Iran has, for years, created controversy over its process of uranium enrichment, allegedly as an attempt to develop nuclear weapons. Over the past decade it has been a lightning rod of criticism, while being diplomatically, commercially and financially marginalized.  The dangers of the situation are clear.  If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it weakens an already fragile non-proliferation regime, threatens to spark a regional arms race, upsets delicate geopolitical relationships and endangers global security by facilitating international terrorism by proxy or by jihadi elements. The Canadian government broke off diplomatic ties with Iran in early September. One of the justifications for this move was Iran’s illicit nuclear weapons program.  So, it seems as if Canada has jumped into the Iran debate and taken a clear side.

Part of the problem with the development of nuclear weapons is that it reduces the effectiveness of the international Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. So, what exactly does the treaty do?  It broke substantial ground when it entered into force in 1970.  The five nuclear-weapons states of the era – coincidentally, the same five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – had three simple objectives in mind when they signed and ratified the treaty. Reducing and eliminating the spread of nuclear weapons, the eventual disarmament of countries that already had weapons, and the peaceful use of nuclear energy technology.  Since then 180 other countries have signed or acceded onto the NPT, including Iran.  Notable exceptions include India, Pakistan and Israel, all of which have never agreed to the treaty’s limitations and so developed their own nuclear arsenals. And North Korea, which abandoned the treaty in 2003 after contravening it by building its own nuclear weapons.

In the case of Iran, news of a clandestine nuclear program was leaked to the world in 2002 by an exiled dissident group based in Iraq, the Mujahedin e-Khalq. Interestingly, the same group that was delisted by the US State Department as a foreign terrorist organization in late September, a major political coup for the collective Iranian opposition.  Since 2002, the United States verified several such claims over the years. With satellite photography and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a body set up by the United Nations in part to fulfill the mandate of the NPT, it has conducted multiple investigations and filed several reports on Iran’s nuclear program.  After highly enriched weapons-grade uranium was discovered in 2003 and two years of European diplomatic efforts achieved little progress, the IAEA found Iran in noncompliance with its commitments under the NPT in 2005.  This was reported to the UN Security Council in 2006 and marked the beginning of international pressure on Iran as the UNSC passed the first of many resolutions and sanctions.

Under the pressure of four rounds of comprehensive UN sanctions and tougher US-European measures, the Iranian economy has begun to show signs of strain.  Oil exports are down to 800,000 barrels per day – a low not seen since the Iran-Iraq war ended – from a high of 2.3 million just one year ago. Revenues have sunk dramatically as a result.  Unemployment is estimated to be at 20% and inflation 25%.  While the Iranian currency (rial) has lost two-thirds of its value relative to the dollar in the past year, it lost 30% of its remaining value in the past week due to speculation and government mismanagement.  International sanctions have effectively frozen Iran out of global financial institutions and banking mechanisms, making it prohibitively expensive for the country to borrow from abroad to finance a growing debt, subsidize traditional industries, pay public sector wages or import goods.

The Iranian government claims that it has a legal right as a signatory to the NPT to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.  Because uranium enrichment is part of its civilian nuclear energy program, the country sees no problem developing nuclear power to meet the country’s growing energy demands and to supply it with reactors useful for research and medical isotopes.  Furthermore, Iran claims that it “has constantly complied with its obligations under the NPT and the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency”.  While these are reasonable claims, they do not stand up to serious scrutiny.

First of all, Iran has a long history of non-cooperation with the IAEA dating back at least 10 years and has been consistently criticized in reports developed by the organization.  Second, Iran has been found in contempt of four cumulative rounds of UNSC resolutions explicitly demanding a halt in uranium enrichment activities.  As a result, it has been targeted with the most punitive sanctions by the international community.  Third, the Iranian government supports Islamic terrorist organizations and repressive regimes while espousing a fundamentalist interpretation of Shiite Islam, qualities that would be strengthened by the possession of a nuclear bomb in their weaponry.  Finally, Iran has made its intention to eliminate Israel no secret, a task which would be greatly facilitated by the destructive potential offered by nuclear weapons.

The consequences of an empowered and emboldened nuclear Iran are serious.  Because of the risks and dangers posed by nuclear weapons technology, it is up to the Iranian government to convince the rest of the world of its benign intentions.  The fact that Iran continues to lob rhetorical grenades at its political enemies, especially to excoriate American imperialism and demonize Israeli existence, does not create any goodwill in its direction among those countries that can positively contribute to Iran’s success and rehabilitation in the international community.  On this note, war remains a very real possibility in the region, and this is in large part because of Iran’s refusal to desist from continuing with its nuclear program.  Its flagrant disregard for the IAEA and international law also undermines the long-term effectiveness of the NPT by weakening the collective ethos of non-proliferation that it represents.  The Iranian government is testing the limits of the NPT by behaving defiantly.  Whether and in what form the NPT survives the Iranian challenge will depend largely on how the international community reacts.

What has become of the Arab-Israeli peace process? Recent years have seen little to no progress, though several opportunities have presented themselves.  The Annapolis Summit in 2007 formally established the two-state solution, to which both Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave their informed consent.  Since then, Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09 – a disastrous Israeli assault on Hamas forces in Gaza – abruptly ended ongoing negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis on one track and between Syria and Israel on another.  Then came the by-now infamous flotilla incident of 2010, which further derailed any efforts to find a lasting peace.  And in 2011, the biggest leak of confidential documents detailing Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking attempts and failures, collusion and cooptation, was exposed by Al Jazeera as the Palestine Papers.  Keeping this brief chronology of a failed peace process in mind, a lasting political settlement – whether between Arabs and Israelis or Palestinians and Israelis – is plainly and simply impossible at this point in time.  Here are four simple reasons why.

Lack of US leadership

President Barack Obama is running for re-election in less than two months, and has effectively been doing so for the better part of the past two years.  There is no substitute for the invaluable role that the United States has to play in facilitating peace talks between Arab and Israeli governments.  US President Jimmy Carter hosted Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin for weeks at a time at his presidential retreat in Camp David, working tirelessly with these two leaders and their entourages to hone the final text of an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1978-79.  It was less onerous for US President Bill Clinton to convince King Hussein of Jordan and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel to hammer out a peace treaty of their own in 1994, but this was only possible after the Palestinians and Israelis formally recognized each other’s authority as negotiating partners in 1993.  Egypt and Jordan are the only two Arab countries at peace with Israel, even if it is a cold peace that faces significant opposition within both countries, especially in a post-revolutionary Egypt governed by the conservative Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.  Nevertheless, in both cases, the United States was the only credible interlocutor.  This remains the case today.

Palestinian disunity

It is no secret that Palestinian society is divided, polarized as never before between two camps – among other fringe elements.  This cleavage pits the Palestinian Authority (PA) as the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people against Hamas, an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood created in the wake of the First Intifada in 1987.  Territorially, the PA governs the West Bank while Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip since 2007 after a near-civil war.  In terms of ideology, Fatah, the biggest group within the PA, is a secular nationalist organization that has been engaged in dialogue with Israel for 20 years; Hamas is an Islamist fundamentalist group opposed to compromise and dedicated to destroying the state of Israel.  Strategically speaking, Fatah and the PA are friendly to the US and welcomed warmly in world capitals from Paris and Moscow to Ankara and Riyadh.  Hamas, on the other hand, has found allies in Iran, Syria (not since President Assad’s brutal crackdown began in 2011), Hezbollah in Lebanon and Egypt (since the Muslim Brotherhood ascended to power in 2012).  The fact that these two factions are so far apart on substantive issues of policy, and that recent attempts at reconciliation have all failed to bridge these divides, spells disaster for a united Palestinian front in the ongoing peace process with Israel.

Israeli coalition politics

Israel is a pluralist society with a diverse range of actors and organized interests mobilized within political parties.  The election of 2009 delivered a Likud-led coalition government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and allied with nationalist parties like Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beiteinu and Haredi parties like Interior Minister Eli Yishai’s Shas.  Likud, Beiteinu and Shas are united in their centre-right vision of constructing and expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank, protecting a sovereign Israel through the use of overwhelming military force and adopting a hardline negotiating position with the Palestinians.  What this means for Netanyahu’s coalition is that the conditions of any final peace deal could be vetoed by any of his junior coalition partners if they refused to accept it.  But that’s not all.  In the process of scrapping the accord, they could pull their support from the Likud Party and join what would then become a majority opposition and force early elections, potentially depriving Netanyahu of his premiership and his party of predominance in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament).  For this reason, the current Israeli government would be in the awkward position of choosing between peace with the Palestinians or electoral survival in Israel’s domestic political scene in the event that an agreement were ever presented to him for ratification.

Arab rejectionism

This point is so critical to the inability of Palestinians and Israelis to resolve their differences that it is remarkable how little attention it is given in international forums.  The Arab countries of the Middle East have been locked in a struggle with Israel since the days of the British Mandate in Palestine, decades before Israel was even established as a sovereign state.  After the seminal war of 1967, the Arab League gathered in Khartoum and famously issued three no’s: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, negotiations with it.”  This changed only when Egypt’s Sadat boldly flew to Jerusalem in 1977, addressed the Knesset candidly and admitted that he was ready for peace, recognition and negotiation.  However, Arab society from Morocco to Iraq to Yemen remains intransigently opposed to Jewish settlement in Israel, with anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist propaganda and hate speech commonly found in public discourse.  The Arab states were not bystanders in the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their ancestral homelands; they were active participants.  This is not to say that Israel must not share its portion of the burden, but until governments and societies in the Arab world begin to assume responsibility for their policies and behaviours, there will be no solution for Palestine’s woes.

In the midst of the repressive Syrian regime’s all-out war against rebels and revolutionaries, the strategic Arab state of Lebanon has struggled to maintain its sovereignty and avoid entanglement in neighbouring Syria’s internal crises.  Lebanon has constantly lived in the shadow of Syria’s influence, literally carved out of Greater Syria by the French imperial authorities under a League of Nations Mandate after the First World War.

Nominally independent since the early 1940s, foreign interference has never been far from the surface of internal Lebanese politics.  In the civil war of 1975-1990, rival states fought proxy wars in Lebanon by ruthlessly backing and betraying antagonistic political, economic and sectarian forces within the country.  Two contiguous states, Israel and Syria, intervened with the warring parties and even invaded different areas during this time, occupying significant parts of Lebanon for decades.  While Israel withdrew in 2000 under different conditions from Syria in 2006, the scars of their invasions and occupations have left Lebanon in a perpetually weakened state of sovereignty and independence.

One major impediment to Lebanese national reconciliation and the rebuilding of non-sectarian state institutions is the continued existence of Hezbollah within Lebanon’s borders.  The Taif Agreement of 1989, which signalled the beginning of the end of the civil war, envisioned the dismantling of all militia movements.  Even after all other militant groups were dissolved in 1991, Hezbollah refused to disarm.

Ever since, Hezbollah has rivalled the Lebanese Armed Forces as a ‘state-within-a-state’ with de facto autonomy in the southern regions populated by Shiite Arabs, and has pursued its own interests at the expense of Lebanon’s.  For instance, Lebanon’s only recent international conflict took place in July and August 2006 when Hezbollah fought Israel to a bloody standstill over 34 days in which thousands of Lebanese civilians were killed or injured and Lebanese infrastructure suffered billions of dollars in war-related damage.  Any strategic or symbolic victory won by Hezbollah in this conflict cost the state of Lebanon severely.

Every now and then, news reports filter through of isolated incidents of cross-border violence between the armed forces of Lebanon and Israel; after all, these two countries have technically been in a state of war since 1948.  The most serious confrontation since 2006 occurred in a massive military exchange of gunfire on the border in August 2010, resulting in the deaths of an Israeli colonel, three Lebanese soldiers and a Lebanese journalist.

While the risk of war is omnipresent on the Lebanese-Israeli border, United Nations peacekeepers patrol the area and effectively provide the two states with a buffer zone.  The onset of the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war was precipitated by violations of that buffer zone and the coordinated attack and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah on the border with Israel.  As long as similar provocations do not undermine the mutual deterrence between the states of Lebanon and Israel, a tentative yet non-militaristic coexistence is likely to continue to characterize their relationship.

Today, however, the most serious threats to Lebanese security and stability arise from the spillover effects of the Syrian uprising next door.  The Syrian military has recently escalated its strikes against rebel factions seeking refuge in northern Lebanon, reportedly killing five and wounding 10 more in the villages of Wadi Khaled and al-Mahatta as of July 7, 2012.  The northern city of Tripoli is the site of pro-Syrian regime Shiites openly battling pro-Syrian rebel Sunnis in the streets, with over 30 Lebanese citizens killed in these sectarian conflicts since the uprising in Syria began over a year ago in March 2011.

Just two months ago in May 2012, the kidnapping of Shiite Lebanese pilgrims in the Syrian city of Aleppo by sympathizers of the opposition Free Syrian Army – apparently in retaliation for their fellow Shiites’ support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – nearly led to internecine warfare in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley until Hezbollah-leader Hassan Nasrallah appealed for peaceful protests.  And a mere two weeks ago in late-June 2012, a leading Lebanese television station (al-Jadeed) was attacked after an interview with a Sunni cleric aired which criticized the country’s Shiite leaders for their policies towards Syria.

Lebanon is not the only state bordering Syria which has felt the effects of its civil war. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has brazenly called for the Syrian president to step down after lambasting the regime’s conduct during this rebellion towards its own people.  Syria’s recent downing of a Turkish fighter jet and the non-stop influx of Syrian refugees into neighbouring countries (more than 100,000 in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq) signal the increasing volatility of Syria’s internal crisis and its nearing a breaking point in which international intervention may finally be warranted to stop the bloodshed and replace the Assad regime.  Aside from refugee inflows, Jordan and Iraq have both felt the consequences of the Syrian government’s crackdown on its people as money and weapons are smuggled in and out by Syrian government supporters and detractors in a push by both sides to defeat the other in combat.

So how does Lebanon fit into the Middle East’s security dilemmas?  Revolutionary movements in the Arab World have so far led to democratically elected governments – albeit with minimal executive and questionable legislative power and authority – in Tunisia and Egypt, with Libya joining the list of post-Arab Spring elected governments in July 2012.  Following a transitional regime change in Yemen, paltry reforms in Jordan and Morocco, the bribing of loyal populations in the Gulf Arab states, the squashing of a popular revolution in Bahrain, and an ongoing civil war in Syria, Lebanon at least boasts a functioning government that grants its citizens basic civil rights and political freedoms.

Lebanese democracy however is neither secure nor sacred, with notable exceptions to its political cohesion, rights, and freedoms apparent when those rights and freedoms contradict Hezbollah’s party line or Lebanese governmental policy towards sectarian affairs, religious matters or its powerful neighbours.  In the meanwhile the Arab Spring – an anti-regime revolutionary movement demanding political reform – has largely bypassed Lebanon. This will surely be a discouraging sign for pro-democracy activists and human rights advocates engaged in the country.

The latest round of nuclear talks between Iran and the West has once again failed to deliver concrete results, resolutions (of even the most minimally binding nature) or serious agreement of any kind; besides of course, agreeing to reschedule previously scheduled meetings for a future-but-as-of-yet-undefined date in time.  The West in this case refers to the P5+1, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States) plus Germany (or the EU3+3, named after another Iranian negotiating bloc in the mid-2000s).

This patently predictable turn of events, this lack of progress on a potentially globally destabilizing hot-button political issue, has not surprised a single analyst or political expert on Iranian nuclear affairs.  Western-Iranian nuclear negotiations have become almost as endlessly protracted and hopelessly intractable as Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations; to paraphrase the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, these nuclear negotiations have become the only continuation of politics by other means.

A decade without progress

Timelines are wonderful organizing tools for demonstrating any political issue’s historical significance and why it matters today.  Though Iran’s nuclear program ostensibly has its roots in the 1950s with the Shah of Iran and the United States’ Cold War-inspired Atoms for Peace program, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear program lay largely passive and uncontroversial until the early 2000s.  In August 2002, an Iranian dissident group publicized information that Iran was secretly constructing two nuclear facilities, an underground uranium enrichment facility in Natanz and a heavy water facility in Arak. Since then the International Atomic Energy Agency has released several critical reports on Iran’s nuclear work and Western powers have begun to heed these developments more closely.  As knowledge of subsequent clandestine facilities has emerged, Iran’s combative stance towards the West in general and many of its neighbours in the region in particular (Israel and Saudi Arabia, along with the Gulf States) has pushed the West towards confrontation with Iran over these nuclear and geopolitical issues.

As of 2007, the United Nations Security Council has imposed a series of sanctions on Iran demanding that it cease its uranium enrichment activities, targeting Iran’s leadership personnel, its banking and financial industries, its military-industrial complex, and most importantly, its energy export and shipping capabilities.  These sanctions have recently begun to bite as Iran acknowledges that its oil exports have fallen by 20-30%, from 2.2 million to 1.54-1.76 million barrels of oil per day.  After little progress in 2011 on the Western-Iranian nuclear negotiating front, the first half of 2012 has already seen two damning International Atomic Energy Agency reports in February and May, both of which accuse Iran of essentially failing to provide nuclear inspectors with the access and cooperation needed to conclude on its nuclear program’s non-military, civilian dimensions.

A false hope?

The latest flurry of diplomatic activity between the P5+1 and Iran has also seen no breakthroughs, first in Istanbul in April, then in Baghdad in May and most recently in Moscow in June.  The positive attitudes and constructive dialogues that supposedly permeated these meetings resulted in no movement whatsoever on the Iranian delegation’s part towards complying with Western demands that it freeze uranium enrichment and open its nuclear program for inspections.  Due to this embarrassing lack of progress, these nuclear talks have been effectively shelved until further notice, pending Western talks in Istanbul on July 4.  One can only wonder what these countries will disagree to agree on next – or how long it will take them to even do that.

While some actors have aided and abetted Iran’s intransigent negotiating position (Russia is a close strategic partner while China is a primary energy-importer), much of the international community has been mobilized in line with the mainstream position and against Iran’s recalcitrant defiance of the West.  Impatience with Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program has even led many countries to push for more action more quickly.  A war of words between Iran and Israel has seen top-level Israeli politicians, intellectuals and military brass openly debate the costs and benefits of a preventive strike on Iran aimed at destroying its nuclear capabilities.  The Saudis have long been wary of a nuclear-armed Iran, as their foreign minister is quoted as saying that negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program are a “waste of time” and should concentrate instead on time-limited talks.  Iran’s historical conflicts with Iraq, its territorial disputes with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, its involvement in the ongoing Syrian civil war as well as its support for the anti-Israel militant groups Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza have all placed Iran in a dangerously precarious, extremely sensitive geopolitical situation.

A complex and tangled web

Ultimately, the fate of these long-stalled nuclear talks rests on Iran’s side of the bargaining table.  As Iran calls for a loosening of the crippling sanctions that have been imposed on it by the United Nations and several key countries before it accedes to any of the West’s demands, negotiations have all but ground to a halt, crawling forward ever-so-agonizingly-slowly.  Meanwhile, outside factors prevent a simple resolution to this ongoing political stalemate.  The presidential election season in the United States has clearly increased the domestic political incentive for American presidential candidates to ‘talk tough’ on Iran while a bolstered governing coalition in Israel amplifies the pressure on Iran to take the threat of a preventive strike seriously.  At the same time, the Arab Spring’s political fallout in the Middle East continues to send ripple waves through the established regional order, with Syria being the latest staging ground for proxy wars between Iran and its detractors over the past 15 months.  All of these potential conflict points could tip the scales of war towards their breaking points, which means that Iran-watchers better strap in their seatbelts and brace themselves for a non-stop, always bumpy ride.

Recent elections supervised by the military-dominated government have failed to deliver fundamental democratic reforms to Egypt’s political system.  The long-awaited parliamentary elections of November 2011 to January 2012 disproportionately favoured Islamist political parties at the expense of the liberal and secularist forces that packed Tahrir Square, the birthplace of the Egyptian revolution, in the early months of 2011.  Although repressed for decades under Egypt’s draconian security services, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists were unofficially tolerated because they provided social services to millions of citizens that the government was either incapable of doing or unwilling to do on its own.  As a natural albeit unintended consequence, political Islamists like the conservative Muslim Brotherhood and the hardline al-Noor Party were much better organized, mobilized and recognized at the ballot box than their opponents, be they political secularists, nationalists, leftists, liberalists, and virtually all others.

Though many may disagree with the results of these seemingly skewed elections, the fact is that they were the freest and fairest in modern Egypt’s history.  If the price to pay for a more democratic Egypt in the long run is an Islamist-dominated Legislative Assembly in the short run, then surely this is worth it?  The successful experiences of comparable parliaments in the Middle East with Islamist-party majorities would seem to support this fact: the governments of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (in power since 2002), Tunisia’s al-Ennahda Party and Morocco’s Justice and Development Party (both in power since 2011) have all managed to reconcile Islamist political stewardship with democratic transitions of power.  While many may disagree with the priorities and proposed policies of Islamist politicians, democracy means trying them out until voters decide to change their minds with the next election.

But even this point is moot since on June 14-15, 2012, on the eve of a long and tumultuous race for the presidency in Egypt and in light of parliament’s failure to convene a representative panel and to draft a national constitution, SCAF unexpectedly dissolved the Islamist-dominated parliament.  This is even more outrageous because after more than a year of gradually repealing Mubarak-era emergency-state laws which restricted political freedoms and civil liberties, SCAF simultaneously imposed a de facto state of martial law, granting the police and security services sweeping powers of arrest and detention – the same powers that had finally just been removed a month earlier!  And this is all taking place as Mubarak himself has been sentenced by the Supreme Court of Egypt to life in prison while his health continues to deteriorate and rumours of his health problems and untimely demise propagate unchecked.

As the sole arbiters of force in the country and the only credible mediators between rival political forces vying for Egypt’s destiny, the military deserves credit for at least maintaining stability and control where tens of millions of people are concerned, a chaotic situation threatens to engulf the region where the risk of governmental authority collapsing without them is all-too high.  Egypt’s socioeconomic situation is far from stable: poverty, unemployment, crime, hunger and corruption all remain rampant, and after over a year, the youth who instigated the revolution have virtually nothing to show for it.  While the military is far from the perfect facilitator of desperately needed democratic reform, it is a far cry better than an Egypt with no Mubarak as well as no law-enforcing, order-imposing military establishment.

So what is the significance of political developments in Egypt for the Middle East and for the rest of the world?  First of all, as the symbolic heart of the Arab World, Egypt’s revolutionary turmoil can spillover into neighbouring countries’ internal affairs and influence developments far beyond its own borders.  Secondly, Egypt’s massive population (85 million) and demographic issues (a youth bulge, urban sprawl and slum dwellings) have the potential – depending on how quickly a government is formed and which policies it chooses to prioritize – to either help or hinder human development in the Arab World.  Third, Egypt has been a critical lynchpin in the region’s Pax Americana since the 1970s, serving as an American ally in the wars against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1990s and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism in the 2000s and since 9/11.  Finally, Egypt is key to the broader Middle East peace process, having signed a decades-old peace treaty with Israel (though its long-term survival has been called into question by leading presidential contenders in Egypt) and having mediating several Palestinian-Israeli, even intra-Palestinian, rounds of peace, disarmament and prisoner-of-war negotiations.

Even as Mohammad Mursi wins the first democratic presidential elections, the Muslim Brotherhood’s charismatic moderate has little leeway to influence events as they unfold in Egypt since no functional constitution yet outlines his powers or the relationship his office has with other governmental bodies.  Arab revolutionaries can at least find solace in the fact that an Islamist president at the helm of the Arab World’s most populous country was patently unthinkable just one year ago.  Having recently arrogated legislative prerogatives and constitution-drafting powers unto themselves, Egypt’s SCAF will continue to call the shots for the foreseeable future and pull the president’s strings, either from behind the scenes or out in the open.  For now, there is no difference.  The government is in the hands of the military, and so the country’s institutions will likewise continue to dance to the tune of their drums.

Like many social phenomena, war is a tricky thing to predict.  The final decision to launch an assault on any enemy is ultimately made by an individual or small group of elite individuals with the power to do so.  This unpredictable human factor means that no mathematical equation will ever be able to model when or where war breaks out in the real world.  Having said that, telltale signs that tensions are rising or militaries are mobilizing typically emerge in the weeks and months prior to combat.  Before the June 1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, for instance, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser signaled his intent to go to war by expelling the United Nations Emergency Force that had been stationed in the Sinai Desert since 1956 as a buffer between hostile Egyptian and Israeli forces.  Similarly, the United States gave the Iraqis plenty of warning and ample opportunity after invading and occupying Kuwait in 1990 to vacate the Gulf Arab country before the Americans forcefully evicted them in 1991 with Operation Desert Storm.  In the modern Middle East, four major trends are contributing to an increased risk of war.

One of the longest festering wounds in the region is the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, with the lack of progress on 20-year old peace talks only worsening the situation.  Negotiations have been on hold since late 2010, when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu in Washington with high hopes, together with US President Barack Obama, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordanian King Abdullah II.  Shortly after those talks floundered, the Palestinians embarked on a unilateral drive for statehood in the United Nations, failing to rally either Israel or the United States to its cause – which are the only two countries whose collaboration is indispensable to the creation of a Palestinian state – and bankrupting the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the process.  As of late in January 2012, low-level Palestinian and Israeli representatives hosted by the Jordanian King in Amman have failed to reach any consensus on how to resume actual negotiations.  For additional reasons discussed below and barring any unforeseen developments, deadlock is likely to characterize Palestinian-Israeli peace talks in the near future.  Since this conflict has always been cited by terrorist groups like Palestinian Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah and al-Qaeda as rationales for their attacks, no progress means more conflict.

The second major indicator of instability is electoral fever.  In the United States, Palestine and Israel, 2012 is shaping up to be a year of contested elections and leadership changes.  The American presidential election is scheduled for November 6, although the primary process to nominate a Republican Party candidate to face off against President Obama will undoubtedly dominate US news coverage and media attention for the rest of the year.  The Palestinian situation is extremely fluid and complex: on top of the May 4 presidential and parliamentary elections for the Palestinian Authority pending successful reconciliatory efforts between the rival Fatah and Hamas national movements, the leaders of both groups – President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of Fatah along with the exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal – are apparently stepping down and leaving ideological vacuums in their wake.  Israeli elections are now slated for late 2013, but the ruling Likud Party’s decision to hold their own primaries more than a year ahead of schedule in late January 2012 signals Prime Minister Netanyahu’s shrewd decision to bolster his own support before calling national elections later in the year and reorganizing the makeup of his own parliamentary coalition.  This preoccupation with domestic political machinations not only distracts these countries from their efforts to make peace but also emboldens extremists to hijack the agenda by acting opportunistically and counterproductively during times of stressful political transitions.

A third trend compounding the first two is the revolutionary dynamism toppling the old guard in North African and Middle Eastern states, the substitution of these dynastic dictatorships with Islamist political parties and the risks of civil, ethnic and international war that these processes invariably bring with them – in other words, the so-called Arab Spring turned Winter turned Spring again.  Already three Arab despots have been deposed by their people in North Africa, with the rulers of Syria and Yemen facing the same fate.  Tribal warfare was necessary in Libya, Syria and Yemen, but international war could just as easily result if border countries become involved – Egypt and Syria border Israel, for example, and could easily scapegoat Israel for their own failings as corrupt, authoritarian governments.  The governing coalitions emerging from recent elections in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco also portend the rise of Islamic influence in democratizing countries, where previously secular autocrats banned all official Islamist organizations from openly engaging in party politics.  Revolutionary upheavals and the spread of Islamism spell instability and raise the odds of conflict in the region.

Fourthly and finally, Iranian intransigence in the Middle East continues to ratchet up tensions between itself and the United States, its Gulf Arab neighbours and Israel.  Iran’s nuclear program has garnered much of the attention in this regard, and as a new round of nuclear talks coalesce in Turkey, this will remain the focus of major concern for the US and many European countries.  As the US applies more unilateral sanctions on the Iranian economy and the Europeans initiate steps to boycott their oil exports, Iran has responded by threatening to blockade the most vital oil shipping lane in the world, the Strait of Hormuz.  Doubtful as this prospect may seem, the effect of this insecurity on oil prices has already had an effect.  In addition, Iran still exerts enormous influence over Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian politics thanks to its support for terrorist proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad while simultaneously leading the rejectionist front against any Arab-Israeli peace and inciting anti-regime activities in Shiite pockets throughout the Middle East.  All of this mischievous activity no doubt contributes to rising tensions, growing instability and increased risks of a Middle Eastern war.

Of all the intergovernmental regional groupings, the Arab League is most likely the least effective.  Since the organization was founded in 1945, the League of Arab States has skillfully steered clear of taking any decisive action on virtually every international conflict in the region.  Except for the Arab-Israeli conflict, on which popular opinion in every member-state remains extremely pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli for obvious reasons, the Arab League has sought to avoid any divisive action within the Arab community.  The League even managed to sit out the ‘Arab Cold War’ of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, an international struggle between nationalist republics and Islamist monarchies in the region that paralleled to some degree the bipolar Cold War between the world’s two superpowers.  In this sense, the Arab League’s institutional weakness was its strength: irrelevance ensured survival.

Fast forward nearly 70 years to the ongoing Arab revolutions reshaping the modern Middle East.  It is ironic that in spite of being composed almost exclusively of autocratic and dictatorial regimes, the Arab League has taken bold and courageous steps in support of mass protests and popular uprisings against unpopular leaders and their governments in the Arab World.  Even more, the Arab League may finally be playing a positive role after decades of irrelevance.  In fact, one key sign that the League is acting in the collective interest of the public rather than in the much narrower self-interest of its member-states’ ruling elites is when the state threatened by internal upheaval lashes out at the Arab League, usually for criticizing the troubled state in the first place.

In Libya Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi described the no-fly zone eventually passed by the Arab League in March 2011 as a ‘colonialist plot’ by the West – in concert with the League, of course – to steal Libya’s oil.  His son and once heir-apparent Seif al-Islam strangely dismissed both ‘Arabs’ and the Arab League, mentioning that Libya would rather rely on African and Asian migrant workers than fellow Arabs.  The League had suspended Libya’s membership earlier in February, laying the groundwork for a more robust United Nations (UN) involvement in the pariah state’s increasingly bloody crackdown and authorization of NATO intervention in the eventual ouster of Qaddafi.  Arab League action in Libya was arguably made easier by its geographical location, sandwiched between two post-revolutionary states, Tunisia and Egypt, and relatively isolated from the rest of the Arab World in the sweeping deserts of North Africa.

The situation in Syria has garnered the most headlines in recent months for President Bashar al-Assad’s handling of an even more deadly and destabilizing civil revolt now approaching a year in duration.  Here the Arab League has waffled considerably more than in Libya, which is understandable given Syria’s traditional role as the lynchpin in an intricate web of Middle Eastern alliances and a frontline state in the never-ending war against Israel.  After a UN Security Council resolution condemning Syria was vetoed by Russia and China in October 2011, the Arab League in November suspended Syria’s membership and imposed sanctions on the regime, but stopped short of calling for foreign intervention.  All along, Assad had accused the League of promoting an international (Western-led, lest we forget) conspiracy against his regime, repeating that the Arab states were mere stooges and that the League was just a platform in this foreign-led, foreign-funded effort to undermine Syrian sovereignty and diminish Arab pride.

In late December, after months of diplomatic wrangling, Syria agreed to allow League monitors into the country to monitor its implementation of an Arab League peace plan to resolve the crisis, an ambitious move for the regional organization that ultimately failed and unfortunately served only to prolong the bloodshed.  The monitoring effort and peace plan fell apart in late January 2012 after several Arab Gulf states pulled out of the mission and recalled their ambassadors from Damascus.  A second UN Security Council resolution critical of Assad, this one explicitly backed by the Arab League, was also vetoed by the Russian and Chinese delegations in early February.  Meanwhile, Assad continued to lambast the League by dismissing its oil-rich Arab Gulf members as countries lacking culture, scoffing that they could “rent and import some history with their money, but money does not make nations and cultures.”  The Arab League has recently called for a joint Arab-UN peacekeeping mission, but few are predicting its success.

More recently, the Syrian civil war has accelerated in scope and severity.  The Arab League and many of its member-states attended the Friends of Syria conference in Tunisia last February, along with representatives from dozens of Western and otherwise interested countries, in an attempt to boost the Syrian National Council’s status and effectiveness as the officially recognized opposition.  Amid Western fears of al-Qaeda infiltration into the Syrian rebel movement, the rebellion’s own inability to crystallize behind a solid front and the risks inherent in arming an unidentified group of anti-regime dissidents, no major breakthroughs occurred at the first Friends of Syria conference.  The Saudi representative made an especially public spectacle of walking out in disgust at its inaction while at the same time calling for arming the Syrian opposition.  As the second such conference approaches this March in Turkey and the man-made humanitarian disasters in Syria become more widely known to the world, one can only hope for progress in terms of uniting the opposition and ending Bashar al-Assad’s iron grip on power.

The Arab states of the Gulf have their own regional grouping, a more exclusive club known as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).  Composed of oil-rich sheikhdoms (except for Yemen), this organization has a mixed record as a positive player in the region and has acted more in the collective interest of regional stability and Sunni Arab dominance.  For example, the GCC mediated the transfer of power in Yemen to promote stability in the Gulf from 2011–2012 as President Ali Abdullah Saleh faced overwhelming opposition in the streets, insurgencies in the North, secession in the South, and several other threats to the state’s unity.  On the other hand, several Gulf Arab states effectively invaded Shiite-majority Bahrain in March 2011 in a blatantly anti-democratic operation to clamp down on widespread protests and ensure the survival of the fellow Sunni al-Khalifa monarchy.

Though the GCC clearly has a mixed record on its own turf, its key member-states (mainly Saudi Arabia and Qatar) are today the leading forces in the Arab League for orderly resolutions of Arab revolutions.  Tunisia and Egypt transitioned to post-dictatorial regimes with little to no external influence.  Libya and Yemen, however, necessitated prolonged intervention by the Arab League (and GCC, respectively).  As populist movements in the Middle East topple authoritarian governments like dominoes, and the Syrian crisis drags on despite Arab League efforts, this regional organization’s next challenge is imminent.  Whether the Arab League continues its proactive policies or reverts to the irrelevance of the past remains to be seen.

“There are so many great connections between Canada and Israel,” said Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird. Canada’s Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty chimed in, “I think that for many years Israel felt there was no one in its court, but as Minister Baird said, it’s not that Canada is behind Israel, it’s that Canada stands shoulder to shoulder with Israel.” Both Cabinet ministers recently visited Israel at the beginning of February in a high-profile visit, meeting with their Israeli and Palestinian counterparts while reaffirming Canada’s support for the Jewish state.

This most recent tour of Israel by Baird and Flaherty follows several top-level ministerial visits between Canada and Israel, which have become increasingly commonplace in the past few years. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made no secret of his Conservative Party’s favourable opinions of Israel since assuming office in 2006, a position that has remained constant through federal elections in 2006, 2008 and 2011. After finally winning the coveted parliamentary majority in 2011, Harper has the mandate to continue to express his Conservative Party’s pro-Israeli positions through Canadian foreign policies.

Many questions follow from this fact, but one sticks out in particular. What accounts for the principled Conservative stand on the security of Israel and other Jewish issues in recent years? There is always the theory that foreign policy choices reflect domestic political considerations, meaning that Tory attempts to garner support from the Jewish community during election season would manifest itself in support for Israel during that time. The problem with applying this theory here is that Jews are only 1% of the population in Canada and represent significant voting populations in a mere handful of ridings.

Still, Jewish voters have certainly taken note of the Harper Administration’s uncompromising backing of Israel. How do we know this? Even though no polling data exists for how racial or religious groups cast their votes, we can still compare the results from one election to the next in ridings where Jewish voters represent a substantial chunk of the electorate. Based on the relative changes in popular support for the federal political parties in these ridings, we can infer changes in Jewish voting preferences over time.

In the federal ridings of Thornhill (where the Jewish vote stands at approximately 37%), York Centre (24%), Eglinton-Lawrence (19%) and Vaughan (17%), the Conservative Party managed to either re-elect their incumbent or oust their competitors and send their own Member of Parliament (MP) to Ottawa in 2011. In addition, the electoral results tell us that support for the Liberal Party in at least three of these Ontario ridings has been slipping considerably in these past elections. So even though ‘courting the Jewish vote’ makes little sense in Canada, Jewish voters are nevertheless switching party loyalties.

Then again, there is little evidence to suggest that a monolithic ‘Jewish vote’ really exists. Steven F. Windmueller, Rabbi Alfred Gottschalk Emeritus Professor at the Hebrew Union College’s Jewish Institute of Religion, has written extensively on Jewish politics in the United States and identified at least five such voting blocs in the Jewish American community: Southern and Mid-Western Jews, Immigrant Jews, Traditional Religious Jews, “Red-Diaper Baby” (Socialist or Left-Leaning) Jews, and the Urban Elite Jews. While Canada may lack an analogous Southern and Mid-Western Jewish community residing in the Western provinces, the other four categories do resonate in some way with the Canadian experience.

So if the Harper Conservatives are not just pandering to domestic Jewish constituencies, what explains the recent pro-Israel shift in Canadian foreign policy? There are a few potential reasons. The argument for human rights and a moral foreign policy is dubious because Palestinians have human rights as well – with Arab and Muslim voters far outnumbering Jewish ones – while the Canadian trade relationship with China has always outweighed any serious concern on Harper’s behalf for human rights there.

Then there is the idea that Stephen Harper’s personal convictions demand that he back the Jewish state, but could a prime minister really convince the Cabinet, his own party and his fellow parliamentarians (especially in a minority government) to indulge his personal preferences if they were simply irrational? Of course not. Much more likely is the fact that social conservatives and Evangelical Protestants are likelier to vote in blocs and to support Israel, but for radically different reasons than Jewish Canadians.

For socially conservative Evangelical voters, biblical prophecy – as interpreted by their religious leaders – suggests that the Jewish people’s return to the land of Israel will trigger the End of Days and signal the onset of the Messianic era. Never mind that when the Messiah arrives, neither the Jews nor any other non-Evangelicals will have any part in the majestic bounty of the heavenly kingdom to come. The point for this much more numerous (3.5 million versus the Jewish 350,000) and thus much more significant voting bloc is that political support for Israel is a religious duty and a theological imperative.

Still, other reasons may very well exist for why the Canadian government has evolved into such a staunch supporter of Israel under Prime Minister Harper’s watch. In the meantime, Jewish support for the Conservative Party remains far from unanimous. Keeping in mind the fact that Jewish voters have conflicting values and priorities and so cannot be lumped together into some kind of grand voting bloc, however, the issue of Israel evidently galvanizes them like no other. Perhaps Canadians will have to wait until the next round of federal elections in 2015 to see whether the Conservatives can hold on to their newfound Jewish support or whether the Liberal and New Democratic Parties have anything to offer the Jewish communities across Canada on a wide range of issues not necessarily related to Israel.

What is the difference between a government’s domestic and foreign policies?  From a public policy point of view, the foreign ministry is just another department in the bureaucracy of government.  In this sense, foreign policy is comparable to housing policy, environmental policy, transportation policy, and so on, all of which are traditionally thought of as domestic policies.  From an international relations perspective, on the other hand, foreign policy is a murky realm in which countries interact with one another and issues of sovereignty, legality and morality arise that tend not to happen with domestic policies (where one sovereign power usually monopolizes authority). 

International relations theories, as unfortunate but as necessary as it is, are laden with meta-theoretical, philosophical and methodological assumptions that would bore most readers to tears and prevent 9 out of 10 of them from finishing this short article.  Therefore, in the interest of readership and feedback, the qualifying remarks that would normally slow the reader down are removed at this point.  Instead, some of the interesting tensions, contradictions and observations within the nexus of domestic and foreign policies are made in as brief and parsimonious a manner as possible.

Foreign policies in democracies are different from those in dictatorships.  They face different pressures, react to different stimuli and assume different qualities altogether (although some process analysts and systems theorists would discount this fact since the state is just a conceptual ‘black box’ to them).  Consider one of the rationales for the democratic peace thesis (DPT), which is derived from Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace” and states that war between countries is much less likely when their citizens – the ones that would become soldiers in any such war – are tasked with deciding whether to engage in it or not. 

The DPT hypothesizes that wars between democratic states should not exist, but the evidence shows that democracies declare war on dictatorships just as often as these dictators do on each other.  Non-democracies do not cycle through foreign ministers or foreign policy priorities as quickly as the democratic governments do, they do not debate the costs and benefits of such policies openly in their societies and no logical justification is needed since propaganda is used to gain the public’s support.  Finally, they seldom worry about courting enough favourable public opinion to become re-elected, which is a convenient segue into the effects of elections on foreign policies.

A passing glance at the 2012 presidential elections in the United States is proof enough of this fact.  How many Republican contenders have attacked the incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama for his (mis)handling of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or for the Iranian nuclear problem and its effects on the US-Israeli relationship?  Elections are like referendums on ruling parties; it is normal to debate these complex foreign policy issues – and a whole host of domestic policy concerns – before elections, exactly when they are most vulnerable to shifts in policy direction.  Needless to say, dictatorships lack these intense and often divisive policy debates, and often follow suboptimal policy pathways as a result.

What is fascinating about this overlap between foreign policy practices and electoral competition is the way that national destinies seem to hinge at times on the outcomes of these seminal moments.  Jimmy Carter infamously lost the 1980 elections for president of the United States because of the hostage crisis in Iran and Ronald Reagan’s skillful exploitation of the Carter Administration’s failure to deal with it.  The 1988 federal election in Canada was perceived at the time as a referendum on Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s negotiations with the United States and Mexico on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); Mulroney won and NAFTA became a reality.  In another example, elections in Israel in 1996 were directly affected by the Arab-Israeli conflict: Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish extremist for making peace overtures to the Palestinians while Palestinian militants initiated a spate of bombings in the early months of 1996 to derail peace talks in their own way.

All these examples demonstrate the extent to which foreign policies and domestic politics are interconnected.  It is foolish to try and place them in separate categories as theoretically distinguishable public policies when in practice they intersect in so many ways and in so many places.  In some places they seem to operate independently of one another, like in Russia, for example.  With elections there set to take place in less than two weeks, Russia confidently flexes its foreign policy muscles in oil and gas markets in Europe and Asia as it defends Iranian and Syrian intransigence in the United Nations Security Council, all while mass protests in major cities have complicated Vladimir Putin’s inevitable return to the presidency and 12 more years of power in Russia.  What seems to be an anomaly can be understood with the argument that the Russian foreign policy establishment is overcompensating for the doubt being expressed by the citizenry within Russia by acting aggressively and exploitatively abroad.

This overlap between domestic and foreign policies is neither good nor bad, it just is.  The lesson to take away from this set of examples is that they are inseparable, administered by the same government and therefore coordinated in some way – even when coalition politics hand one party the leadership post and another party the foreign ministry, that coalition still binds the government together within a tacit regime structure.  Learning how to detect these points of overlap can be analytically very interesting, but knowing how to use them to one’s advantage by exploiting them effectively is something else entirely.

While acknowledging NATO’s engagement in Libya that facilitated the Libyan people’s overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime, I look beyond the immediate events and examine the impact that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict may have on the events that are taking place in other areas of the Middle East and North Africa and how Canada may or may not exert an influence on those events.  I note the conflicting political objectives that exist among stakeholders - not just Arab or Palestinians versus Israelis, but between contending Arab states, rival Palestinian factions, competing Israeli political parties, and clashing great power interests.

This article was originally published in On Track, the Conference of Defence Associations (CDA) Institute’s quarterly journal which, in affiliation with the Department of National Defence (DND), publishes material relating to the Canadian Forces (CF), Canadian military and defence policy, and international military affairs.  To see the full article, check out pages 18-20 here: http://cda-cdai.ca/cdai/uploads/cdai/ontrack16n4.pdf

Abstract:

The recent intensification of enmity between Iran and Israel has been the focus of political analysts, pundits, practitioners, and critics alike.  As Iranian-Israeli relations have progressively worsened over the past few decades, this wide-ranging conflict has come to encompass countries of all kinds: traditional-great powers and peripheral-minor states.  This conflict has become so polarizing in part because it evokes issues of geopolitical security, strategic energy resources, nuclear weapons proliferation, identity politics, human rights and the global ‘War on Terror,’ among others.  By utilizing two of the most prominent International Relations theories, Waltzian Structural Realism (WSR) and Wendtian Social Constructivism (WSC), this paper seeks to simultaneously explain and understand the 30-year period of Iranian-Israeli friendship and cooperation from 1948 – 1979 as well as the subsequent 30 years of hostility and conflict from 1979 – 2010.  The most likely projection for the future relationship between these two countries remains one of continued conflict, discord and hostility.

This major research paper was originally published at the University of Windsor in April 2011 as part of the Master of Arts in Political Science program.  It is now a featured essay at e-ir.info.  To read the paper in its entirety, click here: http://www.e-ir.info/2012/02/08/the-enigma-of-iranian-is%E2%80%8Braeli-relations/

Going strong for more than a year now, the changes wrought by the Arab Spring on the Middle East and beyond continue to reshape the region’s geopolitical landscape in wholly unpredictable ways.  Just over a year ago, nobody could have predicted that three Arab autocrats would be ousted and several more would be fighting for their very survival.  The fact that one of these deposed dictators, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, had honoured the Arab world’s first peace treaty with Israel – a treaty that led in large part to the assassination of his predecessor, Anwar al-Sadat – should worry supporters of peace everywhere, especially Israel.  Amidst all the chaos and commotion, however, the doubtful hypothesis that the processes unleashed by the Arab Spring are somehow inherently bad for Israel has become widely and uncritically accepted as common wisdom.  Even the Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu revealed the Jewish state’s own misgivings about the Arab Spring’s sweeping revolutions, claiming that the Arab world was “moving not forward, but backward,” and labelling them “Islamic, anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli and anti-democratic” in nature.  No doubt the risks and costs associated with these revolutions are real, but so are the opportunities and benefits for many of the actors involved, even for Israel. 

Let’s begin with the fact that authoritarian regimes are fundamentally unsustainable political entities, no matter how benign their leader or how beneficial their existence may seem.  From this perspective, even the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty was built on a proverbial hill of sand that was bound to be washed away by a tide not unlike the wave of popular unrest that unseated President Mubarak.  To be clear, the peace remains in place today, but the fear is that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt will seek to abrogate it after emerging victorious in recent parliamentary elections and consolidating their domestic foothold on power.  This is unlikely to happen for many reasons that would harm both the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s own national interests, but even if it did, there is no reason to think that a country roiled by revolutionary turmoil and on the verge of bankruptcy, rife with corruption and riddled with inefficiency, struggling to transition from military stewardship to civilian rule and struggling to feed, house, educate, and employ tens of millions of people would suddenly decide that its highest priority was to wage a losing war with Israel and squander the international goodwill it has rightfully earned so far.  Therefore, there need be no contradiction between Egyptian prosperity, Israeli security and international peace.

Although many of these autocratic regimes are supported by the West thanks to their contributions to political stability, economic security and foreign policy cooperation, they remain illegitimate because they can only ensure their own survival through violence and would likely lose any free and fair elections held today.  Most Middle Eastern non-democracies are entrenched regimes with decades of experience in repressing their populations and scapegoating Israel for their problems.  Saudi Arabia and other Gulf kingdoms reportedly spent a whopping $150 billion in 2011 on pampering their citizens and avoiding any protests, and many of their foreign policies are in lock-step with Western security and energy interests.  Realistically, who believes wholeheartedly that these countries can stifle domestic dissent and abuse human rights forever just because today’s models of industrial economic growth depend on abundant reserves of oil and gas?  Even the oil-poor monarchies of Jordan and Morocco have managed to escape the fate that befell their fellow authoritarian leaders, but both have successfully leveraged patronage networks to enhance their own legitimacy and cleverly crafted political reforms without relinquishing power completely to dampen the demands of protestors.  It is useful to note that the quasi-democracies in Lebanon and Iraq have been spared the tumultuous upheavals of the Arab Spring, largely because the citizens of these countries can voice their concerns through semi-representative political channels non-existent in other Arab states.  The arc of history is bending clearly in the direction of democratization, and any overthrow of an authoritarian or dictatorial leader is a step in the right direction.

The obvious question to ask at this point is what happens if whatever comes after the dictator is worse than what came before?  Is an Islamic theocracy not worse than a secular autocracy?  This question not only misinterprets the primary causes of the Arab uprisings but also mischaracterizes its final trajectory.  Thirty years ago it was possible for a group of religious hardliners to hijack a revolution and marginalize any opposition, like the clerical establishment did in Iran under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979.  Today this is not only extremely unlikely to happen, but even if it did, the same revolutionary forces of popular discontent that swept the old guard out of power would swiftly do the same to this new group.  What about Islamist political parties that gain support by winning elections, like the AK Party in Turkey, the Ennahda Movement in Tunisia, or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Morocco?  Do they not pose some threat to the fabric of any future democratic society?  Firstly, they were elected by the people, and if they fail to live up to their campaign promises, they can be voted out of office just like anywhere else.  Secondly, religion-based parties have existed in the West for centuries and democracy has survived.  Thirdly, as long as the basic institutions of democratic participation and representation are respected, Islamist parties should be welcomed as positive influences in a country’s path to democratization.  After all, do religious-affiliated political parties not exist in Israel?

Now let’s assume that democracy is the inevitable end-result of these revolutionary changes.  This is admittedly an idealistic assumption, but one that gains credibility at a time when the protestor is dubbed Time’s Person of the Year, when social media and mobile platforms empower citizens at the expense of their governments and when the mass media then broadcasts their messages to the rest of the world in real time.  Besides for being the most legitimate form of government devised until today, democracy is good as a means and as an end.  Of course it benefits Israel when neighbouring regimes can resolve their internal problems without oppressing their people or spiraling into civil war, but it also means that Israel and its neighbours would be able to resolve their own bilateral problems peacefully.  The infamous democratic peace thesis suggests that democracies do not go to war with one another, meaning that Arab-Israeli differences could be addressed through conciliation instead of confrontation.  Furthermore, as the oldest and most successful democracy in the region, Israel is well placed to guide these democratizing post-revolutionary states in their quests for legitimacy among their own peoples, which could in turn pave the path for recognition, negotiation and peace between Arabs and Israelis.

As these Arab populations look inward and seek to rebuild their own fractured political systems so that they better represent domestic constituencies, the educated leaders of these countries would be foolish to ignore a regional powerhouse’s proven track record as a Middle Eastern democracy.  Israel has in the past 60+ years managed to integrate a multiethnic and multidenominational population – with a large minority group, no less – into a vibrant democratic framework.  With civilian control of the government, partisan political pluralism, robust media competition, independence of the judiciary, and guaranteed freedoms for all of its citizens, Israeli democracy can even benefit the Arab street – if they realize it.

What is Palestinian reconciliation and why is it important?  This domestic Palestinian political issue, like many things Palestinian, has far-reaching ramifications for the Arab World and the larger Middle East.  The Palestinian national movement has been divided for decades between left-wing secular nationalists like Fatah (now led by Mahmoud Abbas but previously led by the iconic Yasser Arafat) and right-wing Islamic militants like Hamas (led by Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza and by Khaled Meshaal in exile).  Although Hamas was always excluded from the Fatah-dominated Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) for its failure to sign onto the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, the two publicly broke ranks after elections in 2006 and Hamas’ seizure of the Gaza Strip in 2007.  With Hamas governing the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority (PA) administering the West Bank’s 2.5 million, these two mini-states have failed to reconcile their ideologically opposed worldviews, political positions and approaches toward Israel despite repeated attempts over the past 5 years.  As Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations ebb and flow, the Arab Spring overturns entrenched regimes in the surrounding Middle East and the PA pushes for statehood in the United Nations (UN), the need for Palestinian unity, solidarity and reconciliation has never seemed more urgent.

Because of their dominant positions in the Palestinian Territories, Hamas and Fatah naturally overshadow the many other Palestinian factions jockeying for political representation within the national movement.  Last Thursday, December 22, Hamas agreed in principle to join the PLO after fresh elections are held in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem – with participation from refugees all over the world – in order to restore unity and improve representation in the Palestinian leadership.  Along with Hamas’ recently declared intention to shift from violent attacks on Israel to renewed dialogue with the PA, this latest round of Egyptian-brokered talks could actually be more successful than previous ones.  Both Hamas and Fatah seem to have realized that in the wake of the uprisings sweeping across neighbouring Arab states, the benefits of cooperation may finally outweigh the costs of compromise.  The sheer barbarity of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown and imminent demise of his minority regime has forced Hamas to begin the process of relocating their headquarters-in-exile, and the Fatah-led PA has failed to achieve any tangible results in peace talks with Israel or lobbying in the UN for statehood, so the two parties have engaged once again.  Nevertheless, serious obstacles remain in their way.

To begin with, Hamas remains classified as a terrorist organization, has never renounced violence and refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist, facts which are all diametrically opposed to Fatah’s PLO and the internationally recognized PA.  Hamas also continues to collaborate with Hezbollah, Syria and Iran in rejecting any negotiations with the ‘Zionist entity’ that is Israel – although the unrest on the Arab street in the past year has begun to change this reality.  This fact means that international donors will refuse to continue to fund the PA and Israel will reject any dialogue with the Palestinians if Hamas joins the PLO without agreeing to abide by its past agreements with Israel, amending its charter, denouncing terror, and so on.  But there are other problems: Gaza and the West Bank remain geographically separated, bad blood still lingers from the near-civil war of 2007, millions of refugees live beyond Palestinian borders, corruption continues to run rampant through the bureaucracy, and Hamas’ Islamist political ideology clashes in a fundamental way with Fatah’s secular state-building project.

No country is an island, of course, and foreign interference is inevitable in a case like Palestine’s.  Israel and Hamas remain at loggerheads over issues like recognition, negotiations and nonaggression, so any reconciliation between Hamas and the PLO will be greeted with extreme caution by Israel.  Syrian and Iranian influence over Hamas has also waned as Hamas gradually redeploys its resources outside of Damascus and shifts away from Tehran’s orbit.  The military regime in Egypt has warmed to Hamas as well and has always been congenial to Palestinians in general, hosting reconciliation talks and providing ideological support to Palestinian independence as the Muslim Brotherhood looks poised to dominate Egypt’s postelection political landscape.  As other regional powers aim to influence Palestinian destiny, like the revolution-supporting Turkey and the revolution-suppressing Saudi Arabia, the very identity of the Palestinian political body also remains fluid and malleable.  

Palestinian reconciliation itself remains a distant possibility with major opportunities and several potential pitfalls for the time being.  Much more significant is the electoral process, which will be judged by its legitimacy, fairness and equality for the voting population.  Without meeting several benchmarks for democratic participation and representation, the whole project of Palestinian reconciliation is in doubt.  The dysfunctional nature of Palestinian politics for the past few years has failed to produce long-term results for the Palestinian residents of the Territories and refugees alike, modest improvements in the West Bank’s economic infrastructure notwithstanding.  What is required is a vision for Palestinian unity, a roadmap for sovereign statehood, and a viable basis for its peaceful international relations.  As long as this is lacking from the present Palestinian picture, doubts will remain regarding its future.

No two countries mirror their unfounded hatred for one another more publicly, outrageously, and frankly, entertainingly, than Iran and Israel do.  Most geopolitical archrivals are at least immediate neighbours, like North and South Korea, Pakistan and India, or even the former Yugoslav republics.  Iran and Israel share no territorial borders and so have no land-related grievances.  Even a quick glance at a world map will demonstrate that they are separated by at least two other countries in any direction.  Iran and Israel have never formally gone to war, their militaries have never openly engaged each other, and yet the level of sheer animosity between the two defies even ordinary rivalries.  A war of words has erupted in the Iranian-Israeli relationship that creates drama and stokes tensions.  What’s going on?

In one sense, the media is to blame.  Not directly, but the surplus of reporters and reporting, information’s ease of access and the insatiable appetite among news consumers worldwide all combine to feed this frenzy of speculative journalism and incendiary rhetoric on both sides of the conflict.  Any regular reader of world news – and especially media junkies – will recognize the Iranian-Israeli drama as one of the most frequently recurring stories, often accompanied by detailed maps, timelines and graphs all designed to lure in the reader.  Adam Klein demonstrates the bias and demonization of Iran and Israel in their respective media outlets in a 2009 article in Communication, Culture and Critique.  Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency (a state-run entity, to be clear) often refers to Israel as a ‘savage regime,’ ‘Zionist oppressors’ and ‘general enemies of Islam,’ while Israel’s Yediot Aharonot (that country’s most widely read daily newspaper) lampoons Iran’s President on the regular and casts him as the ‘chief supporter of Islamic terror’ and an ‘immediate threat to the Jewish State.’[1]  Any impartial or ignorant reader of these comments can see that they are oversimplifications and exaggerations, but both countries nevertheless engage in propaganda warfare and fuel much of the tension emanating from the Middle East.

What are the Iranian and Israeli claims for conflict?  Iran routinely mentions three interrelated concerns: Palestinian injustices, Israeli occupations and Western colonialisms.  Let’s look at each of these a little more closely.  The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is indeed a festering wound in the region and involves serious structural inequalities and power asymmetries, but it remains one that can only be solved between Palestinians and Israelis.  In September 2010, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad criticized the Palestinian Authority for renewing direct peace talks with Israel, insisted that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had no authority to negotiate on behalf of all Palestinians, and advocated armed resistance in lieu of negotiations.  In a rare rebuke, Palestinian spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh responded that Ahmadinejad “does not represent the Iranian people” and “is not entitled to talk about Palestine, or the President of Palestine.”[2]  When the internationally recognized representatives of the Palestinian people reject Iran’s influence, their credibility on the issue suffers as a result.

The second issue, Israeli occupation, is also a cause for serious concern where it applies in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.  However, Iran claims that the entire land of Israel is under occupation, a claim that it shares with the Palestinian militant group Hamas (and other radical Islamist groups) and that contravenes hundreds of United Nations resolutions and declarations, numerous articles of international law and the sovereignty of the state of Israel, all of which affirm the basic right of Israel to exist within the borders of June 4, 1967.  Even the Gaza Strip has been evacuated of all Jewish residents since 2005 in the midst of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, though Israel retains tight control over its borders since the Hamas coup of 2007 for security reasons.  In addition, Israel’s relinquishment of the Golan Heights to Syria has always been conditional on a peace treaty along the lines of Egyptian-Israeli peace and the return of the Sinai Peninsula in 1979.  In short, peace negotiations are the best method for the road to less the way to Israel’s occupation the path to peace with Israel

Iran’s third gripe, Western colonialism, is clearly an overblown charge.  This notion stems from Europe’s 19^th and 20^th century-old habit of conquering less advanced civilizations, subduing their populations and extracting their resources for one goal: the power and profit of the homeland.  By considering Israeli Jews as European colonizers, Iran diminishes the impact of the Holocaust (which Ahmadinejad habitually denies in any case) and falsely asserts that Israel owes some unpublicized allegiance to a master-state on the European continent.  There is simply no evidence to support this outrageous claim, yet it is resorted to by Iranian firebrands over and over again.  Another interpretation of this claim lies in Iran’s self-identification as the leader of the resistance against Western expansionism and influence in the Middle East, in which case Israel would be the West’s outpost in the region.  In this case, Iran places itself within an inter-civilizational struggle reminiscent of a Huntingtonian world, or even within a realist’s tumultuous game of power politics in which great powers vie for survival, power and influence.  Again, take a look at a map: can a country the size of Israel really threaten one the size of Iran?

As for Israel’s major claims for continued conflict against Iran, they can also be grouped into three broad categories: nuclear ambitions, genocidal intentions and regional conflagrations.  Iran clearly has a nuclear program; about this, nobody disagrees.  The real issue is the nature of that program, with much of the international community fearing its use as an offensive military weapon and Iran asserting its right to peacefully develop nuclear energy and medical isotopes.  A much-hyped report coming out of the International Atomic Energy Agency in November 2011 provided more evidence than ever before that Iran is indeed flouting the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and pursuing nuclear weapons.  Not only would this challenge the existing balance of power in the region based on conventional arms, it could spur a nuclear-arms race among regional rivals Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others.  Israel has knocked out threatening nuclear sites in other hostile states before: in Iraq in 1981 and in Syria in 2007.  But nuclear weapons themselves are not what frighten Israelis.

Iran’s genocidal intentions – mainly attributable to Ahmadinejad, but found in the ramblings of the Iranian Ayatollahs as well – are what Israelis fear will guide the nuclear threat to their doorstep.  Aside from his ridiculous denial of the Holocaust, a politically motivated ploy to rile Israeli feathers, this controversial claim of genocide has its roots in another one of Ahmadinejad’s fiery speeches.  In June 2006, depending on your linguistic preferences, the president of Iran either called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’ or to ‘vanish from the pages of time.’[3]  This inflammatory quote gets much of the attention, but it only warrants further thought because of the context within which it is perceived.  Whether deliberate or not, this language stirs up memories of Jewish genocide in the Holocaust – denied, of course, by Ahmadinejad – and gives Iran’s nuclear program a uniquely sinister character.  Even the Soviet-American nuclear standoff during the Cold War never witnessed such outlandish rhetoric.  It is the combination of these first two claims – nuclear ambitions and genocidal intentions – that troubles Israelis.

The third and final Israeli cause for concern is similar to Iran’s: the potential for the breakout of conflict in the region.  Nuclear arms races aside, a rising Iran has always threatened Arab dominance of the Islamic world.  Especially through its proxies in the region, Iran has the potential to destabilize domestic governments in Palestine through Hamas, in Lebanon through Hezbollah (the only armed paramilitary group in Lebanon as well as the kingmaker in its current coalition government) and in Syria through its support for the embattled dictator Bashar al-Assad.  As the United States pulls its combat troops out of Iraq at the end of 2011, Iran also lies poised to manipulate the sympathetic, Shiite-led government of that country as well.  Finally, Iranian influence has always worried the monarchies of the Arabian Gulf, spurring them to band together in a collective security organization that has kept a watchful eye on the Persian Gulf ever since.  Recent protests in Bahrain became a contest of wills between Iran and the Gulf Arabs, and Iran has threatened many times to close the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for any US, pan-Arab or Israeli strike on its sovereignty, an act that would immediately shut down 40% of all seaborne oil exports to Asia, Europe and the US.  Israel’s government must obviously weigh all these potential costs against the intended benefits of military action against Iran.

Recent events seem to have elevated these tensions to new heights.  Kidnappings in Iran and assassinations abroad have begun to emerge, computer viruses and Internet censors damage flows of information and technology, proxy wars between terrorist networks and Israel continue to rage, and several mysterious explosions in recent months at Iranian military and nuclear installations all beg to be explained: are they all simply coincidental or is there intentional sabotage going on behind the scenes?  It is not so important what the answer is because the hostility and animosity, while irrational and not traceable to any legitimate historical grievance between these two countries, exists nonetheless.  What is important to realize though is that the media cannot help but filter these actions and events through its own discriminatory lenses, so consult multiple sources to triangulate your information and make up your own mind based on as many objectively supported pieces of information as you can.

While much of the international media’s limited attention span has focused almost exclusively on the popular uprisings in the Middle East and the pro-democracy protests on the Arab street, another longstanding problem in the region has been overshadowed and overlooked.  With roots going arguably as far back as the First World War, the nearly century-long conflict between Palestinians and Israelis has typically dominated the discourse on security and stability in the Middle East.  Recent developments on the Palestinian-Israeli front have made it increasingly likely that a fresh wave of conflict is likely to erupt in the near future, an eventuality that needs to be considered seriously and addressed responsibly if needless bloodshed is to be spared and a long-sought peace is to be achieved.

What follows is a brief analysis of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, along with its main actors and central issues.   The purpose of this exposition is to inform and educate, not to persuade or proselytize.  Naturally, a piece of this length will neglect some salient aspects of the conflict, but a brief introduction to the topic is necessarily truncated.  While recognizing that human beings are fallible creatures whose written works are naturally hampered by their uniquely subjective perspectives, this article still strives to be as objective, unbiased and neutral as possible.  With those caveats in mind, the problem of peace between Palestinians and Israelis can be explored and the possibilities for progress between these two intransigent protagonists can be examined.

Perhaps it is best to begin in the present day and with the main actors on the Palestinian side.  As it stands, the Palestinians are largely divided between two opposing camps: Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Fatah in the West Bank.  While dozens of peripheral players are involved, these two are paramount.  Hamas won legislative elections in the Palestinian Territories in 2006, but international donors withdrew funding for the Palestinian Authority (the government) because of Hamas’ refusal to renounce violence and recognize Israel.  In a bloody 5-day civil war the following year, Hamas seized Gaza and expelled Fatah forces to the West Bank where they remain today.  Hamas and other Islamic radical movements in Gaza adhere to a religious fundamentalist worldview while Fatah and other secular nationalist groups in the West Bank have adopted a more Western-friendly policy orientation.  Since 2007, Fatah has regained control of the Palestinian Authority and wavered between engaging in peace talks with Israel and reconciliation talks with Hamas but to no avail on either front.

Divisions in Israeli society are no less pronounced than with the Palestinians.  While Israel is a thriving democracy, the most recent configuration in its steady stream of coalition governments can explain much of its recent behaviour.  In 2009, the Likud Party returned to power after a decade in the opposition by courting right-wing political parties.  With its hawkish, messianic and jingoistic worldview, the settler movement has found ample support on the ideological right of the Israeli political spectrum.  When the Israeli government is dependent on courting favour from pro-settler political parties for its survival, peace overtures to the Palestinians become increasingly complex and convoluted.  Israel has been forced to choose either domestic political stability or progress in peace talks with Palestinians.  Palestinians, for their part, have elevated the issue of settlements to one of primary importance in setting preconditions for further talks, an equally detrimental move towards peace which neglects other critical issues like borders, refugees, Jerusalem, water rights, economic arrangements, and so on.

In addition, the role of external actors cannot realistically be ignored.  The United States, the principal benefactor for both the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government, exercises influence for better or worse disproportionate to its direct involvement in the conflict.  Other great powers like Great Britain, France and Russia, and international organizations like the United Nations, the European Union and the Quartet on the Middle East, have also weighed in on the conflict’s dynamics with pomp and circumstance unheard of in any other ongoing conflict anywhere else in the world.  Even regional powers have begun to play bigger and more relevant roles, with Egypt being central ever since it signed the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1979, Turkey maintaining elite-level military and diplomatic ties, and Iran cultivating ever more strategic relationships with fellow rejectionists Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Syrian state.  While these actors fall outside the scope of this brief overview, they are nevertheless extremely important since any sustainable peace process needs their involvement.

With President Obama coming to office in January 2009, renewed emphasis was placed on resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  Although the Palestinian Authority and Israel began talks shortly thereafter aimed at establishing a viable Palestinian state living in peaceful coexistence beside a secure Israel, both sides made excruciatingly little progress.  The Israeli government remains unable to compromise on the conflicting demands of Palestinian negotiators and Jewish settlers, and Hamas continues to use violence against Israeli civilians and delay reconciliation with Fatah, both of which remain inimical to the faltering peace process.  Problems internal to the political processes of both actors are unavoidable issues that will only increase in difficulty and complexity as time goes on, whether it be among Palestinians living under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank or Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip, or even among Israelis living within the state’s June 1967 borders or in East Jerusalem and the settlements in the West Bank.  The sooner this problem is resolved, the better.

Recent events have only served to heighten tension and mistrust between Palestinians and Israelis.  A Palestinian terrorist’s cold-blooded murder of a Jewish family in the West Bank settlement of Itamar, increased rocket and mortar salvos from Gaza landing in southern Israeli cities accompanied by retaliatory missile strikes by the Israeli Air Force, and an explosive device detonated at a busy bus stop in Jerusalem that killed at least one person and injured dozens more.  These localized events have only added more intensity to the increasingly globalized diplomatic contest that Palestinians have been waging for international recognition.  With several Latin American countries recognizing Palestinian statehood in the past few months, and President Obama expressing his hopes to the United Nations in September of 2010 that an independent Palestine would emerge in a year’s time, the political pressure is building for concerted diplomatic action.  By September of 2011, political and economic institutions gradually assembled by the Palestinian Authority over the past few years with the help of international donors will be complete, and an opportunity for international legitimacy of the Palestinian cause will present itself.  Unfortunately, peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis show no signs of resuming.  If Palestinians achieve international recognition without a simultaneous reconciliation with Hamas and resolution of the conflict with Israel, the consequences may not be self-determination and statehood, but a resumption of conflict with a high probability of violence, bloodshed, and possibly all-out war.