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.

Iran.  The country is without a doubt one of the most geopolitically sensitive states in the international system.  It is also one of the most challenging and chimerical countries for its immediate neighbours, the region’s rising powers, the world’s great powers and the international community as a whole to fathom.  Just this past weekend (April 14, 2012), the first nuclear talks between the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council – China, France, Russia, the U.K., the U.S. – and Germany) and Iran in 15 months took place. During the past decade, subsequent rounds of these talks have led to little or no progress.  The most recent talks in Istanbul have been hailed by the Americans, Europeans and Iranians as ‘constructive and useful’, although nothing of substance was actually achieved at these negotiations.  If the universally positive atmosphere emanating from Istanbul lasts for another month, the real negotiations on Iranian uranium enrichment and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections will begin in earnest on May 23 in Baghdad.

This tenuous breakthrough in Western-Iranian relations is as fragile as it is unexpected.  The West is understandably uneasy with Iran; as a Shiite Islamic fundamentalist theocracy, it is unique in the world and wholly alien to the Westphalian conception of secular politics and sovereign statehood.  Already at odds with traditional Western norms of international order and ideology, Iranians are also wary of foreign interference in their internal affairs after centuries of colonial adventurism and imperial domination from abroad.  The damage done to Iranian-American relations after the 444-day hostage crisis following the 1979 Islamic Revolution certainly did nothing to alter the situation.  As it exists today, Iran is naturally poised to play a role as a regional power at least on par with that of Egypt or Turkey.  All three dwarf their immediate neighbours in size, population, military might, strategic location, systems of alliances, and so on.  This enables them to effectively craft their own spheres of geopolitical influence, and Iran has done an exceptionally good job of manipulating Middle Eastern politics to its advantage.

Take the conflict with Israel as an example.  Opposition to Zionism and any peacemaking or normalization of relations with Israel has been a hallmark of the Iranian regime’s domestic national identity and coloured its foreign policy priorities since the Ayatollahs assumed power in 1979.  This policy has been championed with a renewed urgency since the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the beginning of the Madrid to Oslo Palestinian-Israeli peace process, a fact which has arguably derailed Middle Eastern peace talks for nearly twenty years.  Iranian supreme leaders Khomeini and Khamenei have both prophesied Israel’s impending demise before, but fast forward to the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 and the increasingly anti-Israeli genocidal rhetoric coupled with his by now infamous habit of flamboyantly denying the Holocaust and it is easy to see why Israeli security interests would be threatened.  Israel has for its part loudly beaten the drums of a preventative war with Iran if nuclear negotiations with Western countries fail to disarm its potential nuclear arsenal, but Iran has done nothing to assuage Israeli fears or alleviate international concerns about its nuclear program.

Another factor complicating American and Israeli relations with Iran is the so-called Arab Spring.  As the domino-effects of revolutionary upheavals in key Arab states permeate throughout North Africa and the Middle East, geostrategic relationships of power are shifting in similarly revolutionary ways.  Since Ben Ali fled Tunisia in a panic and Mubarak stepped down from the Egyptian leadership over a year ago, the Arab World has witnessed unprecedented institutional pressures.  Libya has inaugurated a new chapter in its history with the elimination of Qaddafi while Yemen has initiated a transitional period of governmental change without Saleh in power.  Some Arab monarchies like Morocco and Jordan have ushered in constitutional reforms and allowed for modest political democratization while oil-rich Gulf sheikhdoms spend their way to security.

But the most delicate power play of all is materializing in Syria, where the Assad government is a critical component of the Tehran-Damascus-Beirut-Gaza link.  The Palestinian militant resistance group Hamas has even pulled its headquarters out of Syria’s capital, evidently finding it no longer defensible given its vocal support for popular revolutions elsewhere in the Arab world.  Despite repeated rounds of sanctions and diplomacy from the Arab League and the United Nations, including Kofi Annan’s latest 6-point plan and the inbound monitors meant to stabilize a days-old and already faltering ceasefire, conflict between the Syrian opposition movement based in Turkey and the Damascus-based Assad government will persist because the fundamental issues at the core of it remain unresolved.

Clearly, Iran’s unfaltering support for Assad in this regard is rooted in its strategic interest in the Syrian government’s survival.  Aside from support among Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon – which is not representative of the majority of public opinion in either of those countries – Assad’s Syria is Iran’s only lever of influence in the Arab Middle East and represents one of its closest strategic allies in the never-ending hostility against Israel.  The irony is that while Iran originally praised the Arab masses for ousting secular autocrats and facilitating Islamist competition in Tunisian and Egyptian elections, the regime has found itself in an extremely awkward position in Syria by taking the exact opposite approach.

This pragmatic reality has pitted Iran’s interests diametrically opposed to Turkey’s in the Syrian theatre of conflict.  As Turkey shelters tens of thousands of Syrian refugees and protects the military defectors of the Free Syrian Army, Iran has found it doubly awkward to attend the latest round of talks on its nuclear program in Istanbul – the very same city that hosted the ‘Friends of Syria’ conferences attended by dozens of countries’ representatives in support of the opposition Syrian National Council and aimed at ultimately dislodging Syrian President Assad from power.  Iran almost cancelled these talks completely less than two weeks before they were set to begin because of Turkey’s outspoken role in criticizing the Syrian government’s brutality and aiding the opposition’s efforts.  All this merely indicates the unpredictable and counterintuitive nature of the Arab Spring on the Middle East’s balance of power.

One final observation: the next round of nuclear talks will take place in May in Baghdad, an interesting venue given Iraq’s relative isolation from the region for the past two decades.  The recent Arab League Summit hosted by Baghdad in late March was widely seen as a key step for Iraq along the arduous path towards renewed integration into Arab affairs and largely focused on the ongoing crisis in neighbouring Syria.  Given the long-simmering fears of Iranian influence over Iraq, especially with a Shiite-led government in a Shiite-majority country, even the locale for these talks could be explosive.  Only time will tell if the Iranian government will genuinely compromise with Western powers over its nuclear ambitions, but the P5+1 countries will need to accommodate Iran’s legitimate national interests in terms of energy and security as well.  One thing is for sure, though: the Iranian enigma continues to confound and beguile policymakers and pundit machines alike.

In the discourse of international politics, it is rarely warranted to label a situation a kerfuffle.  Syria is definitely one such kerfuffle.  The international community has failed to broker a solution to what has now become more than a year-long conflict in which the government of Bashar al-Assad is fighting for its very survival against an opposition movement loosely united by the desire to oust him.  Ever since February 2011 when some disenchanted young students in the southern city of Deraa spray painted anti-regime graffiti on the walls of their school, were arrested, and local residents protested against those arrests, the Syrian uprising has escalated to a point beyond any previous predictions.  The international community’s interest in and involvement with Syria’s difficulties has ebbed and flowed in the past year, with very little in terms of results to show for it.

For most of the summer of 2011, the world stood by and refused to engage in any serious action because the Syrian regime looked fairly stable, notwithstanding the demise of local autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt (and soon to be Libya and Yemen).  When the Muslim holy month of Ramadan (which began in August) arrived, the Saudi king symbolically spoke out in defence of the thousands of Sunni Muslims ostensibly being killed, imprisoned and displaced by the Shiite Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad, followed in turn by several other Gulf Arab states.  Turkey, which had until the fall of 2011 gently prodded the Syrian government towards reforms, began to harden its stance as well, allowing Syrian refugees and opposition dissidents to operate from its territory.  The United Nations (UN) failed to pass any resolutions in the Security Council critical of al-Assad’s Syria because of Russian and Chinese vetoes, as well as Russian political and military support, while the Arab League rallied behind the opposition, albeit hesitantly and haphazardly.  Most recently, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has travelled to Syria, Russia and China to gain support for a new peace initiative, but the bloodshed continues.

It is interesting to note some of the comparisons between Syria in 2012 and similar events in the region.  The civil unrest in Yemen began in earnest in January 2011, but President Ali Abdullah Saleh was ultimately convinced to step down as the country teetered on the brink of civil war and after repeated attempts were derailed by delaying tactics because the Gulf Cooperation Council and the United States (US) were able to negotiate the power transfer from Saleh to the Yemeni ruling class in 2012, which was not so much a revolution as it was an evolution in the political and military elite’s composition.  In Libya, where the unrest began only slightly earlier than in Syria, Muammar Qaddafi was only defeated because a broad coalition of countries was assembled and ultimately enabled by the Arab League’s authorization of military force in the form of a no-fly zone, a UN Security Council resolution allowing for humanitarian protection and the combined military strength of key countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as well as token Arab support from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.  Finally, in Iraq in 1991, after the US-led coalition forces ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, the southern Shiites and the northern Kurds rose up in revolt as a direct result of US encouragement, but the US was too afraid of the spectre of another fundamentalist Islamic regime neighbouring Iran to allow these revolts to succeed, a dynamic that is all too similar in the way the Syrian crisis is playing itself out.

The great power interests at work were alluded to earlier, but it is worth pausing for a moment and spelling them out in greater detail.  It is clear enough that US interests in the Middle East typically run parallel to those of the Western Europeans, at least in the post-Cold War and post-9/11 era, and are often seen as antithetical to those of Russia and China, the other permanent members and veto-holders of the UN Security Council.  Both Russia and China have saved Syria from condemnation in the UN and strongly defended its sovereign right to conduct its internal affairs with discretion while simultaneously denouncing Western imperialism and contradictory foreign policies.  Without Russian diplomatic cover and military support, it is seriously doubtful that the Syrian regime could have lasted this long, and as the only Mediterranean port in the Middle East friendly to Russian warships, this makes eminent sense from Russia’s geostrategic perspective.  China is also concerned about its long-term influence in the region, which is perhaps why it has thrown its weight behind Syria, but as the oil-rich countries of the Gulf and the collective countries of the Arab League condemn the atrocities in Syria, China’s position remains tenuous at best.  In addition, regional stability and the economical transport of energy supplies through the Middle East are in China’s direct national interest since they keep commodity prices low, something which cannot be said of Russia’s growing status as a petro-state and an energy superpower.

On a deeper level, the regional interests battling for supremacy in the Syrian kerfuffle are also scarcely as evident and troublesome as they are in this particular case.  Backing Syria from day one have been the Iranian government and its Revolutionary Guards Corps, the militant resistance movement Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of which have provided military training and assistance, and tacit support from the Palestinian movement Hamas until early 2012.  Weak neighbours have also tacitly supported the Syrian regime because they have little choice; they are either directly under its sphere of influence (Lebanon), economically tied to it via imports for their own survival (Jordan) or so penetrated by cross-border clandestine activity that their own tenuous domestic stability would be threatened by a rebuke of any kind (Iraq).  Like Hamas, Turkey formerly considered Syria a strategic asset but has come to the eventual conclusion that the regime cannot be permitted to survive in its current form, even going so far as to host Syrian opposition gatherings and international conferences with the goal of supporting these anti-regime rebels and toppling the al-Assad power structure.  The Saudis and the Gulf countries have been calling recently for much more action on the part of the international community in terms of arming and financing the Syrian National Council and the Free Syrian Army, with 70 countries recognizing these groups as the official representatives of the Syrian people and pledging concrete support for them at the most recent ‘Friends of Syria’ conference in Istanbul in April 2012.  Israel has managed to stay out of the fray for the most part, and other countries have treaded very carefully.

And so the bloodshed continues, more than a full year after the Arab Spring-inspired revolts first began.  The lack of a credible response to the Syrian situation is not directly attributable to any group of actors or individuals, nor can it be chalked up to a failure of the international system of states to act in the interests of the international community.  The UN Security Council was designed with vetoes in mind so as to take into account the collective interests of the world’s post-war great powers.  Regional organizations like the Arab League are also powerless to act forcefully since they are just symbolic expressions of the once-revolutionary ideals that pan-Arabism espoused nearly a half-century ago.  Since unilateral interventions would be suicidal for regional countries and downright disastrous for stronger ones like the US, a multilateral option or an internal revolution would seem to be the best solutions.  But as we have seen up until now, these have only been even more spectacular failures.

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.

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.

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.