The rapid-fire events and widespread violence that started in Sheikh Jarrah and spread to all Palestine and Israel this week seem like just another round of the same dynamics we have witnessed for decades: An occupied Arab population resists a powerful Israeli occupier that uses disproportionate military force in Gaza and Jerusalem that results in hundreds killed and wounded.

But this week is different.

It stands apart from anything that has come before; but it also reflects and repeats everything that has come before in the century-long Palestinian-Israeli and Arabism-Zionism conflicts.

Everything of consequence that has happened since 1920 also happened this week — from Israel’s massive military attacks, sieges, and ethnic cleansing of civilians by force or judicial decrees in order to judaize Jerusalem, to popular resistance by Palestinian civilians, military resistance by Hamas in Gaza, and clashes and lynchings between Arab and Jewish Israelis.

None of this is new, nor are the spontaneous popular rallies of support for Palestinians across the region and the world, or even a few joint rallies by Arab and Jewish Israelis demanding coexistence with equal rights.

But this week is different.

For along with the military, political, demographic and civilian events we are used to witnessing, new elements on the scene indicate that this may be the beginning of a historic turning point in the Arabism-Zionism conflict that has spanned three centuries — since the birth of the Zionist movement in 1897 to create a Jewish state in Palestine.

This week is different and also significant because four new elements have emerged that could change the course of events in the years ahead.

The first important development is that Israel and the word “apartheid” are now routinely mentioned together in discussions around the region and the world.

This is Zionism’s nightmare, because all Israel’s nuclear bombs and American support are helpless in the face of an anti-Israeli apartheid global struggle that would mimic the mobilisation that ended the white South African apartheid system three decades ago.

Recent Israeli and international reports by the Israeli group B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch verified Israel’s apartheid system that many have only hinted at to date. The apartheid word was used because of Israel’s systematic and institutional discrimination against Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, live under its occupation, or have been refugees in exile since the creation of the state in 1948.

Second, this common global coupling of Israeli policies with apartheid is troubling for Israel because of two growing international trends: popular demonstrations this week across the entire world supporting Palestinian rights, and the expanding global support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement by Palestinian civil society to pressure Israel non-violently for its persecution of Palestinians.

The Palestine issue now stands in the global popular political consciousness alongside the three other big international issues — climate change, Black Lives Matter, and women’s equality. Israel and Zionists should be concerned, because their ability to hide their colonial and racist crimes against Palestinians is now exposed for all to see and to counter politically.

The third historic new development this week has seen Palestinian men and women appearing in the global mainstream and social media to tell their own story — no longer filtered by gatekeepers who have allowed the Israeli narrative to dominate the world’s public sphere for the past century.

This started when Palestinians — often in real time social media video — showed the world Zionist and Israeli state practices of ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem.

More importantly, Palestinians routinely explain to the world that Zionist armed gangs before 1948 and the Israeli state since then have practiced such forced evictions and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian civilians for the past century, in order to make room for Jewish immigrants.

The fourth and most important new dynamic this week has seen these three elements above combine to force a global public discussion of how the settler-colonial practices that Israel is using in Sheikh Jarrah have been used by the Zionist movement and the state of Israel since their inception over a century ago.

Interested people around the world, who wonder why Israelis and Palestinians re-ignite their battle every few years in ever more destructive forms, can see for the first time ever this week on their television or computer screens how it happened. How the 1897 Zionist settler-colonial project succeeded in creating the Israeli state in 1947 on land from which it forcibly expelled Palestinians, and continues to expand with new colonies and settlements in occupied Arab lands.

The moves by state-supported Israeli thugs to remove Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah in order to judaize that part of occupied East Jerusalem have been a real-time living lesson in the colonial subjugation of Palestinians. The world now clearly sees Israel’s ethnic cleansing as illegal under international law, and how major western powers’ support and quiet or acquiescent attitudes empower it.

Zionist leaders in 1915-1947 successfully lobbied the British world power then to give them a homeland-to-become-a-state in a 93 percent Arab Palestine; Israel since 1948 has mobilised the US global power to support it fully and not question its predatory brutality against Palestine and other Arab lands, such as the occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

But this week is different.

For never before since 1897 has international attention to events in Palestine included continuous discussions about the role of Zionist colonial and apartheid policies in bringing the region to today’s stage of recurring wars.

Never before has the US Congress seen what it witnessed on May 13, 2021, when a string of newly elected Congressmen and women spoke out for a US policy that treated Israelis and Palestinians equally.

And never before has international media coverage included so many references to seeking peace by redressing the colonial injustices of 1915-1948 that replaced a mostly Palestinian Arab land with a mostly Jewish Zionist Israel.

Israel Friday experienced the nightmare of its own making. As Palestinians in all of historic Palestine together resisted Israeli aggressions, thousands in Jordan and Lebanon symbolically crossed the borders into Israel, and tens of thousands marched in solidarity in foreign capitals

Everywhere speakers called for sanctions and boycotts against Israeli apartheid. Zionism and Israel now faces the threat they feared most — united Palestinians everywhere resist Zionist aggression, identify it as a colonial apartheid system, and enjoy expanding international popular support.

When the fighting ends in this round, it is likely that the four dramatic new developments in the battle between Zionism and Arabism that reared their faces this week will impact attempts to resolve this long-running conflict, by finally addressing seriously the two related forces that still shape it: the colonial apartheid nature of Israel’s policies, and the nonstop quest for justice by the Palestinians.

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

—————-

Released: 17 May 2021

Word Count: 1,120

—————-

CAMBRIDGE, MA — The United States Director of National Intelligence’s release Friday of the classified report on the CIA-led investigation of the murder of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi marks a critical moment of decision for the U.S. government — but also for others around the world who have long acquiesced in the brutality of Arab and other authoritarian regimes.

The report does not offer any new evidence that had not previously leaked about individuals and offices linked directly to the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who played roles in the murder. Its importance is that it provides the most conclusive and credible proof yet of the Crown Prince’s direct complicity in the pre-meditated and gruesome assassination, and it forces many individuals and governments to make a decision they had long put off: Do they sanction the Saudi Arabian crown prince and government for this criminal act, or do they just make symbolic gestures to express their disapproval and continue their political, commercial, and security relations with this leading Arab country?

A Saudi Arabian assassination squad, with several members who were in the crown prince’s entourage or worked with him, flew to Istanbul in October 2018 in two private jets owned by a company controlled by the crown prince. They killed Khashoggi then dismembered his body, which has never been found. The government lied about the murder, then in the face of evidence made available in Turkey it finally admitted that Khashoggi had died in a Saudi arrest operation gone bad, but which had nothing to do with the crown prince.

The DNI report’s conclusion is based on the CIA assessment on the crown prince’s

“control of decision-making in the kingdom, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of [Mohammed bin Salman’s] protective detail in the operation, and support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi”.

The report concluded unambiguously,

“We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”

The fact that the killers took a bone saw with them suggests that murder was in their mind from the start. The U.S. report follows the work in 2019 of United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions Agnès Callamard, whose six-month-long investigation of the murder concluded that Saudi Arabia was involved in a “deliberate, premeditated execution” of Khashoggi.

“There is sufficient credible evidence regarding the responsibility of the crown prince demanding further investigation,” she said.

The combination of the CIA and Callamard assessments now forces the U.S. government in the first instance to decide how it will move ahead in its relations with the Saudi kingdom, which the Biden administration has said it seeks to “reassess” and “recalibrate.” The U.S. government quickly announced Friday afternoon that it will sanction and restrict the entry into the U.S. of individuals who were part of the murder plot or who were involved in targeting, harassing, or surveilling dissidents and journalists in other countries.

These seem like mild actions that have been taken often against other countries without deterring criminal deeds. Yet the mention of acting firmly if Saudi Arabia takes actions against its dissident nationals abroad is new and perhaps significant, because targeted dissidents freely share facts with foreign intelligence and political agencies that help build a strong case against Arab tyrants.

An important reason to act firmly now against the Saudis is that their actions are typical of many other autocratic Arab regimes who look up to the Riyadh government. The entire region will pay a terrible price if a case as clear cut as the culpability of the Saudi crown prince here is not punished severely. For if his criminal and brutal deeds inside and beyond his own country continue to happen, the Arab region will keep spinning out of control into hellholes of gangster states and mafias where human life has little value and citizens have no rights.

What action to take is the big question that the U.S. and other governments must answer quickly, along with the private sector and international organizations that work with Saudi Arabia. Ideas being discussed include stronger sanctions against individuals, isolating political leaders from diplomatic engagements, launching a more rigorous international investigation into the accusations against the Saudi crown prince, and reducing commercial and military ties with the kingdom.

The problem, though, is that it will be extremely difficult to remove Mohammed bin Salman from his position as crown prince, given his strongman’s total grip on security, economic, information, and political power centers in the country. His father King Salman also is not in good health and may or may not be capable of dealing with the repercussions of his son and heir’s apparent criminal behavior. Most of Mohammed bin Salman’s domestic and foreign policies have failed, especially the Qatar blockade and the war in Yemen. To make things worse, he has achieved the dubious feat of turning a once low-key monarchy into yet another brutal Arab authoritarian society where no one dares speak their mind for fear of jail or death — following the model of the late Saddam Hussein or Moammar Gaddafi.

The most important reaction we should look for is probably inside Saudi Arabia, among the thousands of royal family members and the economic and security elite. However displeased or even ashamed many Saudis may be about seeing their country and leaders blackballed for their criminal murder plot and repeatedly lying about it, they have no means to express themselves in the kingdom. Well encrypted and anonymous social media are an option (but it is likely that with the assistance of their pals Israel and the United Arab Emirates, the Saudi security agencies have preemptively plugged any likely route for citizens to express their views).

International pressure is crucial to reduce or end such criminal behavior by Arab officials, but also to offer some hope for ordinary Arab men and women that they might anticipate a future in which they are more than the mere sheep and donkeys that they now feel like. The Saudi and other existing Arab judicial systems will not do this, as the Saudi case indicates. A Saudi Arabian security court convicted eight men for murdering Khashoggi, and five were sentenced to death. Their punishments were later commuted, allegedly because members of the Khashoggi family forgave the killers.

Ms. Callamard noted after her investigation that the Saudi trial represented “the antithesis of justice,” and other leading international human rights organizations said the same thing.

 

Rami G. Khouri is Director of Global Engagement at the American University of Beirut, a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an executive board member of the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies. He tweets @ramikhouri

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

—————-

Released: 26 February 2021

Word Count: 1,088

—————-

The floodgates of unsolicited foreign policy advice for the Biden administration are now wide open. Some sensible individuals offer useful suggestions. However, much of the advice is coming from former US government officials who participated in creating the very foreign quagmires they now audaciously propose to fix. Their policy prescriptions often reflect a serious lack of understanding of international issues that prioritises agendas pushed by domestic and foreign lobbies and narrow US goals over effective diplomacy.

I prefer to stay out of the policy advice game, and instead, only highlight a few enduring principles that might be useful in strengthening any major power’s foreign policy. This applies mostly to governments whose aggressive policies in the Middle East, defined by militarism, threats, sanctions, muscle-flexing, and self-congratulatory delusions of divinely sanctioned exceptionalism, have proven to be counterproductive and even dangerous.

Keeping in mind the history of American and European colonial powers’ domination of the region, I suggest four principles that would allow US foreign policy to make a difference and help resolve some of the crises the region faces.

The rule of law

Foreign policy towards the region must show respect for the international rule of law. Foreign powers create their own rules for how they behave in our region. They tend to ignore international law and norms when it suits them because they feel that power overrides rules and they have more power than Middle Eastern states.

This applies to military assaults, like the wars in Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Syria. It is also valid when principles, such as freedom of speech, individual rights, nuclear non-proliferation, international justice and the right to anti-colonial struggle, have to be upheld. Today, for example, the entire world is watching closely the proceedings at the International Criminal Court regarding war crimes allegations in Israel and Palestine to see if international legal norms and accountability mechanisms are applied equally to Arabs and Israelis.

The arbitrary violation of international laws and rules by foreign powers has created so many of the crises the Middle East currently suffers from. To alleviate them international rule of law must be upheld.

Equal rights for Arabs and Israelis

Over the past century, in Western foreign policy towards the region, Israeli rights and aggressive Zionist ideology have enjoyed priority over Palestinian and Arab rights. Britain’s criminal duplicity, deception, and self-serving colonialism of 1915-1948 set the stage for a cruel century of Western powers consistently acquiescing to Zionist demands while trampling over Arab rights. This allowed the Zionist project to establish full control over historic Palestine, despite the fact that at the turn of the century Palestinian Arabs owned and inhabited 93 percent of its land.

If this principle continues to shape US and other foreign policies in our region, we can only expect continued popular resentment and resistance against both foreign powers and complicit Arab leaders.

It is time that the West understand that there is no need to continue this skewed policy because the Arab countries have all clearly and repeatedly expressed their willingness to coexist in peace and equality with a Jewish-majority Israel. The door to a negotiated permanent peace agreement is before us all, if only all sides viewed Arabs and Israelis as equal.

Only stick, no carrot?

Militarism, sanctions, and threats have increasingly become the main instruments of policy-making towards the Middle East, while dialogue, diplomacy, and compromise have often remained on the back burner. Because of its enormous military power, Washington is inclined to use it as a primary policy instrument.

But the high human cost and military failures of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, as well as the global “war on terror”, have demonstrated how ineffective brute force can be in resolving conflict. Military assaults, threats, and sanctions have wreaked havoc and instability in the region and deepened and prolonged its many crises.

By contrast, the successful negotiations that resulted in the Iran nuclear deal during the Obama administration remind us how effective serious diplomacy and mutual respect can be in resolving disputes and regional tensions.

The rights and needs of citizens

For far too long Western foreign policy towards the region has ignored the rights, needs, and sentiments of the Middle East’s ordinary citizens. Instead, it has solely engaged the elites, enriching them and serving their narrow clientelist interests.

If Arab citizens are treated as invisible people who have neither voice nor legitimacy, it should not be surprising that these same hundreds of millions of men and women support and partake in the ongoing uprisings across the region to evict their ruling elites.

The events of the past two decades confirm that as the majority of people steadily become poorer, more vulnerable, marginalised, and helpless, they ultimately turn against their leaders who are responsible for their plight. The rupture between citizens and most Arab governments is a recent, post-1980s, phenomenon, and it continues to worsen.

This has frightened some Arab leaders who are now embracing Israel as a way to secure American support and protection. Foreign powers which embrace corrupt and inefficient Arab leaders and promote normalisation of Arab-Israeli ties before the Palestinians secure their rights harm the wellbeing and trample the dignity of hundreds of millions of Arab citizens. This is a sure recipe for disaster.

If the Biden administration wants to leave a positive mark on the history of this region, it should learn the lessons of past failures and overhaul American foreign policy to affirm law, diplomacy, respect, and equality. These principles define the foundations of American life and democracy. They should also shape its foreign policy towards the Middle East and the rest of the world.

Rami G. Khouri is Director of Global Engagement and an adjunct professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an executive board member of the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies. He tweets @ramikhouri. (This article appeared originally at AlJazeera.)

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

—————-

Released: 19 February 2021

Word Count: 940

—————-

Lebanon and its citizens have endured many hardships in recent years. The past 12 months alone have witnessed cumulative pain from multiple directions — economic collapse, political stalemate, the Beirut port explosion, an ongoing citizen rebellion against the ruling elite, and the stubborn impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two dimensions of Lebanon’s condition today are especially striking, however, and augur more difficult times ahead. First, Lebanon has become just another pauperized and increasingly militarized Arab country whose citizens rebel against state authorities. Simultaneously, the regional and international powers that once engaged in it for their own purposes seem less interested in saving it from its self-inflicted decline.

The most striking consequence of these dynamics is that Lebanon has lost its once distinct status as a society that stood apart from other Arab countries that were mostly centralized autocracies. Ever since its birth a century ago, Lebanon had been the region’s leader in endeavors that required the full use of the human mind and cultural spirit — press, education, research, banking, theater, publishing, advertising, cinema, art, and other activities. These flourished because the country’s cultural and religious pluralism allowed what no other Arab country provided: enough space for the individual Lebanese to develop his or her full talents, in a free and dynamic public sphere that accommodated a variety of views, and that was the envy of all other people in the region.

One among many That legacy weakened slowly in recent years and collapsed during the last year, bringing Lebanon to the point today where it shares many similarities with two main groups of Arab countries. One is the war-torn economic shells of their former selves (like Libya, Iraq, Yemen, or Syria), and the other is the tightly controlled authoritarian security states where individuals fear to publicly or privately express views that contradict the official line (like Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE). Lebanon now joins the hapless club of two-thirds of the Arab countries where major popular uprisings have challenged or even removed former tyrants from office since 2010.

In fact, Lebanese citizens’ views today mirror almost exactly those of other Arabs in Iraq, Algeria, and Sudan who continue to rise up in protest against their incompetent governments. Millions of citizens across the Arab World took to the streets to reform their governing systems, supported by a clear majority of the population. The 2019-20 annual regional poll by the Doha-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, the Arab Opinion Index, shows that an average of 70-80% of all citizens in Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, and Algeria support their ongoing, but momentarily pandemic-muted, uprisings to uproot current government leaders and systems. This wide support, however, does not seem to materialize in practice — only about 20% of citizens have actually participated in street demonstrations.

Socio-economically, the poll also shows that nearly three-fourths of all families in Lebanon and these countries do not have sufficient resources to cover their basic needs like food, shelter, health care, and education. Nearly one-fourth of all citizens want to emigrate, half or more view their government’s performance negatively, and over 90% see corruption as widespread in their society. In these four volatile nations as well as in the other polled countries, citizens see the main motivations of the uprisings as ending oppression and corruption, and improving poor living conditions and public services. While Lebanon has long been a formal member of the League of Arab States, it is now fully in the fraternity of distressed Arab countries whose desperate citizens and security-minded governments face off against each other.

A century of build-up The October 2019 “revolutionary uprising” was a high-water mark in the country’s continuing implosion and collapse which had been building up for decades. Despite the overlapping economic disruptions, COVID-19 pandemic, and port explosion, the protest movement remains more of a symptom rather than the cause of the cumulative, decades-long rot that has plunged a majority of Lebanese into poverty, vulnerability, marginalization, and desperation.

Like the many other stressed or war-torn Arab countries, Lebanon’s decline must be understood in its four concentric spheres of modern history, which vary by country, but all follow a similar pattern.

The 1920s period was the first and original line of state configuration and policy that ultimately brought many Arab states to their current disheveled condition. Back then, most of the modern Arab states were created by a combination of European colonial powers and local elites — totally without the input of their citizens on the shape, nature, values, or policies of their new countries. The second era that presaged today’s troubles in Lebanon and most Arab states was 1975-85, when the combination of massive new oil income and military officers who took control of governments in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Tunisia, and elsewhere ushered the region into a new era of centralized autocracy and authoritarianism. By the 1990s, this had morphed into socio-economic stagnation in terms of real quality of life among an increasingly pauperized citizenry that enjoyed no political rights to redress their pain. The third historical sphere is the period since 2005 when the Syrian government withdrew its troops and officials that effectively had run Lebanon for 30 years. Left on their own, Lebanese politicians and former warlords-turned-sectarian political leaders then chronically squabbled among themselves. In parallel, they collectively monopolized the public sector and enriched themselves and their followers while most public services steadily deteriorated. The final and most recent sphere is the last 18 months of disruptions from citizen uprisings that brought serious governance to a halt. This coincided with a period of economic fraying and a collapse of the value of the national currency due to unsustainable fiscal and monetary policies.

Lebanon is noteworthy for having long resisted the dilapidated economies and authoritarian political systems that defined so many other countries in the region in the past half a century or so. Today, however, the recurring incidents of a poverty-stricken citizenry protesting in the streets for its rights and a dignified life are increasingly met by a more militarized state that does not hesitate to use its arms and tear gas against its own citizens. Also troubling for Lebanon is the steadily rising pace of state courts, ministries, or security agencies that detain, arrest, and indict individuals for actions such as social media posts that had long been a hallmark of Lebanon’s robust free speech legacy. These two negative trends combine with the third and perhaps the most devastating one that seems to be a foundation of the country’s current ills — a government whose executive, parliamentary, and judicial branches do not seem to care enough about the suffering of the majority of impoverished citizens to take serious reform actions that would unlock billions of dollars of badly needed assistance.

Two main actors going forward The bottom line in Lebanon seems to draw a sad picture of a state that gave up on and neglected its citizenry in recent decades. In return, the citizenry is responding by actively seeking protest methods that would throw out the entire ruling elite and create a more participatory and accountable governance system based on the rule of law and social justice. Yet protesters and state authorities are deadlocked, and neither seems able to stifle the other. This is precisely the same situation that pertains in Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Palestine, Somalia, and other troubled Arab countries that seem to be failing the last century’s triple tests of statehood, sovereignty, and citizenship.

The big difference between Lebanon and other Arab countries though is the presence of Hezbollah, the powerhouse group that will never allow the country to fully collapse. Yet its policies will never be fully accepted by a majority of Lebanese, due to the group’s militarism, decision-making outside the state system, and close ties with Iran and Syria. As the state institutions and political elite continue to deteriorate and lose influence, foreign powers like Saudi Arabia, France, and the United States also seem less interested in stepping in to safeguard Lebanon as they have done for a century. This is due to their more pressing strategic priorities elsewhere in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the Horn of Africa, as well as the intractability of the Lebanese ruling elite in paying attention to anything other than their own self-interest, even if it means the slow corrosion of their country’s integrity.

This leaves Lebanon with two principal political actors: Hezbollah and the very incoherent but persistent protest movement that enjoys wide popular support. A key dynamic to watch in the coming months and years is how these two forces engage with each other and with their patrons and supporters abroad, and whether they can act in time to force the floundering governing elite to behave like adults and repair the society and economy they have almost destroyed.

Rami G. Khouri is Director of Global Engagement and an adjunct professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an executive board member of the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies. He tweets @ramikhouri. This article appeared originally at the Middle East Institute website (mei.edu).

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

—————-

Released: 15 February 2021

Word Count: 1,468

—————-

The recent agreement to end the boycott of Qatar by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Bahrain is a welcomed development that also hides some uncomfortable realities about the past, the present, and the future. It reflects a striking combination of failed old ways and promising new realities in inter-Arab foreign policy and diplomacy, but its most important lesson might prove to be the peak it gives us into internal decision-making in the states involved.

It is noteworthy above all for being the first formal, if silent, validation of the failed policies that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have pursued in the region in the past seven years or so. Some other Arab states often followed in tow for their own domestic or economic reasons, so the abrupt about-face by the boycott leaders might also suggest slow changes in the worldviews of the followers. The reconciliation accord is a positive development that all should welcome, particularly in view of the disasters that resulted from the more dynamic, often politically and militarily aggressive, regional actions they took since their two crown princes effectively assumed control of policymaking.

The blockade of Qatar was the most flamboyant and bizarre move by the Emirati-Saudi duo, largely because it was based on fabricated accusations against Qatar that in turn emanated from slightly hysterical Emirati/Saudi fears about how the region was evolving in political and geo-strategic directions they feared. These fears were well captured in the original list of 13 demands they made from Qatar in summer 2017, which were widely seen as a fantastic, rather than a credible, list of actionable political concerns.

This proved to be the correct assessment in view of the UAE’s foreign policy spokesman’s admission last week that these 13 points were more like maximalist negotiating demands than realistic moves Qatar could make. The logical conclusion is that the UAE-Saudi duo and their supporters were as incompetent in negotiating as they were in foreign policymaking. This is also evident since no meaningful international party supported the boycott, and many leading countries, like Kuwait, the USA, Germany, and others, tried repeatedly to end it.

The agreement silently affirms the failure of the boycott, in the typical Middle Eastern manner of admitting your mistake but not admitting it explicitly. Whether this is an honorable face-saving technique or the consequence of weak statecraft will be for history to determine. For now, we can only say that the underlying and real political tensions among the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states that triggered the boycott, along with the earlier episode of tensions in 2013, have not been resolved, but they can be addressed through serious dialogue instead of impetuous temper-tantrums.

Most of the complaints against Qatar reflect differences in political values and national ideologies which Qatar feels serve it well, but which the boycotters fear threaten their own wellbeing. The most practical include issues like allowing freewheeling coverage, analysis, and commentary on Al Jazeera television and other Qatari-backed media outlets in Arabic and English; good working relations with Turkey and Iran; and supporting Islamist political movement across the Middle East, some of which have won free elections. The recurring incompetence  in  UAE-Saudi foreign policymaking, even a tendency to backfire on their aims, is evident in how Iran and Turkey have stronger political and strategic links across the Arab region than they did three and a half years ago, Qatari-backed media continue to flourish, and Qatar is much less vulnerable today to crude political bullying by its neighbors.

Yet ending the boycott policy without evidence of resolving any of the underlying issues the boycotters raised repeats the enduring old way of inter-Arab diplomacy that has largely failed to achieve stability or security. It perpetuates the danger that future policy follies could occur again, only later to be swept under the rug. Such a never-ending cycle of failed and impulsive decision-making by unaccountable powerful men has ravaged the lives of tens of millions of innocent people in the past half-century, and this boycott-ending agreement does not signal any end to it.

Nevertheless, this positive agreement offers a glimmer of hope for fewer Saudi-Emirati joint ventures in regional overreach and militarism that has usually backfired, most notably, in Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Somalia. We do not know what caused the Emirati and Saudi leaderships to agree to end their blockade. Speculation includes most notably the Saudi king’s desire to relieve pressure on his son Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman before President Donald Trump retires in disgrace and President Joe Biden assumes power — given the Biden pledge to hold Saudi and other regions accountable for their actions, whether in Yemen, Qatar, Libya, or elsewhere.

Qatar’s response to the boycott, on the other hand, shows again how national resolve and steadfastness can triumph over lies backed by aggression. It helps Qatar that it is a small and wealthy country that could quickly enjoy support from powerful friends across the world. Yet standing up to the potentially grave dangers it faced required a measure of self-assuredness that is not common among Arab leaderships. Qatar’s energetic economic adjustments to foster greater self-reliance also hold out promise for reducing its vulnerabilities — offering lessons that many others can benefit from.

Many unanswered questions about the agreement remain, related to what Qatar offered to make the deal work, the role of the USA, Donald Trump’s eviction from the White House, and the shadows of Iran and Joe Biden hovering over the region. Did Gulf states’ expanding ties with Israel play a role, perhaps making them feel more secure in case the USA starts pressuring them or Iran keeps meddling in the region? Time will tell.

But time is also important here in another dimension — the past. The location of the GCC summit in Al-Ula in northwestern Saudi Arabia should remind any Arab leaders who pay attention to history that we have much to learn from what happened in the area around Al-Ula some 2300 years ago. That was when the Nabataean Arab kingdom flourished for around four centuries, in the land of northern Saudi Arabia and southern Jordan today. The Nabataean capital at Petra remains one of the wonders of the ancient world, and its rock-carved monuments are also well preserved in the region of Madain Salah near Al-Ula.

The Nabateans still whisper to us today secrets about how small and vulnerable countries can survive and thrive, which should interest both small countries and bigger, more aggressive, ones. These secrets are about preserving one’s delicate natural resources (especially water), balancing one’s economy among trade, agriculture, and industrial/mineral production, leaders serving their people with dignity and humility, and — most importantly — maintaining peaceful and negotiated relationships with potentially threatening bigger foreign powers.

The Nabataeans survived and thrived for centuries in the face of stronger empires that eyed their resources because they usually evaded war, occupation, or destruction by negotiating agreements to allow the flow of international trade that was a main source of their wealth. Boycotts on fabricated grounds? No thanks, that’s the fool’s tool. War and sanctions? No siree, that rarely achieves desired results, and usually worsens conditions for all. Negotiate a sharing of resources and wealth — and security — for all? Yessiree, I’ll take that!

The next time the Saudi and Emirati crown princes — or any other Arab leaders — travel around Saudi Arabia they might peek into the past and remember what its ancient civilizations bequeathed to us in the timeless arenas of diplomacy and statecraft. These are more relevant than ever in view of important relationships that must be negotiated one day soon among Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and Israelis, and which can only be negotiated on the basis of mutual and equal rights, rather than hallucinatory accusations that are humiliatingly reversed when they fall flat.

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. Follow him on Twitter: @ramikhouri

 

An earlier version of this article appeared in The New Arab https://english.alaraby.co.uk/english/Comment/2021/1/8/History-whispers-to-blockading-states-as-GCC-rift-ends

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

—————-

Released: 18 January 2021

Word Count: 1,292

—————-

(Part I)

Ten years young: Arab revolutionary protests As we mark a decade of Arab protests to replace entire government systems with more efficient, democratic, and accountable ones, the balance sheet of the uprisings seems slim.

Only Tunisia has transitioned to a constitutional democracy, and Sudan is in the midst of a fragile three-year transition. Major national protests still define Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq, and Algeria, while Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen suffer serious warfare among local and foreign forces. Most other Arab countries have reverted to tighter autocratic rule that weakens personal liberties.

This conventional view of the Arab region after a decade of protests is incomplete, though. A more thorough analysis would recognise that major changes that will impact future governance continue to occur across the region. Ten years is not sufficient time to credibly assess these Arab revolutionary uprisings — “uprisings” because they are spontaneous civil protests, and “revolutionary” because they aim to totally change governance systems and citizen-state relations, including the values and actions of individual citizens.

To begin, it’s important to grasp two time frames which led up to the Arab uprising: First, the 50 years since 1970 during which military rulers who seized power across the region and used oil wealth to institutionalise mostly corrupt and inefficient autocratic systems; and second, the 100 years since WWI that gave birth to the modern Arab state system which has largely experienced erratic statehood and weak sovereignty, especially in recent decades.

The Arab uprisings mirror the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements in the United States which also did not erupt in a vacuum. They emerged from a frustrated legacy of repeated earlier protests in the US over the past century, and were ignited by recent egregious acts of persistent physical or socio-economic brutality. The Arab uprisings similarly follow decades of failed smaller protests by politically helpless citizens against discrimination, inequity, and rising poverty and desperation.

 

In their breadth, depth, longevity, demands, and political action, the Arab uprisings are part of the long-denied process of national self-determination and state-building that Arab citizens yearn for, and now try to seize — with mixed results — in this early stage of collective street action.

New alliances and aspirations: The people as political actors
This decade of uprisings is historically significant for several unique aspects that the region had never experienced on such a large and sustained scale. The most striking is their continuity. Protests against state rule have occurred since 2010 in half the 22 Arab League countries, including some monarchies and oil-rich states. The regional spread is matched by the nationwide grievances of a majority of citizens within individual countries.

This was evident in Lebanon, Algeria, Iraq, and Sudan recently, where different sectarian, ethnic, ideological, and regional groups that occasionally had protested separately have now joined in single and coordinated national protests. They have learned that they all suffer the same stresses and inequities — few jobs, low pay, poor education and health services, rising inflation and poverty, imploding economies, unchecked corruption, and a general culture of uncaring and/or incompetent officials.

The common concerns of the protesters who seek a totally new government system are evident in the identical demands they raise in each country. Unlike the spontaneous 2010 protests that called for broad notions of dignity and social justice, today’s demands all seek a series of specific transformative steps to create more efficient, democratic, and accountable governments under the rule of law. They include: the resignation of all senior ruling officials, a transitional government to hold new parliamentary and presidential elections, a new constitution that guarantees citizen rights, an independent judiciary and anti-corruption mechanisms, and putting on trial former officials who ravaged the society and economy and grew wealthy in the process.

The current protests are striking also for bringing together different groups with a wide range of grievances that they had formerly raised separately, and almost always unsuccessfully. Environmentalists, activists for social justice, gender and minority rights, and democratic rule-of-law, and others joined hands for months on end to lobby for governance that would treat them all equitably.

Individuals and organised groups worked together in public squares to express their grievances and chart out solutions for the new states they sought to build. This generated two important new phenomena: many people who never expressed themselves in public joined the protests and became political actors (such as schoolchildren, teachers, and residents of remote provinces); and, most of them for the first time in their lives experienced contributing to shaping their anticipated new government and new national policies.

Activist citizens also created new organisations to replace moribund and corrupted state institutions, such as media organisations, professional unions, and self-help community centres.

Alongside these and other signs of the slow birth of a new Arab citizen, however, the last few years have also seen the brutal response of regimes and sectarian groups that refuse to share or relinquish power. Everywhere — in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Algeria, Sudan, Morocco, and others — long-entrenched regimes reacted to the initial uprisings with promises of limited reforms, including a new prime minister, new elections, or more social spending.

Protesters rejected these as insulting sops that perpetuated the power structure and its failed policies, and they continued demonstrating to bring down the entire government. The power elite and its sectarian thugs and militias then reacted with brutal political or military force. They shot and killed hundreds of demonstrators, jailed or indicted protest leaders, burned down protest camps, and allowed moribund economies to whither even more, which drove more families into poverty and desperation.

The state’s harsh responses did not quell the protests — but the coronavirus in March 2020, did. For most of 2020, simmering citizen anger and fear failed to force new state policies, as the public pressure of the street protests dissipated.

As the virus-induced economic slowdowns and health concerns eventually halted most protests, some governments tried to use their coronavirus responses to generate new legitimacy among former supporters who had often joined the protests, and who saw their own life prospects shrivel by the month.

Protesters across the Arab region are on hiatus today, awaiting the end of the coronavirus threat and using the time to reassess their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses, so that they are better prepared when the political protests resume — which they will, in some forms we may not grasp today.

(Part II)

Taking stock of an unprecedented decade The balance sheet is mixed. Tunisia and Sudan have achieved democracy or a transition to it, but both are in fragile condition. Yemen, Syria, Libya, and Iraq remain mired in domestic or regional wars. Monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Morocco and Jordan to a lesser extent, all either prohibit public protest or allow only symbolic gestures that do not threaten the power structure. Foreign powers are frequently involved in the wars and in bolstering Arab autocrats.

The most important countries to monitor today are where the 2019-20 protests are certain to resume when conditions permit — Algeria, Lebanon, Sudan, and Iraq. Their uprisings all elicited limited state concessions without any real change in the exercise of power; only Sudan’s protests forced the military regime that ousted President Omar Hassan Bashir to negotiate a gradual transition to a democratic system. That arrangement is very fragile, with the civilian and military wings of the transitional authority often at odds (such as on normalisation with Israel) and the economy remains in dire straits.

The stalemate and pause see activists reassessing their tactics and strategy, with many advocating to organise at the grassroots and nationally to create political parties or movements that can contest future elections. The street protests and disruptions of normal life clearly have not caused regimes to cede power, and foreign parties are not stepping in to save collapsing economies. Most Arab elites and protesters realise that they are on their own, because the Arab region as a whole, for the most part, has lost its strategic relevance to foreign powers. Those powers that do intervene — like Russia in Syria — do so to maintain the autocratic order that serves their strategic interests.

The least visible but perhaps most significant change of the past decade that might define the future of political rule in Arab societies is the realization by individuals and masses alike that they are not helpless in the face of their ruling regimes, but rather that they can organise and protest and try to define their own future. That sense of agency and change-through-political action never existed on a wide scale before, and now permeates hundreds of millions of ordinary men and women of all ages. When it is mobilised again, it is likely to have more impact than it has this decade.

The lessons of an uprising on standby

The main lessons seem to be about the balance of power among the two forces that confront each other — the protesters who spontaneously took to the streets to remove their governments but did not master the keys to success, and the power elite that has ruled for decades and will fight to remain in place, even if it governs shattered societies like Syria, Yemen, and Libya. The 2010-20 decade is the latest and most robust, but not the final stage of Arab transitions to democracy and stability.

The confrontations will resume post-Covid because all the underlying conditions of citizen despair that prompted the uprisings continue to deteriorate. As citizen well-being plummets and poverty and vulnerability spread to over 70 percent of the population, confidence in governments vanishes and popular support for the uprisings increases.

These trends are repeatedly confirmed by opinion polls. The most recent regional survey, by the Doha-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, showed that household income is insufficient for nearly 75 percent of families. One in five Arabs wants to emigrate, and almost one in every three 18-34-year-olds wants to leave for good. About half the people view government performance negatively, over 90 percent see corruption as prevalent, and less than one-third feel that the rule of law is applied equally to all citizens.

These realities explain why 58 percent of the entire region view the uprisings positively, and in the four countries where the protests continue the public’s support ranges from 67 to 82 percent. The widespread desire for change only intensifies as economic conditions deteriorate and governments seem uncaring about their citizens’ suffering. Citizen agitation for deep change will persist, though it is not clear today in what form, due to the limited impact of the last decade’s activism.

We should view the revolutionary uprisings in Arab lands as dramatic elements in the state-building process that started a century ago, but never solidified its results in most cases because ordinary citizens never had an opportunity to shape decisions about national values or policies. The uprisings have sent the message that citizens need material well-being, opportunity, and security, as well as intangibles like dignity, respect, voice, and identity. They will continue to do that in new ways, with much greater awareness of how to confront stubborn state power.

As the Arab system of states now enters its second century of state-building, anxious and determined citizens who battled for a better life in the 2010-20 decade will keep trying to make sure that they finally exercise their right to, and participate in, their national self-determination.

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. Follow him on Twitter: @ramikhouri

This article — Part I and Part II — originated in The New Arab.

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 21 December 2020

Word Count: 1,887

—————-

Most of the Middle East’s serious problems — wars, terrorism, foreign militarism, politicized sectarianism, refugee flows, mass poverty and vulnerability — reflect the consequences of the two great overarching trends in the past century of the modern Arab state system.

In the first half of the century, broadly from 1920 to 1970, the Arab region completed impressive state-building processes that steadily improved citizens’ quality of life.

In the century’s second half, from 1970 to 2020, about half the Arab states have seen their state-building momentum stall or even reverse. Economic and social development slowed after 1990 when most non-oil-financed governments could no longer improve or even maintain the quality of life of large swaths of their populations. The UN today says that at least 70% of all Arabs are poor or vulnerable, and that figure is rising daily due to the economic impact of the oil price drop and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Two important dynamics emerged that led to the rise of non-state actors (NSAs): 1) some states started to fragment as local authorities affirmed their authority over a weakened central government (Sudan, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen); 2) in every non-oil-rich country, non-state actors assumed a bigger direct role in providing citizens services they had obtained from the state during the previous three generations (security, identity, political voice, material assistance, and basic services). 

Some NSAs became so powerful that they paralleled the central government in some places (Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Kurdish groups) or even replaced it in others (Hamas, Islamic State, Kurdistan, Insarullah-Houthis, South Sudan rebels). Powerful armed NSAs, like Hezbollah, Hamas, and Insarullah-Houthis, took over the national security role of the state and also provided basic services.

Other armed groups like Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) militias in Iraq, complemented the state’s security operations against threats like Islamic State, and PMFs in Syria, Yemen, or Libya have been created, funded, trained, and armed by foreign powers (regional ones like Iran, Turkey, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Israel, or foreign powers like the USA).

Hundreds of NSAs across the region are unarmed civilian groups that are anchored in the two most powerful forces that existed before the modern state arrived: religious and tribal identities. The modern state usually could not control or co-opt these powerful forces, and mostly coexists with them. When central governments in the 1990s started contracting and ignoring large population segments, the tribal and religious NSAs stepped in smoothly. Some of them in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen also became politicized and frequently sought a share of government power.

The first big sign of Arab citizens’ discontent that translated into stronger NSAs was the rapid expansion of the Muslim Brotherhood and other such Islamists in the mid-1970s. This was due to multiple factors, including: the humiliation of the June 1967 Arab defeat by Israel; the failure of socialism, Arab nationalism, Ba’athism, and capitalism to meet citizen needs equitably; government corruption due to incompetent rule by family- and military-based regimes; and, the stresses of inflation and high living costs that sent several hundred million Arabs into poverty.

As citizens steadily lost trust in the central state’s credibility, and its legitimacy in some cases, after the 1980s, they increasingly turned to NSAs for their essential personal, communal, and political needs. NSAs like the Muslim Brotherhood grew stronger and often shared power, due to several reasons: they focus squarely on citizens’ basic needs, they are anchored in the communities they serve and speak in social justice terms that resonate with citizens, they are mostly uncorrupted by massive money flows, and they emphasize equitable socio-economic development at home and confronting aggression from abroad.

Rami G. Khouri has reported in the Middle East for 50 years. He is journalist-in-residence and a senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 19 November 2020

Word Count: 598

—————-

The avalanche of analyses of how President-elect Joe Biden will address the many Middle Eastern wars, confrontations, and other issues in which the US is entangled will remain entertaining speculation unless they do three things that every American government in the past half a century has failed to do: grasp the underlying (and worsening) realities on the ground in the Middle East, acknowledge their actual causes, and craft foreign policies that serve the US itself, the people of the region, and the wider cause of world peace and stability.

We hear often that Biden’s 40 years of foreign policy experience give him an edge over other American officials who try to navigate our region. Those 40 years are most useful for him if he looks back and tracks how and why the current conditions and trends across the Middle East have changed so much, even since Biden was vice president four years ago.

Issues like Israel-Palestine, Iran, Turkey, Russia, aggressive Saudi-UAE policies, sectarian conflicts, and other current realities are best dealt with on the understanding that they are mostly consequences of deeper drivers of change in the region.

An honest and comprehensive analysis of how the Middle East has reached its current violent condition would help interested policy-makers anywhere in the region or the world craft policies that actually make a difference in people’s lives. This is especially true of Middle Easterners whose thirst for dignity, development, and stability remains largely unquenched — and widely ignored by Middle Eastern and foreign leaders alike.

Now that Biden is heading back to the White House, here is my six-point list of the most important and consistent drivers of Middle Eastern events in recent history. All six remain active dynamics, not historical issues. In chronological order, they are:

1. Uninterrupted foreign military intervention in the Middle East since Napoleon, two-and-a-quarter centuries ago, stokes both internal turmoil and popular anger against foreign powers. Such militarism has significantly increased since the end of the Cold War 30 years ago, and now includes regional militarism (most notably by Turkey, Iran, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Israel) alongside international powers like the USA, Russia, France, and the UK.

Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, and Libya are showcases of the destruction and mass human suffering this causes, and this legacy continues and even expands these days. Replacing military action with diplomacy and economic development drives would be a sensible policy option across the board.

2. The Palestinian-Zionist and wider Arab-Israeli conflict has now entered its second century, and remains the most radicalising and destabilising political force within the Middle East. It helped trigger the advent of Arab military regimes in the 1940s to 70s, all of which ravaged and bankrupted their own societies, cemented inefficient and repressive regimes, increased anti-western sentiments, and expanded regional conflicts, including new Iranian-Israeli-Arab tensions.

It is a serious element in citizens’ lack of respect for their rulers across many Arab lands, especially as a few Arab leaders decide to normalise relations with Israel while it continues its colonisation of Arab lands. Resolving the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Zionist conflict equitably, according to the wishes and needs of the people of the region, rather than a handful of autocrats, is a major priority for anyone seeking to promote stability and dignity across the region for all its people.

3. The foreign militarism and Arab-Israeli conflict together generated a modern legacy of Arab authoritarian and autocratic regimes, all of which needed foreign support to survive. The cruel and incompetent regimes were also developmental failures that ravaged national economies and ultimately drove masses of the brightest Arab (and some Iranian, Turkish and even Israeli) men and women to emigrate. Middle Eastern autocracy must be removed if we wish to end our region’s wars and despair.

4. Due to the three factors above, the Arab region’s 440 million people today are mostly economically poor and vulnerable and politically marginalised and powerless. The steady pauperisation of the Arab middle classes since the 1990s has aggravated all the current destructive trends, including sectarian and ethnic conflicts, mass civilian uprisings, and large-scale emigration, displacement, and refugeehood by millions of desperate families.

It also hardens already vicious authoritarian regimes who reply to citizens’ expressions of discontent and demand for rights with greater state violence, arrests, and intimidation of peaceful protesters.

5. These trends have seen the Arab region and parts of Iran and Israel in recent years break out in sustained citizen protests against their increasingly autocratic leaderships.

The Arab region in particular has witnessed ongoing protests in a dozen countries since 2010; only Tunisia has transitioned to a pluralistic democracy, and Sudan is in the midst of a delicate three-year transition. Polling evidence confirms large scale, chronic citizen discontent with state institutions such as parliaments, the media, and the executive and judicial branches. Citizens and their ruling governmental authorities are increasingly distant from each other, which makes some states more brittle.

6. The Arab countries and people suffer the ultimate indignity of being subjected to the forces mentioned above: some have started to unravel as sovereign states, in at least two key dimensions. First, many have lost control over most of their borders and lands such as in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Israeli-occupied Palestine, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Iraqi Kurdistan and southern Sudan, to mention only the most flagrant. As non-state actors take control of some autonomous regions beyond the control of the central government, foreign powers also wage war at will in the country, directly or through local proxies.

Second, they cannot make fully sovereign decisions related to their national security. Most Arab countries, for example, must get the approval of Israel to buy advanced American weapons. Some must get the approval of Iran, Turkey, or Russia for their military or diplomatic moves. These and other examples represent a de-sovereignisation of important dimensions of national life in Arab countries — probably a priority issue to grasp by anyone seeking engagement in the region.

So the Biden administration and other foreign powers who look at the turbulent Middle East would do well to pause for a moment from their focus on Iran’s nuclear industry, terrorism, non-state militia expansions, refugee flows, and other important realities, and instead try to grasp how we reached this situation, and how we can get out of it. This is all the more important because the six drivers I outlined above continue to devastate our countries, where conditions will worsen more due to the Covid-19 pandemic, low oil price, and economic stagnation.

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. Follow him on Twitter: @ramikhouri

This article originally appeared in The New Arab.

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 18 November 2020

Word Count: 1,079

—————-

Much has changed and nothing has changed in Iraq and Lebanon, as both countries this month mark one year of non-stop mass protests by citizens against their ruling government establishments.

The significant changes that have occurred in society, together with the persistence of the corrupted and depleted governance systems tell important, larger, tales of this historic moment of Arab political turbulence.

Iraq and Lebanon’s overarching message is that steadily pauperised and desperate Arab citizens who peacefully seek a total overhaul of their political systems will continue to face an increasingly militarised ruling elite that offers minor reform gestures without ceding any real power.

As these and other Arab lands settle into a long stalemate, society, economy, and statehood all steadily deteriorate and could collapse. Officials with power do not seem to care, and citizens seeking to evict the powerholders lack the means to do so.

Other protests in Algeria, Sudan, and Jordan echo the same dynamics of the Iraqi and Lebanese uprisings, anchored in common and deep grievances that plague a majority of Arab citizenries in almost all dimensions — economic, political, social, and environmental. These erupted in the last 18 months, but they perpetuate a full decade of protests since the 2010-11 Tunisia and Egypt revolutions.

Iraq and Lebanon are especially noteworthy because their governance systems are defined by sharply delineated sectarian identities and political organisations. Deliberate foreign manipulation formalised these sectarian power-sharing systems, with the French in Lebanon nearly a century ago, and the US in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

The current tensions confirm how durable they have become — almost impregnable in most cases. One big lesson of the last year is the sturdiness of sectarian politics at the top of society, in the face of desperate citizens at the bottom who have started to transcend narrow religious or ethnic identities in favour of a national one.

The Lebanese and Iraqis call for evicting the entire sectarian governance system and replacing it with a new parliament elected via a secular law that allows non-sectarian political parties to emerge and compete for power. From months and months of protesting together in public squares, most young protesters under the age of 30 have felt a new sense of Lebanese or Iraqi national identity, while leaving their religious identity, whether it be Christian, Shia, Sunni, Druze, or other, to the private realm of their home and community.

Two new dynamics they express may shape how political life evolves in the near future: they recognise that their sectarian leaders have failed them and allowed them to slide into poverty and hopelessness, and their first ever public encounters with fellow citizens from other regions and religions showed them how they have all suffered equally and simultaneously.

They discovered they all suffer the same deprivations of jobs, income, fresh water, electricity and other life basics that have slowly slipped away from them. Even among those who dominated or monopolised power in recent decades — Shias in Iraq, and Shias, Sunnis, and Christians in Lebanon — protesters understand that the sectarian power-sharing system has spawned massive incompetence and corruption, and it must be changed from its roots.

Yet in both countries, the street protests that majorities of youth and middle-aged citizens support have not been able to force structural changes in the governing system. The state has responded in two ways: violence against protesters and offering limited political reform concessions. Both have failed to impress or scare the majority of angry and humiliated citizens who persist with their search of genuine citizenship in an equitably managed state.

The primary state response has been a combination of official and informal violence — police and army units routinely break up demonstrations with tear gas, baton charges, and some shooting, and increasingly arrest and indict protesters, while sectarian party thugs burn down protest camps, and beat up or even (in Iraq) kidnap or kill protest leaders. Some 700 have been killed in Iraq, only a few in Lebanon, and thousands have been injured.

In parallel to attempts to quell the protests, the state has offered concessions, including, most notably, revised electoral laws, new prime ministers, major budget adjustments, a few more qualified ministers, and early parliamentary elections that might diminish the dominance of sectarian parties.

None of these have impressed angry citizens, who in some cases forced prime ministerial candidates to withdraw their nominations and prevented parliamentary consideration of some draft laws that would have protected corrupt officials who drained billions of dollars from the now bankrupt states.

The coronavirus pandemic cut short major public protests in April-June and hastened the economic stresses in both countries. Yet street demonstrations and other disruptive tactics have resumed, as citizens have become increasingly impoverished while their governments do little or nothing to address their condition.

The political stalemate persists because ruling powers have entrenched themselves for decades through clientelism and patronage networks that blend their sectarian focus with firm political allies from other identities (such as Shia Hezbollah’s alliance with President Michel Aoun’s Christian party). Foreign influences and money also make it hard for street protesters waving flags to dislodge hard-nosed power elites that enjoy the support of Iran, Saudi Arabia, or other regional powers.

Observers of the Lebanese and Iraqi scenes, and the Arab region in general, should look beneath the surface to see the changes in social values and political behaviour that now define millions of individual men and women, mostly among the under-30 group. Some of these transformations in individuals’ psyches, identities, and behaviour are evident at several levels.

Big demonstrations repeatedly reveal the growing single national identity that defines people who used to respond mainly to their narrow sectarian or geographic groups. The depth, breadth, and persistence of the protesters’ political demands reveal courage and ambitions that are both new — in demanding the total removal of the prevailing governments, personally calling out the rejected leaders by name, and, in the face of death, arrest, and mass injuries, sticking to their demands for new, clean, efficient transitional governments that can re-legitimise the state via new secular elections.

At village and community level, citizens regularly work together to assist the needy through food banks or small cash donations, rebuild damaged facilities, and organise security and other public needs that their government’s are not providing. Expert groups actively plan for a better future government by drafting revised laws, priorities, and regulations that would shape the state they seek with a focus on accountability and social justice.

Women play a large role in all these public and private activities, shattering centuries-old traditions that had deprived public and national life of half the population’s intellectual and creative power.

Much has changed in the people of Lebanon and Iraq, but little has changed in the political controls at the top of their state — yet.

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. He tweets @ramikhouri

This article originated in The New Arab.

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 12 October 2020

Word Count: 1,128

—————-

Sparked by George Floyd’s murder last May, Black Lives Matter protests against racism and police violence in the United States expanded spontaneously into worldwide calls to remove public statues of history’s white supremacists and colonial oppressors.

Americans targeting statues of Confederate generals have now been joined by activists in the United Kingdom, France, Australia, New Zealand and other lands calling to remove or put in museums statues of numerous racist colonial figures.

To fully remedy our world’s ravages and human pain from white supremacy and colonial racism, we must also address one of the colonial era’s most audacious and long-lasting political crimes, one which still reverberates across the Middle East and further afield: the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

In a letter to the prominent Anglo-Jewish leader Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild, Foreign Minister Arthur James Balfour said the British government supported the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine — when Palestine was 94 percent Palestinian Arabs and just 6 percent Jewish — and while it had no legal right to designate the future of a territory it did not control or possess.

Balfour’s name and policies should be added to the list of targeted racists like slave trader Bully Hayes, Captain James Cook, and Andrew Hamilton in New Zealand and Australia, or slave trader Edward Colston and colonial maestro Cecil Rhodes in the UK and South Africa. The immoral policies he represented are as bad as theirs, and their impact may be even longer lasting due to the Arab-Israeli conflict’s genesis in the Balfour Declaration.

Memorials to racist colonialists should be removed or stored in museums which offer adequate context, because they offend people of all colours who oppose white supremacy and 19th-early 20th century colonialism. These European policies and officials planted their vulgar values around the world, enforced them through massive military violence, and degraded the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

They also left a continuing legacy of tension and violence to this day in India, Syria, Kenya, Sudan, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and many other countries in Africa, South America, Asia, and the Pacific. The statues still widely hurt the South, as they also haunt righteous people in the North.

The Balfour Declaration was among the most destructive such colonial decisions in its brazen racism as well as its enduring ability to create pain and chaos. It ignited the Palestinian-Israeli and wider Arab-Israeli conflicts, which in turn contributed heavily to other tensions that ravage the Middle East, and spread around the world.

These include post-1940s Arab military rulers who ultimately drove their countries to collapse and their people to poverty; Iranian tensions with the US and Israel; modern political terrorism in the region; and the entrenchment of Arab autocrats supported by western and Eastern powers who devise new forms of colonial manipulation and exploitation, to mention just the most obvious.

Real changes might now occur across societies whose wounds from racism are visible throughout communities of color, in health, education, income, housing, and other sectors. A supreme irony of racist colonialism’s long shelf life is that the global movement to remove offensive statues started in the United States — a former colony of the mother lode of colonialism, Great Britain.

Balfour’s promise to support a Jewish homeland in overwhelmingly Arab Palestine did not even have the courtesy or honesty to acknowledge the Palestinian Arabs by their name, calling them the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. The British and Zionist colonial attempt to erase Palestinians from history has not worked, because the 1.5 million Palestinians in 1948 are now some 13 million, and they continue to battle to demolish the statues of their own colonial nightmares, especially Mr Balfour and the repeatedly duplicitous British government he symbolizes.

The Trump administration has now assumed the racist mantle of British colonialism in Palestine. It supports Israel’s annexation of Palestinian lands, while only throwing leftovers to the Palestinians if they behave and accept to live in apartheid-like Bantustans. The same colonial methods applied over several centuries in different continents reveal themselves more clearly and grotesquely in Palestine than in any other place on earth, perhaps because they have endured here and engendered a conflict that will not go away as long as Zionism’s spoils remain unchallenged.

The leading scholar of Palestinian modern history, Rashid Khalidi, notes that this historical background shows us the path, “…towards a real lasting, sustainable peace, and towards real reconciliation and compromise between the Palestinian and Israeli peoples.

Genuine reconciliation depends on acknowledging historical realities rather than ignoring them. And genuine compromise must be based on justice and absolutely equal treatment, and absolutely equal rights, for all, not on the imposition of the will of the stronger on the weaker.

Righting historical wrongs in Palestine by promoting the birth of a Palestinian state alongside Israel would contribute to peace and security in the Middle East more than almost any other conceivable move. Correcting the wrongs of Great Britain in Palestine, embodied by Mr Balfour, is straightforward and feasible. The British government can temper its colonial bias towards Zionism by affirming Palestinian equal rights now.

It should start with a new statement today, followed by a unanimous UN Security Council resolution recognising the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis to live in their own sovereign states in the land of Palestine (essentially the two-state solution of a new Palestinian state alongside Israel, in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, on 22 percent of historical Palestine).

A British government with some moral fibre would also bilaterally de jure recognise the state of Palestine within the two-state borders, as many others around the world have done. This would affirm its equal support for the equal rights of Palestinians and Israelis, which could help drive a new peace negotiation, while also atoning for its past sins.

As the anti-colonial struggle moves into its second century around the world, atoning for the criminal acts of Mr Balfour and his government would send a strong signal that the past, indeed, is past; the colonial era has ended, and Arabs and Israelis can look forward to a new age of justice and peace for all.

Rami G. Khouri is journalist-in-residence and Director of Global Engagement at the American University of Beirut, a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an executive board member of the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies. He tweets @ramikhouri

This article originated in The New Arab.

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 21 September 2020

Word Count: 1,021

—————-