission headed by Judge Richard Goldstone?

It is hard to think of a more distorted and backwards brand of political morality than this American-Israeli view of the Goldstone report, which most of the world sees as a historic breakthrough in the elusive quest to apply international norms of accountability to the savagery that has come to define Arab-Israeli warfare.

The JTS report noted:

The Goldstone report drove the Israelis and Palestinians apart, a U.S. State Department official said. The aside by Assistant U.S. Secretary of State P.J. Crowley in a briefing for reporters Tuesday was the clearest signal of U.S. frustration with the United Nations Human Rights Council report into last winter’s Gaza war, authored by South African Justice Richard Goldstone, that recommended war crimes charges against Israel and Hamas.

“It’s not a failure, because the process isn’t over,” Crowley said of Palestinian-Israel talks. “The process is ongoing. But clearly, in the aftermath of the Goldstone report, we’ve seen this fairly substantial gap emerge, and we’re seeing what we can do to move both sides closer to a decision to enter into negotiations.”

After its publication in September, Israel insisted on quashing the report as a precondition for going forward with the peace process; the Palestinian Authority has insisted it be addressed.

If the US position truly is that the fairly substantial gap in peacemaking has emerged “in the aftermath of the Goldstone report,” then we have three enormous problems on hand that are certain to doom any prospect of serious peace negotiations in the near future. Instead, we are much more likely to witness a new round of warfare, though it is difficult to know where that will be (the likely prospects are Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, Lebanon and Iran).

The three problems are the illusions that peacemaking is actually going on and has stalled; that the Goldstone Report is an obstacle to peacemaking; and that — in this instance, at least — the United States is an impartial mediator that seeks the best interests of Israelis and Arabs by trying to promote negotiations on the basis of prevailing international law and norms.

The Goldstone Report is a challenging document for all concerned, no doubt, but the attempt to align the conduct of states at war with agreed international ethical standards always is. The report is important because it provides several essential and constructive elements that have been missing from recent Arab-Israeli peace-making attempts, and are glaringly absent from the American desire to shape diplomatic mediation in its own image and interests. These elements are:

• An impartial assessment of the conduct of both warring parties in the Gaza war by a respected third party;
• Assessing both warring parties’ conduct simultaneously against the same standards of established international humanitarian law and human rights law;
• Demanding that those who wage war indiscriminately be held accountable and not be allowed to kill and maim with impunity;
• Proposing escalating mechanisms of accountability to end impunity through established international forums if the parties do not seriously investigate the charges against them.

Such a balanced attempt to use the rule of law as a means to blunt the scourge of war, siege and terror against civilians is admirable, and should be promoted as vigorously as possible, especially if the process is anchored in international legitimacy and conducted by respected men and women. The United States and Israel appear sick as they keep attacking the Goldstone Report as the purported reason for the breakdown of the peace negotiations, when the reality is that these negotiations have been going nowhere for decades under the weight of continued Israeli colonization of Arab lands that remains impervious to any Arab or international pressure.

The United States and Israel do not seem to care if their position runs against the grain of the rest of the world’s thinking. They seem comfortable smashing the global commitment to the rule of law, in order to protect the American-Israeli penchant for military supremacy as the only law that matters. For two countries that work overtime to market their democratic credentials, it seems hypocritical at best, and criminal at worst, to lead such a frenzied assault on the first serious and credible attempt in modern history to hold Israelis and Palestinians equally accountable for their conduct in war.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 December 2009
Word Count: 804
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BEIRUT — While US President Barack Obama has not been able to secure a total freeze of Israeli settlements, several European governments and the European Union (EU) collectively have undertaken a series of measures related to Israeli colonization policies in the occupied West Bank that are worth noting. The increasing focus on the criminality of Israel’s colonization in some Western countries may represent a new point of pressure that — like the international boycott of South Africa — could ultimately push Israel to a more responsible and realistic political response to the criticisms of its colonialism.

Three separate incidents lead me to suggest this:

• The Norwegian government decided to withdraw its investments from an Israeli firm that is involved in construction of Israel’s Apartheid wall (or separation barrier, as it is more euphemistically called) in the West Bank.

• The Swedes drafted a resolution to the EU last week affirming East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, which was watered down to a call by the EU to Palestinians and Israelis to share the city.

• The British government decided last week to change food labeling guidelines to indicate if goods originate from Palestinian producers or Israeli settlements and colonies.

The Norwegian decision is the most powerful because of its decisiveness, ethical clarity, and political self-confidence. Norway announced in September that its national pension fund would no longer invest in the Israeli company Elbit Systems because the fund’s council on ethics believed that such an investment “constitutes an unacceptable risk of contribution to serious violations of fundamental ethical norms as a result of the company’s integral involvement in Israel’s construction of a separation barrier on occupied territory” in the West Bank. The company provides a surveillance system for use in the Apartheid Wall.

“We do not wish to fund companies that so directly contribute to violations of international humanitarian law,” Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen said, explaining the Norwegian decision. “The surveillance system has been specially designed in close collaboration with the buyer and has no other applications.”

How refreshing! A respectable Western country actually puts its money where its mouth is, by using ethical guidelines to define its investments, and is not afraid to stand up to the sort of political blackmail and pressure that Israel and its goons in Washington and London typically apply to intimidate those governments from pursuing ethical foreign policies.

The council on ethics was established in 2004, “to issue recommendations on the exclusion of one or more companies from the investment universe where there is deemed to exist a considerable risk of contributing to actions or omissions that involve: Gross or systematic violation of human rights, such as murder, torture, deprivation of liberty, forced labor, the worst forms of child labor and other forms of child exploitation; gross violations of individual rights in war or conflict situations; severe environmental degradation; gross corruption, or other particularly serious violations of fundamental ethical norms.”

The fund held around $6 million worth of Elbit shares and sold them just before announcing the decision to divest.

Norway’s fellow Europeans fall short of its moral clarity and political self-confidence, but nevertheless they are making small but meaningful steps in that direction — which should worry Israel. The latest move was the decision by the British government to have food labels distinguish goods from Palestinians in the occupied territories from goods produced in Israeli settlements — rather than merely stating that the source is “Israel” or the “West Bank.” The government said it opposed boycotting Israeli goods, but took this move because it sees the settlements as an obstacle to peace.

The British decision is a step forward, though it is disappointing that the British government will not take a more forceful position on the clear illegality in international law of Israel’s colonies. Great Britain could have struck a doubly redemptive blow for itself and its muddy historical legacy, given that it was a premier pioneer in both its own colonial empire spread around the world and the Zionist enterprise that colonized the land of Palestine which had been 95 percent Arab a century ago.

The third noteworthy move is similarly significant but not overwhelmingly so — the EU’s statement that Palestinians and Israelis should share Jerusalem. The original Swedish draft asserting Arab East Jerusalem as occupied land and the capital of a future Palestinian state would have been the more forceful, ethical and politically courageous thing to do, but it seems that this is rarely the European way these days.

Nevertheless, these and other smaller steps are worth noting because they all tend to acknowledge the illegal or problematic nature of Israeli policies, which is likely to increase the pressure on Israel to change those policies, just as happened in South Africa a few decades ago.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 December 2009
Word Count: 799
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