BEIRUT — The bomb attack against civilians in Tel Aviv on 17 April was no surprise, and the Israeli response of military and political strikes, and further economic strangulation of Palestinians, is equally predictable. In both cases, heartfelt but misguided actions will only accelerate the cycle of war between the two people. The danger that looms over the situation now is not more tit-for-tat punitive military strikes. It is the rapid transformation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a national to a civilizational one, with potentially dangerous linkages between events in Palestine-Israel and the rest of the Middle East.

It seems that little has changed in Israeli-Palestinian relations. The Hamas-led Palestinian government and the Kadima-led Israeli government both represent new political realities, focusing largely on their citizens’ domestic concerns about security, order, and socio-economic well-being. Hovering over them, however, is the monster of their century-old national conflict, represented by the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and Palestinian military and political resistance.

The 17 April attack and Israel’s expected response remind us that if we play by the failed old rules we will get failed old results, with a fairly steady kill ratio of four Palestinians to one Israeli. The failed old policies of Israel and the United States believed that daily hardship, ostracism and humiliation would render the Palestinians weak, desperate and amenable to any proposed unilateral Israeli plan. The reality has proved to be the opposite.

Palestinian weakness and acquiescence to Israeli dictates rendered the Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas governments virtually irrelevant, and powerless to control their own people. Israel’s disdain towards Palestinian rights generated only a greater will to resist Israeli oppression and colonial subjugation. The elections reflected this in the Hamas victory, sending two important messages: ordinary Palestinians want a government that gives them a sense of integrity, decency, normalcy and hope; and, peace with Israel, like the ongoing war, is a two-way process that needs concessions by both sides and cannot be achieved by Israel continuously humiliating the Palestinians.

The Hamas victory is about the Palestinian people’s determination to end acquiescence and colonialism. If the Israelis and Palestinians are to re-engage one day to make peace, they can only do so on the basis of two peoples with equal national rights. Palestinian suicide attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers and Israeli army attacks on Palestinian civilians and militants perpetuate the cycle of occupation and resistance, but without offering a way out of it. If we do not acknowledge the acts of both sides in this war, we will only exacerbate it, as is happening now.

Since its electoral victory, Hamas has insisted that armed resistance and attacks against Israelis are justified self-defense against a brutal occupation, though Hamas itself adheres to the truce it initiated over a year ago. Even if others carry out these attacks, however, Hamas is now held responsible. It cannot expect to be left alone as the Palestinian governing body, and be exempted from responsibility for other Palestinian groups’ attacks against Israelis. Incumbency brings responsibility and accountability.

All concerned must now make hard choices. Hamas and the Palestinian people must decide if they wish to pursue armed resistance or a path towards peaceful negotiations. They now say they wish to do both. Israelis for their part must decide if they want to negotiate peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians, or try to impose a new status quo based on unilateralism, colonial land grabs, and militarism.

Israel, with American backing, is now on a course to destroy the Hamas-led government and the Palestinian Authority, as it has been doing for the past four years. Hamas is pursuing a policy that will help this process along, based on its diehard commitment to armed resistance to occupation as a right that it will not abrogate or curtail.

This path will have enormous regional consequences. It will discredit two important dimensions of recent Palestinian political change: the integrity and legitimacy of democratic elections, and Hamas’ decision to enter into mainstream governance at the local and national levels.

If the current Israeli-American policy prevails, with increasing European support, the collapse of the democratically elected Hamas-led government will send political shockwaves throughout the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of young people who pursued peaceful democratic politics will feel duped and betrayed, and will become radically disenchanted. The wellspring of support for Hamas- and Muslim Brotherhood-style democratic engagement will slowly dry up in favor of more intense armed struggle.

We should not be surprised then to see large numbers of young men and women shift from the path of electoral democracy to that of military attacks against civilians and official targets, along with more Bin Laden-style terrorism in a wider arena. They will conclude that Israel, the United States and Europe value Israeli rights more than Palestinian rights. They will stop wasting their time trying to achieve a redress of grievance through peaceful democratic politics or diplomacy, and instead fight the larger civilizational battle they see before them.

Bringing down the Hamas-led Palestinian government will not bring quiet and more Palestinian and Arab acquiescence. It will result in further radicalization, resistance and terrorism across the region.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 19 April 2006
Word Count: 855
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AMMAN, Jordan — If political and economic reform are supposed to “drain the swamp” and lead to a more peaceful, prosperous Arab world, we should be prepared to be patient for the process to bear fruit. The swamp — like all organic phenomena that hate oblivion — is fighting back, and showing its considerable muscle.

The swamp of the contemporary Middle East is fed by homegrown political discontent, chronic abuse of power, economic stress, social inequity, and sustained abuse by foreign powers. The swamp will only retreat when more wholesome forces are able to mobilize effectively and push it back. This has yet to happen, but an important learning process is underway.

Arab reformers throughout the region are slightly dazed, and a bit down, but not out. Like boxers who came out fighting and have been battered in the middle rounds, they are pausing between rounds. They will refocus and come back into the ring with a more effective strategy that corresponds more to reality than to their idealism.

I say this after an intensive week of meetings and discussions on political-economic reform issues in the Arab region. This included two days of discussions with civil society agencies from throughout Iraq, a World Bank-sponsored gathering in Beirut of several hundred specialists from throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and a day of talks with reform champions and skeptics in Amman, Jordan.

It is crucial not to make the mistake of judging Arab reform and historical change through the distorted lens of Washington and London politicians. Many of the problems of the modern Middle East since the end of World War I can be traced in part to the imperial, presumptuous tendency of Western powers to implement policies that respond more to their own goals than to the interests and rights of the people of the Middle East, e.g., the American-engineered coup that overthrew Iran’s Mosaddegh government in the early 1950s; the British-engineered duplicity that carved out an Israeli state from a largely Arab Palestinian land between 1915 and 1948; and, the crass French colonial manipulation of Syria and Lebanon in the inter-war period.

Many today will look at the stalled Arab reform and democracy effort and conclude that it has failed and will be shelved, because the Anglo-Americans’ patience is limited and their problems in Iraq are growing. It is also easy to write off democratic reform efforts in the Arab region as hopelessly naïve, powerless in the face of strong police states, marginal in the face of widespread local disinterest, or deeply flawed due to association with American and Western goals.

A more complex dynamic is at hand, in fact, as reform-minded activists throughout the Middle East digest the lessons of the flaccid first generation of attempted democratic transformation, and prepare to re-launch and re-engage more effectively. The discussions underway are intense, probing, self-critical, action-oriented and realistic. How do we change state behavior by using the law? How can we partner with like-minded colleagues around the world? Should reform-based mass political parties be established? How can Islamists, democrats and other natural constituents of reform movements work together coherently? How do we control the military and police power of the state? How do we break the hold of individual families on entire countries?

This is a crucial moment in the destiny of the modern Arab world in the midst of extensive change, defined by many forces that eyeball each other with both concern and predatory intent: security-centered regimes and governing elites; opposition Islamists who are gaining power through grassroots organization and electoral politics; expanding private business sectors that need rule of law-based good governance to achieve their potential and generate jobs and wealth for their people; small clusters of democracy and human rights activists; equally small numbers of terrorists; and, a massive center of largely apathetic ordinary citizens who watch all this on television, concerned mainly with taking care of their families. Foreign interests also play a role, whether in the form of Anglo-American, Israeli, Turkish, and Iranian armed forces, or their respective political operatives and agents.

In recent years, Western governments and Arab reformers had joined forces to pressure Arab regimes to accept the inevitability of change in the exercise of political and economic power. So in the past 20 years, we have witnessed more open press and political systems, greater dynamism in civil society, many new political parties, numerous parliamentary elections, and more recourse to the courts for redress of grievance. Real power, however, continues to be closely held in the hands of small ruling elites that have remained largely impervious to the impact of these liberalization trends. We have changed political forms, but not the substance of how power is wielded.
The liberalization dynamic stalls in part because Arab and Western governments work more closely to slow down the pace of change. Some of this reflects fear of Islamist victories, and some the unwillingness of entrenched Arab elites to give up their privileges and power. At the same time Arab democracy advocates and mainstream Islamists who want faster reforms are busy defining where and why they failed in recent years, and how to avoid the mistakes of the past when the bell for the next round sounds — as it will.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 12 April 2006
Word Count: 871
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BEIRUT — Those in Israel, the United States and elsewhere who are puzzled about how to respond to Hamas’ victory in the recent Palestinian elections should not get hopelessly bogged down in the tensions and mutual killing of recent years. Instead they should keep in mind the larger picture of Palestinian identity and the decades-old struggle for national rights.

As usual, there is a good new book that helps people work through such dilemmas. The book is Salman H. Abu-Sitta’s monumental Atlas of Palestine 1948, recently published by the London-based Palestine Land Society (www.plands.org), and available worldwide through the offices of Saqi Books or the Institute of Palestine Studies.

The Hamas victory and this atlas, though very different events, are two examples of a much wider phenomenon: Palestinians everywhere who agitate for their national rights according to accepted global standards of law and common human decency. Other dimensions of this include the two recent intifadas, repeated democratic elections under conditions of severe occupation, and numerous attempts by civil society groups to agree on reasonable terms for a negotiated peace agreement with Israel.

The Atlas of Palestine 1948 is a remarkable document that uses detailed maps and copious tables and charts to provide the most accurate rendition of the Palestinian narrative of dispossession and exile at the hands of the Zionist forces in 1947-48. Israelis and some others challenge this narrative. The facts clearly show, though, that the land of Palestine, during the 30 years of British rule between 1918 and 1948, was transformed from an overwhelmingly Palestinian Arab society into a majority Jewish-Zionist-Israeli country. Palestinians see this as the result of a deliberate Zionist strategy often assisted by the British.

Abu-Sitta has been documenting modern Palestinian history for decades, diligently gathering every available credible source of evidence in order to provide answers to the simple question of how half the Palestinian population in 1947-48 — over 900,000 people according to his work — found themselves as refugees in exile. He also shows in great detail how and why 675 Arab population centers and villages were depopulated.

The power of this large and rich volume of 428 pages derives from the combination of its comprehensiveness and its detail, drawing on Ottoman, British, Israeli, Arab and other available historical records. Documented here in maps, aerial photographs and copious charts covering all of Palestine is every depopulated center, every massacre or ethnic cleansing perpetrated by pre-independence Zionist forces, land ownership records, land use patterns, partition plans, and evolving war and armistice conditions in 1947-49.

So here is what Israelis should ponder: When Palestinians look through this book, they instinctively look up their ancestral village or town, go to the page with the corresponding map or aerial photograph, and locate their neighborhood, even their house or farm.

This is not a record of what Palestinians have lost; it is an affirmation of that which still defines them and succeeding generations to come. The collective link to the land is the source of their national legitimacy. It is documented here with a startling power, and — like the Jewish claim to Eretz Yisrael — it can never be taken away from them, despite death, denial, dispersal and occupation.

When I tracked him down in Kuwait and asked him about his main aim in producing this work, Abu-Sitta replied: “My aim is both to look back and forward. I want to document what happened in those fateful 18 months around 1948, but also to show the facts on the ground that might provide the basis for future scenarios of how Israelis and Palestinians might live together, whether in one state, two states or some other arrangement. If Israelis or others are interested to know why the conflict persists today, they can review the information here, and wake up from their collective amnesia about what really happened in 1948.”

The common, consistent driving force for Palestinians throughout the world since 1948 remains the determination to right the wrongs of that period, to reclaim our right to a normal life in our own land. The Palestinians and all other Arabs have now accepted that a Palestinian state can only hope to come into being alongside the existing Israeli state in its 1967 borders. A negotiated peace seems possible, in theory.

But peace for Israelis and Palestinians will not happen if the starting point is that seven million Palestinians have validity only if they first recognize Israel’s right to exist. The missing element in Israeli-Palestinian peace-making has always been the ability to treat both peoples as having the same national rights : to legitimacy, statehood, security — and to exercise those rights simultaneously, not sequentially.

Hamas’ victory is only another way for ordinary Palestinians to affirm their determination to struggle for their rights, and to regain the dignity and integrity of their national community, preferably through peaceful diplomacy. This will require that Israel reciprocates and recognizes that the Palestinian claim to national sovereignty in the land of Palestine-Israel is as strong as the Jewish-Zionist claim.

The force or validity of such a claim is not, in the end, anchored mainly in law or diplomatic niceties. It is anchored only in the human heart. It is given living expression in that common process, both tragic and heroic, that defines Israelis and Palestinians alike: young children and grandparents in exile who thumb through a book, open to a map, point their finger at a spot, and say “this is my village, this is where I come from, this is the land of my ancestors.”

People who feel this way — as Jewish Zionists did in Europe and Russia a century ago, as Palestinians do today — will not stop struggling until they regain their sense of humanity, the integrity of their national community, and a normal life for their children. Until now, after some ten thousand years of settled human history, no force in the world has ever been devised that can stop such human determination from succeeding. Why is that so hard to grasp?

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 11 March 2006
Word Count: 996
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BEIRUT — If you want to appreciate a common malaise that afflicts the entire Arab world, look at its cities, which project an external veneer of urbanism while in reality returning to lives lived mainly according to militarized village and tribal values. During the past generation, we have witnessed bigger and bigger Arab cities that lack the core element of urban greatness: a sense of cosmopolitanism, of transcending one’s local space to interact with and be part of the larger world.

Before the 1970s, before most Arab regimes were taken over by soldiers and thugs, most leading Arab cities reflected several profound traditions: they were open to foreign and regional traders, absorbed immigrants from other lands, welcomed and benefited from foreign institutions that were often established by religious missionaries, such as hospitals and schools, easily absorbed new ideas and norms from abroad, and were naturally comfortable with a very wide variety of local and foreign lifestyles manifested alongside each other.

Then, unlike today, you rarely saw armed soldiers on every other street corner. And never did a soldier stop you at the entrance of a government building and ask you where you came from or where your father was born, i.e., the armed guards of the narrow sectarian state did not need to determine if you were legitimate or otherwise on the basis of your territorial or tribal origin. Now they do, especially at airports, government departments and other landscapes of crude power projection.

To me this is the single most irritating example of the frailty and brutality of today’s centralized Arab security state: afraid of its own citizens, it must categorize them by their primal affiliation, rather than by their identification with the country itself. By behaving this way, the typical Arab government degrades or even invalidates the citizenship of its own citizens. It signals to them that their equal rights as citizens have been replaced by their relative rights as members of tribes that enjoy different levels of personal esteem and civil privileges, in an essentially caste system of first, second and third class citizens. In return, we all get to go to a new shopping mall every other month.

Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen, Algeria and other Arab lands that have suffered serious internal warfare are the most extreme examples of a trend that pervades most of this region. As the central state authority fractures or becomes a belligerent against some of its own people, the nationals of that country no longer see the government and central armed forces as their protectors. Ordinary people seek protection and identity in many other forms that are available and pertinent: tribe, clan, neighborhood, religion, ethnic sect, ideological group, criminal gangs dealing in drugs or guns, and other such groups and collective defining identities.

It was not always like this, though, as we are reminded in a timely and incisive new book — Heart of Beirut: Reclaiming the Bourj — by Lebanese sociologist Samir Khalaf, who heads the Center for Behavioral Research at the American University of Beirut. Just published by London’s Saqi Books,Heart of Beirut recounts how Beirut’s traditional central square, the Bourj, developed its pivotal public role over the centuries, and, more significantly, how it repeatedly absorbed local and foreign influences to reinvent itself as a vibrant, cosmopolitan and fun place that also reflected collective norms and identities.

The richness of the Bourj was precisely its eclectic but tolerant diversity, accommodating many different activities carried out by people from different backgrounds. Here within a space of less than a square kilometre was the urban epicenter of religious edifices, several large commercial markets orsouqs, publishing and media houses, hotels, houses of prostitution, government agencies, elegant retail shops, cafes and restaurants, political meeting places, cinemas, urban transport hubs, art studios, and port-related maritime offices.

The Bourj has always had the capacity to both affirm and transcend narrow identities, allowing the natives to assert themselves while wandering into adjacent and shared landscapes defined by Lebanese, Arabs and foreign people, a place where people go to satisfy their “need for wonder, exhilaration, exposure to new sensations, worldviews and the elevation of our appreciative sympathies — which are all enhanced through connectedness with strangers.”

The most constituent or defining element of a public sphere, Khalaf says, is inherent “precisely in its ability to transform closed or cloistered spaces into more open ones and thereby to facilitate the voyaging, traversing and crossing over.”

There is not much “crossing over” taking place in Arab cities these days. The opposite is happening, as communities retreat into their own cloistered spaces, often guarded by kids with kalashinkovs. Beirut’s Bourj epitomized Arab urban civility and cosmopolitanism for nearly a century, due to several elements which Khalaf summarizes as follows: “First, the predisposition of the Bourj to incorporate and reconcile pluralistic and multicultural features; second, its inventiveness in reconstituting and refashioning its collective identity and public image; third, its role in hosting and disseminating popular culture, consumerism, mass entertainment and often nefarious tourist attractions.”

The next time an Arab official or soldier asks me where I come from, I am going to tell him: I come from the Bourj, from a place where very different people forged a common strength, where individuals from separate traditions shared a vibrant collective space, and where the vulnerabilities and fears of small groups and tribes dissipated in the shelter of a transcendent Arab conviviality.

And if that same Arab soldier or official asks me where I am going, I will also say: I am going to the Bourj — to reclaim an Arab legacy of urban sensibility, coexistence, civility, multicultural fun and basic human decency that was here before his guns arrived, and that will flourish again, after he surrenders to our shared humanity.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 08 April 2006
Word Count: 957
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BEIRUT — As a big fan of sports, an admirer of most things American, and a lifelong follower of Middle Eastern politics and the role of Western powers in this region, I offer a modest proposal that could serve the best interests of both worlds: Condoleezza Rice should be given a fulltime, serious job in the sports world — commissioner of the National Football League has been suggested, analyst-commentator for ESPN television would also work — and she should leave the task of politically rearranging the Middle East to its own people, and to the natural rhythms of history. Please, somebody give Condoleezza Rice a whistle, and take away her howitzers.

I suggest this after watching her performance last week in the U.K. and Iraq, where she made various official and personal visits with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. She was much more comfortable, even elegant, in the realm of Blackburn Rovers football (soccer) in Straw’s hometown than she was in the company of a thousand guards and a half dozen often robed and bearded Iraqi politicians, each with his own militia.

Rice and Straw’s awkward body language in their meeting with Iraqi prime minister-designate Ibrahim Jaafari in Baghdad was not primarily because of jetlag, or the vagaries of late winter weather in the eastern Fertile Crescent. Rather, it reflected the continuing bizarre specter of the American and British foreign ministers admonishing the Iraqis to hurry up and form a government so that an indigenous political process can stop the violence that now staggers Iraqis in their day-to-day lives.

This is indeed strange history in the making: Western officials who invaded a country, wiped out its mechanisms of order, unleashed pent-up ethnic furies, and indirectly rule it with their military divisions are advising the natives to speed up their grasp of democracy: Compress into two years the political modernization process that Great Britain and the United States themselves required over half a millennium to refine, from the Magna Carta to the American revolution.

The absent realism and excess romanticism in the Anglo-American policy in Iraq result in a broadly psychedelic, occasionally imbecilic, foreign policy. No wonder these two official managers clearly feel more relaxed in the world of their hometown sports teams than in the alien realm of Middle Eastern history and nation-building. This is perhaps not such a surprise coming as it does in the wake of a century of British-then-American military interventions in the Middle East that have usually left the region tense and violent.

The natives can only fall back on five and a half millennia of indigenous experience of a defining historical process that obviously escapes the American and British foreign ministers: That is, five and a half thousand years of different local groups of people negotiating relationships of coexistence and power-sharing with each other, and, occasionally, with foreign powers who send us their armies.

Iraq suffers brutal inter-communal violence and is dangerously close to breaking into a full-fledged civil war because of the consequences of three parallel dynamics that have plagued its modern history. The older and still active tradition is that of Western armies that regularly march into the place and rearrange it according to the strategic interests or personal whims of London, Washington, Istanbul, Berlin, Paris, Moscow and other intermittently imperial capitals. The height of this audacious Western tradition occurred around 1920, when Great Britain and France, in a dazzling display of designer diplomacy, single-handedly manufactured a collection of new Arab countries that suited their strategic goals. Few of these countries are stable today, and many of their leaders suffer deeply frayed legitimacy.

A second dynamic is that of home-grown Iraqi tyrants who use centralized power to brutalize their own people and threaten neighbors. Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime was the worst example of this tradition, but only one of many in the area.

A third process that has never succeeded in asserting itself in the face of the first two is that of the many local ethnic, tribal and religious groups — usually with their armed men — negotiating the appropriate power-sharing, pluralistic arrangements that would foster stability. It takes time for local forces to work out a governance system that is realistic and durable, as the British discovered in the centuries after 1215 and the Americans learned in their civil war 75 years after their own independence.

Thanks to the convergence of the worst aspects of all three of these traditions, Iraq witnesses now a rising tide of ethnic-religious warfare that is gradually fraying the traditions of once pluralistic Arab societies and once cosmopolitan modern Arab cities.

In Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, Alexandria and other cities, people of different local and foreign backgrounds usually coexisted in easy harmony. They normally displayed the spontaneous, relaxed demeanor that is most evident on Condoleezza Rice’s smiling face when she talks about Alabama football or holds up her Blackburn Rovers football club shirt.

The awful combination of local tyrannies and Western armed aggression has transformed Iraq into one of several places in the Middle East where ethnic-religious groups that once lived together according to their own negotiated norms are being overwhelmed by a deadly, terrifying penchant for ethnic exclusivity enforced by unfettered militancy.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 05 April 2006
Word Count: 861
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BEIRUT — Why do so few prominent people in the United States publicly criticize Israel or its American supporters? Because — modern history suggests — this is a sure, speedy route to political and professional oblivion, especially for politicians, academics, writers and others who live in the public realm. An example before our eyes today is worth watching, both for the issues and the personalities involved.

Two respected American scholars at leading universities published earlier this month a controversial paper about what they see as the excessive and detrimental impact of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs and academic dean at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, published a working paper on the Kennedy School website entitled simply “The Israel Lobby”, and a shorter version in the London Review of Books. (Seehttp://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html or http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011.)

This is not an original or path-breaking piece of scholarship, to be sure. It is not based on new research, interviews, insights or fieldwork, but rather largely compiles into a single text, and provides supporting examples of, the many ways the authors believe the pro-Israel lobby in the United States drives and distorts American policy in the Middle East, to the long-term detriment of both Israel and the United States. Many of Mearsheimer and Walt’s points about the lobby are obviously correct; others can be challenged or debated; a few may be flat wrong. Their article reads more like a long opinion essay than a work of empirical social science research. It has been criticized on these and other grounds.

The Israel lobby is intriguing and important, but foreign policy and its impact is what matters in the end, especially whether recent Israeli and American policies truly serve Israeli and American national interests, not to mention the well-being of the rest of the region and the world. That’s where discussion of this matter should focus. The essay and its copious criticisms are worthy of more serious, sincere public debate, for the two questions at the heart of the issue they raise remain profoundly valid: “Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?” Why is there no serious public discussion in the United States of the thrust of American foreign policy in the Middle East or the activities of pro-Israel partisans in the United States?

Israel alone among foreign policy issues occupies sacred space in the American psyche and political system for many historical and contemporary reasons, including many legitimate ones. This same Israel is also among the most widely and routinely censured countries in the world, because of its brutal, often colonial, policy towards the Palestinians and other Arabs. Why the United States government celebrates Israel’s heroism but largely ignores its controversial, criminal and inhuman deeds is a question that simply is not seriously discussed in public in the United States. Why not? What explains Israeli exceptionalism in America?

Perhaps The Lobby is the main reason, as the authors suggest. Perhaps other important forces are at play, and the pro-Israel lobby is less dominant. Perhaps Israelis are simply good at lobbying in a democratic society while the Arabs are mostly incompetent. Maybe it’s our tough luck in much of the Arab world to have joined the wrong side of the Cold War. Or Americans and Israelis simply may share a powerful, identical moral and political tradition, which translates into a common policy. Perhaps the collective Western commitment to the security of Israel as the state of the Jewish people, in the wake of the Holocaust, is so compelling that it momentarily overrides the rights of others in our Middle Eastern neighborhood.

The author-scholars will digest the criticisms they have generated, and I hope they come back with a revised article that allows them to achieve their important goal of prompting a public debate on this issue. They wrote: “Powerful states can maintain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality cannot be ignored for ever. What is needed is a candid discussion of the Lobby’s influence and a more open debate about U.S. interests in this vital region. Israel’s well-being is one of those interests, but its continued occupation of the West Bank and its broader regional agenda are not. Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided U.S. support and could move the United States to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well.”

It’s hard to oppose a call for open, democratic debate that aims simultaneously to promote the national interests of the United States, Israel and the Arabs. So why is this question so rarely asked — let along answered — in the American public realm? Mearsheimer and Walt have suggested one answer — the Lobby — which may or may not be the full story. More importantly, they have put the issue before the public, inviting an honest conversation. That’s what good scholars and good citizens do in a democracy.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 02 April 2006
Word Count: 868
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BEIRUT — Somebody should remind the few Arab heads of state who attended the Arab League summit in Khartoum Tuesday that we have just had our first modern slave revolt in the Arab region. Well, ³slave revolt² may be too harsh a description of the actions of hundreds of mostly South Asian construction workers in Dubai last week. The workers stopped work and went on a little rampage for two days, to protest their harsh working and living conditions, low pay, delayed pay, and general lack of rights.

This should catch the attention of the few Arab heads of state who bothered to attend the Khartoum summit, because it reflects the sad situation that defines much of this region. The collective Arab leaders have conspicuously failed to resolve any significant regional issue in the last half century or so, while allowing their countries to degenerate into increasingly inequitable and abusive systems of exploitation and corruption, often enforced by militia power.

The revolt by the Asian workers in Dubai, ironically occurred in a country, the United Arab Emirates, that otherwise has earned accolades for its sensible development and efficient modernization. It should prompt us all to look again at how we treat foreign workers in the Arab region, and to use that prism to examine how ordinary citizens are treated by their own governments and societies.

Mercifully, perhaps as a sign of God¹s enduring affection and mercy for the Arab people, the Arab League summit meeting in Khartoum was pared down to a one-day event Tuesday. Nine Arab heads of state did not even bother to go. Many of those who did attend, like the Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian presidents, are under immense domestic and global pressure to resign, or to radically change their policies.

The defining collective characteristic of the Arab heads of state who attended or stayed home is an embarrassing combination of irrelevance, police state autocracy, or razor-thin legitimacy. The Khartoum gathering highlights the profound pressures and problems that plague most Arab countries. These can be summarized as a general lack of the rule of law in systems where political, military and economic power is closely guarded in the hands of small numbers of mostly unelected, unaccountable people — often just the men of a single family. Narrow, gun- and clan-based power structures that are more suited to urban gangland cultures have evolved in the Arab region in the past half century into prevailing systems of official governance.

Not surprisingly, a majority of young people in the Arab world these days responds to the dilemma of living in such a world with a range of startling options: a majority of Arab youth wants to emigrate to foreign countries, finds refuge in religion rather than more fully engaged citizenship, adheres to extremist political groups or terrorist cells, goes along with institutionalized corruption and nepotism, experiments with drugs and diversionary alien lifestyles, or joins a militia.

I would guess that the percentage of young Arabs aged 14-25 that does not fall into one or more of the above categories is no more than 25 percent of the total. This is one legacy of contemporary Arab leaders who meet in increasingly delusional summits. We have transformed our children into aberrations of good citizenship and decent humanity because we have raised them in largely lawless systems that enrich those who have and use guns — whether renegade militias or official security services and military sectors.

For the past quarter century, since the 1970s oil boom, this region has relied heavily on millions of manual laborers and semi-skilled professionals from Asia and other parts of the Arab world. For the most part, in return for meager wages that are only more attractive than the no wages they would suffer in their home countries, these immigrant workers have been treated badly in almost every aspect of their personal and professional lives, i.e., wages, working hours, benefits, medical care, housing, recreational and leisure facilities, family unification, civil rights, education and legal protection. Some women domestic workers have been sexually and physically abused. Some others have been held in conditions that can only be called captivity.

This is not a minor issue. These immigrant workers number in the millions throughout the Arab world. The Asian workers in Dubai, the Gulf, the Levant and North Africa are not ³slaves² in the strict sense of the word. But their life and work situations bring them so dangerously close to conditions of captive servitude that one could be excused for metaphorically saying that the Arab world experienced its first ³slave revolt² last week.

The Arab leaders who met in Khartoum, and those who stayed home, should stop wasting their time on issues that they have only mangled over the years — Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, democracy, common economic policies. Instead they should address these issues of fundamental human rights and conditions in their own societies that are more directly under their control, and that ultimately reflect the quality of their own moral values — noble or shriveled as these may be in real life.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 28 March 2006
Word Count: 841
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BEIRUT — By a fascinating coincidence, within the span of just days next Monday to Wednesday, March 27-29, three separate political events will take place that may well clarify the direction in which the Arab-Israeli conflict will move in the coming years. The Palestinian government headed by Hamas is expected to be approved by parliament Monday and issue its program in detail. The Israeli general election will take place Tuesday as an Arab summit conference opens in Khartoum.

The three events potentially carry equal weight. If all three converge in a constructive, realistic manner, the stage may well be set for movement towards a negotiated, permanent resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The odds of that happening are very slim right now. Yet the majority of Palestinians and Israelis appears to prefer a negotiated settlement rather than attempting military victory or wearing down the other side in a long war of attrition. So we have important signs — if not clarity — from Israel, the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world, that a peaceful resolution of the conflict is preferable and, more importantly, possible, under certain conditions.

The Israeli elections next week are the most important of the three events in terms of revealing whether this region will move towards a negotiated peace or remain deadlocked in low intensity conflict and diplomatic stalemate. The latter option of perpetuating the current status quo, with Israelis unilaterally withdrawing behind their security barrier, indirectly controlling and quietly strangling the Palestinians, is a sure recipe for worse things to happen in the future, as we have learned from similar situations in the past.

The Arab world, since its 2002 summit, has repeatedly offered to coexist with Israel within its 1967 borders, but has elicited no serious interest from Israel or major world powers. So the Arab League’s Khartoum summit is not likely to break new ground or clarify existing positions but only reaffirm the pan-Arab conditional acceptance of living in peace with Israel.

Hamas for its part reflects this same view but in much tougher terms: a sort of Arab summit peace plan with backbone. Hamas leaders have issued a range of statements about coexisting with Israel that are as ambiguous as the range of statements that Israeli governments have made in the past few years about their recognition of Palestinian political and territorial rights. The Hamas position is above all an affirmation that this is a conflict between two parties, and not a unilateral Palestinian war against Israelis or Jews.

Hamas’ election in large part affirms the sense that Israel cannot unilaterally define borders, rules of military engagement, or the nature of political and economic interaction, and neither can Israel and its Western friends demand that Palestinians unilaterally recognize Israeli rights before the Israelis in turn recognize parallel Palestinian rights. Hamas has always built its political credibility and success on being very close to the ground and responsive to its constituents’ sentiments. It now heads a government of Palestinian people of whom 75 percent clearly want a negotiated but fair peace with Israel.

This reality has slowly pushed Hamas, as it pushed Fateh before, to find a way to negotiate with Israel. Hamas, though, will demand a clearer Israeli response on meaningful Palestinian statehood, and a resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem than the ambiguous, disguised colonial control that Israel offered Fateh and Arafat in recent years. In other words, Hamas eventually will accept the 2002 Arab summit peace plan offer to negotiate and coexist with Israel, but only if Israel in turn accepts a full withdrawal to its 1967 borders and a fair resolution of the refugee issue. These are tough but not impossible terms, and of such rigorous stuff are historic reconciliations and peace treaties made.

The missing element remains a clear Israeli commitment to withdraw from all the occupied lands of 1967 and coexist in peace with a viable Palestinian state. The Israeli election Tuesday is important because it provides an opportunity for us to hear the views of the majority in Israel that has always been more reasonable and pragmatic than the national leadership.

The Israeli polls have shown two consistent trends in the past two months: the Kadima Party headed by Ehud Olmert (following Ariel Sharon’s lapse into a coma) has slowly and slightly declined in the eyes of the public, down from nearly 45 to around 37 in the 120-seat parliament. Still, Kadima remains the largest party and is projected to lead a coalition — with Labor at around 20 seats, and Likud around 15 seats.

If the election brings in a Kadima-led centrist coalition the stage could be set for a historic transformation of the Arab-Israeli conflict towards balanced negotiations rather than trends being defined by Israeli unilateral acts based on its own security and colonization priorities. How Israelis interpret their new “centrist” ideology will be critical for future trends of war or peace. If Kadima and its partners devise a new kind of defensive colonization and indirect brutalization of the Palestinians, they will only set the stage for more desperation and war.

If Kadima signals a willingness to make the tough decisions for peace — especially on full withdrawal and refugee rights — it will prompt the Hamas-led Palestinian government to move towards peace negotiations, in the context of a wider Arab willingness to make peace with Israel.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 24 March 2006
Word Count: 888
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AMMAN Jordan — Might conservative, top-heavy, security-minded Arab kingdoms provide a feasible model of how politically stressed, violence-prone Arab countries can institute the reforms needed to meet the challenges they face in all sectors? Perhaps — if they complete the job.

One of the oddities of the modern Arab world is that kingdoms have tended to enjoy more legitimacy and stability than most other “republican” countries. Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and a few others have had their ups and downs, but they have also displayed a noteworthy combination of continuity of rule and a recent tendency to accept the need to reform.

It remains unclear in most cases, though, whether such royally mandated reform initiatives are serious models that others can emulate, or are just cruel, tantalizing mirages in the desert, offering a compelling vision of something appealing to strive for but never actually reached, because, in fact, it is not real.

Two Arab kingdoms that are worth examining more closely in this respect are Morocco and Jordan. On several recent trips to these countries, almost every discussion I have had about current affairs quickly reverts back to the urgency of implementing deep political, economic and social reforms, if the citizens wish to ensure a secure, productive future. The monarchies in both lands are very similar: Young kings who took over from legendary long-ruling fathers and are reform darlings of the West, but who also spark sharply contested political debate in their own societies.

King Abdullah II of Jordan and King Mohammad VI of Morocco both inherited countries suffering political tensions and economic stress. These included legacies of pro-American foreign policies, security-dominated domestic governance systems, widening socio-economic disparities, home-grown Islamist opposition movements, and, as they would both discover, local terrorist cells that do not hesitate to attack fellow citizens.

They both quickly initiated reform programs that are driven and largely defined in their broad parameters from the top, but aiming for comprehensive reform of political, economic, social, administrative and educational systems. Both reform programs also are unevenly implemented, and controversial. They elicit fulsome praise from entrenched old guards that believe they can control and limit the actual devolution of power from the hands of the traditional elite; they also draw strong disdain from doubters who criticize the lack of any real change in the exercise of political power, including the two principal components: control of the budget and the security services.

The Moroccan king’s initiative has been nicely documented in a recent report by a study group from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (cis.org/mideast). It highlights noteworthy advances in political participation, freedom of speech, women’s rights, decentralization, and addressing past human rights abuses through the recently concluded hearings of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission. But it also notes real limitations in all fields, since effective power remains closely held by the king and his governing elite, and the palace alone sets the pace of change.

My own sense is that signs of real change are offset by other disturbing examples of the ugly ways of the past. A few weeks ago, for example, the government seems to have launched a campaign against the feisty opposition weekly magazine Le Journal Hebdomadaire. Credible evidence suggests that the Interior Ministry and local government authorities in Casablanca organized a demonstration against the publication, while state-run television editorially attacked the magazine and a court fined it a disproportionately large amount of money, aimed at crippling it financially.

The respected New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has asked the king to launch an investigation into why the Moroccan state apparently orchestrated this attack against an independent magazine. He would do well to order an honest probe, because the king himself will suffer politically if his government claims to champion reform while it also unleash its goons against independent journalists who peacefully disagree with the state’s policies. Reform and ruffianism simply do not mix, and cannot coexist in Morocco or any other Arab land.

Jordan is at a similar crossroad in its reform history. Upon the king’s directive, a year-long widely consultative and inclusive process was launched and drew up a very ambitious National Agenda for Reform for 2006-2015. It includes very serious, impressive, quantifiable and measurable reform targets in every sphere of life, from politics, justice and education to investment, finance, employment and infrastructure (www.nationalagenda.jo). It is the Arab reform equivalent of a powerful, pace-setting Mercedes 600 limousine — but it is not clear yet if the king and the government have their foot on the accelerator or the brakes in pursuing the changes outlined in the agenda.

Like Morocco, Jordan is serious about achieving economic and social modernity, but appears unsure about how to modernize politically on the basis of equal rights for all citizens. This is mainly due to long-standing concerns about strong local political sentiments that are pro-Palestinian, pro-Arab nationalist, anti-American, anti-Israeli and pro-Islamic. These real constraints cannot be swept under the rug, perpetually covered by appeals to security, tradition, or narrowly controlled power. Economic modernity without political modernity, alas, is antiquity and anti-modernity in the end — Rome and Carthage digitized.

Jordan and Morocco can be important examples of real Arab reforms that are locally defined and implemented. Yet they both seem unsure how to push political change alongside economic and administrative reforms. They should address this challenge more boldly because they still have the leadership legitimacy to do so, which is not the case in many other Arab countries.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 22 March 2006
Word Count: 942
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BEIRUT — This weekend marks the third anniversary of the war against Iraq that toppled the Baathist regime, and, not surprisingly, most key dimensions of that country’s future remain clouded. Will Iraq remain as a single country? Will it enjoy real sovereignty, or unofficially become a sort ofIslamic Puerto Rico, a new, long-distance American protectorate? Will Iraq enjoy security and stability soon under a legitimate national government? How will the violence in Iraq impact on other hot regional issues in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel-Palestine and Saudi Arabia?

Following Washington’s cue, there is a tendency these days to assess Iraq through three main lenses, none of which are the most important ones. At the same time, the three historically significant issues at hand are not widely discussed — and almost never raised in public in the United States and much of the Western world.

The first lens through which the world discusses Iraq is that of imminent American withdrawal. This is a non-story precisely because withdrawal isimminent, and now desirable for both Americans and Iraqis. As happened in Vietnam three decades ago, the United States will withdraw mainly due to its own domestic considerations, while real conditions or prospects on the ground in Iraq take second fiddle. After all, America started the war, not Iraq, and therefore America decides when the mission is accomplished, or hopelessly confounded, and thus when it’s time to leave.

The second lens is that of the capability and assertive deployment of the new Iraqi army and internal security forces. This has been designated by President George W. Bush as the litmus test and trigger of American military withdrawal. So, square-jawed, self-confident, able American colonels on the ground will sign off on the capabilities of the Iraqi armed forces, just as American generals did in South Vietnam. This is a done deal.

The third lens is the American-declared “global war on terror” — a fundamentally sound idea that has been fundamentally turned on its head by the impact of the American-ordained raid on Iraq. Terrorism continues to confound and plague much of the world, especially pro-American Arab allies in the Middle East, in large part because of the unintended consequences of the Iraq war. Iraq is now the world’s greatest motivator, training ground, and dispatching station for Ben Ladenist-type terrorists, and for the widespread anti-American grassroots political environment around the world in which such terrorism breeds so easily.

The Western media will speak much these days and weeks of improved counter-insurgency tactics in Iraq, increasingly managed by Iraq forces, signaling an improved security situation that opens the way for an American withdrawal and a stable, unified, democratic Iraq. I sincerely hope this is true. Yet, having grown up with the realities of foreign military adventures and occupations in Vietnam and Israel-Palestine-Lebanon, I think some skepticism is warranted.

When foreign armies are sent halfway around the world or next door to fight in an alien land, the occupied natives inevitably become hostile in response to the mere presence and conduct of the foreign troops that rule them. Iraq is only the most recent affirmation of this universal fact. The double resentments of Iraqis against the long brutality of Baathist rule and the more recent American-led experiment in designer democracy will take some time to dissipate, with unknown results when the dust settles.

Three other issues may prove to be more historic in Iraq in the medium and long run. The first is about the fragility of the modern Arab state. Iraq has revealed people’s allegiances to tribal, religious, ethnic and communal identities that are often much stronger and more durable than their sense of citizenship of the Iraqi state. This is not just an Iraqi problem: It is a common Arab problem that plagues most of this region, but it has been exposed most visibly in Iraq.

The second, related, important development has been the collective Arab inaction or impotence in the face of events in Iraq (or, worse yet, some direct Arab involvement in stoking the conflicts within Iraq). This adds to the already glum reality of thin, vulnerable, often low-legitimacy Arab states the further ignominy of collective weakness and ineptitude by the entire Arab polity. This is a cruel and unusual case of the Arabs simultaneously sinking alone and sinking together.

The third big issue that has been highlighted by the Iraq war is about the use of American troops around the world. This issue gains added important because the United States is likely to remain the world’s sole truly global power for some years to come, and it continues to say that military action is not ruled out as an option to achieve political goals, in Iran and other such lands. Most countries around the world still ask important questions about the legitimacy, appropriateness, efficacy and consequences of American military intervention, especially when such militarism is largely unilateral and not formally sanctioned by a UN Security Council mandate.

Iraq will clear up and settle down in a few years. These other three issues will not.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 17 March 2006
Word Count: 839
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