NEW YORK — My last week in the United States following the run-up to U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit later this week to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Vatican has only confirmed that the erratic, impulsive nature of Trump’s domestic policy-making also seems to apply to his Middle East policies. As far as one can tell from many press accounts that are all based on discussions with Washington and New York insiders, Trump lacks decisively clear Middle East ‘policies’ right now, and has only attitudes towards major issues in the region — and these attitudes could change any day, and change again a few days later.

Several noteworthy aspects of Trump’s Middle East attitudes seem to be clear, at least as of Tuesday this week:
• his apparent determination to try to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian and wider Arab-Israeli conflicts;
• his wish to explore the creation of an Arab-Israeli-American “Middle East NATO” alliance against Iran;
• his desire to forge normal Arab-Israeli ties across the region before resolving the Israel-Palestine core conflict;
• his continuing use of military force against Islamic State (ISIS), without addressing the underlying drivers of IS’s support;
• his happy friendships with Arab, Turkish, and Israeli autocrats, alongside his non-focus on human rights and rule-of-law issues in these countries;
• his enthusiasm for massive new weapons sales to Arab states, perhaps totaling over $300 billion by most reliable press accounts; and,
• a vague desire to promote Islamic-Christian-Jewish interfaith cooperation in the service of regional and global peace.

This is quite a list of decisive and ambitious goals. It would appear to be far beyond the analytical or implementational capabilities of the Trump administration, but it is impressive nevertheless. About half of it is sensible. The other half is delusional, and the entire package in almost every instance repeats the consistently failed policies of the past three American administrations under Clinton, Bush, and Obama.

The broad goals of these policies have all been tried before. Not only have they not succeeded in resolving conflicts or promoting stability and prosperity for the people of the region, they also have directly contributed to bringing the Middle East to the current dire conditions of violence, fragility, terrorism, and mass refugeehood.

More pro-Israeli policies, focus on war-making and bombs-dropping, bolstering autocratic and corrupt local regimes, ignoring international human rights standards, expanding income and rights disparities within Arab countries, hastening the dysfunction of incompetent Arab regimes that focus on elusive security and massive arms purchases before most other priorities, and heightening tensions between Arabs and Iranians have all pushed several hundred million Arabs into conditions of despair and even dehumanization. The consequence of this is what we have seen happen in the past decade or so:
• several countries collapsed in civil wars,
• others fragmented along sectarian lines,
• Russia, Iran, and Turkey have gained major footholds in the Arab region, and
• refugeehood, emigration, and terrorism have emerged as the fastest growing sectors in our societies.

The Trump administration has yet to attempt any seriously new approach to addressing the many issues involved in the current state of the Middle East — except perhaps to press ahead with support for Kurdish fighters in Syria that has created new tensions with Turkey. The Trump administration is at a disadvantage in all this because it draws on the views of either the same officials who implemented the failed policies of the past three decades, or novices whose knowledge of the Middle East barely exceeds their interaction with Middle Eastern golf courses and Israeli settlements.

This is not a happy picture, and it is complicated by a series of inner subtleties within each of these issues, such as whether the U.S. will move its embassy in Israel to occupied Jerusalem, or push Israel to stop expanding its colonial settlements and land theft from the Palestinians. Also unknown is the impact of the fact that two of Trump’s three main advisers on Israel-Palestine (his son-in-law and ambassador to Israel) are supporters of Israeli settlements that are clearly illegal under international law.

This week we learned of some uncertainties over whether or not Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would accompany President Trump to the Western Wall, a sacred Jewish site in a part of East Jerusalem that was occupied in 1967. Also unclear is whether the White House deliberately deleted a Trump tweet in which he had said it was an honor to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Trump’s attitude toward Iran roams across a wide spectrum, sometimes threatening new sanctions and at other times (like this week) promising to continue sanctions relief stipulated in the nuclear/sanctions agreement reached with Iran over a year ago.

The only conclusion I can draw is that we cannot and should not conclude anything about what Trump may try to do in the Middle East. His beloved deal-making prowess will be tested seriously, and we should all wish him well and hope for the best. What we can say now, however, based on the outlines of his apparent goals, is that all his goals are rehashed versions of past policy failures, Orientalist fantasies, a desire to enrich Arab elites at the expense of ordinary citizens, and a repeatedly proven, woeful American government inability to treat Arabs, Israelis, Iranians, and Turks as people who have equal rights that must be achieved simultaneously.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 May 2017
Word Count: 869
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — Many people spend much time and energy these days analyzing the causes of the turbulent, often violent, and occasionally disintegrating conditions of many countries across the Arab region. Years ago and even occasionally today, Western and Arab scholars or analysts alike usually singled out one or two reasons for the problems of the Middle East and its Arab core societies.

Today, we know better than to blame one or two things for our difficult condition. Every Arab country is different, yet some broad trends have impacted the entire region. Here are five “ghosts” of widespread phenomena that still haunt us, as they also help us understand the messy state of the Arab region today.

1. The Ghost of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose invasion of Egypt in 1798 initiated over two centuries of continuing foreign military interference across the entire Arab region. That trend has reached a new peak in the past six years in Syria, where half a dozen major regional and global powers are actively at war with their own armies or by supplying local proxy forces. No region in the world could have withstood over two centuries of non-stop external military interference — with the political interference that accompanied it — that our region has experienced. Internal and regional wars, in a climate of very high Arab military spending, continue to propel countries back into dilapidated conditions every few decades.

2. The Ghosts of Theodore Hertzl and Arthur James Balfour, two men whose actions capture the genesis of the century-long conflict between Zionism and Arabism. This continuing conflict has incalculably set back the Arab quest for development, rights, and stability in many ways, including by retarding Arab national development in favor of military needs, allowing military regimes to assume power, and delaying the development of civilian-led pluralistic democracies. This conflict emerged simultaneously with the Arab quest for independence and sovereignty a century ago, and thus the Zionism-Arabism battle between Israelis and Palestinians has been seen by many Arabs as a much wider and older contest between the forces of foreign domination and indigenous liberation and sovereignty. It is no surprise that the Palestine cause resonates with people across the Arab world and beyond.

3. The Ghost of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Ottoman soldier who became the father of modern Turkey and a model of the secular nation-state in the Middle East. That secular nation-state model has not worked very well in much of our Arab region, because it has never fully provided citizens with the material and emotional services that they expect from their state. Most Arab states either perch precariously on the edges of fragmentation and civil war, or persist because authoritarian governments hold things together by force, and lack of citizen political rights.

4. The Ghost of Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose 1952 revolution in Egypt ushered in the catastrophic modern legacy of military officers forcibly taking command of civilian governments. These military governments that seized power through coups across many Arab states — Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Somalia, and others — have turned these countries into hollowed wrecks that are now the world’s greatest source of terrorists and refugees.

5. The Ghosts of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, whose unbridled free market capitalism in the early 1980s triggered a brand of economic globalization that valued financial mobility and profits above the rights of workers and well-being of citizens. This global wave quickly dominated policy-making in most Arab countries, whose authoritarian governments never developed a serious, diversified, and productive economic base and thus could not resist the demands of global powers that they liberalize Arab economies for the benefit of global capital. The result is visible today in many Arab economies that cannot meet their citizens’ basic needs, and desperately depend on cash hand-outs from friends and international financial institutions. In the meantime, their own citizens suffer from deteriorating educational sectors and labor markets dominated by informality, poverty, and widening disparities.

Many other trends of course shaped our region in the past two centuries, such as the impact of oil, very high population growth rates, and environmental stresses. But these five ghosts that personify wider trends strike me as capturing the most important factors that explain why our region today is so violent and unstable. It is also impossible to separate these elements from each other; they form an interlocking system of domestic, regional, and global forces that together have made it impossible for any Arab country to break through from the constraints of 19th and early 20th Century colonial domination to the promise of modern, stable, productive statehood that is also genuinely sovereign.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 May 2017
Word Count: 766
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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DOHA — I was in Doha, Qatar, Monday evening when Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, issued a new policy statement that amended some of the long-standing hardline positions on Israel in its charter. The next day I also took part in a public panel discussion on where we were on the one state/two state options to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The audience and participants expressed the same range of views that are prevalent among the general Arab and Palestinian publics: satisfaction with Hamas’ more realistic views on coexistence with Israel in two adjacent states with equal rights, but mixed with concerns that Hamas was traveling down the same fruitless path of conceding Israel’s demands without getting anything in return, as Fateh and its leaders Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas have done for decades.

Hamas’ new positions would seem to augur well for a peaceful, negotiated resolution of this long-running conflict. Its acceptance of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem — now occupied, colonized, or under siege by Israel — should allow it and Fateh to join with a handful of smaller political groups to rebuild a Palestinian national consensus on how to negotiate permanent peace with Israel.

That is unlikely to happen in the near future, given Israel’s refusal to deal rationally with any combination of Palestinians it negotiates with. The past 24 years since the Oslo agreements were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) have included countless rounds of direct and indirect negotiations. At some points Israel negotiated with a Palestinian unified delegation that was supported by Hamas in the Palestinian government of national unity. Yet even then no progress was made, because Israel made it very clear, under both Labor and Likud leaderships, that its priorities included expanding Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and maintaining full security control of the Palestinian regions.

Hamas’ approach differed from Fateh’s, and included armed resistance that resulted in several wars and savage, disproportionate, Israeli attacks against much of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. The vastly superior Israeli military has repeatedly attacked Gaza and killed Palestinian leaders and civilians, while Hamas and some other smaller groups launch relatively small, crude rockets that only occasionally cause death or damage in Israel. The result of this legacy over many decades has been massive suffering among Palestinians, without any real political gains in the battle with Israel. Neither Fateh’s nor Hamas’ strategy has worked very well at all.

Hamas’ softening of its position that now accepts a West Bank-Gaza-Jerusalem state for the Palestinians does not include formal recognition of Israel. The Fateh-led Palestinian majority has recognized Israel several times already, and received virtually nothing in return. So the bottom line is that Hamas’ statement this week signals a more pragmatic willingness to negotiate a two-state peace agreement with Israel based on an end to Israeli colonial expansion — but it will only take this willingness to its logical conclusion of a permanent peace with mutual recognition when Israel in turn signals its willingness to accept minimum Palestinian demands.

Israel has not offered any such signals, and remains defiant of the international consensus of the UN Security Council that its colonial settlements must end and it must share Jerusalem. It is not possible to see Hamas going any further to meet Israel halfway and resolve this conflict peacefully, if the Israelis in turn continue to demand from Hamas conditions that Israel itself is not willing to make simultaneously. These include recognizing permanent borders, ending the use of military force and resistance, and other issues related to refugees, security, and demography.

Given this reality, Palestinians nevertheless should work to reconstitute and relegitimize the PLO as their single national leadership, keep challenging Israel to negotiate on equal terms, and, most importantly, keep mobilizing international support through political action that aims at global public opinion as well as governments. Worldwide expressions of support for Palestinian rights continue to grow, but they have no impact yet on the ground because Israel maintains a significant military edge, and nobody in the world is prepared to use any political or other force to make it comply with the global consensus on the illegality of Zionist colonial expansion through settlements and land annexations.

Israel-Palestine keeps rising and dropping on the priority list of conflicts that capture world attention, and in the past few years it has been low priority. The massive hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners and Hamas’ revised political positions are two new elements that could prod a reconciliation among the main Palestinian political factions, a revival of the PLO, and a newly energized global diplomatic push for a peaceful resolution of the conflict with Israel. This is the right thing to do — but it has been tried many times before, and always floundered on Israel’s absolute refusal to comply with international law. So all eyes should now be on Israel to see if it can come up with even partial gestures of serious peace-making, as Hamas has just done.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 May 2017
Word Count: 831
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT— It is bizarre but telling of the modern Arab world that one of the most important meetings that could shape the future condition of hundreds of millions of Arabs and others in this region — the two-day Egyptian-Saudi Arabian summit in Riyadh — has received virtually no serious regional or global media coverage, and mostly only fawning opinion articles in the Arab media. This is unfortunate, but not unusual; it reflects the modern Arab tradition of national political leaders discussing fateful issues without any serious public discussions or inputs from their own citizens.

This tradition is one of the consistent underlying weaknesses in Arab governance systems that have brought us to the dilapidated condition we suffer today in many countries. When citizens have little or no say in how their governments function, their governments tend not to function very efficiently or equitably. That’s why hundreds of small rebellions, strikes, peaceful protests, and work stoppages take place every day now in countries like Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Morocco, and others where power structures remain firmly in the grip of a small elite that is not held accountable in any meaningful manner.

The Egyptian-Saudi relationship has been and remains potentially pivotal for the well-being of the Arab world. We can probably trace the beginning of the modern stagnation and episodic decline of many Arab lands to the 1962-70 civil war in Yemen, where the Saudis and Egyptians supported the two main warring parties. Egypt lost about 26,000 troops in its reckless adventure, which set the stage for its poor performance in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Saudi Arabia and Egypt used to be, and can regain their roles as, the two epicenters of modern Arab power in key fields — notably culture, religion, politics, and economy. Were they to cooperate and work closely together for their bilateral interests — anchored in mechanisms that reflect their own citizens’ values, aspirations, and rights — they could drive a sustained revival of the Arab region like Japan, China, and Korea powered the development of East Asia in the past half century.

But Egypt and Saudi Arabia now pass through trying moments in their national development, for different reasons that in both cases relate to top-heavy decision-making, lack of citizen participation and accountability, exaggerated military reliance, and unsustainable, often unproductive, development policies. They both face internal security threats from Islamic State (ISIS), Al-Qaeda and other such extremist groups.

Saudi Arabia is bogged down in the unfortunate and immature decision to make war in Yemen three years ago, which will preoccupy it politically and drain it financially for decades to come. Egypt grapples unsuccessfully with the continuing opposition it faces from ISIS and other extremists, along with nonviolent expressions of political views from ordinary men and women, of whom some 40,000 or so have been jailed. The tragedy of both countries is that, like most Arab governments, many of their problems are a result of their own past policies. They also fail to see that continuing on the same track will only make their problems worse, rather than resolving them.

So now they both realize that they need each other, and seek a way to work together more efficiently for their common good. Indeed, they could create a formidable force by combining Egypt’s human, military, cultural, and market potential with Saudi Arabia’s massive financial and energy resources and the respect it still enjoys in some Arab quarters for both its religious guardianship and its history of assisting other countries. Such a combination would once again allow the Arab world to take a seat at the table where non-Arab powers (namely the United States, Israel, Turkey, Iran, and Russia) have managed the regional security architecture for several decades now.

The two leaderships have recently embarked on a series of bilateral summits and other meetings to chart a new path forward, with bilateral investments, military cooperation, and other symbolic or practical steps that could address their separate weaknesses and bolster their potential to work together in the region. They both speak of creating a force of tens of thousands of troops from Arab and Islamic countries that would work to stabilize the region; this would be in everybody’s interests and should be studied very seriously, if it genuinely reflects the expressed will of Arab citizens, rather than the private discussions of isolated elites, defense contractors, and foreign consultants.

This raises a delicate question that deserves serious thought: Will relying more on joint military action achieve greater security on its own, without political, social, educational, and economic reforms? Or was an over-reliance on military security one of the reasons why so many Arab states, including these two, have faced vicious terror movements that are all the more troubling because they emerged from within their own societies? Egypt and Saudi Arabia have made enormous, constructive contributions to the development of the Arab world throughout the past century, but handfuls of their own nationals played pivotal roles in the birth and expansion of Al-Qaeda and other such extremist groups. How do we explain this?

It is healthier for all that Egypt and Saudi Arabia work together for the common good, rather than compete with or fight one another to claim the mantle of Arab leadership that is now a historical memory. They could generate enormous new energy and power to drive a human and socio-economic renaissance of the Arab region, based primarily on the human talent and economic resources they enjoy; or, they could spend tens of billions of dollars more on perpetuating their policies of recent decades, that have not provided the genuine security they seek and deserve.

How they proceed could have fateful consequences for the entire region, given their weight and impact. Let us hope they proceed more constructively to seek security and sustainable, equitable development by freeing and tapping their human and cultural talents, more than any other single factor.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 April 2017
Word Count: 976
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — Following day-to-day events in the Middle East is a trying experience, as grown men and women ignore the pain they inflict on so many others. Yet we cannot ignore what is happening all around us, because 400 million Arabs cannot all emigrate to new and peaceful lands; 400 million Arabs cannot escape the death and destruction made by their own national, tribal, sectarian or ethnic leaders and their foreign allies, by finding shelter in gated communities with high-speed internet and 24-hour home-delivered sushi meals in the suburbs of Cairo and Amman, the foothills of Lebanon’s mountains, the coastal plains of Morocco and Algeria, or the hundreds of dazzling towers across the cities and city-states of the Gulf region.

Yemen — the forgotten war, abandoned land, and forsaken community of the Arabs — is the high point of this horror show. Overshadowed recently by brutality in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, Yemen has now poked its skinny neck and weary head above the landscape of Arab moral devastation. It warns us that it may soon make the shift from simply experiencing a wasteful and painful war to being a great moral and political crime whose damages will reach many other countries soon. This is because virtually the entire country may be plunged into famine if the port of Hodeida in the north is attacked by the Saudi Arabian-led war machine that is supported by Arab allies, the United States, UK, and others in the world who are eager to offer mercenary troops-for-pay. (The most recent offer reportedly is 40,000 troops from Egypt, which, if true, would add trans-generational amnesia, incompetence, and irresponsibility to Egyptian decision-making, given Egypt’s loss of some 26,000 of its troops while fighting in the 1962-70 civil war in Yemen).

Documentation this month by the United Nations, the respected International Crisis Group (ICG), and others warns that Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, and Nigeria are on the brink of famine that could impact 20 million people. Yemen alone already suffers the world’s largest food crisis, as 17 million people cannot get enough basic food and need humanitarian assistance simply to stay alive and healthy. Unicef says 460,000 children suffer from severe acute malnutrition.

The deeper tragedy is that Yemen’s situation is totally man-made, reflecting policy decisions in Saudi Arabia, Arab allies, the United States, UK, France and other governments — including some UN Security Council members, ICG reminds us — that have weaponized the economy, shattered Central Bank operations that have almost stopped salary payments and other routine economic transactions, and reduced imports into a country that gets 90 percent of its basic commodities from abroad.

Millions of families that have sold belongings and borrowed to the limits of their abilities will soon reach a point of collapse where they have to decide who in the family gets food or not, who receives medical care or not, who lives for another few weeks or not. It is particularly cruel that Yemen’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens bear the brunt of the current fighting. When I contacted Yemen scholar Sheila Carapico at the University of Richmond to seek her analysis of a country she has known and researched for decades, this is what she told me: Contrary to the Saudi accounts of their aerial bombing to fight Shi’a militia allied with Iran (Houthi rebels who are members of the Zaydi denomination of Shi`a Islam), “The casualties of the Saudi-led assault — the dead or dying from trauma injuries or neglect (starvation or deprivation of basic medicines) and those displaced by fighting — are disproportionately Afro-Yemeni, dark-skinned, poverty-stricken, Red Sea coastal people who belong to the Shafa`i denomination of Sunni Islam. They were already the least privileged members of a poor society.”

These helpless victims largely inhabit the westernmost Red Sea coastal plain, the Tihama, that includes all of Hodeida province and parts of the provinces of Taiz and Hajjah. They and the rest of the country will suffer new mass ravages if Hodeida is attacked, basic commodity imports decline even further, and war continues throughout the country. Ongoing, deliberate warfare has left millions of Yemenis destitute and desperate. They will join the growing pool of tens of millions of once ordinary Arabs whose lives and futures have been destroyed.

Another three or four million children could drop out of school — adding to the 25 million or so Arab children already in that condition. Millions more will suffer acute malnutrition. This desperate, helpless, hungry underclass — without rights or any escape from a guaranteed life of poverty for generations to come — will do anything just to survive, and retaliate against their tormentors who robbed them of their citizenship and their humanity. They might support any extremist or terrorist group that employs their sons as foot soldiers for $200 a month, join any criminal gang that offers them illicit income, or set out on a frantic refugee trail to seek another week, perhaps a month, even half a year of continued life, somewhere, anywhere, but not in their own ancestral land where they are doomed due to no fault of their own.

Syria, Libya, and Iraq have shown us unambiguously how desperate, dehumanized people will behave in such situations. Yemen will be next if we let the war drag on, the assault of Hodeida occur, and our sense of conscience and collective peace-making remain frozen in the face of a criminal war of choice whose vulgar acts on all sides will one day prod an army of starving and orphaned Arab kids to scale the walls of the mightiest walled sushi palace. Most of the world’s news media, including many Arab media, will not cover the assault on Hodeida. So the poor who were invisible in life will also remain invisible in death. Only their ghosts will come back to haunt us one day. There is nothing in the world more frightening than the ghost of a starved child seeking retribution.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 April 2017
Word Count: 982
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For rights and permissions, contact:
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — Among the many reports and studies that emerge weekly on the dire conditions in our region and what must be done to repair them, I want to mention one report that merits much wider reading and appreciation — the Arab Human Development Report 2016 that was published a few months ago by the United Nations Development Programme’s Regional Bureau of Arab States. It is entitled “Youth and the Prospects for Human Development in a Changing Reality” (see its executive summary or full report on-line at http://www.arab-hdr.org/).

The report received a flurry of publicity for a few weeks, mostly due to some of its dramatic infographics that showed how the 5% Arab share of world population accounts for 45% of world terror attacks, 57% of refugees, 68% of battle-related deaths, 17.6% of conflicts, and 47% of internally displaced people. We know all this from many other sources. Anyone concerned about trends in the Arab region should read this report, though, because it captures the nuances, complexities, and interrelationships among many different sectors of life that together shape the tough conditions in which all Arabs live today, not just the young.

It avoids the trap of the easy answer or single magic bullet that repairs our damage. It tells us, in fact, the multiple angles of the deep mess we have created for ourselves. The report recalls that two-thirds of the roughly 400 million Arabs today are below the age of 30; that’s some 260 million young people, and about 100 million of them are in the 15-29-year-old age group.

This should force us to snap out of the mythology that most Arab elites peddle about youth representing our future, and that causes us twice a year to grab a bunch of young people and put them on television with a caring official or other adult in order to hear their views for 45 minutes — before we send them back to school, home, and work where they have no voice, no rights, no freedoms, and no real opportunity to develop their total human faculties in fields like rational and creative thinking, cultural diversity, artistic talent, political and civic engagement, community development, economic growth, social justice, and the other dimensions of life that most young Arabs are denied.

Well, not really just young Arabs. In fact all Arabs to some extent are not able to develop these fundamental faculties that differentiate us from sheep and snakes — even though most Arab citizens tend to act like sheep because that it what their political culture taught them to do, and many in the elite act like snakes because that is what their political culture allowed them to do.

This report forces us to see that there are few meaningful differences between young and adult Arabs. They share basically the same concerns, values, and aspirations. The young are the biggest group in our societies, and they have already revolted against their elites three times in the past few decades — first, by emigrating in the hundreds of thousands to lands of more opportunity and freedom; second, by creating their own parallel world on the web and in the mall, mosque and playground where they can do what they are not allowed to do in their actual everyday lives; and third, by launching the 2011 Arab uprisings that have rocked our region ever since. What will they do next, these feisty youngsters?

One thing is certain. Giving young people more basketball courts or cartoon channels on television is not going to solve our problems. Fixing our societies and offering 260 million young Arabs a serious chance at living a normal life requires serious policy reforms and power-sharing in a very wide range of fields. These include political power, social activism, economic development, cultural life, education and health services, environmental protection, accountability, and many others. This is how marginalized, pauperized, and militarized young people shed these burdens, and dare to live a normal life.

This is the moment — when we know from new research that 78% of Arabs live in ‘hardship’ or ‘in need’; that the 20% Arab unemployment rate is the highest in the world; that the 22% Arab female labor force participation rate is the lowest in the world; that about half of mid-primary and mid-secondary school Arab students do not meet basic learning levels, in rich as well as poor countries, that perhaps over half all Arab labor is in the informal sector — this is the moment when we have to ask a very basic question: Are launching new wars, imposing new emergency laws, sending people to prison for expressing their views on social media, or spending another several trillion dollars on foreign arms purchases the best way to move towards a decent future? Or are these actually the failed ways of our recent past that have brought us to our current calamity?

Our power elites may not wish to ponder this question. Someone should whisper in their ear that their own children are asking this, in those worlds they created in the malls, mosques, playgrounds, and websites, where they seek to enter the realm of total humanity, and forever leave behind the frightening landscape of sheep and snakes.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 April 2017
Word Count: 863
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BEIRUT — The limited news from Washington, D.C. Monday about the meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Egyptian Field Marshal-turned-President Abdel Fattah Sisi has been widely described as marking a historic turning point in United States-Egypt relations, following the coolness in ties during the Obama years. That strikes me as a pretty inaccurate assessment; rather I would see the warm expression of mutual admiration and close political-military ties between the two leaders as merely perpetuating and affirming the close American-Egyptian relations that have existed for decades.

Those relations have been called “strategic,” but for those willing to embrace reality they can also be called ineffective and counter-productive. Egypt is passing through a very difficult and delicate moment in its modern history, which has been manifested in multiple dimensions. Egypt is one of the very few Arab countries that do, indeed, have multiple dimensions — rather than the rule of one-dimensional lands characterized by simplistic economies, cultures, and capabilities.

For a century or so Egypt has been seen by foreign powers as a key to their Middle Eastern policies, interests, and relationships, due to the many genuinely strategic dimensions of Egypt. These include geography, economic bulk, military power, political impact and initiative, cultural and intellectual leadership of the Arab world, and the sort of national self-confidence that only emanates from a genuine nation-state’s assets, actions, and attitudes. For some half-a-century or so, nobody else in the Arab world could get close to Egypt in these realms, yet its dilemma today is that in every one of these realms Egypt has been steadily regressing. It continues to become more dependent on handouts from others, and is shedding those traits that make it a genuinely important and strategic partner for others.

Ever since President Sadat some 35 years ago forged close strategic ties with Washington, both sides have benefited in various ways, and the momentum of the recent past has continuously shaped the policies of leaders in the West, who would not pressure Egypt too much on its terrible human rights record and autocratic ways, or push hard to help Egypt institute genuine domestic economic, social, and political reforms.

The result has been Egypt’s steady decline over the past four decades, as almost all of its key national institutions, other than the military and security services, have been hollowed out in stunning and shocking testament to why military leaders should not run countries with total abandon and a lack of accountability to their citizens. The return of military rule to Egypt, with Sisi’s ouster of the elected President Mohammad Morsi in July 2013, reflected a combination of forces in society that all deserved serious reappraisal by Egyptians, including the quality of their constitutional democracy, the performance of the Morsi government, and the emotional-political sentiments of the citizenry.

The option to bring the military back to power was genuinely appealing to many Egyptians, but it was the worst option. We can see the results of that today as the country desperately looks around to see which partner, friend, or neighbor can offer it two, five or ten billion dollars for the coming years, just to get it through the economic constraints that are a result of its own poor management of the economy and the state over many decades.

The main reason I say that U.S. policies towards Egypt have been a failure and counter-productive is that Egypt’s trajectory is likely to fuel new episodes of extremism, instability, and political violence, which already see homegrown extremist forces link up with partners in terror and crime across the region, such as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS). The most dangerous and systematic dynamic that creates an environment that in turn promotes extremism and terrorism is precisely what Egyptians have suffered for some years now — economic and political pressures, combined with poor education and social services standards, low job prospects, and a limited government capability to redress these, make it inevitable that some ordinary and poor Egyptians will slowly experience frustration, anger, helplessness, desperation, and, ultimately, radicalization. As hundreds of thousands or perhaps some millions of men and women, especially young people with no hope of a decent life, join forces with similarly dehumanized men and women across the Arab region, the result will be more of the same political violence, terrorism, and state fragmentation that we have witnessed in the past 20 years.

This is what happens when the world’s strongest power works closely with Arab authoritarian and autocratic leaderships for decades on end, while they ignore the conditions within Arab states that generate instability, dehumanization, and terrorism, and instead mutually praise each other’s courage and leadership in fighting terrorism and promoting national development. What happened at the White House Monday between Trump and Sisi, is a tragic and catastrophic harbinger of terrible days ahead for Egypt and much of the Arab world, where Egypt’s impact remains immense.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 April 2017
Word Count: 811
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — Few people in the Arab world or abroad will take seriously the regular Arab Summit meeting of heads of state in Jordan this week, which is a tragedy for all concerned. Pan-Arab joint action could have generated worldwide respect for the views and policies of sovereign Arab states, and could have improved the lives of hundreds of millions of men, women and children across our region, who now gravitate steadily towards lives of chronic vulnerability and suffering.

These two positive trends broadly did happen in the initial half-century of Arab independence and modern statehood, between the 1920s and 1970s, when total Arab population grew from 60 million to 150 million people. That trajectory reversed itself in the past 50 years, as Arab sovereignty, self-determination, and independence have all frayed visibly at the edges, while the living conditions and future wellbeing of the 400 million Arabs today have deteriorated steadily for at least half the population.

One reason for this is that Arab leaders have become more distant from their own citizens. They rarely if ever feel the daily pain and discomfort that ordinary families experience when electricity is cut off for six or ten hours a day, fresh water taps emit saline water from over-exploited aquifers, or children aged 8 or 12 come home from school reporting that they have graduated to the next class, while testing results show that almost half these same students effectively cannot read, write or do basic maths.

Arab summitry has always had an element of pageantry, usually with sincere intentions. Yet the problem remains — even worsens every year, as Syria, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, and Somalia remind us daily — that pageantry and sincerity are not acceptable substitutes for responsible policy-making and genuine, structural improvements in people’s living conditions.

It is unlikely to happen, but I suggest that some of the Arab leaders meeting along the Dead Sea shore in a sparkling conference center should sneak out once or twice and visit neighboring villages in the Jordan Valley and Wadi Araba, like Karamah or Ghor el-Safi. Perhaps on their way back to the airport they could visit settlements like Sahab, Jiza, Umm al-Basateen, or any of the many other smaller villages and towns on both sides of the main highway. A swing through southern and eastern Greater Amman would offer many insights into the realities of the lives of perhaps a majority of Arab citizens, especially in places like Zarqa and Ruseifeh.

The following few numbers reflect realities in our Arab region, and should spark some lively discussions among the gathered heads of state and their officials in charge of national development policies.

78% is the percentage of Arab families living in ‘hardship’ or ‘in need’ in 2016, according to the Arab Opinion Index survey by the Doha Center for Research and Policy Studies).

20% is the unemployment rate in the Arab world, which is the highest in the entire world — and it has not budged much in decades.

30% is the percentage of youth unemployment, also the highest in the world.

22% is the female labor force participation rate in the Arab world, which is the lowest in the world.

95% is the percentage of start-ups in the Arab world that, five years later, had remained small start-ups or had closed, mainly due to the stranglehold on the economy by larger, older companies that enjoyed monopoly power and were connected with political elites.

32% is the average rate of absenteeism of doctors in public sector clinics in Egypt (32), Morocco (27) and Yemen (37), because they were making more money running their private clinics during their working hours. Similar absenteeism patterns hold for many public school teachers, who make more money tutoring students after class instead of teaching them in class.

0.9% was the real GDP growth rate of the entire Arab region in 2014, and 1.6% and 6.4% were the rate of contraction of Maghreb economies in 2015 and 2014, signaling that most Arab family-level indicators (job opportunities, income, social services, etc.) would continue to decline because economic growth was well below population growth.

56% is the average percent of primary students in school who are not meeting basic learning levels (from 33 percent of children in Bahrain to 91 percent of children in Yemen).

48% is the average percent of lower secondary school students who are not meeting basic learning levels (from 26% in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, to nearly two-thirds of students in Morocco).

40% is a rough estimate of the labor force in Arab countries engaged in the informal sector, without meaningful legal protections, social safety nets, or future prospects.

These are the realities that define perhaps half the total Arab population’s stressful lives, maybe as many as 200 million people, while the other half gets along comfortably. If I were a summiteering leader, and I learned of these realities, I would expect this to be the first item of action on the agenda, because it is how just leaders govern, and also because it may be the most serious security threat they will ever face.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 March 2017
Word Count: 851
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — Just as I left New York City a few days ago to return to Beirut, I read in the New York TimesDan Barry’s powerful obituary of the late Jimmy Breslin, a New York City columnist and book author. Breslin achieved his initial fame in the 1960s, when I was a journalism student in the United States, by writing about the views and conditions of ordinary men and women — the “poor and disenfranchised,” in Barry’s words — who were otherwise mostly ignored by the elite mainstream media.

The “new journalism” that Breslin and many others developed explored how political power impacted the lives of ordinary men and women, especially low- and middle-income citizens. It made it more difficult for corrupt politicians or uncaring corporate leaders to get away with their misdoings. That was half a century ago, and Breslin’s death warranted a page one and full-page obituary in the New York Times because the story was not about the passing of a single scribe; it was and remains about how power is exercised unjustly in societies where, broadly, those who are not rich, white, male, and politically connected suffer throughout most of their lives. Breslin and his many daring colleagues broke through the political screens and the media/information barriers that had relegated stories of the needy and weak in society to marginal and special interest media.

Why do I mention this in my column that is mainly about events in the Arab world and the wider Middle East? I do so because the hidden suffering of millions of Americans half a century ago is replicated today in the lives of hundreds of millions of Arab men, women and children across the Middle East, whose condition, sentiments, and rights are largely off the mass media agendas in our region. The critical and dangerous difference between the United States in the 1960s and the Arab world today is that governments and media organizations linked to the ruling power elite actively work to prevent serious dissent or alternative views from appearing in the public sphere, while configuring political governance systems in a manner that guarantees perpetual dominance of the decision-making mechanisms by the ruling power elite.

I estimate that about 200 million of the 400 million Arabs today live on the edge — in conditions defined by constant, structural pain, helplessness, and vulnerability. They usually lack decent pay, formal contracts, medical insurance, retirement plans, minimum safety and working hours, and other important elements of an advanced, wage labor-based, commercial economy. The 200 million other half of the Arab world live more comfortably, but they do not see that the chronic hopelessness of their poorer compatriots in such large numbers represents a massive source of vulnerability for them also.

The most troubling aspect of this situation is that it is becoming increasingly difficult, sometimes even dangerous, for journalists, poets, creative people, activists, or others to speak out in public and point out the catastrophe that await our region, as hundreds of millions of people who once lived relatively decent middle class lives quietly slip into poverty and desperation. The uprisings of 2010-11 were a massive wake-up call that our governments — and the foreign governments that support them — totally ignored.

Our power elites continue to stifle serious dissent, even when it is simply loyal citizens saying they deserve to live in societies where political and economic decisions — like spending hundreds of billions of dollars to buy advanced weapons — should be made on the basis of wider citizen participation and greater government accountability. Tens of thousands are now in jail in countries like Egypt, Turkey, Iran and others, mainly for their political views, rather than for committing criminal acts. Israel, with the support of the United States, refuses to allow any discussion of peaceful political, economic, social, or sports boycotts and sanctions against Israel because of its repeatedly verified criminal actions in occupied Arab lands. Foreign supporters of such peaceful protest, that was central to the U.S. civil rights movement and the struggle against South African Apartheid in which many Jews were pivotal participants, now will be forbidden entry to Israel, and Washington may withdraw funds from international organizations that dare to discuss Israeli policies. Some Arab governments now even prosecute their own citizens for making political criticisms of other Arab governments.

As Arab, Israeli, Turkish, Iranian, Russian, American, British, and other power elites continue to pursue some illegal, irresponsible, exploitative, and uncaring actions, public protest against them has become criminalized, and will become rarer. The story must be told of ordinary men and women in the Middle East who are caught in this terrifying cycle that sees them relinquish their humanity. Many journalists and artists across the Middle East are doing precisely this, but mostly on internet outlets, out of sight of the mainstream public sphere. Jimmy Breslin’s memory should remind us why freedom of expression and press are so important to a wholesome society, whether in America half a century ago or in the Middle East today.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 March 2017
Word Count: 832
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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NEW YORK — The problematic contrast between how Arabs see themselves and how they are generally perceived in the U.S. public sphere of media and politics jolted me again this week, as I followed American mainstream mass media that mostly mentions Arab countries in the context of war, terrorism, refugees, collapsing states, or security threats. I simultaneously read through the results of the new Arab Opinion Index poll published by the Doha-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies that provided multiple insights into the actual identities, values, and policy views of Arabs across our region. The contrast between the Arab reality and its perception in the U.S. was stark, and troubling.

The latest poll (the fifth since 2011) interviewed 18,310 individuals in 12 Arab countries, with an overall margin of error of +/- 2 percent. Several significant findings deserve greater appreciation in the U.S. and other Western lands that still largely deal with an imagined, rather than the actual, Arab world.

Arab citizens’ attitudes towards the “Islamic State” (ISIS) indicate that religiosity does not play as big a role in people’s actions as often perceived abroad. Eighty-nine percent of respondents opposed ISIS, while just 2 percent had a “very positive” and 3 percent had a “positive to some extent” view of ISIS. This reconfirms the overwhelming rejection of ISIS in Arab societies, though it is also worrying that 5 percent, or 20 million Arabs, had positive views of it.

More interestingly, Arab views of ISIS are not correlated with religiosity, the survey found, as positive and negative views were expressed equally frequently by people who self-identify as “very religious,” “religious” and “not religious.” Other questions on individual religiosity, views of ISIS, and the role of religion in public life indicate that attitudes towards ISIS are defined by political considerations, rather than by religious beliefs.

While the prevalent preference among Americans to deal with ISIS seems to be ongoing military action or promoting “moderate Islam,” just seventeen percent of Arabs suggest military action as their first option. The other first options among the majority of respondents included “ending foreign intervention,” “supporting Arab democratic transition,” “resolving the Palestinian cause,” and ending the Syrian conflict in a manner which meets the aspirations of the Syrian people.”

In other words, the survey analysts said, “In broad terms, the Arab public supports taking a comprehensive set of political, economic, social and military measures to confront terrorism.”

The Arab focus on political factors that exacerbate many of our problems was also reflected in increasing public disenchantment with the policies of Arab and foreign powers towards Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen. Strong majorities negatively viewed the foreign policies of Russia, Iran, and the United States (from 66 to 75 percent). Arabs widely also saw the United States as the greatest single threat to collective Arab security — 67 percent of Arabs said both the U.S. or Israel pose the greatest threat to collective Arab security (ten percent said Iran). Majorities of Arabs (from 59 to 89 percent) saw Israel, the United States, Russia, Iran, and France as threatening the region’s stability.

It was fascinating to see that while the U.S government and Israel are seeking a mythological alliance of Arabs and Israel against Iran, the survey found that the overwhelming majority of Arabs (86 percent) reject official recognition of Israel by their governments. This reflected widespread perceptions of Israel’s colonialist policies towards the Palestinians and its expansionist threat to other Arab countries. Dr. Mohammad Almasri, Coordinator of the Arab Opinion Index, explained this Arab animosity towards Israel as reflecting political actions, rather than being framed in cultural or religious terms.

Perhaps the most troubling finding of the poll was about the material condition of Arab families, and their views of the biggest problems they faced. The single most pressing problem facing respondents’ country was economic conditions (44 percent), followed by priorities related to governmental performance (20 percent), the stalled democratic transition, deficiencies in public services, and the spread of financial and administrative corruption.

Not surprisingly, the survey also identified widespread and total lack of satisfaction with people’s financial circumstances. Nearly half (49 percent) said their household incomes were sufficient to cover necessary expenditures, but they could not make any savings (designated as living “in hardship”). Another 29 percent of Arab citizens cannot cover their basic family expenses, and thus live “in need.”

In other words, nearly 4 out of 5 Arabs live in precarious family situations where they do not have enough money, savings, or social safety net mechanisms to handle critical human needs in daily life or in an emergency.

These findings cry out for a better grasp of the linkages between this crushing and precarious reality at family level, the sustained autocratic and increasingly incompetent policies of Arab governments that are supported by foreign powers, and the impacts of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the war-making politics of regional Arab and non-Arab powers — precisely the biggest issues for ordinary Arabs that almost never appear in the U.S. public sphere.

(The survey results are available on-line at http://english.dohainstitute.org/file/Get/d3e8a41a-661d-44f0-9e02-6d237cb91869)

Rami G. Khouri is a senior fellow at the American University of Beirut and the Harvard Kennedy School, and can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 March 2017
Word Count: 841
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For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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