DOHA Qatar — A flurry of short trips recently has allowed me to sample political and social sentiments in several different parts of the Arab world, including Amman, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Cairo, Doha, and my normal routine at home in Beirut. My sense from this mini-tour of Arab attitudes is that this region is defined by severe and growing polarization, but for the most part, without radicalization or extremism.

The two militant extremes that drive action and attitudes — George W. Bush’s triumphalist neo-conservative and unilateral militarism, and Osama Bin Laden’s neo-nihilistic and globalized Salafist terrorism — have both failed to take root among most Arabs. But an alternative consensus for the Arab region has not emerged.

The vast majority of individuals and movements in the Arab world reject both the Bush and Bin Laden ideologies, yet the region still finds itself driven and often defined by the policies of these two extremes. In between the Bush and Bin Laden ideologies are the three hundred million or so Arabs who seek lives of normalcy and moderation, safe and stable societies, equitable personal development opportunities, national configurations of statehood and nationhood that make sense to them, and credible means of governance and accountability.

However, a common problem in the Arab world is that structures or systems of credible national decision-making and consensus-building do not exist — despite the presence of many parliaments, elections, political parties, and non-governmental organizations. Political power is exercised and usually monopolized by small groups of elites, who use various means of self-legitimization, including military legacies, Islamic religious lineage and identity, developmental progress, security for all, Arab nationalism, and, most recently, modernization and brisk economic reform and expansion.

Because existing governance systems are not credible for majorities of Arabs, people gravitate to other arenas where they find satisfaction by freely expressing their identity and working for their professional, personal or political goals. Not surprisingly, therefore, if you walk or drive through any major city in the Arab world today, you will find it is defined by the two less extreme manifestations of the Bush-Bin Laden zealotry.

The first are vast swaths of political and social Islamism that have provided major segments of Arab cities and people with a sense of identity, protection, and hope.

The second is a spectacular brand of free-market globalized capitalism and consumerism that is now dramatically manifested in striking and often bizarre architectural extravaganzas — business towers, shopping malls, gated residential communities, hotels, public buildings — that are popping up all over the region.

In between these poles, many middle class Arabs survey the politicized and badly fractured landscapes of their own communities. They are attracted to both consumerism’s promise of doing well in life — accumulating cell phones and high definition televisions — and Islamism’s promise of a good life through dignity, equity and justice.

The polarization of the Arab world is obvious at every level and in every sector — politically, socially, religiously, economically, and, now, architecturally. The physical layout of all Arab cities is now a convenient guide to political, social and economic ruptures in our societies.

Pockets of super opulence and massive new real estate projects coexist with neighborhoods of poverty and marginalization. In the poor quarters, criminality and the desperate enticements of Bin Ladenist Salafist militancy and terrorism are not far away. The poor are usually indigenous Arabs, but also migrant workers from Asia or other parts of the Arab world.

This is not a sustainable situation, and anybody who takes a moment to analyze these trends honestly should grasp that the current polarization across all sectors of life and society will build up until it reaches a point of crisis. The mass breakout from the Gaza jail was just one sign of rebellion and self-assertion by human beings who will no longer acquiesce in their dehumanization. It is perhaps the most serious abuse of human and national rights in the region, but not the only one.

The region continues to suffer high inflation in the Gulf, active warfare in Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Palestine, and political tensions in Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria and other lands. Any open-eyed traveler around the region must recognize that the Arab world cannot long enjoy warfare, political stand-offs, stability, prosperity, and polarization all at the same time.

It is to their credit that the Arab people have rejected the Bush and Bin Laden extremes, but they have gravitated instead to non-violent zones of proximity to those gun-based zealotries.

We still need a mechanism by which the Arab majority can express its will and the minority can be protected and enjoy its human and civil rights. Cell phone jamborees, lagoon palace estates, and fantasies of Islamist redemption through mass murder are not the answer — but they remain attractive to some, in the absence of accountable and decent governance systems.

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

Copyright © 2008 Rami G. Khouri

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Released: 09 February 2008
Word Count: 794
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AMMAN — The twin issues of the legitimacy and efficacy of power and authority are becoming more clear and urgent throughout the Arab world. This is the big ongoing story of our day, as a region of centrally controlled, mostly autocratic modern states evolves into a patchwork of different sources of power and authority. If we wish to address the problems of violence and instability in many Arab quarters, we must grapple with the issue of the legitimacy or power that remains one of the few enduring taboos in the region.

This refers to two parallel legitimacies: that of the modern Arab state order that was crafted by the retreating French and British colonial powers, and also the legitimacy of ruling elites and governments. My guess is that most Arab people would validate the existing state configurations and many of the existing leaderships, but clearly not all of them. Because our Arab region enjoyed statehood as a unilateral gift from the Euro-colonialists before the people of this region enjoyed any meaningful process of self-expression or self-determination, our statehood, nationhood and citizenship are all defined by chronic tension. The redistribution of power is a sign that the citizens of the Arab world are finally moving to take charge of their own destiny, when and where they can.

There are different reasons why Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Palestine, Algeria, Egypt and other parts of the Arab world suffer chronic warfare or deep ideological tensions and stalemates. There are also assorted local explanations for why the central power and authority of the national government is gradually withdrawing from many urban quarters of the Arab world, and being replaced either by local Islamist community organizations and services, tribal networks, or by private commercial interests that are developing massive new glitzy globalized quarters.

The power of non-state Arab actors was dramatically revealed by Hizbullah’s military capabilities in fighting Israel for 34 days and forcing it to accept a UN cease fire in 2006, which no combination of Arab states had ever been able to achieve. Similar realities pertain to the social service sector, non-corrupt public administration, and other aspects of life where citizens who do not get what they expect from their government will find the needs fulfilled by efficient non-governmental groups.

This is not axiomatically a good or bad thing. Some states offer quality services equitably and some non-governmental groups are little more than disguised gangs and private patronage or criminal syndicates. What is significant is that the centralized power of Arab states is slowly fraying or dissipating, even in strong states with emphatic central governments and efficient, self-assertive security organizations, such as Jordan, Egypt and Morocco.

Power is decentralizing in many cases because governments simply do not have sufficient money to maintain the welfare, employment, subsidy and state-building services they provided very efficiently for half a century after the surprise of their own statehood in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

The decentralization and dissipation of state power into the hands of Islamicized urban quarters, armed militias, ethnic-based parties, neighborhood thugs, autonomous regional authorities, multinational corporations, and private sector commercial real estate firms is an important sign of several simultaneous phenomena: the fraying credibility of state authority, the determination of concerned citizens to take charge of their own life needs and well-being, and the enormous power of the globalized commercial marketplace.

As Arab power configurations evolve, it is critically important that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past 75 years on authoritarian governance; instead, we must prod sensible statehood by consulting rather than ignoring the Arab citizen. Coming to grips with the evolving realities of power and authority requires much more honest, integrated and sophisticated analysis than has broadly pertained in recent years in the public discussions of what is wrong with our societies and how can we make things better. Much of this debate has been driven by ideological zealots, and a few naïve rascals in the Anglo-American-Israeli-dominated West, who tend mainly to focus on Islam and Arab violence — or by elite Arab autocrats who are equally blind to the powerful currents of their own fellow citizens’ discontent and fear.

The reconfiguration of power and authority is the big, new, historic and pervasive macro-development now taking place in Arab society, as the prevailing power structure of the past 75 years reaches the limits of its abilities. Not surprisingly, concerned citizens, agile gangs and efficient businessmen alike are moving in to grab their share of power in those spaces where the state is retreating, or franchising its own legitimacy and authority. Handled wisely, this could be a heartening and positive development that allows Arab society to define itself according to the consensus views of its pluralistic citizens — unless American, British, Israeli or other Western armies invade again and try to re-configure us to their liking, rather than to our rights and wishes.

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

Copyright © 2008 Rami G. Khouri

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Released: 06 February 2008
Word Count: 810
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BEIRUT — Three simultaneous developments related to the Gaza Strip earlier this week provide a historic and dramatic opportunity for Egypt and the Palestinians — especially Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — that should not be missed.

The three developments were:
• the Egyptian government’s talks with Hamas and Fateh about re-organizing the Rafah border crossings with Gaza that were breached by hundreds of thousands of Palestinians last month;
• President Abbas’ visit to Cairo for talks on the subject; and,
• the Israeli Supreme Court decision to allow the state to reduce deliveries of electricity and fuel to Gaza as a means of pressuring the population to reject Hamas and return to the rule of Abbas’ Fateh party.

Mahmoud Abbas has an opportunity to act as a real leader, but his window to move is very small. He has been in Egypt talking with President Husni Mubarak about how the Egyptian and Palestinian presidents and their vast security forces could collectively serve Israeli and American political interests by sealing the Gaza-Egypt border. At the same time, tens of thousands of ordinary Palestinians continue to move between Gaza and the Egyptian Sinai.

Abbas should take advantage of the one Palestinian border point that is not controlled by Israel, and join the flow of other ordinary Palestinians returning to Gaza from Egypt — preferably on foot, but if he wishes by car, or even on one of those nifty donkey- or horse-drawn carts. He should walk to Gaza to share the pain of living in the harsh conditions that Israel is imposing on the region, in order to send a powerful message to four distinct audiences.

To the Palestinian people first and foremost, he would send the message that he is the president of all Palestinians, and that despite a severe ideological feud with Hamas he wishes to be the symbol of unity among all Palestinians. He would make the point that he is the leader of the Palestinian people, not the errand boy of the Israeli or American security services. He would also make it clear that Palestinians and Egyptians can jointly control their common border to allow normal life to return to Gaza’s 1.5 million people.

To the Israeli government and people, he would send the message that the Palestinian leadership and people are united, and that Israel cannot play off one group of Palestinians against another either by starving one or by offering the other material bribes like VIP travel passes, military assistance, and money.

To the American and European governments — who support the Israeli attempt to destroy Hamas by backing Abbas — he would send the message that the Palestinian people will not engage in a foreign-fuelled civil war, despite the Fateh-Hamas feud. He could force foreign governments to reconsider their boycott of Hamas, by resuming talks to form a national unity government. Hamas and Fateh both would have to admit their recent mistakes, and work closely with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others to form a single government.

To the Arab people and leaders, he would provide a stunning example of solidarity and sacrifice in the face of Israel’s pressures. The message would be elegantly simple: The Arab world should support the Palestinians, not implement Israeli-American orders.

The Israeli Supreme Court ruling gives the green light for Israel to reduce the flow of electricity from Israel, cut gasoline supplies to Gaza to 75,400 liters a week (vs. 400,000 liters a week in October), and reduce diesel fuel shipments from 1.4 million to 800,000 liters. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said ten days ago that Gazans without gasoline for their cars could walk.

Mahmoud Abbas had a meeting in Jerusalem last week with Olmert, then went to Cairo for talks with the Egyptians. He should leave Cairo and go to the Gaza border point at Rafah, and from there send a message to Olmert with his feet, by doing exactly what Olmert suggested: He should walk into Gaza, like most Palestinians have to walk rather than ride cars due to the Israeli cutbacks on essential supplies of fuel, power, food and medicine.

Abbas is the elected president of the Palestinians, not the viceroy of the Israelis or the deputy sheriff of the Americans. He is now confronted with a situation in which he can choose to achieve three important simultaneous goals: He can share the pain of his fellow Palestinians in Gaza, provide an opening for reconciliation and national unity talks with Hamas, and symbolically affirm that he is the president of all Palestinians and not just a political hit-man for Olmert and the American government.

President Abbas, your people tore down the Israeli wall that confined you along with them. Now is the time for you to walk with your people, to show that you are their president, not their jailer.

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

Copyright © 2008 Rami G. Khouri

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Released: 04 February 2008
Word Count: 794
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DUBAI — I always find it exhilarating to visit Dubai, one of the most dynamic and visually spectacular examples of rapid urban growth in the world. Especially coming from Beirut, where I live, the contrasts are sharp and immediately felt: security vs. chronic political violence, law vs. lawlessness, predictability vs. spontaneity, and immmigration vs. emigration.

In discussions with friends and colleagues here in Dubai, the conversation often returns to “the Dubai model” — fast growth, bold expansion, rapid implementation of plans, efficient service delivery, openness to the world. A recurring discussion concerns whether Dubai teaches the Arab world something important, and whether the Dubai model can or should be replicated in other countries. A more useful discussion would be about the nature of urbanism, and how the role of the city in Arab culture and history will adapt to our new globalized world.

This pertains to fast-growing Gulf cities like Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, and Manama, and ambitious new city projects in Saudi Arabia, as well as the revitalization of urban areas in cities like Beirut and Amman. Arab planners, leaders and citizens must grapple more deliberately with the question of what makes a great Arab city, rather than leaving this urban hyper-growth to the whims of commercialism and the profit motive of private developers.

What are the enduring characteristics that make a city meaningful, rather than only comfortable and efficient? And what do Arab cities in the Gulf and elsewhere offer beyond rapid growth?

The Gulf cities seem to have three of the five essential elements of great, meaningful and durable cities: efficient infrastructure, cosmopolitan populations comprising many nationalities, and expanding economic opportunities. The two missing elements are cultural production and pluralistic politics.

Political life will take time to develop naturally in the small monarchies and emirates of the Gulf. In the meantime, cultural and intellectual production is probably the criterion that will help answer the question of whether spectacular Arab Gulf urbanism will cross the threshold between super efficient construction project management and the building blocks of the human spirit.

A closer look at the “Dubai model” suggests that other than its unprecedented speed of development over a single generation, it has followed the same path that transformed Beirut from a small town to a globalized Arab city, from the 1860s to the 1960s. The trajectory of cumulative services these two cities offered their surrounding region in their growth years has been virtually identical: entrepôt and trade services, regional business offices, splendid consumerism, a bit of smuggling and sanctions-busting, serious banking and quiet money laundering, quality professional services (engineering, advertising), tourism and discreet sensual pleasures, easy interaction with the world, plenty of new job opportunities, education on a wide scale, a major international airport, and a sense that the growth years would continue forever.

It is useful to grasp the distinctions and similarities between contemporary and historical Arab urban growth if we want to see Beirut, Cairo, Damascus and other cities regain their balance and role in the world; also if we hope to see Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and other fast-growing Gulf Arab cities achieve their full potential and contribute to the collective knowledge and heritage of human civilization.

The long and rich context of Arab urbanism is a powerful and humbling guide. Cosmopolitan urbanism has defined the Middle East for nearly 5000 years, since the third millennium BC. The recipe for a great, meaningful, satisfying and enduring city was written long ago. The blend of economy, infrastructure, politics, pluralistic citizenry, links to the world, and cultural production determines two critical dimensions of urban life: Do citizens remain passive, eager consumers, or do they become producers who contribute new ideas and goods to the collective human endeavor? Does a town grow into a true city whose urbanism prompts the production of cultural ideas in the form of the arts, journalism, books, research institutes, and centers for the discussion of ideas and the resolution of problems and challenges?

None of the spectacularly growing cities of the Gulf region have yet achieved institutional critical mass that allows them to produce and export ideas — they still prefer to erect marvelous buildings. Those buildings, however, are an essential first step. It is potentially significant that the Gulf region is now investing heavily in universities and museums, perhaps signals that these societies wish to take the next critical step towards great Arab urbanism: the production of cultural, technological and intellectual knowledge that comes only from free minds that interact in an open, respectful, pluralistic environment.

The people and leaders of Dubai might consider defining their “model” not in terms of what they have built with concrete and steel, but rather in terms of what their new urbanism can now contribute to the rest of the world in the realm of ideas, knowledge, culture, and universal human norms. I, for one, am cheering for them to succeed.

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

Copyright © 2008 Rami G. Khouri

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Released: 30 January 2008
Word Count: 814
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BEIRUT — It was not exactly the Red Sea parting to allow a persecuted, enslaved people to flee to safety, but it was pretty close as far as political symbolism goes: Palestinians this week blew holes through the wall on the Egyptian-Palestinian border that Israel built to pen in the Palestinians in Gaza, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians poured over the border into Egypt. They went mainly to purchase the simple everyday needs that had been denied them recently due to Israel’s policy of total isolation and strangulation of Gaza and its people.

The scale and symbolism of events in Gaza clarify some simple truths about the Palestinian issue in its wider historical, political, and geographic context — and perhaps also its moral context, thanks to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s insensitive and obtuse call to “think creatively” about how to deal with the Gaza situation.

It is ironic but not unexpected that 3500 years after the Hebrews fled their dismal life in Egypt and escaped eastwards to freedom across the miraculously stilled Red Sea, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians should be fleeing from the modern day descendants of the Hebrews — the state of Israel — who now play the role of the oppressive Pharaoh to the subjugated and dehumanized Palestinians in Gaza. The reversed political geography is politically stunning, and tragic for both sides.

The double irony, however, is that the indigenous Palestinians in both cases pay the heaviest price. In antiquity, the Hebrews who fled Egypt conquered and settled in Palestine, driving out the native Canaanites and others who can be seen as the ancestors of the Palestinians, just as the Hebrews can be seen as the ancestors of the Israelis and Jews today.

More significant are the continuing implications of Israel’s repeated attempts to force neighboring Arab states to assume responsibility for policing the Palestinian refugees and subduing the Palestinian nationalist resistance movement that were both spawned by Israel’s creation and the parallel exile and occupation of the Palestinians.

Two Arab leaders in particular suffer politically from this crisis — Egyptian President Husni Mubarak and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Israel and the United States have tried unsuccessfully to use both of them to control Gaza, thwart the rise of Hamas, and protect Israel from Palestinian wrath, just as they used the Jordanian and Lebanese governments to achieve similar goals.

But Mubarak and Abbas cannot play the role of Israel’s subcontracted jailer, strangler and starver of the Palestinians in Gaza, and expect to remain credible with their own people or other Arabs. When an Arab leader is caught between acting as an agent and surrogate for Israel and the United States in treating the Palestinians like animals, or showing support for the basic humanitarian needs of Palestinians, they will lean towards helping the Palestinians. They will also try desperately to cling to the material aid and increasingly vacuous political validation they get from the US and Israel. Mubarak and Abbas sway in the wind this week, buffeted by their own untenable confusion about whether their primary role is to implement Arab, Israeli or American priorities.

The equally bewildered American position was reflected in Rice’s macabre call to deal “creatively” with the Gaza situation. Why “creatively”? Is this a kindergarten finger painting class? Why not deal with the Gaza situation on the basis of more compelling adult criteria, such as legality, legitimacy, and humanity?

The American call for “creativity” in dealing with Gaza is an ethical weapon of mass destruction. It will only aggravate the widespread disdain, fear and disgust that define much of the world’s attitude toward American foreign policy. Rice’s call for creativity is a cheap attempt to get around the moral, political and legal consequences of Israel’s many decades of brutality in Gaza, and Washington’s refusal to deal with the reality of Hamas’ election victory last year.

Israel and the United States refuse to do the hard work of making reasonable compromises that all the Arabs, including Hamas, have already suggested: to engage with all the Palestinians and negotiate, first, a long-term truce and, consequently, a permanent peace that is fair to all, that gives Israelis and Palestinians alike a chance to live in peace and dignity.

Rice’s quest for “creativity” is a desperate bid to evade law, morality, human decency and constructive political compromise. It is a moral abomination that demeans all Americans in whose name it is spoken.

It is also one reason why the flow of thousands of desperate, dehumanized people across the Sinai — fleeing subjugation and brutality, and in search of their own humanity — was reversed this week — 3500 years after today’s Israeli jailers were history’s jailed Hebrews. No surprises, here. Just politics and humanity taking their normal course.

The answer is not “creativity”. It is mutual respect, abiding by the law, and, above all, human decency.

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

Copyright © 2008 Rami G. Khouri

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Released: 28 January 2008
Word Count: 803
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BEIRUT — I have two texts that I pull off my bookshelf every now and then for renewed stimulation and hope in times of conflict and pessimism. One is the Book if Isaiah in the Bible — that great work of Jewish warning, faith and hope during times of peril in exile — and the other is the collected works of Martin Luther King, Jr., the great American civil rights leader whose annual commemoration took place this week in the United States.

These texts are powerful and enduring because they are universal, not particular. They emanate from contexts of ancient Jews in exile in Babylon, and African-Americans in exile in their own society, shut out from mainstream life, and equal rights. Their common theme is a simple one: Moral faith can overcome all pain, injustice and oppression, if we allow God’s and humankind’s values to guide our actions in our temporal daily life. It is not enough to be faithful to God’s word, we must put into practice the dictates of those words, which are primarily about justice, equality, mercy, humility and compassion, and, above all, about human dignity and mutual respect.

The coincidence of the Israel’s siege and starvation of Gaza this week and the celebration of Martin Luther King’s life reminded me of the universal sense of hope that allows people in such inhuman situations to get through their ordeal and look forward to a better day. Life seemed bleak for the Jews sent into forced exile in Babylon in the five decades or so in the middle of the 6th Century BC, just as it did for African-Americans in the middle of the 20th Century. Their conditions changed and improved in the years to come, however, partly due to their own faith and hard work, and partly due to fortuitous changes in prevailing political conditions.

I do not understand how the same Jewish ethos that permeates the Book of Isaiah can also define the Israeli government’s decision to apply a total blockade on Gaza, in an effort to starve, squeeze and freeze several million Palestinians into submission. Is Israel testing the Palestinians in Isaiah’s “furnace of adversity” in the same way that God tested the exiled Jews in Babylon? If so, why would Israelis expect the Palestinians today to respond to their dehumanization any differently than the Jews in antiquity and in modern times responded to their own bestial treatment by their own oppressors with determination, faith, patience and, above all, steadfastness rather than submission?

That was also the central message of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. King spoke of the “legitimate discontent” that finally drove African-Americans to throw off their chains and struggle for their equal rights as American citizens. African-Americans, King said, were “fighting a degenerating sense of nobodiness,” and felt as if they were in “exile in our own land.”

The road of mass suffering from ancient Babylon to 1950s America to Gaza in 2008 is not a parallel path of a linear or common history. It is, however, a shared mirror of the strength of the human spirit, and its indomitable will to live in freedom and dignity.

Gazans today, who have no electricity and fuel, and may soon have little food, medicine and clean water, feel exactly like the Jews of Babylon or the African-Americans in Birmingham, Alabama. All of them never gave up hope that God, their fellow human beings, and the prevailing political power of the day would one day acknowledge their humanity, and the basic civil, personal and national rights that come with that humanity.

“Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever,” King said in his letter from a Birmingham jail in April 1963. “The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself…if repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence,” he warned, knowing that there is a limit to the capacity of the human body and spirit to endure dehumanizing treatment. African-Americans were fortunate to have an enlightened leadership that recognized, as early as the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, that “there is a new Negro in the south with a new sense of dignity,” tired of injustice and oppression, prepared to suffer, and even die, to achieve their rights as human beings.

The power of the words of the Hebrew Bible and of Martin Luther King, Jr. is so enduring because the moral concepts of those words are made meaningful for human beings in two critical ways: first, those moral values are not abstract, but must be translated into reality that improves the conditions of ordinary people; second, those values are universal, applying to all human beings, and not only the strong.

We remember those basic truths this week as we commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inspiring life, witness Israel’s bestial threat to strangulate and starve all Palestinians in Gaza, and read and re-read the Prophet Isaiah, praying for the humanity and dignity of Palestinians and Israelis alike.

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

Copyright © 2008 Rami G. Khouri

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Released: 23 January 2008
Word Count: 824
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BEIRUT — In a few months, the Arab-Israeli conflict will be 60 years old, if we use the 1948 war and the establishment of Israel as its starting point. What happened in Palestine and Israel this week? Israeli troops attacked assorted targets in Gaza, killing dozens of militants and civilians. Various Palestinian resistance groups — the United States, Israel, Micronesia and a few other powers see them only as terrorist groups — fired hundreds of missiles into Israel. The Israeli government threatened tougher military measures, “no mercy,” and a tighter blockade of the Gaza Strip, including cutting off all fuel supplies. Israeli and Palestinian leaders met to negotiate a peace accord, while US President George W. Bush traveled to the region to show his support for a negotiated Arab-Israeli peace agreement.

What’s wrong with this picture? The juxtaposition between military action on the ground and the words and acts of politicians is dizzying in its contradictions. Sixty years after the tensions between Zionism and Arabism in Palestine erupted into a full war, we continue to experience warfare as a routine mode of interaction between Israelis and Arabs, mostly on the Palestinian-Israeli front, and occasionally on the Lebanese-Israeli front. Simultaneously, politicians explore opportunities to end the conflict through a negotiated peace agreement, but without any major successes on the Palestinian-Israeli front.

The most important single development in recent weeks, I suspect, was the Palestinians’ firing of longer range missiles into southern Israel, some of them traveling over fifteen kilometers. They have caused very little material damage in Israel; they frighten and traumatize many people, and have killed maybe half a dozen Israelis over the years, while Israeli attacks against Gaza and the West Bank in the past year have killed hundreds of Palestinians.

This imbalance in numbers is typical of the history of Palestinian-Israeli warfare. More relevant today is the trajectory of the fighting. Israel has had total control and a free hand in Gaza and the West Bank since 1967, through a combination of direct occupation, punitive and preemptive attacks, and attempts to seal the border through the use of walls, fences and blockades. What does it expect to achieve with renewed military ferocity and brutality that it has used for 40 years, since 1967? It should recognize at some point the real legacy that it will continue to reap from such a policy: Palestinian rockets that reach deeper into southern Israel, and many young men who are prepared to risk death to fire them, and who are not intimidated by Israel’s military capabilities or renewed threats.

The Israeli threat to attack Gaza will result in more deaths and widespread suffering by civilians. It is unlikely to crush Palestinian national resistance, though, or the will to live in freedom and dignity. A new Israeli assault would probably only trigger Palestinian efforts to develop or obtain rockets with an ever longer range, perhaps to hit central coastal cities in Israel. This is clearly one of the lessons of the past 60 years: Sustained Israeli attacks elicit greater Arab technical proficiency and political will to resist and retaliate. Hamas, Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and other smaller groups manifest this reality. The regional infrastructure to enhance Palestinian military technical proficiency is in place, as Hamas and other resistance groups forge increasingly close working relations with fellow Islamists and nationalists throughout the region.

The threat of another Israeli military assault on Gaza and the promise of fiercer Palestinian retaliation for Israel’s assassinations of Palestinian militants are both signs of great will, but also of immense political frustration. Neither side is likely to win, or be defeated, purely by more military attacks. Mutual militarism is a dead-end road that both sides must travel, however, to reach the point where they grasp the stalemate they have achieved. We are near the point where repeated mutual attacks and terrorized civilian populations lead to consequences and reactions that are so predictable — more rockets, assassinations, and missiles from both sides — that they become politically meaningless.

This kind of warfare is as much about self-assertion as it is about self-defense. Asking one side to stop its militarism and violence as a precondition for political engagement is unrealistic, which is why this approach has never worked. The antidote — which has succeeded briefly in recent years — is to explore a cease-fire that both sides fully observe.

Israelis and Palestinians have amply demonstrated the depth and durability of their national identity, the ferocity of their will to fight, and their occasional willingness to explore political rather than only military resolutions of the conflict. Mature adults should be able to transcend the anger they feel at suffering military attacks, and instead probe the underlying political and national issues that generated the fighting in the first place. Any serious external mediator should explore the possibility of a total mutual cease-fire linked to serious negotiations based on internationally accepted benchmarks and reference points, especially UN Security Council resolutions.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2008 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 21 January 2008
Word Count: 821
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BEIRUT — I do not spend much time mingling with officers in the United States armed forces, but when I do, usually at a conference or international gathering, or reading texts on the web, I always come away from the experience more heartened than threatened. Presumably, so does President George W. Bush, who spends much of his time deploying or threatening to use the US military against terrorists around the world, or against Iran — or demonizing mainstream Islamists movements that defy the United States.

He and others in Washington would profit from reading a sensible and timely short paper by Colonel Laurence Andrew Dobrot, Deputy Director of the US Missile Defense Agency’s Airborne Laser Program. Just published, in November 2007, by the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it is entitled The Global War on Terrorism: A Religious War? (available at http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB822.pdf)

It makes a cogent case for a change in strategy in the American-led global war on terror. It sees the existing strategy as having limited impact, and even that, “The nation’s current policies and actions may, in fact, be creating more, not fewer, terrorists.”

Those in the United States who are fed up with hearing people around the world point out the flaws in American foreign policy may be more inclined to listen to an American soldier who speaks from experience in the global war on terror — he served in Afghanistan — and understands the strengths and limits of military power. After five years of driving the global war on terrorism (GWOT), including the loss of over 3,000 Americans, Dobrot writes, “many people question whether the US strategy is working, and whether the United States understands how to combat an enemy motivated by a radical revolutionary religious ideology.”

He suggests three root causes of the terror problem as manifested by Al-Qaeda and other such groups: the lack of wealth-sharing in Islamic countries, resentment of Western exploitation of Islamic countries, and a US credibility gap within the Islamic community.

Comparing the Ends, Ways and Means of Washington’s war on terror with those of Al-Qaeda and other such groups, he concludes that the United States is not achieving its long-term strategic objectives in the war on terror, and recommends that “US strategy focus on the root causes of Islamic hostility.”

He suggests that the United States combat radical Islam from within the Islamic community by consistently supporting the efforts of moderate Islamic nations to build democratic institutions that are acceptable in Islamic terms. Part of his recommendations is worth quoting at length:

The GWOT is an ideological battle. Our enemy is a group of violent religious extremists who are trying to unify Islam under their banner. The nature and circumstances of this war make it one that the United States cannot win militarily. Two objectives are identified in the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism: defeat violent extremism and create a global environment inhospitable to violent extremists. These are the correct ends. However, the United States may be failing to apply appropriate ways and means to achieve these goals. It has clearly demonstrated the capability to find and eliminate the most violent of terrorists, but does it have the capability to create a future global environment that will be inhospitable to violent extremism? The nation’s current policies and actions may, in fact, be creating more, not fewer extremists(….)

A principal focus of this strategy must be to establish among the umma [the Islamic community] the credibility of the United States and its policy. Two recommendations are proposed to help shape that future: First, the United States must be seen as ‘just’ to reestablish its credibility and legitimacy in the Islamic world. Second, the United States must communicate and promote democracy in terms that the Islamic world understands and respects. To achieve its long-term objective of creating an inhospitable environment for violent extremists through the creation of democratic institutions in nation-states, the United States must consistently focus its reform efforts on those predominately Islamic nations with which it already has relationships…To repair its credibility, the United States must focus on applying just practices. The United States must hold the Israelis, the Saudis, the Egyptians, and itself accountable to standards and policies perceived among mainstream Muslims as being consistent. Specifically, the United States must recognize democratically-elected governments such as Hamas and actively engage them in public diplomacy, even if it disagrees with them.

Col. Dobrot also mentions Iran, and the Arab-Israeli conflict as arenas where the United States can and must re-establish its credibility with Muslim populations and societies. I don’t know how well Col. Dobrot is doing in protecting the United States with his Airborne Laser Program, but his assessment of how to fight terrorism seems to me an intellectual and analytical “direct hit” that deserves wide consideration.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2008 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 16 January 2008
Word Count: 801
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BEIRUT — I thought the most intriguing aspect of US President George W. Bush’s call in Jerusalem last week for a Palestinian state that was “viable, contiguous, sovereign and independent” was the simultaneous use of the words “sovereign” and “independent.” This tells us nothing new about American rhetoric on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it is intriguing for how it can help clarify crucial political sentiments in other parts of the Arab world.

Why does Bush feel the need to use both the words “sovereign” and “independent”? You would think that if a country enjoyed one of these attributes, the other would come automatically. Well, not really — and not only in the case of Palestine’s desire to gain genuine independence and end Israeli control of its land, air, water, people and natural resources. In fact, one of the major concerns of ordinary citizens and mass political movements in much of the Arab world today is the sense of living in independent Arab states that are not fully sovereign, because they do not fully control their own resources or foreign policy.

This sense of feeling disenfranchised within your own borders is one of the major driving forces for Islamist and other political movements in the Arab world. In Lebanon, for example, the most powerful criticism the Hizbullah-led opposition makes of the Fouad Siniora government is that it is an American puppet, and that it transforms Lebanon into an agent for American plans and goals. Many in the Arab world feel that their governments are not fully free to make decisions that are in the best interest of their people, but rather must succumb to Israeli, American, European or other pressures.

The sense of clipped sovereignty is not only a consequence of Western and Israeli pressures; in some cases, citizens complain that other Arab governments, or Iran, are the ones who dictate policies to Arab leaders. The sense of thwarted rights is also felt at the personal level, by many Arabs who feel that they do not enjoy the full rights and privileges of citizenship, due to the abuse of power by small ruling elites and the many people in society who revolve around those elites.

The common Arab self-perception of being independent but not sovereign reflects several different feelings: that others make decisions for us, that we do not fully control our own resources, or that we are so dependent on others for money, security, food or technology that we suffer profound vulnerabilities that erode our sovereignty.

The manner in which some Arab governments openly or covertly participated in the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, for example, is seen by many in this region as a sign that some Arab foreign and security policies are largely dictated by Washington or Israel. Whether this is true or not is largely irrelevant. What matters is that many Arabs believe this to be the case, and formulate their political attitudes and behavior accordingly.

It is important for others around the world to appreciate how deeply many Arab citizens feel this sense of disempowerment, dependency, marginalization, and manipulation and control by others. It is one of the core degrading discontents that drive the Islamist movements throughout the region, which aim — at a basic and crucial level — to give people back their sense of empowerment and humanity.

To be an independent state that is not sovereign, or to be a citizen whose political and human rights are abused by one’s own state and government, does not only anger or irritate people, it generates a deeper sense of dehumanization — of being almost worthless and meaningless in the face of the power exercised by others.

Citizens without rights and states without sovereignty are unnatural conditions that cannot long endure. The power to make one’s own decisions is a universal driving force for individuals and countries alike. This is a biological rather than an ideological matter. It is a human need as basic as food, water, shelter and companionship. People and societies that feel they are invisible in the eyes of others will insist on being seen and respected. They will organize, struggle, suffer and even fight if necessary to affirm their humanity.

It remains unclear if the United States is serious about brokering honest Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. The track record today suggests not, but we will find out in the coming months. But it is a good sign that the American government explicitly mentions both independence and sovereignty as being necessary attributes of a Palestinian state to be born.

The United States and Israel, Europeans, and others around the world would do well to extend this sensitivity to the rest of the Middle East, where the sense of being only quasi-sovereign is widespread, and corrosive. True sovereignty requires less foreign interference, threats, and dictates — and remains among the most pervasive and powerful political driving forces in the Middle East today.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2008 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 14 January 2008
Word Count: 809
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BEIRUT — Immediately after the 9/11 attack against the United States, President George W. Bush and many other perplexed, angry, and often ignorant Americans asked a question — “why do they hate us?” — and made a statement: “You’re either with us or against us.”

This week, those Americans who are actually interested in answering the question — and exploring the validity of the statement — have a very good opportunity to grasp precisely why most people around the world admire the United States but detest many aspects of its foreign policy. This revelatory moment comprises two simultaneous events this week: the competitive American presidential primaries, and Bush’s journey to the Middle East. The contrast between the two events is substantial, and very revealing of the best and worst of American political culture.

The primary campaigns and elections are a spectacular display of a vibrant, rigorous democracy, whose many benefits clearly outweigh its few faults. The world — myself included — stands in awe and admiration before this spectacle that affirms the principle that power and authority are vested in the citizenry.

American democracy is impressive for allowing any aspiring leader to throw his or her hat into the ring, leaving the decision for voters to make after the aspirants are rigorously and repeatedly tested and questioned. On the downside, of course, if you have a lot of money, your hat moves into the ring more quickly and with a lot more media coverage — though charlatans rarely get very far in the process.

The mass sentiments of ordinary citizens in rural and small states are thrown into the electoral mix with the influence of big money, organized groups, serious domestic and foreign lobbies, and political party machines. The most admirable aspect of this element of American democracy is how — with only a few exceptions — it puts into practice the principle of the consent of the governed.

The vibrancy and worldwide respect for American democracy is offset, however, by the actual conduct of American foreign policy by democratically-elected leaders. President Bush’s current trip to the Middle East affirms everything that is wrong about American foreign policy, and everything that is flawed about American democratic policy-making at home, for several reasons.

The first is that Bush’s administration seems to prefer using force, threats and sanctions, rather than democratic elections or diplomatic engagement, as a main means of pursuing legitimate national interests. American military bases, secret prisons, outsourced torture chambers, and covert operations around the Arab world and Asia are expanding at a rapid rate, while American democracy activists and public diplomacy officials are widely viewed around the region as anathema. Bush also seems more motivated on this trip by fostering antagonism — and perhaps war against Iran — than by trying to synchronize American and Arab-Iranian mass demands for dignity, democracy and stability.

Second, the United States seems to prefer to continue supporting autocratic leaders, especially in the Arab world, who run variations of security and police states, while vigorously opposing those mass movements that articulate grievances in the vocabulary of Islam. This tendency to preach democracy but to strengthen autocrats and authoritarians around the world makes the itinerant American champion of democracy look more like a false prophet than a man of truth.

Third, Washington refuses to accept the verdict of democratic Arabs when they elect movements like Hamas to power. This exposes the American call for democracy as an insincere and limited franchise when the rights of Arabs run up against the rights of Israelis. Washington seems to say that Arab democracy is OK only when the policies of elected leaders conform to American-Israeli priorities.

Fourth, the American official policy of guaranteeing Israel’s might over all combined Arab countries reflects a deeper flaw: Washington’s affirmation of Israeli rights as taking priority over the rights of all people and countries in the Middle East to live in peace and security according to the rule of law — in this case international law and conventions, and UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions.

If you preach majority rule and the rule of law as a desirable global norm, but refuse to respect it when Israeli interests are concerned, you come across as a hypocrite at best, and a deceitful cheat at worst.

This is why much of the world rejects the simplistic attempt by some Americans to ask if we are with or against the United States. Speaking for myself — and maybe for somewhere between four and five billion other human beings, I would guess — I would respond “yes” to both. We are with the American principles we witness in practice in the United States these days, and against American policy as it is practiced by the roving American president in the Arab-Asian region these days.

It reminds us that the greatest thing about democracy in America is that every few years you get a chance to throw the rascals out.

<i>Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based </i>Daily Star<i>, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.</i>

Copyright ©2008 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 09 January 2008
Word Count: 809
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