BEIRUT — Lebanon and Palestine are the most dramatic examples of the new ideological battle that now defines much of the Middle East: Where local players and medium-strength regional powers often interact with one another in parallel with foreign powers’ interests and goals. While tensions were increasing in Beirut last weekend in anticipation of the 23 January national strike by the Hizbullah-led opposition against the Siniora-Hariri-led government, in nearby Damascus the leaders of the two major Palestinian political groups, Hamas and Fateh, were meeting under Syrian auspices to try and solve their dispute over who rules Palestine and defines its foreign policy vis-à-vis Israel.

If you were too young to remember the Cold War between the American- and Soviet-led global camps, study this dynamic closely, because it is a miniature regional version of the former global contest. It is possible that the Middle East-anchored new cold war we are living through these days may persist for many years, or it may be over in two or three years, depending on how both sides harness and use their competitive assets. For now, we can only identify some of the new rules and realities of the regional confrontation.

The two core powers who confront each other in the Middle East today are the United States on one side, and the Iran-Syrian tandem on the other. Major supporting actors and local allies include Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Europeans. Lebanon and Palestine are the two most interesting proxy wars in this battle; Iraq is also important, but local tensions that have been unleashed in the past three years are more likely to determine its fate than actions by foreign powers. What makes Lebanon and Palestine so fascinating today is how they have slightly rewritten the rules of Cold War proxy warfare, in which local actors fight ideological battles on behalf of their more powerful patrons and allies.

In the Cold War, rival ideological powers usually confronted one another from neighboring states, such as North and South Vietnam, Syria and Jordan, Iraq and Iran, Somalia and Ethiopia and dozens of other such pairs of ideologically antagonistic states. In the Middle East today, the competing political forces are usually found within the same country, and often share local legitimacy to a large extent. Just as in the Cold War, they fight on many fronts, including the occasional military clash and local insurrection. But more often, they fight via competing political ideologies and economic policies.

In Lebanon, the Siniora government and the Hizbullah-led opposition are fighting an intense battle on many fronts, just as the Hamas and Fateh camps square off in Palestine. They do so as part of a local political power struggle, but also explicitly as part of the wider confrontation between the United States and Iran-Syria. The fact that these face-offs now occur within Arab countries, rather than between different countries, reflects a slightly bizarre reality: Most Arab countries — in some cases half a century or more after their birth — still have not achieved stable statehood based on the collective allegiance of satisfied citizens. Different groups do not only compete for political control of the government, but for the even more basic ideological definition of the state and its policies.

The Fateh-Hamas talks in Damascus were perhaps most interesting for their location — in the Syrian capital. The substance and outcome of the talks are less dramatic issues, because they are largely known and also perhaps slightly irrelevant, and sadly so. This is because the Palestinians will almost certainly agree on a national unity government based on the principles in the agreement reached last year by leading Palestinians in Israeli jails; yet a unity government will not have any serious impact on the burning issue of whether to make war or peace with Israel. There is simply too large a gap between Hamas’ rejection of recognizing and dealing with Israel and Fateh’s insistence on resuming peace talks with Israel to be bridged by a vague national unity government agreement whose main anchorage is diplomatic imprecision.

Holding the meeting in Damascus was significant because it highlights the role that Syria hopes to resume playing as a broker among different parties in the region, especially those who oppose the United States and some of its Arab allies. Earlier this month, Syria hosted the Iraqi president, and now it wants to show that it can achieve results on Palestine that are beyond the reach of the United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel or any other third power. Syria’s links with Hizbullah and other smaller Lebanese opposition groups give it continued influence in Lebanon, and it also maintains good ties with Iran.

Syrian and Iranian attempts to score points in their contest with the United States by using their influence and alliances with junior partners in the region, such as Hamas, is classic cold war-type behavior.

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 ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 23 January 2007
Word Count: 808
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BEIRUT — In the span of five days last week, I had the pleasure of participating in five different events that brought together concerned civil society activists, assorted professionals, academics, and a few public figures from across the Arab world. These gatherings are routine nowadays, but are also noteworthy because they mirror a wider determination among Arab men and women to chart a new path out of the mediocrity, violence and despair that define many aspects of Arab society these days.

This trend stands in sharp contrast to the two other main dynamics that define the region, and that we also witnessed last weekend: the American government meeting with assorted “moderate” Arab regimes to forge slightly dreamy plans that have no realistic hope of success, because they do not have the support of public opinion; and, Islamist forces that enjoy large support among the Arab public, but have no clear answers to the real challenges that face our countries, such as employment, democracy and dealing with foreign powers, including Israel and the United States.

Briefly, here are the five events that I participated in last week:
1. A public panel discussion at the American University of Beirut on the role of civil society and think tanks in promoting change in this region, with two leading Arab activists and intellectuals: Dr. Paul Salem of Lebanon who heads the new Beirut-based (but regional) Carnegie Middle East Center, and Dr. Saadedine Ibrahim of Egypt who founded and heads the Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development in Cairo.

2. A brainstorming session with a group of 20 students, civil society activists and journalists from the Arab World, Europe and the United States, who came to Beirut as part of a trip to Jordan and Palestine to learn of developments on the ground, and to explore how to promote joint work with colleagues from those countries. Most of them were affiliated with the Ibn Khaldoun Center or the American University of Cairo.

3. An evening panel discussion at Al-Burj bookshop in downtown Beirut to honor the late Samir Kassir’s memory, on the occasion of the Arabic-language publication of his history of Beirut book. Kassir was assassinated in 2005, though his work and life continue to inspire many people who share his commitment to a brand of Arab modernity that weds the best of universalist democratic values with the riches of Arab history and identity.

4. The next day, I flew to Amman, Jordan, for the first of a series of regional seminars organized by the Beirut-based Arab Center for the Development of the Rule of Law and Integrity, a Beirut-based non-governmental organization working to analyze and improve the state of the judiciary, mass media and political participation in the Arab region.

5. Back in Beirut, I attended a full-day seminar on Saturday, 13 January, exploring the positive and negative aspects of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that ended the Israel-Hizbullah war last August. Organized by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation of Germany and the local Cultural Movement in the Antelias region of north Beirut, the gathering brought together distinguished scholars, lawyers, activists, UN officials, diplomats and politicians of all shades.

I mention these events not because they are especially noteworthy or unusual, but precisely because they are so routine. Similar gatherings take place in scores of Arab cities every week, throughout the year. Committed individuals and concerned organizations come together like this on the basis of a shared focus and aim: To analyze why our region suffers such low quality public politics and wasted national potential, while our societies are characterized by a wealth of individual talent, and human dignity and integrity.

This noteworthy dynamic brings together ordinary men and women and elite members alike who have seen their societies and lives degraded, yet who remain determined to chart a path to a better future. They refuse both the subservient tutelage of American hegemony and the imprecise final destination of Islamist mass mobilization. They are neither deterred by being jailed, beaten or intimidated, nor overly impressed by invitations to meet with Arab kings, emirs and presidents for life, or with their sons. They meet, talk, research and publish on crucial public issues, spark wider debates through the mass media, and challenge but also engage with authority.

Tens of thousands of determined, honest, and loyal Arab individuals demand to exercise responsibly their rights as citizens, rather than to retreat into the passivity of immobilized subjects. One day, they will generate enough momentum to break through the barriers that have confined them and their societies to the current state of mediocrity and immobilization. This is why I remain confident that the Arab world will see better days ahead, while autocrats and incompetent leaderships, along with their guards and sycophants, will face a moment of reckoning.

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 ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 16 January 2007
Word Count: 795
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BEIRUT — According to official Washington explanations, President George W. Bush is working hard to achieve a wholesale transformation of Iraq, and the Middle East, into a more stable, productive, democratic nation, and region. I know Bush enjoys reading a lot of American history, but he would do well to check out some historical narratives from this region, especially if he is sending many thousands more young American men and women with guns and missiles to engage with the natives out here. He might specifically benefit from reading about another Western leader who towered over the world and similarly tried to rearrange the Middle East — the Roman Emperor Diocletian.

Bush, like Diocletian, speaks in the sweeping vocabulary of those who do cosmic rearrangements, describing the challenge he sees as the defining battle of his generation. He acts with equal boldness, on the same grand scale. In the late 3rd Century, Diocletian ordered a major military and administrative reorganization of Rome’s eastern frontier provinces, centered — not coincidentally — around Mesopotamia, now called Iraq.

Diocletian (240 – 311) undertook a major program of building forts and highways throughout the Arabian provinces, after he had imposed a humiliating treaty on his defeated Sassanian (Persian) foes. Around the same time the Sassanians also launched a significant fortifications program, in order — no surprise — to protect themselves against their militarily powerful Roman neighbors.

For three centuries to follow, Rome and Persia fought intermittent wars separated by brief periods of uneasy peace, temporary conquest and subjugation, and occasional mutual exhaustion. By the early 7th Century, Rome and Persia were both battered by their perpetual wars, their own civil strife and border clashes with third parties, and were unable to resist the militant Arabs who emerged from Arabia under the banner of the new religion called Islam.

In 636, at Yarmouk in Jordan and Qadisiyya in modern Iraq, the Arabs of Islam defeated both the Byzantine Romans and the Persians. The Middle East lands of Rome and Persia were eventually conquered and united in the new Islamic realm. The forts of the Romans and Persians remain to be seen today throughout the land — tourist sites mainly attesting to the futile doctrines of military conquest.

The new strategy for Iraq announced by President Bush Wednesday night will continue to generate great debate for some time to come. But events will soon enough reveal if it is a feasible, rational approach to the dilemmas that Washington has largely created for itself in this region, or if it proves to be a Diocletian-like bit of imperial self-assertion. It may only add to the already rich history of this issue yet another cautionary tale about imperial tendencies and dangers.

One of the historic developments during Diocletian’s rule was the expanded role and status of the imperial court, and the explicit linking of the
emperor’s rule with the realm of the gods. Diocletian transformed the emperor’s post into something of a vice-regency of God — even declaring himself the son of Jupiter — becoming increasingly detached from the day-to-day affairs of ordinary people and more focused on implementing the divine will on earth, including in Mesopotamia. People in his presence had to prostrate themselves on the ground before him. Diocletian emasculated the republican institutions of the Roman state, turning the fabled Senate of Rome into little more than a local council, thus removing most political checks and balances and opening the way to autocratic governance. And his persecution of Christians almost certainly prompted the faith to spread more rapidly.

Some of this may be relevant to events today, or it may just be curiously fascinating — as stories of tragic mortals usually are. George W. Bush speaks of Iraq and the Arab world in a language of imperial disdain, and acts with an exaggerated sense of divine pomp and circumstance, emboldened by a fearlessness anchored in military might and certitude of the nobility of his mission. Yet he makes repeated mistakes — as he admitted this week while changing policy — and the consequences of his policy in the Middle East appear to bring about the opposite of his stated intentions: more terrorism, less stable states, spreading Islamism, weaker central governments, and more intense anti-Americanism.

Bush has displayed an unusual combination of confidence and confusion that we do not normally find, say, in domestic politics or local neighborhood relationships. This is the unique manifestation of the deadly allure of imperium — the sense that one has the absolute power to rule over distant, foreign lands and people who are considered vital for the well-being of one’s nation or state. What Bush sees as a sensible surge appears more clearly to many in the Middle East as the more familiar scourge of imperial history.

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 ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 12 Janaury 2007
Word Count: 782
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BEIRUT — Every time I walk through the front line of the political confrontation in downtown Beirut between the American-Saudi-backed Fouad Siniora Lebanese government and the Iranian-Syrian-backed Hizbullah-led opposition, I have the distinct if surreal sensation of walking through a 1970s-eras American rock festival on a WWII movie set. This downtown Beirut scene encapsulates today’s multiple ideological and cultural confrontations in the Middle East and the world, and may be the most visible front line of a wider global face-off. Like all other things Lebanese, this serious, often tense, and increasingly unpredictable confrontation is garnished with a bit of levity, and much humanity.

On one side are numerous encampments of the government’s gun-toting soldiers, amidst armored personnel carriers and several layers of barbed wire barriers, reflecting both the special camaraderie of their martial profession and the deadly serious nature of their mission. The simultaneously relaxed demeanor of the troops, though, suggests that D-Day is some ways away. One giveaway is that this muscular war scene takes place on a stretch of road that houses a music conservatory, a church, a Buddha Bar, a Subway shop, major banks, the prime ministry, and one of Beirut’s best cigar shops.

Facing this military encampment across the front line — an unglamorous but utilitarian street junction and corner of a parking lot — is the tent city of several hundred fulltime protestors from Hizbullah — the Free Patriotic Movement and half a dozen other mini-movements — where the young lads seem to sleep most of the day and rally most of the night to fine music and fractious political rhetoric.

When the weather is fine, especially on evenings, weekends and official holidays, thousands of families converge on downtown Beirut to rally for the opposition. The smell of grilled meat wafts over the scene, music interspersed with political speeches fills the air, and hundreds of young couples, families, and groups of friends sit around on chairs and mats, playing cards or backgammon, waving flags, and, mostly, smoking water pipes loaded with nicely flavored tobaccos such as watermelon and rose.

For an indiscreet moment, you think that this is what Paradise must be like: friendly folks having a good time, with plenty of camaraderie, good food and music, and only pleasant garden smells from a thousand water pipes. That is a passing thought, for this is serious business, pushing Lebanon towards an increasingly strident confrontation with no clear outcome.

The dramatic front line in downtown Beirut is much more than just an anthropologically fascinating bifurcation of a very pluralistic and tolerant society. It is also more than a great urban center’s ability to keep adding to its historical repertoire by inventing new ways for people to congregate and affirm their powerful humanity as well as their simple need to enjoy life.

These sharp cultural and political distinctions between the two camps that face off in central Beirut will now spread throughout the city, following the January 8 decision by the Hizbullah-led opposition to escalate the peaceful protests to other government offices and public facilities. Like the central Beirut dynamic, this escalation is matched step by step by an increasingly self-confident and assertive government. Among its important moves has been the widespread deployment of the army and police force to preserve order and keep open all public facilities. Little encampments of army and police are visible all over the city at strategic junctions. Mostly they comprise a single armored personnel carrier with a typically dashing young soldier hanging out of the hatch door, smoking a cigarette or munching on a high-quality shawarma sandwich, with a few other mates standing around on the street.

The message of all this resonates far beyond central Beirut, reflecting a trend that we are witnessing in several Arab lands simultaneously: Incumbent governments facing challenges from Islamist-led oppositions are standing their ground, defending their positions, and fighting back politically; in cases like Palestine, Iraq and Somalia, the state also fights back militarily. Beirut’s stand-off remains peaceful and political, even though politicians on both sides occasionally verge into silly-land with their vitriolic rhetoric.

Here is the long delayed synthesis between anthropology, ideology and politics in the modern Middle East, as groups with very different agendas and significant domestic and foreign support square off and battle for control of the governance system. The roughly equal weight and determination of the two main camps in Lebanon augurs for a compromise settlement in due course, unless foreign interests on both sides push for a prolonged battle.

Watch this political battle closely. Lebanon may emerge from all this as a historic beacon of peaceful, increasingly democratic contestation of power in the modern Arab world; or, if things go badly, it may shatter and collapse in an ugly heap of its own self-destruction, fuelled by a combination of mediocre local provincial politicians egged on by selfish foreign patrons.

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 ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 09 Janaury 2007
Word Count: 804
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BEIRUT — Of the many transformations taking place throughout the Middle East, the most striking is that the new regional security architecture that is gradually emerging in the Arab world seems to be managed almost totally by non-Arab parties: Iran, Turkey, Israel, the United States, and, now, Ethiopia.

It is possible that the Arabs could write themselves out of their own history, ending up as mere consumers of foreign goods, proxies for foreign powers, and spectators in the game of their own identity, security and destiny. This is not certain, but the current trend points in that direction, which would be a demeaning cap on a century of repeated incompetence in the field of Arab security and statehood.

The United States is clearly looking to withdraw from Iraq in the coming few years, signaling the end of the short-lived neo-conservative era in Washington leadership and foreign policy. Washington will continue to safeguard its national security interests and friends in the Middle East, but by using more sensible methods than the diplomatic and military artillery that it has deployed in recent years, including its Rottweiler-like approach of intimidation, attack and overkill in Iraq. A new security architecture or system will have to emerge to ensure stability and order, thus sparing the Middle East the ignominy of becoming the world’s first failed region.

This occurs while two other major trends define the region. Traditional major state powers like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as well as minor ones like Syria, Jordan, Libya, Algeria and Morocco, are less influential and interventionist regionally than they have been in the past. And in many cases, they also suffer greater dissent and even some stressed legitimacy at home. At the same time, the powerful new non-state actors in the Arab world now challenge, work alongside, or even replace long-serving regimes. The most noteworthy examples include Hizbullah, Hamas, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the Badr and Mahdi militias in Iraq, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and, most recently, the Union of Islamic Courts in Somalia.

Arabs, Israelis, Turks, Iranians, Americans, Europeans and, now, Ethiopians will not sit around passively watching the rise to power of these groups on CNN and Al-Jazeera. All concerned will try to secure their national interests and weaken their enemies, ultimately forging a new security arrangement that allows the region’s many forces to find a balance of power that is stable. This could be negotiated — like the historic Helsinki Accords between the East and West in 1975 — or it will emerge from the political and military battles we witness these days in downtown Beirut, Gaza, Baghdad, and south-western Somalia.

The coming new era in which Middle Eastern geo-strategic security is handled primarily by non-Arab regional players will replace the traditional US-USSR superpower rivalry and the actions of major Arab players like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Several regional hegemons will emerge to balance out each other. The leading candidates now seem to be Iran, Israel, Turkey and a toned down United States. Any Arabs who play a role will mainly be surrogates, subcontracted militias, or outsourced intelligence agencies to these front-line powers. Arab military systems that cost hundreds of billions of dollars to build will be relegated to little more than local gendarmeries.

Political circumstances in Iraq, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon have given Tehran openings that it has exploited to forge closer alliances or tactical working relationships with groups as different as Hamas, Hizbullah, the Syrian Baathist leadership of Bashar Al-Assad, and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government that is merrily hanging former Baathists. Turkey is primarily focused on Kurdish-related events in neighboring Iraq, Iran and Syria, though it could also play a greater role in Arab-Israeli and UN peace-keeping activities. Israel works covertly throughout the region, but remains constrained by its lack of formal ties with most Arab states and Iran. A comprehensive, fair Arab-Israel peace accord would open many doors for Israeli ties with other Middle Eastern states, making its role in a regional security system more legitimate and acceptable.

This picture is startling for the prevalent absence of Arab states in the creation and management of their own security order. What remains unclear is how the enormous power of Islamist militant and resistance groups will translate into formal engagement with a new regional security system. The best we can hope for is that Islamists who win democratic elections, Turkey-like, would assume power and responsibly manage the affairs of state and society, including striking diplomatic deals with regional and foreign powers. Attempts by Iran, Syria and others to control Islamists will not work in the long run, because the Islamists only have legitimacy and impact in their role as nation-specific defenders of their own people’s rights, not as agents for foreign governments.

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.

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 05 January 2007
Word Count: 767
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SWEIMEH, the Dead Sea, Jordan — The journalist’s tendency to look back on the past year and spot important new trends is heightened when the setting for such an exercise is the idyllic northeastern shore of the Dead Sea in Jordan, where I spent the last days of 2006. Amidst some serious serial napping, as I reviewed the past year I noted half a dozen recent and ongoing developments that may be worth keeping an eye on in the years ahead.

Polarization and confrontation, with occasional violence, have become the prevailing political norm in the region, as the docile ideological center of years past temporarily leaves the stage. Militant polarization manifests itself on three levels and is evident in many countries such as Lebanon, Palestine, Iran, Sudan, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain and others. The three levels are: local power balances, regional alliances aligned around the Arab-Israeli conflict, and a global confrontation pitting Arab-Iranian Islamism against American-Israeli-Arab power elites.

If the increasingly common use of violence by most local and foreign parties in the Middle East becomes the norm of political expression, it could remove negotiated politics as a credible means of conduct for years to come. Political and military violence are now routinely used by all around here: Arab states and regimes in the Middle East, Iran and Turkey, Anglo-American-led foreign armadas, local hegemonic and occupying powers like Israel, assorted terrorist groups, several resistance movements, and a wide range of local gangs and criminals. No wonder that the most common symbol of the contemporary Middle East — at airports, hotels, government offices, shopping malls — is the security guard with metal-detecting scanner. It is the sad icon that defines and unites us, but it is an icon of our own making.

Foreign intervention in domestic affairs, though not new, has become more common and audacious, involving primarily countries like Iran, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and some low-key Europeans. Foreign support for local proxies is most obvious in Lebanon and Palestine, but also evident in Somalia, Iraq and Sudan. The latest entry into this club is the Ethiopian army in Somalia, where the rollback of the Islamists who had recently controlled the Mogadishu capital region is likely to encourage more such foreign assistance to stop the advance of political Islamists. Such a strategy is underway in Lebanon and Palestine, where political forces of roughly equal strength on both sides are likely to be forced to accept compromise agreements, rather than fight to the finish.

Consequently, we may be witnessing the birth of an odd new system in which Middle Eastern countries are governed by political elites umbilically linked to foreign patrons. This mirrors two recent historical antecedents: the foreign mandates that ruled this region after World War One, and the Capitulations system during the Ottoman era that allowed European powers to protect minorities (mainly Christians and Jews) in the Middle East. It is bizarre, and troubling, that as most of the world moves forward in history, our region is moving backwards towards arrangements from the past.

The turmoil and spiraling violence throughout the region are prompting honest people to acknowledge that trying to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict is probably the single most useful thing to do in the short run in the quest for a more stable region. This has not yet been translated into meaningful diplomatic progress, but it is one of the few signs that some people may respond sensibly to the violence and incoherence all around them.

This could be linked to the expanding opportunity for the United Nations to play a constructive role in the region, if it can break away from Washington’s attempt to turn it into an agency of the Defense Department. Signs of this include the UN Security Council-mandated investigation into the murder of Rafik Hariri and dozens of others since February 2005, the Lebanese-international court being set up to try those who will be accused of the murders, the details of Resolution 1701 that opens the way for Lebanese-Israeli conflict resolution, the expanded UN military force in South Lebanon, and the UN’s expected greater role in Darfur in Sudan.

Change is everywhere, but not always positive, as our region and its many foreign patrons refuse to remain static, or docile, for long. After half a century of mostly frozen political development, the Middle East is experiencing the resumption of history, with all its good and bad dimensions. Unlike 1918 and 1948, though, this episode of historical change is especially noteworthy because the people of this region insist on participating in this process, rather than being passive and helpless recipients of foreign powers’ sometimes drunken dictates. That strikes me as the most important development of 2006 — the self-assertion of Middle Eastern natives who are not only restless, but determined to play a role in the new drama of their own destiny.

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.

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 02 January 2007
Word Count: 806
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BEIRUT — By most measures, it would seem that in the Palestinian-Israeli war, the Israelis are winning. They control and colonize Arab lands, enjoy military superiority and total American support, and unilaterally try to define the diplomatic parameters of the conflict. But this may be a mistaken assessment, and perhaps the Palestinians and Arabs are starting to win some battles, while Israel is losing some of the dominance it has long enjoyed. Seven significant events in the past five months seem to support this possibility.

The first was Hizbullah’s ability to fight Israel for 34 days this summer, and on the 34th day still to be firing hundreds of rockets into Israel. Morality and political consequences aside, this reflected a truly historic combination of Arab political will, technical military proficiency, and a capacity to remain shielded from Israeli, Western and Arab spies and infiltrators. No Arab party had ever crossed this threshold in the century-long conflict with Zionism and Israel.

The second event was Israel (and Washington) having to accept the August ceasefire resolution at the United Nations, after the United States had given Israel weeks of extra warfare to hit Hizbullah. A determined Arab group forced Israel and the United States to accept a political resolution instead of military victory, and the cease-fire resolution included measures that Israel had previously always rejected, e.g., addressing the occupied Shabaa Farms area in the context of the Israel-Lebanon conflict, rather than as occupied Syrian land, and specifying the return or exchange of Israeli and Lebanese prisoners.

Israel quietly dropped its previous position that the two Israeli soldiers snatched by Hizbullah on July 12 be returned unconditionally. Then, the stationing of over 20,000 Lebanese and international troops in southern Lebanon, long an Israeli demand, also came at a price: limiting Israel’s scope of action in southern Lebanon and its over flights throughout the country.

The third noteworthy development was Israeli acceptance of a ceasefire with the Palestinians in Gaza in late November. This, after it had said that it would not stop attacking and would do anything required to retrieve Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, whom Palestinian guerrillas had snatched from an Israeli army post on the Gaza-Israel border.

The juxtaposition of events in Lebanon and Gaza this summer was powerfully telling. Israel’s once vaunted military prowess and frightening deterrence failed to stop Lebanese and Palestinian fighters from snatching three of its soldiers from border areas. Israel’s subsequent severe, savage military attacks and mass punishment of civilian populations failed to make the Arabs cough up the soldiers. Weeks or months later, Israel swallowed its words, put away its ultimatums and threats, and accepted cease-fires in both cases.

The fourth important development is that Israel has been unable to stop the home-made, rather rudimentary Qassam rockets from being fired into its southern region by Palestinian militants and resistance fighters. The Israeli military might and intelligence capabilities (resulting in the killing of some 400 Palestinians since June) have not stopped determined young men from firing these rockets into Israel.

The fifth striking incident occurred in early November, when Israel had pinned down a group of Palestinian fighters in a mosque in Beit Hanun in northern Gaza, expecting them to surrender or be killed. What happened next was significant: Over 200 Palestinian women broke through the Israeli siege, swarmed the mosque, and provided cover for the young fighters to escape — at the price of two women being killed and a dozen injured. Battle-lines that had been defined by Israeli troops fighting a handful of Palestinian youth had been transformed into the Israeli army finding itself helpless — and defeated — in the face of the Palestinian civilian population.

The sixth incident happened in mid-November, when the Israeli army had telephoned the home of a Palestinian militant in Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza and warned the inhabitants to leave a three-story residential building that was going to be destroyed. Instead of fleeing quickly as they had usually done in such cases, hundreds of civilians instead swarmed into the residence, stood on the rooftop, and dared the Israelis to kill them all. Faced with these nonviolent civilians who no longer feared death, the mighty Israeli killing machine and its befuddled political leaders suddenly became much less impressive — for they had lost their capacity to intimidate with the threat of death.

The seventh, most recent, incident was Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas earlier this week, and announcement that Israel would release $100 million of withheld Palestinian tax revenues and remove some checkpoints in the West Bank — reversing his previously steadfast insistence to make no such gestures, or even meet with the Palestinians before Gilad Shalit was released. In the end, Olmert met, talked with, and made concessions to the Palestinians. Shalit was nowhere in sight.

Events in 2007 may determine if these of 2006 signify a change in balance of power in the Palestinian-Israeli and Lebanese-Israeli confrontations. We must now hope that the trend these events signify opens the eyes and brains of Arab and Israeli leaders who have relied mainly on military force to achieve their goals, and propels them towards negotiations as a more effective and humane route to achieving their goals, and bringing a normal life of peace, security and recognition to their peoples.

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 ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 29 December 2006
Word Count: 880
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BEIRUT– It was a coincidence that I was reading Fouad Ajami’s new book on the American adventure in Iraq at the moment when the whole thing seemed to turn the corner from an enterprise of self-perceived righteous audacity — planting a virulent democracy in the heart of the Arab world — into an unfathomable mess from which Washington earnestly sought rapid but orderly separation.

Ajami’s book, The Foreigner’s Gift: the Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq (2006, Free Press, NY, 378 pp.), revolves around a central thesis that will remain worth pondering for years to come. The United States went into Iraq with the well-intentioned aim of breaking the tradition of Arab tyranny, by removing its worst despot and replacing him with a pluralistic democracy that would infect the entire Middle East. This was America’s “gift” to Iraq and all Arabs — the chance to live in freedom, democracy and real constitutionalism. Once in Iraq, though, the United States realized that it was the foreigner who did not understand the land or its people, and had an even weaker grip on the heavy traditions of modern Arab political history, tribalism, religion and ethnicity that simultaneously engulfed Iraq after the Baathist police state of Saddam Hussein had been removed.

The American “expedition” to Iraq, he notes, made Iraq “the battleground between Arab authoritarianism and participatory politics… for the first time in a very long stretch of history, Iraq was at the center of Arab political life. It was a statement on the political sterility of other Arab lands that an election held under the protection of a foreign power, right alongside a raging insurgency, had come to be viewed as the herald of a new Arab political way. …a new Iraq held out great attraction to the American imperium and its architects. The promise of Iraq was that of a new beginning — a base of American influence free of the toxic anti-Americanism at play in both Saudi Arabia and Egypt.”

The adventure seems ultimately to have misfired, though, probably because it responded more immediately to American than to Arab needs and priorities. Ajami is among the few American public figures who supported the war in Iraq and is honest enough to admit some of the central reasons for this calamity that now threatens Arabs more than it does Americans. Despite the many American and Iraqi characters he profiles in short, admiring vignettes, often in the context of what he sees as a noble, earnest, decent and heroic effort, Ajami also accepts that “the foreignness of the effort, and of the men and women doing the work, was impossible to shake off. “America could awe the people of the Arab-Muslim world, and that region could outwit and outwait American power.”

He dismisses with a sentence the original war rationale of rooting out weapons of mass destruction, and also admits that “it wasn’t democracy that was at stake in Iraq. It was something more limited but important and achievable in its own way: a state less lethal to it own people and to the lands and peoples around it.”

Ajami is very controversial and widely disliked in the Arab World, especially in his land of origin, which he calls “my ancestral Lebanon.” I have always made it a point to read his writings and hear him out when the opportunity arises — along with others who share his views, including real live neo-conservatives — for several good reasons.

I do a better job as a journalist an analyst when I hear all views on a topic, especially ones I disagree with, rather than absorb wisdom only from those whose opinions I share. And Ajami is a man who moves in powerful circles in commercial and official America, in and out of the White House and other impressive American places of power — like corporate media headquarters — where often amateurish policies are made and pursued, sometimes recklessly and destructively, occasionally flirting with moral or actual criminality. His thoughts therefore provide important insights into, and sometimes even help to shape, the worldview of those who have ruled America and directed its bizarre, bloody little imperial adventure in the Middle East since late 1991.

His analysis of the modern Arab condition is often brilliantly insightful, not to mention written with much grace, regardless of the fact that his prescriptive advice on what the United States should do in the Middle East is often wrong, and easy to challenge. Ajami analyzing the wasteful horrors of decades of modern Arab despotism and cruelty is rich if partisan reading; the same Ajami offering policy advice for the future is much less credible. Separating the successful professor from the misguided policy-maker is a useful and bountiful endeavor.

The ultimate lesson of the American mission to Iraq, he hints, is that neither the rule of native despots nor of foreign armies is going to bring about “the possibility of a decent, modern life” in the Arab world. “America rolled history’s dice” in most of Iraq, he writes, while noting correctly that the experience in the Kurdish areas also shows that “terrible histories can be remade.”

The balance sheet of Iraq will be clarified by history yet to come, and Ajami provides a useful outline of some of the key issues that will be weighed in the making of that verdict:

• Western armies who come and go with some regularity;
• Local Arab despots who hang around for decades at a time and pass on power to their sons;
• The decency of ordinary Arabs seeking a normal life;
• The mesh of indigenous identities rooted in religion, ethnicity, tribe and sect;
• Arab regimes and ordinary men and women who accept Washington’s money and wink at terrorists who attack it; and, ultimately,
• The heavy weight of this entire thick legacy on the possibility of change in Arab societies, power and governance.

“The foreign power that blew into Baghdad happened onto a tangled and pained history,” he concludes. Yet he never fully accepts that much of the mess was the consequence of other episodes, in other times, when other Western armies also “rolled the dice” and “blew into Baghdad.” He seems not to appreciate fully the indignant view of those tens of millions of ordinary Arabs in successive generations who do not take kindly, or quietly, to being treated like a bingo board for the pleasure of foreign politicians.

The role of Israel and Western powers in generating the freak show of modern Arab security state political culture is — as in the Anglo-American-Israeli analysis on TV these days — nowhere to be seen. Nor does Ajami sufficiently differentiate between the sick ways of the military rulers and the persistent decent humanity of ordinary Arabs. His own bitterness against the entire Sunni-dominated Arab order of the past half century permeates the entire book, sometimes in exaggerated ways, but, like this entire book’s menu of riches and gaps, always providing bountiful food for thought.

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 ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 26 December 2006
Word Count: 1,148
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BEIRUT — “A commandment of love” was the theme that the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah, stressed when I asked him last week about what Arab Christians should be doing to address the many challenges and threats in the Middle East today. I was especially interested in the role of Arab Christians because their plight is highlighted this Christmas week, while a delegation of UK church leaders makes a timely Holy Land pilgrimage.

Christians experience the same pressures and challenges as the majority Muslim Arab people living under Israeli occupation, the assault of Western armies, or the incompetent, autocratic mismanagement of their own Arab political leaders. A strangled Bethlehem, though, is likely to catch the attention of Western citizens and church leaders more than a stressed Alexandria, Aleppo or Casablanca. The four pilgrims are Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Moderator of the Free Churches the Rev. David Coffey, and Primate of the Armenian Church of Great Britain Bishop Nathan Hovhannisian.

The focal point of their four-day visit is a pilgrimage to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Their trip and witness will help Christians and other people of good faith around the world better appreciate the impact of the Israeli occupation on all Palestinians, including Christian communities.

His Beatitude Michel Sabbah welcomed the pilgrimage and noted that, “At a time when our communities in the two Holy cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem are separated by a wall and checkpoints, the visit of the churches’ ecumenical delegation is a reminder to us, to the Israelis and the Palestinians, and to the world, that the pilgrims’ path of hope and love must remain open.”

Hope and love stand in sharp contrast to the Israeli colonization and control policies in and around Bethlehem that have shattered the physical, spiritual and economic integrity of the community — cutting off the built-up areas from thousands of acres of agricultural land and water resources. The main culprits are Israel’s separation wall fencing in the Palestinians, and an associated system of smaller cement walls, 27 Israeli settlements, and a network of electric fences and Apartheid-vintage, “Jewish settlers-only” roads and checkpoints, almost all built on land confiscated from Bethlehem’s previous owners. The result is a prison-like environment for the people of Bethlehem, 70 percent of whom now live below the poverty line. After Israel’s attacks and reoccupation of Bethlehem in 2001-2002, some 3000 Christians emigrated, representing 10 percent of the local Christian population.

Leila Sansour, the Palestinian chief executive of the Open Bethlehem project that works to preserve the city’s physical, spiritual, demographic and economic integrity (www.openbethlehem.org), wrote last week: “A UN report into Christianity in Bethlehem predicts that our community will not survive another two generations. We live from pilgrimages, and our city is closed. We have traditionally stored our wealth in land, and our land behind the wall has been seized. Our lives are intimately bound up, economically and socially, with the Christian community in Jerusalem, yet we are forbidden to enter that city, which lies only 20 minutes away.”

When I met with Patriarch Sabbah in Larnaca, Cyprus last week, I asked him if he saw a particular role that Arab Christians can and should play. His reply was clear, and challenging: “My vision is that we are Christians, whatever are our numbers, are Christians in and for our society, which is a Moslem Arab society. Christians have something specific to give as Christians, because of their belief in Jesus Christ and all the values that Jesus Christ taught us. This is an obligation. Our commandment is a commandment of love, and it is shows the way to build a society. Christian love is about accepting the other or not accepting him. It is about building with the other or refusing to build with him. All the Christian Arabs can bring to Arab society this love as a power of cohesion within the society to love themselves and show how to live together with the Moslems who are the majority in these societies.

“There must be a broad project, a social, economic, political project so that people together can see how they can prepare a country and homeland, and enrich every citizen so that he or she feels at home, content and secure, without any fear of the other. All citizens must have the same place and opportunities in terms of their social and political rights.

“We Christians can be a true bridge through all the churches that are present in the world,” he replied to my question about Arab Christians playing a role as bridges with the West. “All of us together can have an impact. We have an obligation to understand Islam for what it is, therefore we have the obligation even to have alliances with Moslems, in order to build a new type of society, and bring this as a model of coexistence to the West.”

Love, indeed, seems worth a try. In that spirit, I say Merry Christmas to all, and early Eid Al Adha greetings and Happy Hanukah wishes to my Muslim and Jewish brothers and sisters, hoping that all of us together will respond to Michel Sabbah’s call for an ideology of love to replace this time of war.

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 ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 22 December 2006
Word Count: 877
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BEIRUT — There is a tragic, pitiful quality to British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s current trip around the Middle East, which he says aims to resurrect an Arab-Israeli peace process, though it seems much more obviously designed to salvage some of his own fading reputation. It is unlikely to succeed on either count, for he continues to pursue the same sort of biased policies that generated the Palestine problem in the first instance under his nation’s dishonest tutelage over half a century ago.

Tony Blair, even more than the befuddled Condoleezza Rice, has come to epitomize in a single stroke the three most destructive tendencies of Western powers in the Middle East in the past century: sending their militaries to rearrange our region, intervening in domestic conflicts to help one of the feuding local parties, and generally ignoring the democratic rights of the majority of Palestinians and Arabs, in favor or Israel or chosen Arab elites who pay as much attention to the needs of Israel and the Western powers as they do to their own people’s rights and sentiments. This has been a proven recipe for conflict and disaster since colonial Great Britain first sided with Zionism over Arabism in Palestine in the 1930s, and it remains so today.

This is also a tragic missed opportunity, because Tony Blair has the potential to practice real statesmanship by supporting a political and peace process among Palestinians and Israelis that truly responds to their mutual needs. He could show the way towards a more stable Middle East for the dumbfounded George W. Bush, by fostering an Arab-Israeli negotiating process that starts to cool down some of the other hot spots in the region. He could help his European partners reverse the rising tide of tension and mistrust between many in the Arab-Asian region and Europe. He could atone somewhat for Britain’s colonial mismanagement and duplicity.

He could do all this and more if he only chose to be honest, rather than dishonest, and principled, rather than voraciously expedient. Blair’s UK should assert and stand up for the rule of law, impartiality, consistency, democratic pluralism, and peaceful resolution of conflicts. Instead, by boycotting and starving the democratically elected Hamas government, supporting the politically frail and largely discredited Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas against Hamas, and standing firm alongside Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Blair seems likely only to exacerbate tensions within Palestine and between Palestinians and Israelis. His incoherencies are many, and consistently destructive to both our societies and his reputation.

He makes for a fine sound bite in asking the world to support “moderates” in the Arab world who want peace, but his support of Mahmoud Abbas in the internal Palestinian power struggle sends the message that corrupt and inefficient Arabs are the West’s chosen partner. He speaks eloquently about supporting democratic processes in the Arab world as an antidote to terror, but also insincerely — for he quickly jumped on the Israeli-American bandwagon to boycott Hamas after its election victory in a rare modern Arab democratic endeavor.

He reminds us that Great Britain today, as in the 1930s in mandatory Palestine, favors the political will of Zionism and Israel over the democratic will of the indigenous majority Palestinian Arabs, or the equal rights of both communities. He is free to hold that position, of course, but he sounds like a fool — or simply an eccentric Englishman in Arabia — when he simultaneously preaches to us about democracy and moderation while practicing immoderation, supporting a bizarre Palestinian thugocracy, and boycotting democratically elected governments.

Blair said Monday in Palestine-Israel: “If the international community really means what it says about supporting people who share the vision of a two-state solution, who are moderate, who are prepared to shoulder their responsibilities, then now is the time for the international community to respond.”

This sensible commitment to moderation, a two-state vision, shouldering responsibility and acting in a timely manner is embarrassingly contradicted, however, by the policies of Blair’s and many other British governments going back nearly a century. Their cumulative policies have been characterized by immoderation, partiality and bias, ignoring the democratic will of the majority, turning a blind eye to pre-state Zionist terror and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, responding to urgent issues with immobility and negligence, favoring the security of the Israeli state over the rights of the Palestinians to a parallel state, and brandishing political and moral irresponsibility as their policy compass.

This insincerity does not escape us, and has not done so for generations. I recall in the 1960s when my aged maternal Palestinian great aunt was on her deathbed in Beirut, having lived through the entire modern history of Palestine from the 1910s. When I was visiting her one day shortly before she died, she offered me sage advice, garnered from much bitter experience: “If you want to live a long and happy life,” she told me, then a lad of 16 years just embarking on life’s journey, which she was completing, “you should remember two important things: Always brush your teeth well in the morning and evening, and never trust the British.”

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 ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 19 December 2006
Word Count: 848
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