BEIRUT — It is refreshing to read a report once in a while that accurately captures the multiple reasons and mechanisms that lead some young people in the Arab world to pursue a path of radical action, including joining movements like Islamic State (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda. This is the case with a concise study that was published this week by an Amman-based think tank named WANA (West Asia-North Africa) Institute that was launched a few years ago by Jordan’s Prince El-Hassan bin Talal to promote “authentic” research, analysis, and policy recommendations by the people of this region.

The 32-page study entitled “Trapped between Destructive Choices: Radicalisation Drivers Affecting Youth in Jordan,” (available at www.wanainstitute.org) is based on focus group sessions with 52 youth in Jordan, including 16 Syrian refugees, in four cities that have experienced occasional radicalization and violence in recent years: namely Salt, Ma’an, Irbid, and Rusayfeh. While this is by no means a nationally representative sample, the methodical research is valuable because it succinctly captures the multiple factors in young people’s lives that intersect to drive some men and women to join militant groups and join “the jihad” in Syria, as they explain it.

These many factors in people’s lives are rarely acknowledged in an integrated manner in the masses of research and public policy materials that I have examined from the rest of the world. Especially in the Western world, most analyses of the drivers of radicalisation emphasize one or two factors, often exaggerating the role of religion while downplaying political and socio-economic factors

The simplistic, superficial, deficient, and usually useless analyses that dominate both the Western world and Arab officialdom could be the result of several factors: ignorance, laziness, ideologically-driven bias, or simply that Arab and Western elites simply do not want to see the many causes of radicalisation, because they would find that they are often to blame for some of them.

This WANA Institute report is refreshing and valuable because it clarifies the wider range of factors to blame for radicalization of our youth, and the relationships among those factors. It says that a combination of economic, social, family, psychological, and ideological push and pull factors combine in various combinations, and at various junctures in young people’s lives, to create tensions in those lives, and to drive a relatively small number of them over the edge and into the hands of sophisticated ISIS and other recruiters who are very aware of these dynamics.

Among the important contributors to youth radicalisation, the study found, are economic pressures (especially unemployment and poverty) that leave youth frustrated and powerless to produce change in their own societies. These can combine with deep political grievances about corruption, injustices, marginalization, nepotism, and unequal application of the rule of law, which cause some young men and women to seek alternatives to their vulnerability, humiliation, and helplessness.

These “public” factors can combine with personal, psychological, or family conditions that aggravate a young person’s sense of hopelessness and of “being trapped in a network of lost opportunity and injustice,” which can then trigger a psychological search for meaning and purpose in life. Such a search is usually part of the growing up process of any human being; it becomes lethally urgent when it combines with the negative conditions in some young people’s economic, political, social, and family lives.

So who answers the call for a new life in which marginalized, hopeless young men and women can instantly become powerful and heroic, part of a community of like-minded dynamic actors who wipe away corruption and exploitation, restore dignity and equity to the world, and avenge injustices against their fellow (Sunni) Muslims? ISIS and others who claim to carry out divinely-mandated jihad answer the call.

Many other dimensions of this process have been identified in this and some other research, including gender-, sexuality-, and refugee-related dynamics. The authors of this study — Dr. Neven Bondokji, Kim Wilkinson, and Leen Aghabi — have provided important insights and some fresh verifications related to how we and the world fully understand why relatively few people in our societies become radicalised and join groups that engage in terrorism and savagery in a sustained manner.

The report also includes intriguing policy recommendations, and valuable suggestions for further research that are both firmly anchored in the realities of our societies’ dynamics at government, economic, social, psychological, and family levels — rather than the fantasy analyses we often get from foreign quarters or most of our own Arab political elites who still refuse to grasp why and how terrorists suddenly emerged from our own homes and schools in recent decades.

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: 08 March 2017
Word Count: 764
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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 — The destructive and almost irrational nature of decision-making by governments in the Middle East and abroad has been highlighted again this week by three developments that should cause us all to pause for a moment and ask how we have allowed our inhumanity to prevail in the business of war — while also generating a destructive sense of helplessness and worthlessness among hundreds of millions of ordinary people across Arab countries who increasingly conclude that their lives do not matter to anyone

The three developments are: 1) the announcement that Saudi Arabia would provide $10 billion to help rebuilt the widespread destruction in Yemen (which was largely caused by the Saudi decision to initiate a quite senseless war there nearly two years ago); 2) a report by Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) showing the catastrophic impact of the war on the city of Taiz; and, 3) the Donald Trump administration’s desire to raise the U.S. military budget to nearly $650 billion.

The juxtaposition of these three suggests a level of decision-making in assorted powerful countries that has long surpassed the point of uncaring disdain for human life, and now ventures into the criminally irresponsible. The MSF report is based on their continuous presence on the ground in Yemen serving the needs of citizens on both sides of the fighting. It clarifies the massive destruction and thousands of civilian casualties that result from the Saudi Arabia-initiated war, with the support of some Arab allies, assorted Yemeni groups fighting on the ground, and the United States and other foreign and Middle Eastern states offering technical assistance.

The thousands of dead and tens of thousands of injured Yemenis, alongside the significant destruction of civilian facilities, have generated millions of refugees and internally displaced people, leaving about 80 percent of Yemen’s population of 26 million in need of food or other basic needs. Nearly three million have been displaced, and the rate of child malnutrition is among the highest in the world, according to the UN.

In the meantime, Al-Qaeda continues to entrench itself in parts of the country, while thousands of disgruntled young men who see no hope or future for themselves surely must be thinking about joining radical militant groups like Islamic State (ISIS) or others. They ask: Why should they play by the global rules, if Arab and foreign powers and the warring Yemeni parties do not observe those same rules? They saw what happened to civilians in Homs, Aleppo, Gaza City, Tikrit, and other Arab cities, where millions of innocent civilians were displaced, hundreds of thousands were killed, entire urban quarters were razed to the ground, and no power in sight was willing or able to stop the atrocities.

It seems clear then that powerful and rich countries like Saudi Arabia, the United States, Iran, and others can continue to stoke the war in Yemen without any pressures of restraint now or political or legal accountability in the future. If the U.S. military budget is increased by another $50 billion, some of this will go to eradicating ISIS, as President Trump promises. So we should expect more Middle Eastern or Asian lands to soon resemble Yemen, and the world will watch with shock but political immobilization, as it does now in Yemen.

The succinct MSF report, entitled “Yemen: Healthcare under siege in Taiz,” clarifies how almost two years of continuous fighting have created a medical-humanitarian disaster in Yemen’s third largest city — and conditions still continue to deteriorate. (The report is available on the web at http://www.msf.org/en/article/yemen-healthcare-under-siege-taiz).

MSF operates on both sides of the frontlines in Taiz. What it reports is incalculably shocking: “An unacceptably high proportion of the war-wounded are women and children. The city, once Yemen’s cultural hub, has shrunk to a third of its pre-war population size. Yet it is still a densely populated urban war zone where 200,000 people live amidst constant heavy artillery shelling, daily air strikes and armed clashes (…) Shells are launched into and out of the city center while the movement of people and goods in and out is severely restricted and tightly controlled. None of the warring parties in Taiz show any respect for the protection of civilians. Our patients and their caregivers, on both sides of the frontlines around the city, have reported being injured by shelling while preparing lunch at home, wounded by airstrikes while walking to their fields, shot at by snipers while walking the streets outside their houses, and maimed by landmines while herding their livestock (…) Hospitals have been repeatedly hit by shelling and gunfire, one clinic has been hit by an airstrike, and ambulances have been shot at, confiscated or intruded on by armed men. Medical personnel have been shot at on their way to work, harassed, detained, threatened and forced to work at gunpoint (…) The general population is not only caught in the crossfire, but is frequently indiscriminately targeted.”

All the local and foreign warring parties are directly or indirectly involved in these destructive acts. MSF says it has treated over 55,000 war-wounded in Yemen, with over 10,700 of them from Taiz.

MSF is asking that International Humanitarian Law (IHL) be urgently applied to reduce or stop the “consistent pattern of injuring and killing of civilians by all belligerents,” and that all warring parties respect, “the protection and neutrality of medical structures and personnel, allow the wounded and sick to safely access to health care, and facilitate the delivery of medical and humanitarian aid.”

It seems far better to do this now than to mindlessly and criminally spend tens of billions of dollars on more wars and post-war assistance in shattered countries that should never have been shattered in the first place.

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: 28 February 2017
Word Count: 950
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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 — It is always heartening to see some Western-based global institutions speak the truth about aspects of our turbulent and sometimes derelict conditions in Arab countries. This is the case with a report released in London Tuesday by Transparency International (TI), that said the “Islamic State” (ISIS) would only be defeated if the corrupt conditions that help it to thrive are addressed. This call significantly says responsibility for the conditions that created ISIS and others like it is shared among Arab and other Middle Eastern and Western countries, including the United States and UK.

Both aspects of this are noteworthy, especially as various Middle Eastern and foreign armies are attacking ISIS’ Raqqa and Mosul strongholds. The two bookends of the ISIS phenomenon and many others like it are that corruption is a major driver of terrorism, especially in the Middle East, and that Western governments are complicit in this and need to revise their policies, as do Arab states themselves.

The deeper point is TI’s call for Western and other foreign governments to stop using their taxpayers’ money to support authoritarian regimes that thrive on corruption. Katherine Dixon, director of Transparency International Defence and Security and co-author of the report, said, “This is not just about closing off the corrupt channels that enable the day-to-day operations of groups like ISIS, but rethinking relationships with the Mubaraks [in Egypt], Gaddafis [in Libya] and Malakis [in Iraq] of the future.”

This call coincides with new data compiled by the U.K. group Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), quoted in the Guardian newspaper on Feb. 12, showing unusual British exuberance in selling arms to Arab states, including those involved in the catastrophic war in Yemen. The story notes: “In the years leading up to the Arab spring, the UK sold those countries £41.3m of small arms, £7m of ammunition and £34.3m of armored vehicles. In the five years following the events of 2011, these figures, compiled by CAAT, had risen sharply to an annual average of £58.9m, £14m and £59.6m respectively. In some cases sales skyrocketed. UK exports of small arms, ammunition and armored vehicles to the United Arab Emirates jumped from £18.3m to £93.2m, to Qatar from £2.3m to £33.4m, and to Egypt from £2.5m to £34.7m (….) The UK has continued to arm the Saudi regime, licensing about £3.3bn of weapons to the kingdom since the bombing of Yemen began in March 2015.”

Andrew Smith of CAAT echoed TI’s call for Western states to reconsider how their policies bolster non-democratic Arab states: “The 2011 uprisings should have caused countries like the UK to re-evaluate how they do business with the Middle East and North Africa, but they did no such thing. The arms sales have increased, even where the repression is getting worse.”

The TI report adds a new element to this argument, which is that ISIS and other groups like it will only be defeated if the underlying drivers of dysfunction, disparities, and indignity across many parts of the Arab world are tackled head on – meaning that both Arab and foreign governments must revise their policies. The TI report, entitled The Big Spin, says that ISIS exploited the widespread Arab popular resentment of corruption to radicalize and recruit people, offering the Islamic State as the antidote, even though it also practiced dishonest activities.

A related problem, TI acknowledged, is that foreign powers spend too much time focusing on radical religious ideologies, but completely ignore the material circumstances in which ISIS and other such groups thrive. So defeating ISIS in Raqqa and Mosul while corruption, government incompetence, and citizen despair continue to grow will only guarantee the birth of new groups even more dangerous than ISIS, Al-Qaeda and others like them.

The “material circumstances” that TI refers to have led to very difficult living conditions for several hundred million Arabs in the past few decades; this has been due to the ravages from the convergence of corrupt, often inept, elites that mismanage government services, a total lack of political rights for citizens, and no credible accountability of power — while high population growth continues apace, environmental conditions deteriorate widely, and foreign armies attack and colonize Arab lands at will. This entire grim picture has been heavily supported by Western governments or quietly accepted as an unfortunate dimension of the Orient — but never mind, they say in London, Washington and Paris, if those Arabs spend tens of billions of dollars to buy our weapons that are mostly used to further destabilize other Arab countries and spur refugee flows now measured in the millions.

The outcome is what we have seen across many Arab lands since the early 1990s, as disgruntled citizens turn desperate, and in turn destabilize their own and neighboring lands. TI concludes appropriately: “Corruption is a real security threat, more than just a means for elites to line their pockets. In the end corrupt governments by fueling public anger and undermining institutions, are the architects of their own security crises.”

Well said, old chaps.

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: 22 February 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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BEIRUT — We should have a better idea in the coming 48 hours what the Trump administration really means by an unnamed senior White House official’s statement that Washington does not necessarily insist in a two-state solution as the outcome of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations — meaning adjacent, sovereign Palestinian and Israeli states living in peace. Then again, it might be that both the senior White House official and visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could both be indicted in courts in a few weeks, given the precarious situations these days before the law of both Netanyahu and some White House officials.

This does not take into account that both Netanyahu and Trump are candidates for the Global Prize in Flip-flopping Double-Speak. They have both said they are committed to certain principles, and then either reversed themselves or pursued policies that make application of those principles impossible to achieve, e.g., the illegality or legality of Jewish colonial-settlements, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, supporting a two-state solution. So we should be slow and cautious to react to the latest statement about the non-essential nature of a two-state solution. For the Americans and Israelis making these statements on the future of Palestine and Israel have repeatedly shown themselves to be ignorant, confused, untrustworthy, or simply hormone-bloated, mean, aging male politicians in increasingly dysfunctional democracies that ignore the primacy of the rule of law and the clear consensus of virtually the entire world.

Unnamed senior White House officials’ statements usually need to be taken with great caution, or else the speaker would have identified themselves to give their thoughts more clout. In this White House, that principle is at least doubled, given the erratic nature of political management we have seen in the past three weeks. So we should not react very strongly to this right now, other than to enjoy the show of two troubled and very entertaining politicians trying to save each other in the midst of swirling political waters all around them.

Yet, two dimensions of this situation may be significant. The first is how two foreign tough-guys assume that they can dictate or at least direct the future fate of Palestine. This has been a problem for the past 50 years, when Israel and the U.S. used their military and political muscle to try to impose the shape of a permanent peace agreement with Arab states and Palestinians. It has not worked and will not work, precisely for the reason mentioned by the White House ghost speaker, who said that the parties themselves have to negotiate the final shape of a peace settlement.

It is fascinating that the Israel-U.S. combine feels it can unilaterally lay out what it seeks or accepts in a permanent agreement, and in so doing to go against the entire consensus of the entire world and the entire body of international law and conventions during the entire past half-century (since the 1967 war). This is another sign of the presumptuous Israel-American sense of being able to lay down the law and the Palestinians have no option other than to accept. Yet the past 50 years — and the 70 years since 1948, and the 100 years since the 1917 Balfour Declaration that gave global diplomatic impetus to the Zionist desire to create a Jewish state in the land of Palestine that was some 95% Arab Palestinians then — indicate that Palestinians and Arabs will not roll over and accept humiliating sub-sovereign and sub-national status in the face of Israeli-American power that is regularly used against them. That the new American presidency seems to be repeating this combination of arrogance- and ignorance-driven mediation in Palestine-Israel is disheartening, but probably not lasting.

The other fascinating issue is the context in the U.S. in which all this plays out. A new Gallup poll shows that Americans overwhelmingly (71%) have a favorable image of Israel. This is not new, and it is fully understandable in view of how Israel and its friends and clients in the U.S. repeatedly portray it in public in positive terms, many of which align with America’s own historical mythology and throbbing foundational heartstrings.

Yet equally important here is that the across-the-board high admiration for Israel is slowly tapering off, as just 61% of Democrats and 63% of 18-29-year-old Americans have a favorable view of it. These are small but steady changes, and they are supported by the second point, which is the evidence from numerous other national polls that Americans want their government to be even-handed in promoting Israel-Palestine peace — which is very much in line with traditional American values. This is especially clear among young people and Democrats, including Jewish-Americans, which this new Gallup poll reflects only slightly because it only asked about views towards Israel, and not to both Israel and Palestine.

So we should wait and see whether this new American administration follows all the others before it in recognizing that a two-state solution that offers Israel and Palestine equal rights is the best way to resolve this long-running conflict.

Let us also hope that this is reflected in the policies of governments and not just their words. This seems to be the wish of the entire world, including Americans, other than perhaps a narrowing circle of extreme politicians in Washington who will make their voices heard again this week, while the rushing and rising waters of the stream of justice and equal rights for all people close in on them day by day.

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: 16 February 2017
Word Count: 909
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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 — Monday was a rough day for moral clarity in the Middle East. We heard from the respected Amnesty International that up to 13,000 Syrian prisoners were tortured and hanged in a government jail. The American president promised to expand military spending significantly, just days after putting Iran “on notice” for test firing a missile that Iran was fully allowed to test fire. The executive and legislative branches of the Israeli government both approved Apartheid-like colonial policies to expand Jewish settlements on stolen Palestinian land. Yemeni rebels fired a missile at a military installation near the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, marking a dangerous new escalation in that conflict.

These were only a few of the problematic developments across the Middle East that highlight one of the most serious threats that our region faces: the de-linking of one’s actions from any serious consequences because of those actions. Government leaders, opposition militant groups, foreign powers, and everyone else in between can do anything they want in the Middle East, without serious fear of accountability or retribution. So acts of cruelty, savagery, or even near-barbarism mostly go unpunished, regardless of the perpetrators or the victims. Only a few hapless minor criminals who do not have the protection of a major local or foreign patron get caught, tried, and sent to jail for a few years.

Our Arab region’s terrible de-coupling of political acts from both moral standards and legal constraints or consequences did not happen suddenly. In recent decades we have seen millions killed or exiled in Sudan, by Sudanese primarily; ferocious warfare in Syria and Iraq that includes barrel bombs, starvation sieges, and suicide attacks by governments and militant terrorists; drone attacks by the U.S. against Arab militants and civilians in several countries; Lebanon’s civil war atrocities from 1975-89; Israel’s non-stop colonization, sieges, and killing or imprisoning of Palestinians in large numbers since 1967 and before; the inhuman warfare in Yemen that includes attacks by Yemenis and by neighboring Arab Gulf powers, with the active association of the United States and Great Britain; and the examples go on and on.

This reflects a quarter-century of slow unraveling of established governance systems and state orders — mostly since the end of the Cold War around 1990. When the United States and Russia became less directly concerned with the Middle East, local structures of political order and mechanisms of “stability” slowly eroded. Local powers emerged and took control, often fighting each other to the death, as we witness today in Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Iraq, though similar tensions in other Arab countries persist at lower intensity levels.

Many have theorized about why this has happened mainly in the Arab world. This is an important discussion, if it can offer credible and verifiable insights into the root causes of why we have allowed our region to become a killing field for sectarian thugs, a shooting gallery for local warlords, and a proving range for foreign military salesmen.

Until we achieve a better understanding of those reasons for our descent into a political battlefield devoid of moral values or legal and political constraints, we must sadly admit that most Arab countries have no real significance to the rest of the world, with the exception of some who produce energy. And only somewho produce energy, not all of them; for we have seen now how the world gets on fine without full oil production from Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. So even oil and gas reserves do not guarantee you protection as an Arab country. Israel is able to protect itself and in any case can count fully on U.S. support in case of any real threats.

So, the Arab region has little or no strategic significance to anyone. It can burn to its heart’s content, it seems. I suspect this is because no Arab country has been able to achieve genuine full sovereignty, meaning effective domestic and foreign policies that lead to increased well-being, opportunity, security, and — most critically — international respect for its citizens. Some Arab states seek instant respect by throwing their military weight around, and they end up only spreading chaos and human misery to even more countries. Other Arab states seek instant respect by becoming active cogs in the global neo-liberal economic-entertainment order, by hosting golf tournaments or car races, or building the world’s biggest amusement parks or fried chicken fast food outlets. Others yet seek instant respect by offering their services as security partners and sub-contractors for global powers.

Monday’s news should remind us, sadly, that these and other desperate strategies do not work; they do not breed respect for Arab states, but rather decrease it. They cause the world to view us as utilitarian tools that can be picked up and abandoned in an instant. So when we start neglecting the needs and rights of half our low-income or marginalized people, concentrate state wealth in the hands of a few dozen families, and ultimately shoot and bomb each other, the world powers watch with bewilderment — or, as in Syria and Yemen, they join the fray and shoot away with abandon. The fact that our power elites do not seem to grasp this elementary reality is as troubling as their lack of ability to achieve genuine sovereignty and self-respect for Arab cultures and peoples that had achieved those feats several times in history.

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: 07 February 2017
Word Count: 892
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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 — Never in my life, which has spanned the United States and the Arab world, have I experienced a moment such as the past week when ordinary Americans and ordinary Arabs share exactly the same sentiments of personal vulnerability and indignity and political anger. In the United States in the past week, I have seen the precise mirror image of the Arab world I have experienced my whole life — with one important difference. This should be a really valuable learning moment when Arabs and Americans, who value freedom and the dignity that comes with it, can overwhelm the ugly hatreds and ideological venom and lies that assorted special interest groups in both societies impose on the majority of people.

Millions of Americans have been reacting spontaneously to the Trump administration’s executive orders temporarily halting the admission of refugees and specifically refusing entry to individuals from seven Muslim-majority countries. Individual Americans have taken to the streets, the media, the political system, and the courts of law for many different reasons — they found the Trump measures unconstitutional, un-American, unethical, unfair, or un-anything else, including being harmful to economic growth and innovation — they instinctively felt in their hearts and minds the need to challenge their government through all available legitimate means.

They were outraged that their presidential system could wield power so whimsically and unilaterally, implementing measures that were deeply offensive to many citizens’ sense of decency in America. They also felt fearful for their and their children’s future. They saw the danger of how a small group of people, including members of a single family, could destroy social and economic policies that have been painstakingly built up for decades to assist middle class and low-income families, protect the environment, promote justice for all, and maintain an open, inclusive, and participatory political system — all the while enriching the wealth and power of a small minority at the peak of the political pyramid.

American citizens have experienced in one week what several hundred million Arab men and women have been experiencing for the past half century or so: power structures that are controlled by a small number of men, revolving around a single family, closely tied to corporate business interests, and taking decisions unilaterally with little interaction with or respect for the elected legislative branch of government, expertise in the scholarly and civil society worlds, or the domestic and international rule of law. It has been fascinating to watch many sectors of American society spontaneously and vigorously stand up and challenge the Trump decisions; these have included ordinary citizens in the streets, university professors and administrators, corporate presidents, human rights and lawyers’ organizations, journalists from all corners of the media world, government officials at the federal and local levels, and many others.

Ordinary Americans now should be able to appreciate what it felt like in January 2011, when hundreds of thousands of ordinary Arab men and women similarly took to the streets to challenge the unjust, heavy-handed ways of their long-serving, family-based, security-anchored leaderships. Several hundred million ordinary Americans — about the same number as their Arab counterparts in 2011 — have been glued to their television and computer screens, following every new development in this historic moment when millions of people spontaneously stand up and hold their moral ground as citizens who insist on protecting their rights as citizens.

We in the Arab world should be generous and merciful to our American brothers and sisters, and not say that this is a Facebook or Twitter movement in the United States – as many in the United States said about the Arab uprisings. Because Facebook, Twitter and the social media world have been mere instruments for sending messages, not major elements of substance or drivers of conscience. The real (and universal) story here is the courage and determination of individual men and women who stand up, openly confront their homegrown bigots and autocrats, and protect that beautiful and precious terrain where liberty, dignity, and equal opportunity converge in the everyday lives of individual people, and in their constitutions if they are lucky.

Arabs have not been so lucky. The single big difference between this American uprising and the Arab one six years ago to the week almost, is that Americans can use available means of political dissent and legal challenge and restraint that live in their political governance system. Arabs had and have no such avenues open to them, other than peaceful demonstrations in the street. Even there, tens of thousands of Arabs sit in jail today because they dared to take to the street and speak out against their governments’ harsh policies.

In the final analysis, though, these are not tales of acts in the street, but rather of impulses in the heart. The blood and the values that flow through Arab and American veins can now be seen to emanate from a single source of human dignity, vitality, decency, respect for the law that protects everyone equally, and the indomitable will to be free in one’s own home.

I stand in awe at Americans who work in so many ways to affirm their values when those values are threatened or curtailed; I stand in equal awe at Arabs who have tried without success for half a century to achieve the same goal, with no real political and legal tools at their disposal. Those tools will come to our lands one day soon, however, and not because they travel digitized routes of social media, but because our blood in our veins that seeks the fresh air of full citizen rights and the rule of law for all will burst out from our bodies, to overwhelm the autocrats, and flood the streets with goodness and decency.

I suspect Americans appreciate this a little more clearly this week.

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: 01 February 2017
Word Count: 960
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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 — Despite all the negative gestures and statements he has made in the past 18 months, my personal and journalistic instinct is to see what U.S. President Donald Trump actually defines and implements as policies before judging him conclusively. That should take just a month or two at most, given the brisk pace of his bold actions and rhetoric. It is fair game, though, to react to what he is doing and saying these days in situations where any of us can offer insights based on experiences that he may not have had himself.

So I think we should all be very worried about the tone and direction of Trump’s apparent views on how the United States should pursue its relations with Egypt. I say this only on the basis of what the White House spokesman said Monday when he reported that Trump had spoken by phone with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi, and that the lead issue in their discussions was “efforts against terrorism and extremism.”

The White House and the Egyptian media both said that Trump praised Egypt’s efforts to fight terrorism, and promised to fully support Egypt in its economic and security plans. It is good news that one of the most important Arab countries and the world’s most powerful country both plan to cooperate in the critical battle against terrorism and extremism. It is imperative that Arab and global powers work closely together to defeat this serious and growing terror threat to all countries, by adopting strategies that could succeed.

Yet, Arab and American leaders (and Russian, British, French and other world leaders) who have tried this have yet to find those strategies that succeed. The main reason may be that they continue to refuse to acknowledge that sustained domestic autocracy devoid of citizen political rights, combined with socio-economic stagnation and growing disparities, actually generate the conditions that promote terrorism among Arab citizens who had never been inclined to this sort of criminality before.

It would be frightening news if Trump’s announcement means the United States plans to fully support Sisi’s current strategy to fight terror, because that strategy has failed to date on both the developmental and the security levels. Even more problematic — the lessons of modern Arab history indicate — is the proven reality that the total support of global powers to autocrats, dictators, or military men who rule Arab countries has been a recurring catastrophe for the our region for 65 years now.

This started when the Egyptian military in 1952 initiated the ugly legacy of soldiers seizing power and ruling with a devastating combination of heavy-handedness and incompetence. The good things some of them did ultimately were dwarfed and swamped by the negative consequences of unchecked military rule. The novelty of soldiers in power spread from Egypt to many other Arab countries after 1952. The results we see today include the weakened national skeletons of once promising countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, and others.

The new Trump administration should definitely support Egypt’s desire to fight terrorism, but it should do so while recognizing that the sustained combination of unquestioning American support and unchecked Arab military rulers has been one of the most important underlying causes of the country wrecks and security threats that we see across many Arab lands today, including Al-Qaeda and the “Islamic State.” Our own lived history suggests that Egypt’s current policy of using massive military tactics to suppress the small, home-grown terror movements that threaten it, while stifling the political freedoms of all citizens, is unlikely to succeed in the long run. Many other military-run, foreign-supported Arab states have tried the same things in recent decades, and now they are the world’s leading generators, trainers, and exporters of terrorism. Do foreign powers that understandably support Arab autocrats in the fight against terror simply ignore this reality of the past 65 years?

The real challenge here is for the Trump administration and Arab leaders to put away their egos and, in some cases, their political desperation, and think rationally and honestly about what happened from the 1950s until today in many Arab lands that routinely exhibit barbarism and cruelty. Heavy-handed local military responses to sustained citizen discontent and rights denials eventually prompt small groups of politically and economically ravaged individuals who see no hope for improvements in their lives to adopt violence, and then terrorism. More strong American support for Egypt’s stringent security policies and blanket prohibition of any meaningful opposition will almost certainly see this legacy confirmed and repeated — to the great detriment of all Egyptians and all of us, wherever we live.

Terrorism is not a structural or cultural certainty. It is a symptom of underlying distress and distortions that are the consequence of bad policies. Those bad policies include security-first approaches to reducing terrorism, rather than combining police and security operations with serious political reforms and socio-economic expansions. Trump and Sisi would seem to be the perfect candidates to adopt this more sensible, rational approach to the terror threat they must address. They may be signaling exactly the opposite, which would be a terrible tragedy for us all.

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: 24 January 2017
Word Count: 854
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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 — We’ve just passed through quite an extraordinary period of international activity on how to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict. The UN Security Council resolution declaring Israeli settlements as illegal under international law was followed by the United States forcefully speaking out against Israeli settlements that block the path to a permanent peace agreement. Then the French convened an international gathering of 70 states that reaffirmed the need for a two-state solution. The Vatican chipped in by recognizing a Palestine embassy at the Vatican.

This is fascinating for several reasons. It reflects an almost total international consensus on a two-state solution as the best outcome to aim for, which also assumes that Israeli settlement-colonies are illegal and need to be dismantled or swapped for land given to the Palestinians in exchange. It shows that the world is deeply preoccupied with the conflict and finding ways to resolve it, which totally rebuffs the common Israeli official view that our region has other priorities than Palestine. The forceful U.S. position expressed in its statements lacks any hint of other actions to try to force a change in Israeli settlements policy.

In this context, an opinion piece in the Washington Post last week by Dennis Ross and Stuart Eizenstat clarifies much about the broad attitudes of the U.S. government to this conflict, and in particular it helps us understand why the U.S. has been unable to achieve any significant progress in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations it has mediated for almost 25 years now. The Jan. 12 op-ed entitled “Here’s what Plan B in the Middle East should look like,” is a shocking reminder of how structurally biased and dishonest American official attitudes to Palestinians continue to shape the stalemate we all suffer, in which the continued colonization of Palestinian lands by Israelis is a central dynamic.

The op-ed by two American ex-officials who had been deeply involved in the failed negotiations for many years seeks to perpetuate the core failures of past mediation in several dimensions. First is the illusion that the past quarter century has shattered many times, that step-by-step confidence-building measures can move both sides towards renewed trust that would help drive successful agreements for a permanent peace accord. This has been tried many times and has always failed.

Second, the proposal by Ross and Eizenstat explicitly allows the continued building of new settlements in areas near the border that they presume will become part of Israel under any peace agreement; they also accept the completion of the Israeli “security fence”, which much of the world knows as the Apartheid Wall. The idea that Israelis will relax if they can continue doing these things and move towards a full negotiated peace has been proven by modern history to be a fantasy — but the sort of fantasy that pro-Likud zealots in the United States and Israel have peddled for decades.

Third, and one reason why the United States has been a serial failure in mediating peace, is that the Ross-Eizenstat text subtly reinforces the long-standing American perception that Israel must have security before it can offer any “concessions,” while the Palestinians are viewed almost exclusively through the lens of extremists whose violence threatens the lives of Israelis. Nowhere in American eyes do the Israelis and Palestinian enjoy perfectly equal and simultaneous rights to statehood, security, and prosperity.

So the core elements of the Ross-Eizenstat plan calls for restoring trust and protecting Israel’s security, while “creating a more prosperous and less resentful and violence-prone Palestinian population.” References to the Palestinians center around improving their development prospects, reducing incentives for violence, improving access to jobs in Israel or basic services in Palestinian lands controlled by Israel’s occupation, and preserving effective counter-terrorism cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security forces.

Here in a nutshell is a concise picture of why American mediation has failed for so long — because it has repeated the Israeli view that Palestinian violence is the core problem, while ignoring the fact that Israeli colonization and military force are the bigger and core cause of the violence that consumes both sides and has resulted in five times as many Palestinians as Israelis being killed in the past year or so.

Continuing Zionist colonization while perpetuating the colonized status of Palestinians who can be appeased with some day jobs in Israel and a few more water wells or power plants is not how a genuine, serious, and impartial mediator operates. It is rather the manner of the colonial accomplice.

No wonder there has been no breakthrough for peace, and an exasperated world, including the American president, now opts for forceful symbolic actions through the UN Security Council. What is a wonder is why in the world anyone could possibly take seriously the advice of ex-officials like Ross, Eizenstat, and others who step forward now to suggest how to resolve the dilemma they helped deepen and perpetuate.

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: 18 January 2017
Word Count: 810
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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 — Donald Trump’s appointment of his son-in-law Jared Kushner as a senior adviser in the White House has kicked up several controversies that perfectly capture the tone and substance of the Trump triumph across the American political system. But they also tell us nothing about what actual policies President Trump will pursue once he is the incumbent. The Kushner appointment offers important insights into the political, substantive, ethical, and attitudinal dynamics that continue to shape American society’s coming to terms with the fact that it has elected a controversial and very successful showman as its president.

Four dimensions of the Kushner appointment are worth pondering, and the fact that he is Jewish is not one of them. People’s religion in the United States is their own business, but if faith becomes entangled with one’s political positions — especially if this happens in the White House — then a discussion is necessary. This is not yet the case with Jared Kushner, so his religion remains irrelevant for the moment. Skeptics of this view should recall how the public call to focus on Palestinian rights by the Jewish-American presidential candidate Bernie Sanders did not hurt his candidacy, and may even has helped cement his reputation for proposing ethical policies by the United States government.

The four dimensions of the Kushner appointment that are worthy of analysis are:

1) His age and public policy experience: It is highly unusual for a 35-year-old person with no experience in government or pubic policy issues to suddenly assume immense power as a trusted adviser to the president of the United States. This could be frivolous and dangerous, or it could end up being harmless, mostly offering the psychologically convoluted new president a soothing and calming presence. We may find out soon.

2) Possible ethical constraints due to his extensive business investments with domestic and foreign partners: This also applies to many of Trump’s cabinet and other appointments of wealthy men and women with very serious investments and personal/political ties at home and abroad. This is likely to be the easiest question mark about Kushner to resolve, given the many models that have been used in the United States to resolve conflict-of-interest concerns in recent years.

3) Whether his appointment runs counter to the anti-nepotism laws in the United States that came into being to prevent presidents from allowing family members to have undue influence on policy-making: This is likely to be a non-issue in the long run, as Trump can appoint Kushner as his golfing adviser or consultant, and what they discuss on the golf course is their own business.

4) Any involvement he may have had in his family’s providing funds for illegal Israeli settlements, which are a crime in international law according to the latest UN Security Council resolution: This is the most problematic aspect of the Kushner appointment, given the clear illegality and other problematic dimensions of Israeli settlements that have been regularly reaffirmed, including by the current American president and secretary of state. If Kushner proves to be an explicit supporter of Israeli settlements — a strong possibility, given his support for appointing the settlements-loving David Friedman as the next American ambassador to Israel — then Trump is going to have to reveal if his son-in-law’s views are only his son-in-law’s views, or reflect and shape official American policy in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian and Arab territories.

These issues are now already being actively discussed and analyzed in the Kushner and Trump families, among the new White Houses senior staff, and by many lawyers. They all reflect one common denominator: Everything Trump has done in the past 18 months since he started running for the U.S. presidency is designed to challenge the American political establishment and the Republican Party’s traditional way of doing business. This approach has brought him enough media attention, grass-roots support, and votes to win the presidency, despite his many proven deficiencies, contradictions, and vulgarities.

The Jared Kushner appointment is controversial and even shocking to many because of the issues mentioned above. But to Trump it is the epitome and the heart of what he and America are all about: It is just one more link in a chain of anti-establishmentarian defiance by the new president, who is the product of riding the waves of what the American establishment cherishes most — wild capitalism and unbridled, sometimes vulgar, entertainment.

How many more of these incidents will it take for Americans to wake up from their combined stupor and shock to realize that repeatedly expressing amazement, anger, and bewilderment at Trump’s appointments and behavior is pretty amateurish behavior. For the real problem, in fact, is not Trump the person, but rather the distorted condition of the American political system that has allowed him to reach the presidency through a democratic process.

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: 11 January 2017
Word Count: 795
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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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NEW YORK — Last week’s United Nations Security Council vote condemning Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian land as contrary to international law and an obstacle to peace, i.e., a criminal and unacceptable action, was an important, even historic, vote, for many reasons, and with many consequences. It transformed a long-held global consensus against Israel’s settlement-criminality into a functional legal foundation on which the world can decide to take further actions.

Condemning Zionist colonies and settlements on stolen Arab land has been the clear position of virtually all the countries of the world, including the United States, for decades. Giving this position the force of law via a UN Security Council resolution is new and meaningful. It allows Palestinians and people across the entire world who oppose Zionism’s expansionist enterprise to take further practical, political, peaceful, and legitimate actions to stop this criminal behavior — in the same way that the world acted politically to counter South African Apartheid or terrorism today.

Palestinians committed to a negotiated peace with Israel — a disillusioned majority — can now explore mass political mobilization on a global level that would exert pressure on Israel to stop and then reverse the settlements process. Israel’s hysterical and arrogant response to the UN resolution — parroted by its increasingly isolated political agents and proxies in the American political system — are so extreme that we should not expect sanctions, boycotts, and other unilateral actions against Israel to move us towards a permanent negotiated peace agreement.

The absolute support in the United States and globally for the basic security of Israel within its pre-June 1967 borders gives Israel the option to oppose any move against it by claiming that the existence of Jews themselves is being threatened by hostile actions against the “Jewish state.” Yet the importance of the UN resolution is precisely that it clarifies, and anchors in law, the explicit distinction between the inviolability of the Israeli state within its pre-1967 land, and the corrosive, criminal actions of that state in expanding its territorial base and its Apartheid-like controls of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Palestinians and other peace-loving people must now pursue much more serious diplomatic initiatives for a permanent, comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement than has been the case in the past 50 years. The UN resolution provides that public and legal space in which to shape political actions by states and popular mobilizations that reaffirm support for the pre-1967 state of Israel, but reject and vow to fight vigorously and reverse the colonization legacy of the settlements enterprise.

The deeper significant factor here is that popular sentiments in the United States and other Western countries now increasingly favor a balanced approach to Israeli-Palestinian rights, and reject — often with clear majorities — the worn-out Zionist and Israeli arguments in defense of their colonial and racist-like policies on the Palestinians. American Jews in particular are sensitive to the need for a firm but balanced approach to resolving the Palestine-Israel and wider Arab-Israeli conflicts; this is both for their focus on justice as a central Jewish ethic, and because Israel’s continued defiance of the global consensus on Palestinian rights will only stoke new waves of anti-Semitism that will hurt Jews around the world.

Political, diplomatic, and legal actions against Israeli colonization will now slowly escalate around the world. This will continue the dominant international trend of the past decade that has seen churches, labor unions, student groups, professional associations, commercial companies, and some governments restrict their dealings with Israeli entities that are directly linked to settlements. Many Israeli leaders and their equally wild American political parrots will scream about new Nazis and reinvigorated anti-Semitism by people who hate Jews only because they’re Jews; the world will respond calmly that it wants to protect the state of Israel that was created as a homeland for the Jews who wish to live there, but it also wants to end the illegal, intolerable colonization of Arab lands that is an enduring and active remnant of 19th Century European colonialism.

The legal base for political action that the UN resolution offers is matched in importance by the resolution’s signal that Zionist huffing and puffing, including threats and reprimands, are no longer credible anywhere in the world — except for a small, narrowing, and steadily discredited circle of Washington institutes, congressmen and women, and political extremists who stand outside the explicit global consensus.

It is important now to shift the center of gravity of current actions and reactions — away from more hysteria and curses, and towards constructive diplomacy that would penetrate the key underlying issue that remains at the core of this conflict: how Palestinians and Israelis can share the land they both covet, with equal and simultaneous national rights for both.

I sure hope that clever and sincere mediators in the Middle East and abroad are quietly working to craft a new diplomatic initiative that would allow this historic moment to propel us all onto a path that addresses the legitimate rights and needs of Palestinians and Israelis, on the foundation of international law and morality that the UN Security Council has just reaffirmed. Zionist hysteria, unanchored Palestinian pleas for justice, and many decades of American-Israeli-defined fantasy diplomacy will achieve nothing, as the past 50 years have shown. Seeking security, statehood, and justice for all concerned peoples in this conflict must not repeat the mistakes of the past once again. The UN Security Council was the first to signal that we needed to break with the serial failures of recent legacies. Others should follow in the same spirit of courage, law-anchored precision, and a profound moral and political commitment to the equal rights of all the parties involved. That would be a fitting end to those nagging colonial practices, including colonies and settlements, which have haunted and ravaged us since the 1890s.

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 ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 December 2016
Word Count: 963
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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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