We may get a temporary ceasefire and the release of some hostages in exchange for some of the 4500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, but we are unlikely to see a resumption of Middle East peace efforts scarred by years of failure.

Israel’s pursuit of the Hamas leadership — notably Yahya Sinwar, the political chief on the ground in Gaza, and military commander Mohammed Deif — will likely continue until both men are found, dead or alive. That’s assuming Sinwar and Deif are still in Gaza itself, which is far from clear.

In the meantime, the world is mobilising to funnel humanitarian assistance into Gaza by land, sea and air. The American air drops into Gaza represent an extraordinary spectacle: on the one hand, Washington continus to arm Israel with munitions used to cause death and destruction among Palestinians; on the other, it is seeking to circumvent Israeli restrictions on the supply of aid across the strip’s land borders.

In the tortured history of the Middle East and America’s complex relationship with Israel — going back to Dwight Eisenhower presidency in the fifties, when pressure from Washington brought an end to the Suez crisis — there has scarcely been a more confounding moment.

In 1956, Eisenhower brokered a halt to what was known as the “tripartite aggression” after the nascent state of Israel had joined Britain and France in confronting Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez canal. In some ways that was a high point of America’s playing an honest-broker role in the Middle East, matched by Jimmy Carter’s mediation of the  Camp David Accords in 1978, which ushered in a cold peace between Israel and Egypt.

In the years since then, constructive US influence in the Middle East has waxed and waned depending on circumstance, with sporadic  interventions such as President George H.W. Bush’s push to kickstart a peace process in the wake of Gulf War I.

Bill Clinton tried but was let down by poor preparation for a Camp David II summit in 2000 between Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Arafat deservedly got much of the blame for the failure of Camp David II, but Barak, who refused to meet Arafat one-on-one, and Clinton’s feckless Middle East negotiators were also culpable.

Judged against the performance of his predecessors in managing a Middle East crisis, and depending on how the Gaza war ends, history is unlikely to be kind to Joe Biden. As things stand, the fair judgement is that Biden, with his sights firmly on his own re-election prospects, has been far too indulgent of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden might argue that his strategy of not allowing questions to arise about Washington’s support for the elimination of the Hamas leadership will prove to be correct, both politically and strategically. But his tardiness in calling for a humanitarian ceasefire, and his sanctioning of repeated US vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions demanding such a pause, has left him wide open to criticism that he has acted as Netanyahu’s enabler.

Belatedly, the US president appears to have realised both the political costs for him domestically, where many in his Democrat base are outraged, and the concomitant damage to America’s international reputation. He has consequently begun to step up his criticism, in public and private, of a war that has filled TV screens with shocking images of civilian casualties and deprivation.

This has taken far too long.

In remarks picked up last week by a “hot mic” after his State of the Union address, Biden told a Democrat legislator that a “come to Jesus” moment was approaching in his relations with Netanyahu. He made it clear he would regard an Israeli assault on Rafah at the southern end of the Gaza Strip — where about half Gaza’s 2.3 million population are huddled — as the crossing of a “red line.”

Interviewed, Netanyahu rebuffed the president, saying he would not be deterred from pursuing the Hamas leadership at risk of adding further to Gazan deaths and injuries.

In all the history of a blood-drenched Israel–Palestine conflict one date stands out: 4 November 1995. That was the evening on which Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot by an Israeli zealot opposed to peace with the Palestinians.

Not only did Yigal Amir assassinate Rabin, he also destroyed progress on the “two-state solution,” towards which Israel’s fallen leader and Arafat were groping via implementation of the Oslo Accords signed on the White House lawn in Clinton’s presence in 1993.

Among the bleak consequences of the Rabin assassination was the coming to power of Netanyahu, leader of the nationalist Likud bloc. To say Netanyahu has been a blight on Israeli and Middle East politics ever since would be an understatement.

In his years in power, either as prime minister or opposition leader, Netanyahu has contrived to stymie legitimate peace efforts to the point where any kind of peace in our time, even if the Gaza conflict subsides, has come to resemble a mirage.

Netanyahu may well be consigned to history if and when the war in Gaza ends and elections in Israel are held, but his malign influence will endure in the form of an explosion of settlements in the Occupied West Bank and a less obvious transfer of Jewish settlers into Arab East Jerusalem.

By latest count, Israel has turned the West Bank into a Swiss cheese of settlements and settler outposts, with something like 200 settlements and 220 outposts on land occupied in the 1967 war. All are illegal under international law since they involve a transfer of members of the victor’s population into territory seized in war.

In all, some 500,000 settlers are now living in the West Bank and 250,000 in East Jerusalem, a total of about 10 per cent of Israel’s population.

Even as late as this month, in the midst of the Gaza war, the ultra-right Netanyahu government, whose leader is beholden to extremist elements, has continued approving new settler housing in the Occupied Territories. This could hardly represent a more pointed affront to international efforts to calm the situation, given the fact that settler violence in the West Bank has spiralled since the 7 October Hamas pogrom on Gaza’s boundaries.

Behind all this is an assumption that Netanyahu is hoping to hang on to leadership, and avoid jail on corruption charges, pending a return to the White House of a president who could be expected to look more favorably on his tenure. But there is a long way to go between now and January 2025, when Trump might get his hands on power and thus loosen restraints, such as they are, on an Israeli government.

In the meantime, there is much loose talk these days about a “two-state solution.” This is glib posturing: anyone who knows anything about the Middle East understands that we are very far indeed from a realistic consideration of two independent states, one Israeli, one Palestinian, living side by side.

When next you hear a politician talking about a two-state solution without any realistic prospect of such an outcome coming about, or of that politician actually doing anything about it, reach for the smelling salts. In reality, there is barely a pulse detectable in America, or among its allies, of a willingness to exert real pressure on Israel to engage realistically with the Palestinians towards a two-state solution.

Such is the depth of animosity and mistrust — and, yes, raw hatred — between Palestinians and Israelis that, short of divine intervention, or the arrival of an Israeli or Palestinian Nelson Mandela, or preferably both, there is little cause for optimism.

In fact, there is hardly any cause at all, not least because the Israeli right is adamantly opposed to a two-state outcome, leaving aside the likelihood of civil conflict if any leader in Israel proposes the dismantling of settlements and moves towards negotiations on a Palestinian state — even if there was a Palestinian entity capable of assuming leadership responsibility across the West Bank, and Gaza.

This might be hard to accept for the two-state-solution industry among academics, commentators and politicians groping for an off-ramp for the world’s most confronting conflict. But there has scarcely been a bleaker moment in a history burdened by failure and a feeble US presidency.

If there is a counterpoint to Biden’s weak hand, played weakly, it is Ronald Reagan’s example when he picked up the phone in the Oval Office in 1982, responding to what he was seeing on his television screen, and rang Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.

In its invasion of Lebanon to rid that country of its Palestine Liberation Organisation presence, Israel was using its airforce fighters as “flying assassination squads” to pound Palestinian positions in Beirut.

“Menachem, this is a holocaust,” Reagan said. The Israeli offensive ceased.

Contrast that with Biden, who can’t even persuade Netanyahu to faciliate aid shipments into the Gaza Strip. This is both shameful, and farcical. •

The post Too little, too late appeared first on Inside Story.

Among the various negative consequences of a vainglorious attempt to implant Western-style democracy on the banks of the Tigris is the empowerment of Iran as a regional force. Prior to 2003, Iran had barely recovered from a debilitating 1980–88 war with Iraq. Its efforts to spread power and influence across the region were constrained by war wounds and a weak economy. After 2003, however, Iran found itself the principal beneficiary in a Middle East power game gone badly wrong.

Overnight, it acquired an oil-rich client state, Iraq, on its western flank and a virtually unimpeded gateway for spreading Shiite influence across the region via surrogates including Hezbollah, its client in Lebanon, and an embryonic and ultimately lethal relationship with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Not all the fallout from the disastrous American intervention in Iraq was negative. The Arab Spring of 2010–12 raised hopes, all too briefly, that autocratic regimes like those in Syria would succumb to popular uprisings, partly driven by social media.

Over time, though, autocrats reasserted themselves. In the process, Iran’s influence continued to spread. In Syria, for instance, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bolsters Bashar al-Assad’s regime against ongoing civil conflict.

The upheavals following the Iraq war also helped to facilitate Russia’s re-engagement in the Middle East. Moscow has become a significant player across the region with relationships that extend from Syria, where a Russian intervention helped to save Assad’s regime, down into the Gulf.

Russia’s renewed influence includes what is effectively a security pact with Iran and a push to sell arms into a region already awash with armaments. Acknowledging the weakened and weakening US position in the region, Gulf states like Saudi Arabia have improved their ties with Moscow.

Sometimes overlooked is the fact that Russia, China and Iran have mutual security ties. They have conducted joint naval exercises in the Arabian Sea. China is heavily dependent on Middle East crude oil. It’s a far cry from 1972, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat sent Soviet advisers packing and tilted his country towards the West, and America in particular. That year marked a nadir of Soviet influence in a region broadly regarded by Moscow as its sphere of interest — a nadir from which Vladimir Putin’s regime has sought to recover.

If the historian Barbara Tuchman had been alive to update her magisterial critique of American foreign policy, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, she would surely have included the Iraq invasion in her summation of misguided policies with far-reaching consequences.

This brings us to 7 October 2023, the day Hamas militants broke of a Gaza security cordon in which Israel had assumed, wrongly, they were contained. The massacre of combatant and non-combatant Israelis has had, and is having, metastasising effects across the region. In many cases, though not all, Iran is a common denominator.

This is not to say that Tehran doesn’t have legitimate security interests in a hostile Middle East environment. But its support for disparate players ranged against America’s client, Israel, is a principal cause of the current mayhem.

Without Tehran’s backing, it is doubtful Hamas would have been in a position to carry out its brazen 7 October incursion. Absent Iran’s military training, arms and diplomatic support, Hezbollah in Lebanon is unlikely to have become the force it is.

In Yemen, Iran’s nurturing of the Shiite Houthis enabled its client to withstand brutal efforts by Saudi Arabia to bomb its forces out of existence. In recent weeks, Tehran’s supply of cruise and anti-ship missiles and drones has given the Houthis the capacity to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, through which 15 per cent of the world’s seaborne trade usually passes.

Iran’s regional power play brands itself as an “arc of resistance” aligned with its Shiite co-religionists in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria (whose heterodox Alawite rulers represent a branch of Shiism), and with Sunni fundamentalist Hamas in Gaza. This is resistance primarily to Israel, but also more broadly to efforts by the United States to assert itself in a region where its credibility has been eroded by mistakes like the Iraq war and virtually unconditional support for an Israel whose treatment of the Palestinians fuels resentment.

Long gone are the days when Henry Kissinger, US secretary of state at the time, could broker a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. Now Kissinger’s latest successor, Antony Blinken, shuttles forlornly between Israel and Arab capitals constrained by his own weak president and the prerogatives of American domestic politics in an election year.

The Biden administration has been shown incapable of restraining Israel’s merciless attacks on Gaza, which have left more than 25,000 Gazans killed, according to the Hamas health ministry, and vast swathes of the enclave uninhabitable. American cover, direct or tacit, for Israel’s brutal tactics against Hamas has further stretched Washington’s credibility in the region.

On the other hand, support for Hamas among Arab regimes is tepid, if not hostile. This attitude has been conditioned by concerns that Hamas’s version of radical Islam, incubated in Egypt in the 1920s, will spread and thus create an internal threat for those regimes.

Self-preservation is the prime concern of the hereditary rulers of oil-rich Gulf states, but at the same time they can’t ignore the horror among their populace at what they are witnessing on their television screens. The Biden administration’s resistance to calls for a ceasefire has strained relations with traditional allies, like Jordan, the majority of whose population is of Palestinian origin.

The continuing spillover from the generations-old conflict between Israel and Palestine has also intensified a shadow war far beyond the Gaza Strip. Evidence of this can be seen, on the one hand, in Israel’s assassination of Hamas leaders in Syria and Lebanon and its elimination of a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon, and, on the other, an upsurge in attacks on American bases in the region.

Meanwhile, it is hard to see a realistic conclusion to the Israel–Palestine conflict as long as Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s prime minister. For virtually his entire political career Netanyahu has sought to frustrate reasonable efforts towards a resolution of the issue. At every turn, whether in office or in opposition, he has contrived to stymie a process that might lead to a reasonable compromise.

Since his earliest days in politics he has been a sponsor of Israeli settlers in the territory occupied in the 1967 war. The number of settlers has reached a point where it will be virtually impossible to unscramble the settlement egg without risk of civil conflict in Israel itself. Some 500,000 Israelis now live in the occupied West Bank and another 200,000 in Arab East Jerusalem; many are militant Zionists who believe they are occupying the biblical home of the Jews.

Netanyahu has been a godfather of this process both from the perspective of his own ideological attachment to a Greater “annexationist” Israel and out of political expediency. In his continued efforts to hold on to power and avoid possible jailing for corruption he has aligned himself with some of the most extreme elements in Israeli politics.

His reluctance to countenance a “two-state solution” if and when the guns fall silent is consistent with his opposition over many years to an accommodation with the Palestinians except when it has been politically expedient for him to show some flexibility.

He is a prime minister on borrowed time. It is highly likely, even inevitable, that once the Gaza war subsides Netanyahu will be obliged to step aside. An inquiry into events leading up to 7 October, including intelligence failures, will almost certainly hold him accountable.

None of this is to suggest the Palestinians are blameless. A weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has contributed to a vacuum being filled by more radical elements. It might be an inconvenient detail, but if elections were held in the Palestinian territories today Hamas would almost certainly prevail, credited with its resort to armed struggle.

What then are the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians under the two-state formula discussed over many years? This is the holy grail of Middle East peacemaking and, like the holy grail, it is likely to remain mythical.

That is unless America and its allies in Europe and the Middle East are willing to impose a formula on Israel and the Palestinians. The only way that will happen is if Washington puts Israel on notice that financial aid, military assistance and diplomatic cover will be jeopardised if it doesn’t engage in realistic steps towards formalising a Palestinian state.

Since this is highly unlikely under any reasonable political scenario, the Israel–Palestine conflict will remain an open Middle East sore with the likelihood, even the certainty, that terrible events will erupt from time to time. As we’ve seen in recent months, these events — and the ever-present risk of a much wider conflagration — will test not only America’s resolve but also that of the international community.

The risks are manifest. In an American election year, with the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, a volatile situation in the Middle East may well become even more incendiary. While it is not in either America’s or Iran’s interest for the conflict to escalate out of control, that possibility can’t be excluded given both the circumstances and personalities involved.

We can but speculate as to America’s response to the events of 7 October if Trump had been in the White House, but it is most unlikely that he would have had a calming influence. Biden may have been ineffectual in constraining Israel, but Trump could well have made a bad situation a whole lot worse.

Then there are Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Both sides of American politics have said Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear capability would constitute a red line. In the event of his winning the presidency, would Trump resist pressure to conduct pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s facilities as it creeps ever closer to acquiring the ability to manufacture and weaponise a nuclear device?

It was Trump who abandoned the nuclear deal with Iran negotiated by Barack Obama’s administration. The single most irresponsible foreign policy decision of Trump’s administration, it undid an agreement aimed at persuading Iran that its interests would be better served by desisting from enriching weapons-grade uranium.

All this means that even when the Gaza war is over, a proxy war between Iran and the United States and its ally Israel will persist, made worse by an erosion in America’s ability to influence events or stop its principal ally from pursuing policies detrimental to Western interests more generally.

With the Middle East in turmoil, history tells us that once a thread is tugged from a regional tapestry things can unravel, and unravel fast. These are perilous times. •

The post March of folly appeared first on Inside Story.

Most tellingly, the vote demonstrates a fracturing in what has been a fairly solid wall of support for Israel’s war against Hamas among its allies, led by the United States.

Given the tormenting scenes emanating from Gaza of civilian casualties pulled from the rubble of destroyed buildings it is surprising, even unconscionable, it has taken countries like Australia as long as it has to say “enough.” Prime minister Anthony Albanese has been under considerable pressure from within his own party to detach Australia from the United States and Israel on this issue. That he managed to do so in partnership with two of Australia’s close allies — Canada and New Zealand — gave him the diplomatic cover he no doubt wanted.

In effect, Australia averted its eyes for too long from Israel’s slaughter of civilians in response to the pogrom conducted by Hamas against Israelis on 7 October. No reasonable argument can be advanced to deny Israel the right to wreak vengeance on those responsible for that heinous crime. However, what are the limits on Israel’s war against Hamas? How many non-combatant Palestinians, including children, need to die to satisfy Israel’s declared aim of “eradicating” the terrorist group?

In other words, how much longer will Israel persist in its efforts to eliminate Hamas, and at what cost to a civilian population that has been displaced in its tens of thousands, and traumatised? And is it even possible to kill off a movement and an ideology, however repugnant?

After weeks of some of the most intense bombing of civilian areas since the second world war, another question presses in: where lies the exit strategy for Israel once the guns fall silent?

Unless they are inhabitants of another planet, members of Israel’s war cabinet can’t be unaware of Washington’s increasing uneasiness over Gaza’s civilian casualties, made more pressing by the horrendous images playing out on the nightly television news.

At a 2024 election fundraiser this week president Joe Biden voiced some of his strongest criticism of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza. He warned that Israel was beginning to alienate Europe and the rest of the international community. Although his remarks were made at a private function, they have been reliably reported. He is also quoted as saying that Israel can’t continue to say no to a Palestinian state.

Biden’s intervention on the twin issues of Israel’s disproportionate use of force and its reluctance to embrace a Palestinian state will be troubling for Israel and its supporters globally. While the United States voted against this week’s General Assembly resolution on grounds it didn’t condemn Hamas, its diplomatic support is weakening. Whatever might be said by Israeli hardliners and their friends in the West, Israel can’t afford to alienate Washington, which provides both diplomatic cover and armaments.

In all of this a reasonable question arises: could Biden and his national security team have done a better job managing a highly combustible situation? The answer is not simple, and comes in two parts. Biden responded well to the risks of a wider conflagration by quickly bolstering a US naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf to deter a regional spillover. But his embrace of Israel’s strategy — literally, for he travelled to Tel Aviv in October and hugged Israel’s prime minister on arrival — relayed a message to the region that Washington would indulge Netanyahu’s war aims and practices.

That this was a mistake has become increasingly obvious in recent days as Israel continues a merciless bombing campaign that has reportedly killed more than 15,000 Gazans, including thousands of children. Casualty numbers are imprecise, but may well exceed 20,000, including those buried in rubble and not recovered.

Having given Netanyahu the impression that the United States was offering virtual carte blanche to Israel, Biden is now trying to rein in the Israeli leader. This will not necessarily end well.

Of course, Israel will be hoping it can capture key Hamas leaders, including political supremo Yahya Sinwar and military commander Mohammed Deif, either dead or alive, to parade before the international media as evidence of the success of its mission.

All of this leaves unresolved the fundamental conundrum: what happens once the guns fall silent and the bombing campaign and other offensive measures have run their course?

No one, not the American president, nor the United Nations, nor Arab states, nor the international community more generally, and certainly not Israel itself, has come up with a realistic way forward. The reason is simple: no clear-cut avenues exist for resolving an Israel–Palestine dispute vastly complicated by the devastation wrought on the people of Gaza.

Central is the question of who will take responsibility for managing Gaza in the war’s aftermath, assuming Hamas has been disabled. Would it be a UN trusteeship using the organisation’s humanitarian resources? Would it be the Palestinian authority, currently governing the West Bank? Would Arab states fill a vacuum until the devastated Strip could be rebuilt? Or will Israel remain in Gaza as a garrison occupier much as it did in South Lebanon after its invasion in 1982 to rid that country of the Palestine Liberation Organisation?

On the face of it, none of these options seems particularly attractive, or even plausible. Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, have warned Netanyahu that they won’t tolerate an Israeli reoccupation of Gaza or Gazans being forced to leave. They have also made clear that Israel needs to engage meaningfully with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu’s response has been to say he won’t deal with the Palestinian Authority in a Gaza context and that he is against a two-state solution in any case. This is hardly encouraging. But if there is a glimmer of hope in all of this, it is that Netanyahu himself will not be a spoiling factor.

Israel’s leader is living on borrowed time, and will almost certainly be pushed aside after the war ends. This is not the least of the reasons why it remains in his interests to continue to prosecute a war that is proving devasting for Israel’s support among its close friends and allies, including Australia.

Israel and its supporters would be unwise to misread the message emanating from the UN General Assembly this week. Global patience, including that of the United States, is wearing awfully thin. •

The post A turning point for Gaza? appeared first on Inside Story.

This year, though, the series would have to be pitched as a documentary. COP28 opened on Wednesday in the improbable location of Dubai, where futuristic glass towers and a palm-shaped luxury resort raised from the sea cater for the world’s gas-guzzling classes. Dubai is the principal city of the United Arab Emirates, the world’s eighth-biggest oil producer. The head of the UAE’s state-owned oil giant ADNOC, Sultan Al Jaber, is the person its government has appointed to be president of the UN climate conference. And last week the BBC published leaked briefing notes for Al Jaber’s meetings with twenty-seven countries over the past year revealing that, as well as discussing the COP negotiations, he was pursuing energy investment deals for ADNOC and another UAE investment company he heads, Masdar.

For the climate NGOs this was merely confirmation that the UAE should not have been made host of the COP in the first place, and that Al Jaber was a completely inappropriate person to preside over it. “A brazen conflict of interest,” said Amnesty International, calling for him to resign.

But there was never any chance of that, and most of the country delegates in Dubai have reacted to the revelations with a world-weary shrug. “So the UAE is pursuing its oil interests?” said one. “And your point is…?”

The UAE’s energy interests overseas are large. The Financial Times estimates that it has invested almost US$200 billion in energy projects in the United States, Africa, Asia and Europe in the last year alone. Around half of this is in oil and gas, including for a major expansion of new drilling. This blatantly ignores the International Energy Agency’s warning that meeting the agreed goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial times effectively means no more fossil fuel exploration. The UAE’s plans alone will blow the global “carbon budget” out of the water.

The UAE argues that the finger of blame is being pointed in the wrong direction: it is merely responding to demand. On all realistic projections, countries will still be using oil and gas till well into the mid-century, and the UAE’s is the cheapest and among the least polluting.

And look at the other half of the UAE’s energy deals, adds Al Jaber: huge new solar, wind and geothermal investments helping provide power and air conditioning to developing and emerging economies from Azerbaijan to Zambia, China to Turkey. For many poorer countries, the UAE’s investments are critical — and far larger than anything they receive from Western governments or private sector companies. You don’t hear many developing country delegates criticising the UAE here.

Yet the revelations about Al Jaber’s Janus-like activities in the run-up to COP28 can’t be wholly dismissed. The UN rules are clear: the COP president must be neutral and impartial, and must not act to further their own interests. In Dubai over the next two weeks probably the single most contentious issue on the agenda will be the future of fossil fuels.

A distinctive feature of this year’s COP will be the “global stocktake.” This is one of the key processes set out in the landmark Paris climate agreement of 2015. Every five years, the agreement says, countries must take stock of their progress, or otherwise, over the last five, and set out global ambitions for the future. In this way the stocktake should inform the Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, countries must make two years later, in which they must each set out new and stronger emissions reduction targets. The next round of NDCs is due in 2025.

Over the past year the global stocktake negotiations have been fraught. Climate scientists have made it very clear that collectively the world is not remotely on track to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5°C. In its annual report on the emissions gap, the UN Environment Programme observes that the difference between the emissions trajectory the world needs to be on for 1.5°C and the one it actually is on has widened rather than narrowed.

Last year it looked as if countries’ plans would take the world to around 2.6°C of warming; today it is probably 2.9°C. At that level much of the world’s agricultural output and water supplies will be at serious risk of failing, the incidence of extreme weather events regularly catastrophic, and large numbers of species would be wiped out. Countries’ current plans for emissions in 2030, UNEP says, need to be cut by another 42 per cent to be on a 1.5°C-compatible pathway.

The stocktake negotiators have focused on the future rather than dwelling on past and present failures. Everyone agrees there should be more investment in renewable energy: COP28 is likely to set a new goal of tripling global renewables capacity by 2030. That will not be easy: solar and wind power are being installed around the world at record rates, but market forecasts currently expect capacity only to double by then.

The COP will also agree on a doubling in the rate of energy efficiency improvements. Energy efficiency has long been the cheapest way of cutting emissions — the International Energy Agency describes it as the “first fuel” — but has always been something of the Cinderella of energy policy, requiring regulatory tightening in many different sectors. Doubling the rate of global improvement will require accelerated innovation in heat pumps, vehicles, consumer goods and industrial processes.

COP28 may well also reach an agreement on methane. Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, more powerful as a cause of warming than carbon dioxide. It is produced by livestock, by waste disposal and as a by-product of fossil fuel production. Here the UAE is playing up its status as an oil giant. Only a country like his, says Al Jaber, can bring the global oil and gas sector to the COP table. Expect a historic announcement of a new tough methane target for 2030, and the major oil and gas companies — traditional opponents of climate policy, and enemies of the climate movement — pledging their support.

As ever, though, it won’t be the things that everyone can agree on, however important, that will dominate negotiations. The major battle this year will be over what the COP says about the future of the fossil fuel industry itself.

The small island states and other nations most vulnerable to climate impacts are insisting on the science. The goal of 1.5°C means reducing carbon emissions to net zero by sometime before 2050. That means ending fossil fuel use more or less entirely. (“Net” zero allows some residual emissions, but only if they are captured and stored, either by increased vegetation or geologically.) So COP28 should agree that fossil fuels must be phased out.

The European Union, with its strong pro-climate-action lobby, is sympathetic. But for China, India, the United States and Saudi Arabia it is a step much too far. They want the text to say merely that fossil fuels should be “phased down,” not out. They also want this to cover only “unabated” fossil fuels: if coal, oil and gas plants are fitted with carbon capture and storage technology to capture the emissions and bury them underground, then they should be exempt from the phase-down.

With the two groups of countries so far apart, agreeing on the text will be very difficult. So the question being asked is: will the UAE be a neutral and impartial chair of the negotiations on this crucial issue? Many observers think it is hard to believe so. Al Jaber is only COP president for a year; he will be chief executive of ADNOC for much longer. The interests of the UAE are not exactly a secret. So expect another bruising conclusion to the conference, we are told, with NGOs crying foul, and the negotiations running acrimoniously into extra time, as they so often do (last year by nearly two whole days).

But there’s another possibility. Al Jaber is a deal-maker. That’s what he does in the day job, and what he’s been doing at those meetings over the last year. He wants to show that this is what you get with a serious player from a serious oil state. So he’ll find some clever new wording to bridge the gap between “phasing out” and “phasing down,” acknowledging that the use of fossil fuels will no doubt come to an end, eventually, but in the meantime they are needed to help the world’s poor escape their poverty. And then he’ll bring the gavel down on a successful COP before, not after, the scheduled end.

In fact, he’s shown what he can do already. The first day of a COP normally manages to do no more than agree on the agenda — and that often takes hours of wrangling in itself. But the first day of COP28 on Wednesday ended with an unprecedented agreement on one of the most significant issues of the entire two weeks.

Developing countries have been arguing for years for a fund to compensate them for the “loss and damage” climate change is now inflicting on their economies. Last year they won the fund — but it had no money in it, and everyone expected the negotiations about how it was to be organised to last several more years. Yesterday, though, the UAE pulled a remarkable rabbit out of the conference hat. Not just an agreement on the arrangements for the fund, but US$440 million of financial pledges to it — including US$100 million from the UAE itself.

Curmudgeons noted that these sums are not nearly enough — the economic costs of loss and damage already run into the billions, and with the UAE’s oil revenues having soared last year to almost US$100 billion a group of former world leaders led by Gordon Brown urged it only this week to provide US$3 billion for climate change. In comparison, US$100 million is small beer.

But Al Jaber didn’t look too worried at the press conference closing the day. He had pulled off a stunning coup, developed and developing nations alike expressed themselves delighted, and the UAE was in its rightful place. •

The post Big deal in Dubai appeared first on Inside Story.

From the 7 October Hamas pogrom against Jewish residents on the borders of the Gaza Strip to the obliteration of much of the civilian infrastructure of North Gaza by Israel in retaliation, this is a merciless conflict. How will it end so that the “day after” question can begin to be answered?

The short answer is no one knows how this war will end, nor how many will be killed beyond the 1200 Israelis who have perished and, according to Gaza’s health ministry, the 11,000 Palestinians. These are the raw numbers, but they hardly reveal the extent of the destruction of a Palestinian enclave of 2.3 million people in a narrow strip of land on the Mediterranean, and nor do they account for the extent of the trauma experienced by both sides.

The day after will not simply involve a reckoning of casualty figures or physical destruction, but will also leave a traumatised Palestinian population in Gaza and an Israeli population haunted by what happened on 7 October. These are wounds that will not be healed for generations, if at all.

All wars end sooner or later, even the Hundred Years’ war, but in the case of the Gaza war it is hard to envisage how this conflict can be brought to an end in a way that will avoid further conflict in that conflict-ravaged space between the Jordan River and the sea.

Israel’s stated aim is the complete destruction of Hamas, its leadership inside Gaza, its military infrastructure and indeed its ability to reconstitute itself as a viable player. Whether this is achievable remains to be seen, since Hamas is not simply a military organisation to be defeated in the field. Like the Irish Republican Army it has a political wing and, most definitely, an ideology, whatever we might think of it.

The Israeli government has said repeatedly that what happened on 7 October means it won’t deal with Hamas, not now and not ever. What it has not made clear is the sort of arrangement that might satisfy it in Gaza once the shooting stops.

Will Israeli forces occupy Gaza and oversee the toxic aftermath of war? Will a global community shocked by the ferocity of the conflict mount a peacekeeping operation under a United Nations supervised trusteeship or some other such arrangement? Who will be responsible for the enormous cost of reconstruction that will run into billions of dollars?

Only those with direct experience of a war-ravaged wasteland pulverised by the most intensive bombing campaign since Richard Nixon’s carpet-bombing of North Vietnam in 1972 can have any idea of the extent of damage wrought by modern weaponry. Would Israel, in any case, be prepared to hand over the governance of what remains of Gaza to a depleted and discredited Palestinian Authority in faraway Ramallah in the West Bank?

Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel won’t be yielding responsibility for Gaza to the PA. He deflects questions about the circumstances in which Israel would remain in Gaza.

In any case, it is unlikely that any of this will be within his control. Politically, Netanyahu is a dead man walking given the degree of disapprobation with which he is regarded by Israelis, who blame him for security failures that enabled the 7 October attack in the first place.

PA leaders have said they won’t be reasserting responsibility for Gaza in present circumstances, weakened as they were by the election there in 2006 and having yielded control altogether to Hamas the following year. They have said they will certainly not be re-entering Gaza on the “back of an Israeli tank.”

Then there is the overarching question of whether the savagery of the Gaza conflict will bring about a full-on attempt, backed by the United States, the European Union, Arab states and the United Nations itself, to force-feed a political settlement more broadly to Israelis and Palestinians?

Here, we are talking about a two-state solution in which the Palestinians would be granted a state of their own behind secure borders in exchange for peace. This was the aim of the Oslo process of 1993–95 that delivered an agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation designed to lead to a permanent settlement after a transitional period.

The breakthrough agreement was consummated in 1993 by Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat in the presence of US president Bill Clinton on the White House lawn. Two years later, before the Oslo process took root, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish zealot opposed to peace with the Palestinians. That terrible moment, whose main political beneficiary was Netanyahu, effectively killed a nascent peace process.

In the generation since, attempts have been made by successive presidents to re-energise the peace process, Clinton at Camp David in 2000; Barack Obama in the early stages of his presidency before he foundered on Israeli obduracy and Palestinian fecklessness; George W. Bush, half-heartedly, at Annapolis in 2007; and Donald Trump with his “deal of the century” that was no deal at all as far as the Palestinians were concerned.

The Trump administration’s strategy was to persuade Arab states, principally Saudi Arabia, to make peace with Israel. The Palestinians would then be left, the strategy proposed, with little choice but to fall into line — in other words, to accommodate themselves to whatever morsels were left to them. This process was marketed by Trump as the “Abraham Accords,” as if the memory of the revered Jewish patriarch would cast a biblical spell over the region.

Among Hamas’s clear aims on 7 October was to derail that process. In that regard it has succeeded for the time being, but in the longer term it may have galvanised an international community to actually try to do something about the issue beyond mouthing empty platitudes about a “two-state solution.”

The next question is why Hamas chose to attack Israel in the way it did in the certain expectation that retaliation would be brutal and the civilian population of Gaza would bear the brunt. The answer is complex but might be explained by a nihilistic terrorist mindset that pays less attention to the consequences than to the act of terror itself.

Hamas’s branding of its military operation by reference to the violation of Jerusalem’s  Al-Aqsa mosque by an extremist member of Netanyahu’s cabinet underscores the jihadist component of what took place. But beyond all this is the possibility that Hamas may have hoped to provoke a regional conflict involving Israel in a several-fronts war with Hezbollah in Lebanon and with Syria in the north, and may even have believed Iran could be drawn into the conflict.

None of this, apart from fairly desultory rocket salvos from Hezbollah in northern Israel, has come to pass. US president Joe Biden’s decision to deploy two aircraft carrier battle groups in the region was aimed at forestalling a wider conflict. It appears to be working, for the time being.

As Israel continues to dismember what is left of the northern section of Gaza, which had been home to one million Palestinians, we come closer to the existential question: what next when, and if, the guns fall silent over a wasteland?

Having lived in the Middle East for many years, having reported from Israel and the occupied territories and having written a book about Israel–Palestine, I find it hard to be optimistic about a resolution of the longest-running conflict in modern history. For the sake of argument, though, let’s consider a scenario that harks back to the lost opportunities following the PLO’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist, as dramatised by the Rabin–Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in September 1993.

Under this optimistic, even improbable, scenario, America would lead a comprehensive process to impose a settlement on Palestinians and Israelis that would enable the two sides to accommodate each other in separate states living in relative harmony side by side. The contours of such an arrangement were negotiated up hill and down dale in the 1990s, with territory to be set aside for land swaps to compensate the Palestinians for Jewish settlements contiguous to Israel that could not be dismantled under any reasonable circumstances.

An agreement with the Palestinians would have four main pillars: the putative state of Palestine would be demilitarised, Palestinians would not have the right of return to Israel proper among families displaced in 1947–48, settlements on the boundaries of Israel would remain in place and, tackling the thorniest issue of all, East Jerusalem would be the Palestinian capital under a shared sovereignty with Israel over the Holy places. Jerusalem would be left for “final status” talks, in other words the concluding chapter of a peace settlement.

When those bare-bones details are exposed, what becomes apparent is how difficult, if not impossible, a comprehensive settlement would be. The above was more or less on the table — without the Jerusalem issue being close to being resolved — at Camp David in 2000 and in a final desultory attempt by the Clinton administration at Taba in 2001 before Bush was inaugurated.

What has happened in the meantime to further complicate the picture? Quite simply, a very great deal has transpired to make realising a two-state solution even more complicated, if not impossible. This might be described as the multidimensional Middle East Rubik’s cube.

For a start, Israel’s settlement-building in territory occupied in the 1967 Six Day war has continued apace. By 2022, Israel had 199 settlements and 220 outposts in the West Bank with something like 500,000 settlers on land occupied in 1967. Under international law those settlements on territory seized by Israel in 1967 are illegal; even Israel itself regards many of the small settler outposts as renegade establishments.

On top of that are the 250,000 Israeli residents of East Jerusalem. That adds up to three-quarters of a million Israelis who would be anxious about, if not bitterly opposed to, any peace settlement that involves relinquishing those areas.

Under present circumstances Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are subject to military rule and don’t enjoy the same civil and political rights as Israeli settlers. Human rights groups describe this as apartheid.

This is the reality of 2023. It is one of the main reasons why there are many advocates for what is described as a one-state solution, in which Israelis and Palestinians live side by side in a single state with equal rights. This is not an outcome that would be favoured by most Israelis, and certainly not those on the nationalist settler right. It is not idle to say that the country would risk falling apart on the concessions that would be required to secure an honourable settlement.

Here it might be useful to clarify a misunderstanding surrounding the failure of Camp David in 2000. Arafat got, and deserves, much of the blame for its failure; the Palestinians were deeply divided on the concessions required for an agreement. But blame should also be attached to the Americans for poor preparation of the process, and to Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who refused to meet Arafat one-on-one at Camp David.

What is often overlooked is that it was not in Barak’s gift to deliver an agreement without strings attached. He had undertaken to take the Camp David II formula to a vote of his compatriots with no certainty of a positive outcome.

If the lessons of Oslo and the other attempts at Middle East peace tell us one thing, it is that no positive outcome will come without American leadership, and not simply leadership but a willingness to take control of the process in partnership with its allies, including Arab states fearful of further destabilisation in the region.

Does America have the time and energy for such a process given challenges it faces from China in the Indo-Pacific and from Russia on NATO’s western flank, not to mention a domestic political environment that could hardly be less stable.

America and its allies have always been at pains to say it is up to the protagonists to make peace. A settlement cannot be force-fed. In light of what has happened since 7 October the question becomes whether the West in partnership with Arab states can afford to allow the situation to continue to fester.

American supporters of the Israeli settler right would certainly mobilise against a process that involved widespread dismantling of settlements. Yet no agreement will be possible without a comprehensive arrangement that respects Palestinian sovereignty, removes impediments to freedom of movement in a West Bank desiccated by settlements and, most likely, creates a secure and elevated transit route between the West Bank and Gaza that itself would need to be open to the outside world.

Only a supreme optimist would believe that all this will come to pass in very many days after the guns fall silent, and certainly not “the day after,” but it is the only plausible scenario that has emerged so far. •

The post The day after appeared first on Inside Story.

Deterrence’s conceptual framework developed around nuclear weapons. This is deterrence of a special kind, because of the absolute nature of the weapons and how hard it is to use them to win a war given the threat of retaliation in kind. We can see the caution this induces at work in the Russo-Ukraine War. NATO has not engaged directly on Ukraine’s behalf; Russia has not attacked NATO countries.

Israel also practises nuclear deterrence. It has its own arsenal, which it prefers not to talk about. It is geared to deterring Arab governments, and now Iran, from starting wars intended to destroy the Jewish state. As with all nuclear deterrence, it does not require demonstrations of what the weapons can do or a readiness to use them. All that is required is for potentially hostile governments to be aware of what could happen if an inter-state war escalates too far.

For lesser contingencies, including the threats posed by Hamas operating out of Gaza and Hezbollah out of Lebanon, deterrence looks quite different. It is not based on absolute weapons and nor does it offer constant relief from danger. There is no guarantee of success and so when it fails, if only slightly, it must be restored. It is more like a fence that easily breaks but can then be mended than a solid brick wall. Unlike nuclear deterrence, there can be no sole reliance on threats but instead a readiness to respond forcefully to any challenge to bring home to adversaries the folly of attacking Israel.

It is this deterrence that failed on 7 October 2023 and may never be restored. An enemy so irredeemably hostile that it will always be looking for ways to attack, whatever the severity of the likely response, appears beyond deterrence. Instead of deterring Hamas, Israel now wants to eliminate it as a political and military force, but any relief achieved by this approach might also be only temporary.

WHY DETERRENCE?

Before it became so dependent on deterrence, Israel sought to control threats directly by maintaining a substantial presence in Gaza and Lebanon. The costs of maintaining that presence proved too high.

In the case of Lebanon, Israel became fully engaged in the 1970s after the Palestine Liberation Organisation, having been kicked out of Jordan, took up residence there in 1970. Because Lebanon was being used to mount raids, Israel occasionally entered its territory to push the guerilla bases further away from its northern border. Then, in 1982, it entered in force, moving north until it laid siege to Beirut. The aim was to push the PLO out (with some success) and also to install a government willing to make peace with Israel (in which it failed completely). Hezbollah in its current form is a lasting consequence of those events.

The Israeli Defence Forces, or IDF, eventually withdrew to a strip of southern Lebanon, which they policed with a Christian militia. In 2000, after Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak decided the presence there was doing more harm than good, they withdrew unilaterally. Hezbollah concluded that this was a great victory and a result of its constant harassment.

Five years later Israel left Gaza, again unilaterally. Ariel Sharon, a hardliner who had made his career by being tough on Arabs and was most responsible for the debacle in Lebanon, decided as prime minister that the effort to hold on to Gaza was futile because Israel’s position could only be sustained at an inordinate cost. He ordered withdrawal. In the face of protests from their residents, the IDF closed down the settlements. (Sharon suffered a stroke and went into a coma before he could reveal what he had in mind for the West Bank.)

The withdrawal was not negotiated with the Palestinians. No plans were made for what could follow. There were hopes that Gaza might turn a corner, replacing its seething resentment at occupation with economic development, but such hopes didn’t last long. Within two years Hamas was in control, first as a result of an election victory and then having won a short civil war with the Palestinian Authority.

With only rejectionist parties active in the territory, and no interest in coexistence with Israel, Hamas turned Gaza into its base, using all available resources, including those obtained from Iran, to manufacture rockets and build tunnels for smuggling supplies and getting fighters into Israel.

DETERRENCE BY DENIAL OR PUNISHMENT

With two implacably hostile neighbours in positions to attack Israel at any time, and having abandoned the idea that they could be occupied, deterrence became the centrepiece of Israeli strategy.

Deterrence is usually described as taking one of two forms. The first is deterrence by denial, which basically means that, whatever the target’s aggressive intent, it will be unable to act upon it because it will be thwarted if it tries. The other is deterrence by punishment. In this case the target can act on hostile intent, and even do some real harm, but the punishment will be severe, and whatever the gains the costs suffered will be far higher. When an adversary is not deterred, and decides to attack, the costs must be sufficient to ensure that it does not try again. In this way deterrence can be restored.

Israel follows both forms of deterrence. For denial it constructs large fences to prevent incursions into its territory. But the fences couldn’t stop rockets fired by Hamas or Hezbollah. So Israel also developed an elaborate and advanced air defence system — the Iron Dome – to prevent rocket attacks doing too much damage. The population can also use air raid shelters to protect them from rockets that get through.

The success rate of this system is impressive but not complete, and the attacks are cheaper to mount than to stop. So Israel normally seeks to add to the price for the perpetrators with air raids on the places from where they have been launched. There is always an element of punishment.

The punishment comes in three forms. First, it attempts to assassinate those responsible, whether political figures or military. Israel’s many “targeted killings” may have disrupted the enemy’s command structures and operations in the short term, but their long-term effects are at most marginal. Other commanders step up to take the place of those killed, and there is no guarantee they will be less capable or effective.

Second, the IDF targets the military assets that make the attacks possible. Again, this can make a difference in the short term but in the long term more rockets can be built, more tunnels dug and more fighters recruited.

Third, because these assets are to be found in the middle of urban areas, often deliberately near schools and hospitals, civilians will suffer. Israel denies that it engages in collective punishment and the deliberate targeting of civilians. In the name of self-defence and military necessity, it is not a war crime to attack areas where civilians may be present if armed units are also there. Hamas can be blamed for fighting out of such populated areas and Israel urges civilians to move away from areas where fighting is likely to be intense.

But intense strikes against military targets, especially involving tunnels believed to be below occupied buildings or individuals hiding in residential areas, are going to involve many civilian casualties and wider suffering. For onlookers the distinction between collateral and deliberate damage is often hard to discern.

Another feature of deterrence is that it appears as all stick and no carrot. There is no reason in principle why negative threats can’t be combined with positive inducements, but it is not a requirement of the strategy. And if the threats are working, there is less reason to find incentives to encourage a potential adversary to coexist peacefully.

DOES IT WORK? (I) HEZBOLLAH

In July 2006 Hezbollah conducted a raid into Israel, combining rockets fired into border towns and an attack on an Israeli patrol that left three soldiers dead and two abducted to Lebanon. A failed rescue attempt led to three more deaths. Israel refused Hezbollah’s demand to swap Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails for the abducted soldiers. It responded instead with air and artillery strikes, against not only Hezbollah military targets but also Beirut airport and other civilian targets. It launched a land attack against well-prepared Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon that turned out to be costly and difficult.

Eventually the United Nations arranged a ceasefire. Much later the remains of the two soldiers were returned as part of a prisoner exchange. The operation was widely considered a failure in Israel, having exposed the country’s weaknesses to rocket attacks and a determined militia. Yet Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, acknowledged that the Israelis had killed up to twelve of his commanders and went on to make an interesting comment about the initial operation.

On the question of whether Hezbollah’s operation would have proceeded if it was felt there was “even a 1 per cent chance” it would lead to a war like the one that eventuated, he responded, “I would say no, absolutely not, for humanitarian, moral, social, security, military, and political reasons.” Israel had been waiting for an excuse for a planned attack, he added — yet this admission, and the fact that there have been clashes since but nothing quite comparable, has been taken as evidence that deterrence can perhaps work.

But while Hezbollah is undoubtedly antagonistic towards Israel, it is less so than Hamas. One reason for this is that Hezbollah is now part of the Lebanese political system. While it is the most substantial force in that country, it still has to be responsive to factions and persuasions that are less interested in its feud with Israel, and to present itself as serving Lebanese interests. With the country in an economic mess, aggravated by the massive blast at the Beirut port in 2020, and still being run by a caretaker government, it is in no position to cope well with a war with Israel. Nor is Israel angling for a war with Lebanon.

This is not straightforward Israeli deterrence. Hezbollah’s agenda is as much set by Iranian considerations as Lebanese. It sent its fighters into Syria during the civil war there, for example, where they worked (not particularly effectively) with Iranian and Russian forces to prop up the Assad regime. (It is perhaps worth noting that the Sunni Hamas did not support Assad.) It depends on Iran for its military assets, including its large number of missiles, which are much more capable than those of Hamas. It has no particular incentive to go to war with Israel other than as part of a larger Iranian project.

DOES IT WORK? (II) GAZA

The Gaza experience has been different. Ever since Hamas took over the territory, the periods of calm on the border have been few. Clashes have varied in intensity and frequency, with big ones every few years. Each case involves rocket fire by Hamas (and its junior partner, Islamic Jihad) and air and artillery strikes by the Israelis; the casualties are starkly asymmetric, with those on the Palestinian side far greater than those on the Israeli, especially for civilians.

The suffering of Palestinians in these flare-ups leads international organisations, governments and campaigning groups to denounce Israel for acting disproportionately. Other than in 2021, when unrest spread to Arab communities in Israel, supporting protests have been held in the West Bank and elsewhere, but not much more. After weeks of fighting, a ceasefire of some sort has been struck and nothing much has changed once the fighting subsided.

The regularity of the clashes suggests that deterrence has worked poorly in Gaza. From the Israeli perspective the priority has mainly been to show that it is not rattled by provocations and will respond forcefully each time. These responses were described by some Israelis as “mowing the lawn,” a phrase capturing the idea of an indefinite conflict containable by occasional forceful action.

Part of the shock of 7 October was that the Israeli government had convinced itself that its approach was working, to the extent that it was starting to ease the restrictions on Gaza. Islamic Jihad was a problem, but Hamas didn’t seem too interested in any more violence. What happened then, in Israeli eyes, was a failure not only of intelligence but also of deterrence, and the extent of the failure meant restoring deterrence no longer seemed an option.

The response followed the same pattern as before, except with more intensity. Many individuals connected with Hamas and in particular the attacks of 7 October have been targeted and killed. Military infrastructure has been hit mercilessly, and the consequences of Hamas’s actions have been brought home to the suffering population far more ferociously than in past episodes and with far more civilian casualties and general distress. Despite Hamas’s original provocation, this has led to international anger and demands for a ceasefire.

We can question whether deterrence was ever operating effectively, but it certainly isn’t now. Israel has no interest in persuading Hamas not to attack again. It wants to make sure that it never has the capacity to do so.

But it does need to deter Hezbollah, and in practice Iran. The latter’s network, including the Houthis in Yemen, has been busy. So far, much of that has been largely posturing, with the aim of demonstrating what might happen if the war continues at its current pace. In this respect it might be argued that the deterrence offered by Iran/Hezbollah has failed because Israel has pressed on regardless with its ground war, though they might claim that they are tying down Israeli forces that might otherwise be used against Hamas.

If Hezbollah did want to get involved, it would have had more effect if it had done so early on. Israel is now geared up for a two-front war, including evacuating people from the border with Lebanon and restocking the Iron Dome. This doesn’t mean Hezbollah won’t get involved, especially if the accusations of letting Hamas down start to worry its leadership. But the key decisions will be taken in Teheran, which will have to consider whether this is the issue with which to take on the United States. A tweet from Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi — “Zionist regime’s crimes have crossed the red lines, which may force everyone to take action” — suggests that no decision has yet been made.

The pressure will also grow on other Arab countries to do more than issue statements, especially those like Saudi Arabia that have already “normalised” relations with Israel or were preparing to. It is hard to assess how they will act, but if they look ahead they should see a significant role for themselves in shaping the new order that might yet emerge.

NEXT STEPS

Israel’s land invasion of Gaza was undertaken despite US misgivings and Saudi objections — one a country on which Israel relies, the other that it has been courting. The foreign ministry has insulted the numerous countries supporting the ceasefire resolution in the General Assembly, and refused to talk to UN secretary-general António Guterres because he saw equivalence between the unprovoked attacks on Israel’s people and the ruthless response undertaken in the name of self-defence.

Israel can note that it is hardly the only state in the region that puts its security needs above humanitarian considerations. The past decade has seen extraordinary loss of life in the battles against Islamic State and in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen (the last two with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths). But the pressure on it to stop will only grow. Israel is used to treading a lonely path, and it may find its position gets lonelier. As with its previous wars, it will be resisting pressure for a ceasefire until its objectives have been achieved.

Can its objectives be achieved? That is not yet a given. Information on what is going on in the battles in northern Gaza and towards Gaza City are sketchy, so it is unwise to speculate. It is also unclear how much humanitarian assistance will be able to get into Gaza in these conditions, and whether countries like Qatar are still potential mediators, including in efforts to get hostages released. In all of this, the biggest uncertainty away from the battlefield and the potential widening of the war is the future governance of Gaza.

Israel has been forced to look beyond deterrence. It has concluded that it is dealing with an entity that has never truly been deterred and can’t be deterred in the future. Wilder elements in Israel may fantasise about pushing all the Gazans out of the territory, but that is not a serious option. This is where the other flaw in Israel’s deterrence strategy becomes painfully evident. It has not been accompanied by a more positive political strategy. The only long-term vision Israel offers is a Gaza without Hamas. The chaos and instability that would result if Gaza were turned into an ungovernable space without anyone in charge would serve nobody’s interests. A way will have to be found to fill the space.

Given how Israel has defined its objectives, success for Hamas simply requires surviving in a commanding position in Gaza. Even if it is forced to evacuate its positions, Hamas will not disappear. It represents a strong political tradition in the Arab world, and regardless of what happens to it over the coming weeks it will have the capacity to regenerate and to return to power if there is no alternative government in place.

There is no evidence of great love for Hamas among Gazans, and at some point they will reflect on the missed opportunities to develop the territory and the wisdom of its constantly provoking Israel into attacks that it is unable to mitigate. Nor is there much respect for the Palestinian Authority, which is generally considered to be inept, corrupt and unable to stand up at all to the Israelis. Though constitutionally the PA’s return to Gaza would seem the best option, this would be greeted suspiciously in the best of circumstances and even more so if it arrived behind Israeli tanks. Any government installed by Israel would lack legitimacy and would be a natural target for assassins.

If Israel can’t find a government for Gaza, someone else will have to. Here the main initiative will have to come from the Arab world, probably in concert with the United States. This seems to be what many analysts anticipate happening after this war. It is possible, for example, to imagine at some point a multilateral conference including the main Arab and Western players, with Israel on the sidelines, given the job of coming up with a viable government for Gaza and managing the influx of aid necessary if the territory is to recover from the traumas of the past weeks and look to possibilities for future development. It would also need to consider both Gaza’s internal security and how to stop it causing trouble to its neighbours (Egypt as well as Israel) in the future.

In principle, this process could be confined to Gaza, but Arab governments are unlikely to cooperate unless the future of the West Bank is also tackled. The trade that Israel faces in return for insisting that Hamas plays no part in the territory’s government is that the “two-state solution” is put back on the agenda. Most Western governments have already been quite explicit on this matter.

Netanyahu has been around long enough to know that dismissing the two-state solution out of hand isn’t realistic, even though he has built his career on subverting the idea. That’s why he was content to leave the rejectionist Hamas in charge in Gaza as he made life difficult for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The encroachment of settlements on the West Bank has made the prospect of a viable Palestinian state there seem even more remote.

All one can say is that this war changes a lot. When the two-state solution has come up, as it did for example in the prewar talks with Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu has paid lip service to the idea and pointed to the rivalry between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to show why progress is impossible.

But that excuse won’t work if a way can be found to get Hamas out of Gaza. Netanyahu is unlikely to be on the scene for much longer. After all this, Israel’s Western and Arab partners are not going to want to let the situation drift away into catastrophe again. If there is to be any resolution of the current conflict, the starting point will be taking the fate of Gaza away from both Hamas and Israel. •

The post How Israel’s deterrence policy came undone appeared first on Inside Story.

Rightly, a barrage of words has been fired to describe Hamas’s recent attacks: atrocious, abhorrent, despicable, outrageous, inhuman, nihilistic. They are all well chosen. The biggest shock lay in the assault’s surprise, brutality and short-term success. How could the much-vaunted and feared Israeli intelligence and defence establishment be caught out so badly?

Martin Indyk, who served twice as the US ambassador to Israel, suggested a “total system failure on Israel’s part.” Through sophisticated spying Israelis are accustomed to knowing exactly what the Palestinians are doing. Israel has built a very expensive wall between Gaza and its side of the border. How was it possible, Indyk asked, for “a ragtag band of terrorists” to beat the “mighty” Israeli intelligence community and defence forces? The answer, in part, “was hubris — an Israeli belief that sheer force could deter Hamas, and that Israel did not have to address the long-term problems.”

Nimrod Novik, a former adviser to the late Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, spoke of Israel’s two-layered strategic failure. Netanyahu and his current coalition, “the most extreme ever,” downplayed or ignored warnings from several Arab states about Palestinian grievances. Netanyahu pursued the illusion that even under his draconian policies — which have long turned Gaza into what Human Rights Watch calls “the world’s largest open-air prison” — Hamas would abstain from the sort of attacks that might jeopardise its hold on power in Gaza.

Haaretz journalist Amira Hass argued that Israeli security forces neglected the defence of communities near the Gaza Strip because they were preoccupied with “defending the settlers in the West Bank, their land seizures, and their rites of stone and altar worshipping.” Such neglect, she said, was inherently connected to one of the chief goals of Netanyahu and his religious Zionist supporters, accelerating the de facto annexation of most of the West Bank and increasing the settler population there. Haaretz editorialised that the government had left the Gaza border communities unprotected as “the IDF provided security for every settler whim.”

Netanyahu has been an ardent champion of West Bank settlements, the growth of which makes the idea of a viable Palestinian state fanciful. He has desisted from annexing (at least) large chunks of the occupied West Bank only because of likely US disapproval. UN figures show that in the ten years to 2022, the population of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, grew to around 700,000. The settlers live illegally in 279 Israeli settlements across the West Bank, including fourteen settlements in East Jerusalem.

The company Netanyahu keeps should give considerable pause for thought. On 1 March this year the head of a pro-settler party, Netanyahu’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, called for the Palestinian West Bank village of Huwara to be “erased.” This followed a settler rampage through the village that one Israeli general described as a “pogrom.” A US State Department spokesperson described Smotrich’s comments as “irresponsible… repugnant [and] disgusting.” Undeterred, Smotrich followed up by declaring that “there is no such thing as the Palestinian people.”

Last August, Netanyahu’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, exhibited a similar sneering condescension, declaring that his family’s right to move around the West Bank “is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.”

Israelis mourning their dead might reflect on the awful reality that, stretching back to the 1980s, Israeli governments have provided limited funding and intelligence assistance to Hamas, at first seeing the Islamist organisation as a useful counterweight to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation under the quixotic Yasser Arafat. This assistance continued after the formation of the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s nominal partner in any “peace process.”

Michael Hirsh, a columnist for Foreign Policy, commented recently that Netanyahu’s various governments ended up weakening the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas — who wanted to negotiate — while strengthening Hamas, which has vowed Israel’s destruction. Hirsh quoted Gilead Sher, chief of staff to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who has said that Netanyahu’s policy to “nearly topple” the Palestinian Authority fostered Hamas’s “sense of impunity and capability.” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal that “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

Hamas calculated, correctly, that its break-out in Gaza and Israel’s inevitably harsh response would freeze steps towards normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Shortly after the Gaza attacks the Saudis issued a statement accusing Israel of ignoring their repeated warnings of an explosion “as a result of the continued occupation and deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights.” Martin Indyk commented that the image of American weapons in Israeli hands killing large numbers of Palestinians will ignite a “strong reaction” around the Arab world. President Biden’s whistle-stop visit to Israel has done nothing to dampen that reaction.

Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas political leader who lives in exile in Qatar (Hamas’s military commanders are based in Gaza) explained the motivation for the Gaza attacks as a profound sense of frustration and defeat. But Hamas’s embarrassment of Israel comes at an unimaginable cost to the people of Gaza. The Economist has calculated that the scale of Israel’s bombardment — 6000 bombs dropped in six days, compared with 2000 to 5000 per month across Iraq and Syria during the American-led air campaign against Islamic State from 2014 to 2019 —  suggested that “the definition of military targets is being stretched to breaking-point.”

On 10 October, the Israeli Defence Forces’ Major General Ghassan Alian declared that “Human animals must be treated as such… There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, weighed in, asserting at a press conference that all citizens of Gaza were responsible for the Hamas attack. “It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.”

Such nonsense points to the glaring double standard in some commentary about Gaza. Hamas’s rule is rightly derided as brutal and authoritarian, yet there seems an expectation that ordinary Palestinians should miraculously rise up and overthrow it. In the New York Review of Books Fintan O’Toole wrote that “Hamas’s knowing provocation of Israel’s wrath against a Gazan population it cannot then defend shows that Hamas cares as little for its own civilians as it does for the enemy’s.” That is the sickening truth.

Ben Saul, head of international law at Sydney University, has argued that Hamas should be held accountable for its “atrocious war crimes.” He added, though, that Australian defence minister Richard Marles’s claim that Israel was acting within the rules of war indicated only that Marles was “poorly briefed.”

One stark Israeli violation, Saul wrote, was its medieval “complete siege” of Gaza, with no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. “A sixteen-year blockade has already debilitated Gaza. This latest turning of the screw is unlawful and could constitute the war crime of starving civilians. It could also be unlawful collective punishment if it aims to retaliate against all Gazans for Hamas’ sins.”

Running against Netanyahu in the Israeli 2019 general election, the former Israeli army chief Benny Gantz released a campaign video boasting that during the 2014 Israel–Gaza war, “parts of Gaza were returned to the stone ages.” Gantz is now part of the emergency war cabinet and is no doubt keen to finish the job. Israel clearly has the capacity to level what is left of Gaza city, killing many (more) thousands of Palestinian men, women and children, including Hamas and other Islamist militants.

That might trigger a wider war. Martin Indyk has commented that if the Palestinian death toll rises, “Hezbollah will be tempted to join the fray. They have 150,000 rockets they can rain down on Israel’s main cities.” Even if that doesn’t happen, the question of “what now?” only comes sooner. If Hamas is obliterated, what then? Who will rule Gaza? The Israelis? They tried that once before, with unhappy results. The Palestinian Authority? It struggles to maintain its shaky rule in the West Bank.

Whatever the future, it will be troublesome, to say the least. In one way or another we will all pay a price. •

The post Netanyahu’s war appeared first on Inside Story.

Bowker is the “dean” of an exceptional group of Australian diplomats who dedicated their careers to understanding the region. That description comes from Nick Warner, a wise owl of Canberra foreign policy, defence and intelligence, who says Bowker throws much light “on the history of our relationship with the Middle East, where we have gone wrong and right, and what we should do now.”

The book’s title — Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots: An Australian Diplomat in the Arab World — gives a taste, in several senses. Bowker explains that the apricot prophecy is a Syrian saying similar to “pigs might fly.” The hope for apricots, he writes, “captures an unquenchable, droll optimism which, together with the deep appreciation of culture and hospitality, ranks highly among the virtues that define what it means to be Arab. It also reflects an abiding scepticism towards the pretensions of those in positions of authority.”

In just 300 pages Bowker offers two books. The first traces his career in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT, as a Middle East specialist, after he joined as a diplomatic cadet in 1971. The second, “Reflections,” is an analysis of the big issues confronting the region.

The two-in-one package is a fine blend of the personal and the policy, describing a fifty-year journey: thirty-seven years with DFAT and twelve years as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments and an academic at the Australian National University.

“Being an Australian diplomat in the Arab world was more than a career: it was an adventure,” Bowker writes. “In many ways it was my life.” He reminds us that former prime minister John Howard labelled himself a cricket “tragic” because he was tragically in love with the game. Bowker embraces the hopelessly-in-love thought, titling the first half of the book “The Career of a Middle East Tragic.”

It’s notable the book starts with that light-hearted reference to Howard, because one of the great policy fights of Bowker’s career was Howard’s shifting of Australian policy on Palestinian self-determination to lean towards Israel. The diplomat notes he was “trumped by the prime minister” and “went down in flames.”

A great scene in this flame-up has Bowker locked in a shouting match with the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser at the annual conference of the Zionist Federation. Howard was sitting only metres away, preparing to address the conference dinner. His breach with Canberra is an example of Bowker’s observation that the policy choices the Middle East must live with are divided between bad and much worse.

Tragically in love with the Middle East in all its tragic complications, Bowker offers great yarns, finely told. He has an ear for the telling quote and an eye for a good scene.

Heading off for his first overseas post as a third secretary only seven months after joining the department, he records the three pieces of advice given him in the conversation that amounted to his consular “training”: “Never take possession of a corpse. Never take possession of a madwoman. Use your common sense. And that was it.”

At his second post in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, his struggle learning Arabic is illustrated by his regular visit to a roadside stall: “I later realised that when I thought I was asking, in terrible Arabic, for a freshly cooked chicken, I was actually asking for a fresh wife. The stall owner didn’t seem to mind.” But Bowker’s “colloquial Levantine Arabic” had uses beyond talking to stallholders and taxi drivers. To impose ceremonial pain on Sudan’s president for atrocities by his tribal proxies in Darfur, the ambassador gave “my speech on presentation of my credentials in Arabic.”

A gem of a chapter entitled “Touring Tobruk by Moonlight” captures Libya’s “blend of chaos and impenetrability under the Ghaddafi regime” by describing Bowker visiting, as the non-resident ambassador, as scout for a visit to the war cemetery by the Australian defence minister. Two Libyan minders drive Bowker from Benghazi in a car that “sounded very sick indeed” to visit a range of war cemeteries — British, French and German — but can’t find the Australian site until the moon is out.

At the end, the minders have an animated discussion about the report they must file “on why the ambassador chap had been scoping out the port area and surrounds of Tobruk, especially the high ground overlooking the harbour, quizzing the locals about the layout of the urban area, and doing so in execrable Arabic.” When they got back to Benghazi at 1.30am, one of the minders “shook my hands and planted kisses on both my cheeks. When you are kissed by a Libyan security official, you know it is time to go home.”

Writing of his time in Syria in the 1970s, Bowker recounts a local quip: “Saudi Arabia exports oil, Iraq exports dates, Egypt exports jokes and Syria exports trouble.” The three-line description of president Hafez al-Assad, the late father of the incumbent, is a miniature masterpiece of disdain: “his smile was like moonlight on a tombstone,” he had a “penchant for delivering historical lectures” and he dominated meetings with “his awe-inspiring bladder control.”

Bowker’s sad conclusion is that the Assad family — Hafez and now his son Bashar — has become the regime that outlasted its country. The bedrock of Bashar’s rule is its brutality, he writes, and father and son always avoided “questions about the appropriate relationship in Syria between state and society.”

Among his reflections, Bowker considers the department that made his career, lamenting how the role of Australia’s diplomats in Canberra has changed, “and not for the better.” DFAT, he argues, gives priority to trade and consular crisis management ahead of the research and thinking needed for effective foreign policy planning and advocacy. Policy is made in ministerial offices, with the department seen as mere implementor. “This is a deeply problematic direction for any government, or government department, to take.”

DFAT no longer debates with itself and the rest of Canberra through despatches and cables: “The final decade or two of my time in the department saw a shift to reporting by cable that was prone to be concise rather than nuanced. It was directed in its brevity towards immediate briefing needs, rather than the evaluation of trends and their consequences for Australian interests.”

Under the Howard government, he notes, the lengthy despatch from an overseas post became a thing of the past: “By the time I retired it had become almost unthinkable to reflect on broader issues, let alone to challenge policy settings, in cable traffic.”

In this second half of the book Bowker considers three core questions:

• “How do you build peace between two peoples — Israelis and Palestinians — with compelling national rights, human rights and historical narratives, but who have a clear imbalance of power?”

• How do you connect the present, the past and the politics of Palestinian identity? This is an intellectual who twenty years ago wrote a book called Palestinian Refugees: Mythology, Identity, and the Search for Peace. As a diplomat, he offers the answer (“if there is one”) of negotiating on interests, because beliefs are “organic, structural and fundamentally non-negotiable.”

• How does the Arab world confront its demographic fate (a Middle East population of 724 million people by 2050) and its economic and social challenges while preserving its Arab and Islamic identity? “None of the current leaderships of the major Arab states and Iran have answers to the problems of legitimacy and governance,” Bowker writes. His fear is that governments will “grow more authoritarian, transactional and violent in their instincts and behaviour.”

Defending privilege and predictability, rulers have found that repression works for them, arguing that “freedom is more likely to produce chaos and division rather than bread and social justice.”

The Arab outlook, Bowker observes, feels like being on the bridge of the Titanic smelling the ice. It took the Titanic a long time to sink, though, and the modern Arab world has no way to stop the drivers of change, which are “generational and societal as well as political.”

On the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Bowker declares that the two-state approach pursued since the 1990s is “dead.” He pointedly calls it a two-state “approach” because no solution is in sight. If that option is mired in fundamental conundrum, the path to justice is by “building a foundation for Palestinian rights and dignity among Israelis.”

Israel can facilitate a new, more positive future for Palestinians and Israelis, he says, without raising existential questions for Israel: “The absence of sovereignty is a legitimate grievance for Palestinians, but in practice it is the absence of dignity and economic security that matters much more.”

If the two-state vision/solution is dead, as Bowker avers, then Palestine’s dream of independence must fade. As the Economist observed recently, the Palestinian diaspora has “begun to call for a one-state solution, where Jews and Arabs between the Jordan rivers and the Mediterranean would live together in a single democratic state — and where Arabs would have a slender overall majority.”

For Israel and the Arab world, demography should meet democracy, and history must reconcile with geography.

Bowker concludes that the fun and frustrations of his life as a Middle East tragic have forced him to accept key realities. Middle East policy is not a morality play; expediency shapes decisions: “The logic of strategy is not always consistent with the logic of politics.”

Diabolical complexity rules. It is in the nature of the Middle East for problems to linger and become more complex: “We must accept that views, interests and values within Arab societies are more likely to differ from our own: any apparent synchronicity of views should be cause for caution, as well as celebration.”

The final sentence of this tragic’s meditation on his life’s works reads: “And, despite almost fifty years of exposure to the Arab world, I remained free of tribal delusions, except where Collingwood is concerned.”

Ah, the Melbourne conundrum of the Collingwood Football Club — the only passion running through this fine book that (in the tribal view of this reviewer) does not bend towards truth and logic. •

Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots: An Australian Diplomat in the Arab World
By Robert Bowker | Shawline Publishing | $24.95 | 307 pages

The post Memoirs of a Middle East tragic appeared first on Inside Story.

Nothing about Vatikiotis’s life is straightforward. Born in 1957 of parents forced to leave postcolonial Egypt, ending up in suburban Indianapolis where his father got a teaching job, Vatikiotis was educated in England and has spent most of his life in Southeast Asia. He went to Asia first as a BBC correspondent, then joined the staff of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He now lives in Singapore.

Vatikiotis’s published works are an indication of the depth and range of his knowledge of the region, and include four works of fiction. But with Lives Between the Lines he leaves Southeast Asia behind to delve into his own complex lineage.

The book opens with one of the most arresting sentences I’ve come across in reviewing: “The Ottomans were poor timekeepers.” It quickly becomes clear that Vatikiotis isn’t emphasising how backward that empire’s timekeeping was — the usual kind of response when that bygone polity is mentioned — but highlighting its success.

Timekeeping was initially needed primarily to facilitate the Muslim call to prayer, but with successive dynasties and the arrival of a mix of different peoples and their disparate religions, each with its own calendar, time grew ever more complicated. Even after mechanical clocks began appearing (the gifts of visiting Europeans) the Ottomans “set the hand to twelve at sunset.” Public clocks and bells were generally outlawed into the seventeenth century, and each different means of measuring time was accommodated.

How did this work? As it happened, reasonably well. For more than 600 years, until its final dismantling after the first world war, the Ottomans presided over a vast plurality with surprising harmony.

But time sped up, leaving this empire behind. Beginning with Napoleon’s conquests, British–French rivalry set in motion the decline of the Ottomans. Napoleon invaded Ottoman Egypt in 1798 to further his plan to wrest India from Britain and dent its commercial supremacy. It was Egypt’s misfortune to straddle the isthmus connecting Europe with Asia, and Napoleon’s to be defeated. But Europe had established its beachhead.

A succession of Ottoman viceroys of Egypt, eager to corner its share of the global trade, negotiated with the two European rivals over digging a canal to connect the Mediterranean and Red Seas. In 1859, the year that Darwin published his Origin of Species, work began.

As Vatikiotis explains it, the Suez Canal changed everything. Its building brought a host of surveyors, architects, and other European entrepreneurs and professionals to Egypt at a time when Europe was in chaos and the Levant was stable and thriving. For visionaries and hopefuls alike it was the place to be.

Yet for all the material progress the canal represented, it left the Egyptians seriously indebted, and Egypt itself something of a vassal state. It was the beginning of the end for the pashas, but it also ushered in a period of increased cosmopolitanism: a hundred years in which Europeans were added to the Ottoman mix.

The author’s forebears were part of this great eastward migration. Vatikiotis set out in 2019 to uncover their stories, and as is the way of these journeys, to discover his own. He began in Port Said, the city where his parents met, now a sad remnant of its glory days. His mother, Patricia, was the daughter of a former British soldier who joined the colonial service and married into an Italian–Jewish family that had settled in Egypt during the previous century. Vatikiotis’s father, Panayiotis, was of Greek-Palestinian heritage, so his searches also took him to Israel.

From these pivotal points, the narrative branches out in space and time. We meet the Soragnas from northern Italy, the first Vatikiotis from Hydra, and other twigs on the spreading family tree. Greeks from Palestine who’d never seen Greece; Italians from Egypt, few of whom saw Italy: all of them were imbued with a sense of themselves that crossed national borders, formed by the tolerance that marked an empire where Jews and Muslims and Christians lived in messy if mainly happy accommodation.

Vatikiotis never claims, though, that the Ottoman arrangements were perfect. Inequality existed along with plurality, a matter of class as much as religious or ethnic identity — all of which he explores in detail.

After the spell in America, his father, a noted scholar, moved the family to England, where the author grew up in relative privilege, attending a British boarding school and then Oxford University. Yet he hasn’t much good to say about the British, or the blind intolerance that characterised their empire. Nor is he happy about the British penchant for neatness, divide-and-rule and partitioning being their standard solutions to problems of imperial governance. Thus were Britain’s parting shots in India and Palestine, with horrific effects in both cases.

The Middle East is seen today as a region of intractable conflict, the very reverse of what it was in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, when Europe was being torn apart by revolution and war. Almost a century after the Suez Canal was built, Britain and France together enlisted Israel in an attempt to stop Egypt from nationalising it, and thus cutting off their supply chains. But the Americans had left the two old rivals behind, establishing their own empire in opposition to the Soviets in the rising cold war, and intervened in what we now know as the Suez crisis. So, in a sense, Lives Between the Lines is the story of the fate of empires, and a clear-eyed assessment of the achievements and failings of each.

As for the Ottomans, Vatikiotis cites two main reasons for the demise of “this constructive cosmopolitan complexity”: “European imperialism with its uni-dimensional line-drawing… and the parallel emergence of puritanical strains of Judaism and Islam.” Instead of what he calls “the fluid lattice of overlapping transactions that characterised Ottoman society” we’ve been left with a world rigidly bisected, with immeasurable suffering in consequence.

To help us on our travels with Vatikiotis, his publisher has supplied maps, an index and an excellent timeline of significant events. With all this and its fascinating perspectives to ponder, it seems churlish of me to remark that I could have used a family tree as well. Then again, given the complexity of his lineage, it might have proved too broad to fit comfortably on a page. And we might find, if we dare to look at ourselves through the lens of his thought-provoking book, that we too are — or at least are increasingly becoming — cosmopolitans, despite those hard lines the powers have insisted on drawing for us. •

The post On being cosmopolitan appeared first on Inside Story.

After more than a year of disruption and uncertainty — a time when coping with anxiety was a major challenge — this might seem like the last perspective we need. In spite of its portentous title, though, this is no empty indulgence in doomsaying. Grant wants to make an urgent case for a fundamental political reorientation.

With the Falling of the Dusk is mainly a book about China, and about Grant’s experience as correspondent for CNN in Hong Kong — during 1997, the year the territory began its long reckoning for a century and a half of British control — and Beijing. Recent events in Hong Kong have served to confirm a grim challenge: how many times does the Communist Party leadership need to tell the West that they reject liberal democracy before we accept the reality?

Grant has chosen the politically potent metaphor of the virus deliberately. Under Stalin and Hitler, targeted populations were characterised as infections to be eradicated. The totalitarian state itself, as Francis Fukuyama warned in his 1989 book, The End of History and the Last Man, “could replicate itself throughout the world like a virus.”

Fukuyama’s big-picture view of history is in tune with Grant’s way of thinking. Both acknowledge the influence of the early nineteenth-century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, who drew an arc from imperial China through the foundations of democracy in the classical world to the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath.

Mention Hegel, and you have to explain him, or at least explain enough to justify the allusion. That’s no easy task in a book designed for readers unlikely to be interested in the metaphysical wranglings of the Enlightenment. Grant devotes only a few pages to the task, though he insists that “Hegel looms over us” and we cannot understand our own political environment without some grasp of his ideas.

Hegel may also throw light on Grant’s enterprise in a way that he doesn’t mention. According to the great German theorist, history can be done in three ways: through first-hand witness and documentation; by situating events in the longer sweep of time; and as a form of philosophy, identifying overarching patterns in the march of civilisation. By braiding all three strands, Grant builds a sense of urgency.

The reporter who has been sent to Papua New Guinea, North Korea, China, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq to witness some of the darkest scenes in recent history is backed up by the historian who places them in the larger scheme of things. The philosopher is compelled to ask where all this is heading, and whether we still have the time or the awareness to stave off the worst of what the future may hold.

Many foreign correspondents write books, but few do so with such intellectual ambition and historical sweep. And I doubt many of them read Hegel, who may seem a remote and abstruse figure to most of those who front world crises. Yet the work of bearing witness to human cruelty and derangement also prompts a need for larger structures of understanding in which reason holds its place as an article of faith.

Rationality and optimism, though, don’t necessarily go together. When Fukuyama, in a mood of Hegelian buoyancy, rashly proclaimed the end of history, he believed that the grand narrative of humanity’s march towards freedom was at last being brought to its conclusion: capitalism had triumphed; the totalitarian regimes of communism were a spent force.

Fukuyama himself has clarified and largely retracted those predictions; and Grant’s ongoing determination to wrestle with them, which he has done numerous times in reports for the ABC, seems driven by a conviction that Fukuyama was not just wrong, but wrong in a critical way. History has returned with a vengeance, with China as the model towards which the major political traditions are converging. And now the virus may prove to be the instrument through which freedom itself is terminally weakened.

Grant’s brief as Beijing correspondent involved covering major political moments, such as the accession speech of Xi Jinping, but also gave him licence to hunt the length and breadth of the country for stories illustrating all aspects of contemporary life. He provides a distressing account of the wet markets in Guangdong at the time of the SARS outbreak in 2002. Poverty shapes destinies in many ways. Near Lanzhou in the northwest, where the suicide rate is high, a fisherman adapts his inherited trade to make an income hauling in the corpses of those who have jumped from the bridge. He posts the photographs online, and relatives can then pay to view the corpse for identification.

Ever-present official minders and trackers must be evaded on an expedition to Chengdu on the Tibetan border to speak to Buddhist monks protesting about the crackdown in their homeland. Reporting in this country is a cat-and-mouse game that is by turns dangerous and absurd: new tactics are constantly needed to hide footage and outwit the surveillance.

The assiduous journalist alternates between chasing emerging stories in the provinces and delving into the background of the people who steer events, but the weave of destiny is always his underlying story. The roles of reporter, historian and philosopher merge seamlessly in Grant’s narrative.

In search of insights into how a new form of leadership has emerged in China, he visits Mao’s living quarters in Yan’an, where the Long March ended. A photo hanging outside shows the young Mao still in political exile, weakened by hunger and depression, who was spending days and nights alone in the mountains planning the guerilla campaign that would change the course of the revolution.

Mao and Xi carried bitter experience of privation and exclusion into positions of supreme power, and the consequences are still playing out in the reign of Xi, who calls himself “son of the Yellow Earth.” Like Mao, Xi has ridden the wheel of political fortune. Tainted by the reputation of a father who was purged from the party, Xi spent his childhood in a re-education program, so ragged and underweight he lacked the strength for the farm labour to which he was assigned.

Such reversals of fortune are emblematic of revolution itself, expressing the capacity of the people as a whole to rise from the worst of human conditions to become a force of destiny. This is Hegel with a twist. How is it that the rise of the people as an expression of the world spirit has led only to a worse form of despotism?

And there is no cause for complacency in the West, where a very different narrative of freedom has led us to a state of delusion. “History hisses at us like the devil,” Grant warns, yet we fail to hear it. There are parallels with 1914, when the worst-case scenario played out because so many believed it could not. Even since the publication of this book, talk of potential conflict with China is recklessly leaking onto the front pages in Australia.

But might such pessimism itself be a dangerous indulgence? If we are at a crucial hinge point, perhaps a journalist who has supped full of horrors from the worst places of human suffering and cruelty is not the best guide to the way forward. “The things I have seen weigh heavy on my soul,” Grant acknowledges. But these things do exist out there in the world.

Just over halfway through the book the focus shifts to Pakistan, where Grant made several visits in the mid 2000s, and found another order of horror unfolding, one without even the pretence of reason and justice that inspired the revolutionary leaders of China. It is there that he finds his way to “a place beyond grace,” in a town square in the Swat Valley where headless bodies are dumped and the heads impaled on posts or left on doorsteps.

Zibahkhana Chowk, or “Slaughter Square” as it is now called, is an exhibition of extreme human pathology. There may be versions of it in any war zone. It is the heart of darkness that Conrad found in the Congo and Coppola recreated for Apocalypse Now in an abandoned Angkor Temple near the mouth of Cambodia’s Nùng River. In Coppola’s version the presiding spirit is Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a colonel in the US army who has gone into full-blown psychosis and used his military authority to create hell on earth.

Grant finds “the devil incarnate” in the very different guise of Imran, a tall, red-haired Pashtun man taken captive by Pakistani troops. Imran has a voice like honey — smooth, quiet and alluring — and the demeanour of a holy man. It has been his job to mentor the boys who will become suicide bombers, poisoning their minds with visions of a higher destiny. Reason, the core business of Hegelian history, has no place here.

The world is what it is, and journalists must report it as they find it. If Grant’s primary aim were to provide an overview of his experiences as a foreign correspondent, the accounts of what he witnessed in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan would clearly belong here. But he is attempting something much more. He wants to do the historian’s work of analysis and correlation, and the philosopher’s work of interpretation.

His Hegelian paradigm is convincing when it’s applied to China, where the long march of history is a drama by turns heroic, tragic, harrowing, euphoric and ominous. As he was told repeatedly during his ten years in the country, there’s no China without Mao, no Mao without Marx. And no Marx without Hegel. In a revolutionary scenario, big ideas lead to big events, not vice versa.

The chapters on China have a cohesiveness and depth that is missing from the rest of the book. There’s an atmosphere, too, created from the opening paragraphs, where Grant recalls the train journey into China with his family on Christmas Day in 2004, feeling “the pull of the earth” in a land that seems to pulse with memory.

As the landscape unfolds in the morning light, his attention is caught by a solitary figure working in the field. The man looks old, and must have lived through tumultuous changes: the birth of the People’s Republic, the reign of Mao and the Great Leap Forward. Grant, as a Wiradjuri man bearing a heritage of dispossession, senses a fellow time traveller. “We were twinned with fate,” he writes. “We belonged to old cultures whose worlds had been upended by the march of modernity.” This upending brings with it a legacy of anger towards the modernising nations, with their presumptions of moral authority and powers to enforce it.

Grant’s style may be cool and measured, but at its heart this is an angry book. Civilisations have long memories, he warns, while nations think only of tomorrow. As China and Australia face off in an absurdly mismatched game of sanctions, and our great ally America is trying to work its way out of a political quagmire, a reckoning looms.

So what are we to do? No world-historical individuals are in sight, at least from our side of the picture, which could be a blessing. One of the bitterest lessons of a failed democracy is that the people have only themselves to blame. Perhaps they are also to blame for states of post-revolutionary dictatorship. At the end of his documentary novel Stalingrad, Vasily Grossman launches into a tirade against the people, seeing the underlying cause of Stalin’s regime in a resurgence of “the soul of the serf” among the Soviet citizenry.

When things get fraught, it feels good to lay some blame, even if it means blaming oneself. It may feel good, but whether it does any good is another matter, and that depends on whether the hinge point is a point of no return. This would not be the first time the spectre of 1914 has reared its head and faded again. If we are not there yet — and as Grant claims, “destination is a Western idea” — a moment of reckoning may be to some purpose.

Grant contrasts his vision of the Chinese peasant working in the fields at daybreak, heralding a world of possibility and a new story to tell, with the image of his title, taken from Hegel. “Wisdom is not gained in the dawn; the owl of Minerva spreads its wings with the falling of the dusk.”

Hegel wrestled with the question of whether the long march of history was on some predetermined course. He rejected such a view, believing it left no real place for human freedom and agency. There are times when events seem to converge in inevitable ways, and it is perhaps this, above all, that is the most dangerous assumption.

For all his apparent pessimism, Grant raises the alarm with the conviction that a change of course is possible. The reckoning he calls for involves recognition of political responsibility at all levels: not just by governments, elected or otherwise, but by all of us who in our diverse ways may have some influence on the course of events. This is in many respects a compelling and convincing book, though not one that will help you sleep easily. •

The post At a hinge point in history appeared first on Inside Story.

Now the questions are very different: have we entered an altogether new era of violence, more akin to past conflicts in Yugoslavia or Rwanda than to any of Israel’s? And never mind who started it, who can make it stop?…

Read the full article here

The post A thousand frontiers appeared first on Inside Story.

If Netanyahu was contentious then, he is even more so now. Two Sundays ago he achieved another first as prime minister, appearing in a courtroom on corruption charges, having felt no obligation to resign from office and having announced his intention to annex large swathes of West Bank territory previously earmarked for an eventual Palestinian state.

Perhaps not surprisingly, events in Israel have caused a shift within Australia’s 120,000-strong Jewish community, and it has been reflected in the formation of their delegation to the World Zionist Congress in October. The five-yearly congresses are an important opportunity for political representatives from Israel to hear how diaspora supporters of Israel as a Jewish homeland feel about their policies.

In a consensual process just completed, eight members of the small Australian delegation (just thirteen out of 500 congress delegates) will be representatives of “progressive” or liberal Jewish organisations, either secular or from the like-minded religious streams known as “Reform” and “Conservative.” The other five delegates will speak for the Orthodox religious stream and groups like Friends of Likud, which generally support the steady push by Netanyahu and his Likud party for Israel to fully absorb the West Bank areas they call by their Biblical names of Judea and Samaria.

A notable new voice in the progressive majority is a secular coalition calling itself Hatikvah (“The Hope”), the title of the nineteenth-century poem that became the lyric of Israel’s national anthem. It wants Israel to “fulfil its destiny as a just, free homeland for the Jewish people” that also “lives in harmony with its neighbours and upholds the rights of all its citizens.”

Hatikvah has managed to pick up two places in the delegation. Leading the push for support during the formation of the delegation were Liam Getreu and Maddy Blay, respectively from local groups Ameinu, which is aligned with the Labour Party in Israel, and Meretz, aligned with the greenish-secular Meretz party. Behind Hatikvah is a new voice in the Jewish community, the online magazine Plus 61J, established in April 2015 and edited by liberal journalist Michael Visontay. Strongly focused on the Israel–Palestine question, Plus 61J declares itself “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro–human rights” and supportive of a two-state solution.

Joining the Hatikvah ticket was the Melbourne venture-capital entrepreneur and longstanding supporter of Israeli–Palestinian contact, Ron Finkel, who modelled the push for places at the World Zionist Congress on a Hatikvah ticket for the big United States delegation organised by his American friend Kenneth Bob, long active in Ameinu and a board member of the American liberal Jewish group J Street.

Finkel says that the Jewish community in Australia, “or at least a large chunk of it,” had begun to “tune out” from Israel because of alienation from the values shown by the Netanyahu government. “The drift has been clearly in the direction of non-engagement,” he tells me.

That was not the Jewish voice heard by the wider public, however. “You have those who are dyed-in-the-wool Israel über alles and they seem to have by and large effective control of communal institutions,” says Finkel. “They are the voice you hear through the ECAJ [Executive Council of Australian Jewry], through various state councils, and if that is all that there is you would come to the very rapid view that these sentiments reflect ‘the Jewish community.’”

A group of Jewish Australians decided they wanted to promote a different viewpoint. “We have got to make it clear that there is a voice in the community that reflects core progressive Zionist values, that they’re still relevant,” says Finkel, “even though progressive Zionists don’t have much say in Israel at the moment. And that’s good because it’s the first time in a long time that progressive Zionists of all ages have decided to stand up and say: this is what’s going on.”

As well as sending representatives to the congress, Hatikvah wants to work in a more engaging, structured way to gain a voice within the Jewish community. “We don’t want to be outside the tent pissing in. We want to be inside the tent and being part of the shaping of communal strategies.”

Already the group has put out two statements, one on climate change and one on the Uluru Statement from the Heart. “We are not trying to replace organisations that are active in this space, but we want to make it clear these are issues that speak to us, that are important to us as Australian progressive Zionists, and we’re involved,” says Finkel.

All this is encountering some resistance among some older, established community figures. “They can’t grasp, they can’t get their heads around the idea that you can be critical of policies of the current government of the state of Israel, fight for the rights of oppressed minorities in Israel whether they be Ethiopians or different segments of the Arab populations, or point out Israeli soldiers can do obnoxious things,” says Finkel.

He believes these sentiments are understandable, especially in Melbourne, which had the highest postwar concentration of Holocaust survivors, per capita, outside Israel. “You can’t blame them when your family has gone through the horrors and as a young person in 1967” — during the Arab-Israeli war — “you thought there was a likelihood that a new holocaust was going to be perpetrated on the state of Israel.”

After the past year’s three Israeli elections, each of which resulted in a stalemate, Netanyahu is still in power. He has stared down his rival, former defence chief Benny Gantz of the Blue and White party, and persuaded him to accept second place in a governing coalition. So precarious is the political balance that the government includes fully thirty-six ministers and sixteen deputies, some with invented portfolios and no clear responsibilities, in a Knesset of only 120 members. Crucially, Netanyahu retains control of the law-related portfolios.

Israel’s High Court allowed Netanyahu to stay in office while being tried on charges of receiving gifts and favourable media coverage in return for political favours, partly because of the presumption of innocence and partly because prime ministers, unlike ordinary ministers, are not explicitly prohibited from doing so.

“A situation in which a defendant charged with serious ethical crimes forms a government and heads it raises a public and moral problem whose magnitude is hard to overstate,” said Justice Menachem Mazuz in his judgement. “Such a situation reflects a social crisis and a moral failure by both society and the political system.”

Still, Netanyahu is doubling down, announcing he will start annexing some 30 per cent of the West Bank, including many of the Jewish settlements there, on 1 July. Gantz has acquiesced as part of the coalition agreement. Cynics believe that Netanyahu, while advancing the Israeli right’s perception of an ancient destiny, also hopes to project himself in court as a heroic statesman rather than a slippery politician.

The start on annexation may be more token than real. While the American right and its evangelical component might support the aim, even Donald Trump’s administration seems to be telling Netanyahu to slow down. It wants presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “peace plan” — land for Israel, cash and connecting freeways for the resulting Palestinian enclaves — to stay in play.

Formal annexation would sever Netanyahu’s new dialogue with conservative Arab governments and possibly set off a new Palestinian intifada. It would not be recognised by most European nations, nor by Washington if Joe Biden becomes president.

Hatikvah still holds the hope that the two-state solution can be revived. “What’s happening in the trajectory of both sides has been a continuous path of delegitimisation to now, unfortunately, many elements of dehumanisation,” says Finkel. “And so that chasm is getting bigger, so we have to try and bridge it, and the only way to bridge it is bringing people in touch with each other so they can realise that not every Palestinian is a murderous terrorist and not every Israeli is a bloodsucker. The need to inject humanity into the relationships is paramount.”

Palestinians would find “an incredibly receptive” audience in Israel if they changed their discourse to frame their aspirations as a civil society alongside Israel, Finkel believes. At the same time, Israel should restrain its “messianic” expansion. “All these steps towards colonisation or the settlement enterprise are a cancer on Israeli society,” says Finkel. “They are really going to put a stake through the heart of the Jewish future in Israel if they don’t step back from it.

“But I am an optimist and I certainly believe we can get to a two-state solution,” he adds. “You’ve got to have the will in order to find the way.” •

The post Can the drift be stopped? appeared first on Inside Story.

But the tentacles of the Israeli–Palestinian dispute spread right across the Arab and Islamic world, and any efforts to resolve it, well-intentioned or otherwise, could have significant knock-on effects.

Now into the second half of his term, Trump has systematically shaken the props behind the “rules-based world order,” even though he has failed to find anything better to replace them with. In the Middle East, he has clearly decided to trust a new generation of players who seem set on remaking the rules.

Ideally, in his view, these players would be the Saudis plus other key Gulf states, who would then take on Iran and those Arab states willing to act as Iranian proxies in alliance with Russia. But he is oscillating between the hawkish scenarios promoted by his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and his national security adviser, John Bolton, on the one hand, and the more sober assessments of his generals and diplomats, on the other.

Most American presidents would avoid bouncing around like this, but Trump lacks thought-through plans of his own. His instinctive tool is “disruption”; he has no patience for history or theology. We may well be at the most critical phase of his attempt to sweep old paradigms off the table and see what can be picked up from the floor in the way of new “deals.”

By deliberately courting disorder, Trump is abandoning the logical thinking that might be expected of the leader of a superpower and allowing himself to be manipulated by a new figure in the Gulf, Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, known as MBS, who has adapted the customary Saudi formula of an aggressive form of Sunni Islam backed by profligate oil funds.

MBS’s role is amplifying the difficulty of resolving the stand-off between Israel and the Palestinians. Rivalries across the Gulf go back thirteen centuries and still define the way the Sunni–Shia divide is perceived. Most outsiders have long seen the divide as something to stay well clear of, conscious that the tensions have largely been kept in check since the middle of the eighth century by leaving small theological differences to theologians.

Instead of working through issues patiently and cautiously, though, and at least paying lip service to international mechanisms, Trump wants to try it his way. In the process, the United States is being sucked into disputes its president neither comprehends nor has patience for.

The current confrontation in the Gulf is largely a result of Trump’s willingness to do Salman’s bidding, and secondarily Israel’s bidding, by attempting to reduce Iran’s role in the region and ditch the exactingly negotiated Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, rather than build on it. The JCPOA got in the way because it was working. Its other members — China, France, Germany, the European Union, Russia and Britain — have been bypassed and even threatened with secondary sanctions for actions that are essentially legal under anyone’s law except Trump’s. The signal is clear: only Washington makes the international framework from now on.

Underneath this heap of disruption lies the compost pit that is the Israel–Palestine problem, with its huge overburden of UN and human rights resolutions. Trump has abandoned the traditional role of helping, or at least ostensibly helping, to unpick the issues between the parties, and has instead embarked on a course of serial disruption designed to replace UN resolutions and international law with disorder based on an impossible paradigm.

This week’s Bahrain meeting furthers that plan. In playing along with MBS’s vision of a Middle East in which Saudi Arabia is Trump’s deputy sheriff (or is it vice versa?), Trump has accepted another breathtaking leap of Salman’s logic. The same logic delivered an unwinnable war in Yemen, tried to hold a Lebanese prime minister to ransom and had a regime critic hacked to death in a backroom in Istanbul. On these performance parameters, Saudi Arabia’s chances of persuading scores of Arab League and Islamic states to accept Israel’s 1948 takeover of Palestine as a fait accompli are slim indeed.

The Bahrain plan is not only overwhelmed by the drama in the Gulf. In Jared Kushner’s hands, it also shows every sign of poor design and clumsy execution. Even if a brace of Arab states can be summoned to Bahrain to endorse a new economic “plan” for Palestine, little can be done unless Israel commits to lifting its blockade of Gaza and its stranglehold on the West Bank. But Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now so beholden to extremists that any hope of coopting him appears remote, even if some would find tempting the prospect of banishing the Palestinians to a series of Arab Bantustans and closing down their access to Jerusalem.

Middle-power countries like Australia have always argued that this dispute will only be resolved by a rules-based approach. Their interests lie in avoiding the nastier complications caused by disruptive tactics with no defined outcomes. Australia may be faced with difficult choices if Trump seeks support for hastening the dismantling of the JCPOA, or in endorsing the Bahrain game plan as a way of bypassing many decades of support for a two-state solution in Palestine. To join the disruption game is to put at risk structures that have largely served Australia’s interests well.

Scott Morrison’s ill-informed lurch towards the recognition of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem last year was a foretaste of what life might be like if we rely on deals in the age of America First. Australia has maintained a policy of engaging with Iran, for example. It is perhaps ominous that Pompeo is currently in the Gulf pressing a range of countries to join a “global coalition” against Iran — “a coalition,” to use his words, “not only throughout the Gulf states but in Asia and in Europe.” This is a deal-making game Australia would be well advised to stay out of if it doesn’t want to find itself a victim of Pompeo and Bolton’s dark obsessions. •

The post American disruption, Saudi logic appeared first on Inside Story.

Tempting as it is to believe that Morrison is prone to thought bubbles, that might not be the whole story.

First, what “Jewish vote”? Jewish voters, like other religious people, consider many issues before they vote. A senior Wentworth rabbi last week reminded his congregation to take account of the “moral issue of climate change” when casting their votes — hardly a ringing endorsement of a Liberal candidate.

Second, we shouldn’t assume that the prime minister’s signalling is all about Jewish voters, let alone Wentworth. Conservative Christians are also in the mix.

A few days earlier, the prime minister, who attends a Pentecostal church, had offended those Coalition members and senators who think that “religious freedom” means defending the right of religious schools to expel gay kids — in the memorable phrasing of former Australian Christian Lobby managing director Jim Wallace — “in the most loving way.”

In agreeing to bring a bipartisan end to religious schools’ exemptions from anti-discrimination law for LGBTIQ children, Morrison effectively conceded that gender identity and sexual orientation are part of a person’s make-up rather than a disorder or a set of behaviours that can be prayed away. The Australian Christian Lobby hasn’t conceded any such thing.

Morrison may well have felt that he needed to do something fast to show he is still the Christian right’s man. Praying on megachurch stages is a start, but policy signals also help.

In Righteous Gentiles: Religion, Identity, and Myth in John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, published last week, Sean Durbin (whose PhD I supervised) analyses an important undercurrent of the Christian right, known as Christian Zionism. Durbin shows that America’s largest pro-Israel organisation is, in fact, made up of evangelical and Pentecostal Christians, led by megachurch pastor John Hagee.

When Donald Trump moved America’s Israel embassy to Jerusalem, the cheer squad was only partly Jewish. The ceremony was blessed by two Christian pastors, one of them being Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel, who believes that Jerusalem is “the preordained capital of Christ’s 1000-year empire.”

For these conservative Christians, identifying with Israel is a means of attaining God’s blessing, for themselves and for their nation. For politicians, the blessings are more immediate: appeals to an important Christian constituency.

In a chapter on “the eternal enmity of God’s enemies,” Durbin points out another reason for this new-found “philo-Semitism” among many conservative Christians in the United States: a common post-9/11 distrust of Islam. Morrison’s other recent pro-Israel thought bubble — a reconsideration of Australia’s support for the Iran nuclear deal — has a similar appeal.

The power of the US Christian right is well documented; Australia’s version is far from a potentially election-swaying critical mass. Intra-party politics, however, is another matter.

Durbin studied US Christian identification with Israel through church-organised, pastor-led tourism to Israel. The tours encourage participants to develop a sense of spiritual affinity with Israel and to “bless” (that is, give money to) Israel, to the degree that they have become important to the Israeli economy.

Australian megachurches offer something similar. For example, Metro Church on the Gold Coast offers the Israel 2019: Treasures of Grace tour, led by that federal Liberal frontbencher and lavish internet user, assistant treasurer Stuart Robert, for $5800.

To Christian-right party colleagues spooked by the announcement about religious exemptions for schools, the PM’s thought bubbles act as a reassurance. He has shown he cares. Observers of US politics call this kind of coded gesture to a specific religious constituency “narrowcasting.” In Morrison’s variety of politics, they call it “virtue signalling.” •

The post The narrowcaster appeared first on Inside Story.

Other potential flashpoints remain. West of Deraa, on the volcanic plain that stretches to the Golan escarpment, another patchwork of rebel groups includes residual elements of Islamic State hemmed in by other Islamist and militia elements. Israel is keen to see Islamist forces, particularly Hezbollah, kept away from the disengagement lines west of Quneitra. West and north of Aleppo, meanwhile, Turkish forces occupy the Afrin Valley and the hill country stretching around Aleppo from the west. To the east, the territory from Menbij to the Iraqi frontier has been taken by a joint American–Kurdish operation, its future undefined. Other areas outside the Syrian government’s direct control include much of Idlib province, the destination for fighters who refuse to accept “reconciliation” deals with the government.

Significantly, all the reconciliation deals have been negotiated under Russian supervision, and Russian military police and other units have monitored the local ceasefires. Russia is also acting as intermediary between Israel and Iran to ensure that Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah units are kept well back from the line of division on the Golan. Turkey’s role in the north is less easy to define; in many ways it seems to be settling in as a long-term supervisory power.

The real tinder box at the moment covers most of Idlib province south of the road running between Aleppo and Antioch. Its population has been augmented by rebels who refused to stay in the zones selected for reconciliation deals over the past three years, and the local, largely Sunni population is consequently living in pitiful conditions. Little information emerges from what is effectively a “black hole,” filled with rebels armed with the light weapons they took when they were evicted and free of any stabilising outside presence. Internet postings indicate sporadic clashes between al Qaeda units and more secular competitors as well as firefights along the southern edge of the province immediately north of Hama.

In eastern Syria, stay-behind Islamic State units survive in remote parts of the steppe on either side of the Euphrates, and there have been isolated reports of engagements with Syrian forces. And, finally, there is the curious case of the stretch of Syrian territory well to the east of the Jordanian border crossing at Nasib: except for its long common border with Jordan, and the fact that it straddles the main highway link to Baghdad, it is devoid of any sizeable population or strategic interest.

All conflicts, no matter how visceral and violent, have a natural half-life. But like the civil war in Lebanon (1975–90), they can also linger senselessly. A turning point finally came in Lebanon when the Arab League, notably Saudi Arabia, stepped in as arbiters and re-established more or less the same power-sharing formula as the National Pact of 1943. In Syria, the situation is a little clearer: there is now every sign that the regime will survive and take control of virtually all the state’s territory, assuming covenants can be reached with residual occupation forces and with Syria’s allies in the conflict.

The keys to this process are Russia, Turkey and Iran. Early in the conflict, Russia and Iran read the situation correctly and identified where their interests lay. Iran had been building relations with Syria since 1979, encouraging a greater role for Shiite Islam. The Soviet Union had been a long-term backer of Syria, though at some points during the rule of Hafez al-Assad, father of the current president, it was clearly bamboozled by the country’s complicated manoeuvring. After Hafez’s death in 2000, Russia probably found his son Bashar a little easier to read. Turkey, for its part, had been a backer of Bashar al-Assad’s mildly reformist economic agenda before 2011. It switched 180 degrees in the early stages of the conflict, allowing the rebels to use the Syrian border crossings as revolving doors — a policy it came to regret when Islamic State extended its campaign of violence into Turkey.

The missing element was the major Western powers. Most of them read the protest movements of 2011 as another phase of the Arab Spring and hoped that, given the right encouragement, a tide of popular enthusiasm would sweep Bashar al-Assad out of power. This was a fatal misreading: Syria was not Tunisia or Egypt. The call for Assad to go offered no identifiable basis for a post-Assad order, but many Syrians believed that the democracies would follow through and impose a solution.

Soon the encouragement turned more lethal, with the United States beginning to provide light weaponry. While the gesture was too ineffectual to make an impact, it deprived Western democracies of any role in calming the situation. When both Turkey and the United States turned a blind eye to the role of Gulf interests intent on unseating Bashar and reversing the drift towards a Shiite identity for Syria, the conflict flared to peak intensity.

Perhaps a few lessons have been learned, but they may not be enough. The US presence in the northeast and its enigmatic foothold in the south may be a Pentagon armchair strategist’s idea of a claim to a seat at the final negotiations. But even a token presence can bring dangerous and unexpected outcomes. By inserting itself between Turkey, the Kurds, the local Arabs and the Syrian government, the United States faces home-grown skills way out of its league.

In a recent paper for the Hoover Institution, the French political geographer Fabrice Balanche notes that all scenarios in the northeast of Syria suggest a no-win for the United States: “US troops could be pushed out of northern Syria, giving the Syrian regime and its allies free rein,” he writes. “Iran will then control the entire Syrian–Iraqi border and the corridor between Tehran and the Mediterranean Sea.” The US strategy, once again oblivious to complex dynamics on the ground, is likely to hasten one of the very aims it professes to oppose.

Whatever credibility as a great power the United States had before 2017 is now irrelevant if Trump continues to see the world as akin to a reality TV show. Whether we like it or not, Russia, by contrast, has played its role expertly and consistently. Before 2011, it was a guarded marginal player in the wider region; now it holds a master key to any solution. So, too, does Iran. Adopting tactics designed to exclude Russia and Iran is simply counterintuitive. In a regional order clumsily forged by the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the likely winners will continue to be those who know the environment and play the long game. ●

The post From Deraa to Deraa appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s nearly six years since a Syrian official confirmed what had long been suspected or assumed — that Syria possessed chemical weapons. But Syria wouldn’t use those weapons against its own people, he claimed; they were reserved for responding to external aggression.

Yet sporadic reports of chemical weapons use were emerging from Homs and outside Aleppo, and they attracted condemnation from Western leaders citing the century-long effort to ban their use. Concerns intensified in August 2013 when evidence emerged that chemicals were being delivered by rockets aimed at opposition territory in the satellite towns around Damascus in the Eastern Ghouta. With around 1400 deaths reported, the issue jumped to the top of the list of horrors unleashed during the Syrian conflict.

At a press conference during a visit to Stockholm the following month, US president Barack Obama appeared to assert that the use of chemical weapons had crossed a “red line.” He was probably referring to a red line long observed by the international community rather than a red line drawn by one nation — the United States, for instance — acting alone. In fact, the international outcry after the Ghouta attack was so strong that the Russians and even the Syrian authorities seemed to accept that a threshold had been reached.

Syria announced that it would do three things: join the Chemical Weapons Convention, the international mechanism to counter the use of chemical weapons; agree to allow a team from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, to inspect its facilities; and abide by the inspectors’ findings by dismantling the network of production and storage facilities. Russia stepped in as co-sponsor of the process of dismantling and destruction, which was carried out over the period October 2013 to January 2016. It was an unprecedented achievement with massive technical support from many countries.

So far, the sequence of events resembled a textbook case of the international system working as it should — working, for example, like the methodical and consensual process that oversaw the dismantling of South Africa’s small nuclear arsenal in the 1990s under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

What went so wrong since then? Why is Russia now seen as part of the problem, not of the solution? It’s convenient, of course, to blame Obama. He flagged a red line and then failed to enforce it, didn’t he?

Well, not exactly. He could have sent in the Tomahawks straight away, and taken out the network of chemical-weapon facilities in Syria. But he seized another opportunity — to wrestle the Russians into agreeing that chemical warfare was a no-go area, and should be recognised as such by all warring powers. His strategy, in other words, was to get Moscow to sign up the Syrians to the international mechanisms and then take the process to its conclusion. It was an opportunity no reasonable leader could pass up, particularly when both British and American legislators were not keen to get involved in the Syrian war.

Nowadays, though, almost every media commentator sees Obama’s strategy as shilly-shallying rather than statesmanship. What changed?

We have passed two more landmarks in the blatant use of chemical weapons to hasten an end to a prolonged war: the attack in Khan Sheikhun in April 2017 and, this month, the unleashing of chlorine and possibly sarin on Douma in the Eastern Ghouta. Though the death toll may only represent a fraction of the carnage wrought in the 2013 attack, these attacks look like a deliberate flouting of the Chemical Weapons Convention/OPCW framework, or the use of material that slipped through the earlier dragnet, or both.

An international response was clearly warranted, but it needed to be carefully linked to a strategy. As British prime minister Theresa May has noted, it is essential to ring-fence chemical weapons from the modern practice of war. This is not because chemical warfare has brought slaughter on a massive new scale — not yet, anyway. But it could so easily be adopted widely as a weapon of choice for parties able to harness the relatively small-scale technology and resources involved, especially in contests where no side seems able to gain a commanding advantage through conventional firepower.

There is also a shock value in highlighting the risk of resorting to chemical weapons. Ideally, the response should come through mechanisms such as the OPCW and the Chemical Weapons Convention. It is clear that the century-old consensus — Obama’s red line — needs reinforcing, but it would best be accompanied by efforts to strengthen rather than marginalise the international mechanisms.

Chemical warfare is only a small part of the disaster that has overwhelmed Syria but it shouldn’t overwhelm the need to deal with the fact that Russia, Turkey, Iran and the United States are fighting proxy wars within the wider conflict. Unless those wars are dealt with, the next horror could be the unleashing of chemical weapons on the hundreds of thousands of opposition members dumped in Idlib Province as part of the country’s “deconfliction” agreements — a target likely to be more difficult to overwhelm than Aleppo or the Eastern Ghouta. •

The post In Syria, the fog of war appeared first on Inside Story.

Does that mean the Iran deal is finished? No. He is directing his administration to “work closely with Congress and our allies to address the deal’s many serious flaws so that the Iranian regime can never threaten the world with nuclear weapons.” And if a solution is not reached with Congress and the allies? Simple: “then the agreement will be terminated… our participation can be cancelled by me, as president, at any time.”

Nothing could be less clear. This formulation puts the responsibility for a solution on Congress and on America’s “allies.” Iran is not considered a party to this elaboration of the JCPOA. The allies have made their views known: while they might agree with many of the other issues of concern to President Trump, they want first and foremost to preserve the deal on Iran’s nuclear program. Even Australia has been willing to publicly defend the agreement.

As rightly pointed out by Iran and other parties to the deal — the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States) plus Germany and the European Union — the JCPOA is a multilateral agreement and no one party can unilaterally end it. That said, it is hard to imagine the deal surviving a head-on US attack.

The certification requirement was a gesture to a sceptical Congress enabling Barack Obama to lift sanctions on Iran as part of the nuclear deal. The implied threat now is that sanctions could be reintroduced.

THE RECORD

The “factual record” underlying Trump’s policy was set out in a four-page White House statement on the same day — titled President Donald J. Trump’s New Strategy on Iran. The strategy is described as having been arrived at in consultation with Trump’s national security team and after “nine months of deliberation with Congress and our allies on how best to protect American security.” I wonder if Australia and other allies feel comfortable being so implicated?

As laid out by Trump, the record has frightening parallels with the gilded and airbrushed arguments used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Trump describes the Iranian government as being a fanatical, radical dictatorship “with a long campaign of bloodshed,” indeed a “murderous past and present” — but stops short of calling for regime change. The new strategy recounts historical attacks by Iran on US interests in Iran and elsewhere (which are indeed shocking) and itemises other antisocial behaviours: its development of missiles, promotion of terrorism and harbouring of terrorists, support for Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, hostility to Israel, threatening of shipping in the Persian Gulf, cyber-attacks against the US and Israel and other allies, human rights abuses, and arbitrary detention of foreigners.

THE SPIRIT OF THE DEAL

The Iran deal did not seek to solve all issues of the Middle East. It focused on the very clear and present danger that Iran was about to achieve a nuclear weapons capability. The White House is now asserting that Iran is not observing the “spirit of the deal,” which was to contribute to “regional and international peace and security.” Instead, according to President Trump, Iran is posing an increasing menace to the international community.

What is to be done? The US will work with allies to address Iran’s malign behaviour in four ways:

• Counter Iran’s support for terrorism: scarcely a new policy direction.

• Sanction the Revolutionary Guards: as some observers have noted, now that the threat of Islamic State in Iraq has receded, the US has little to lose in taking on the Revolutionary Guards; and it plays to the Sunni regimes of the Arabian Gulf and to Israel, which see Iran as the mortal enemy.

• Address Iran’s “asymmetric” missile weapons program: but there is no explanation as to how this will be achieved.

• Deny the regime all paths to a nuclear weapon.

Worryingly, except for the fourth issue. we are given no clue as to how the success of these far-reaching ambitions will be measured.

ALL PATHS TO A NUCLEAR WEAPON

Apart from accusing Iran of being in breach of the spirit of the deal, the White House is charging Iran with specific failings.

First, President Trump’s speech, but curiously not the Iran Strategy, accuses Iran of committing “multiple” violations of the deal, for example on the two occasions when it exceeded limits on its holdings of heavy water. But the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, the international body entrusted to verify the deal, does not consider that the discrepancy amounted to a material breach and has confirmed that holdings are now below the agreed level. What the president fails to acknowledge is that the IAEA is implementing in Iran the world’s most robust nuclear verification regime, with an inspection effort more than double that deployed before the deal (and with the US meeting much of the cost of this extra effort).

A second charge is that Iran has been exploiting loopholes in the deal — but no detail is provided (perhaps Trump is obviously pointing to the fact that the agreement does not address Iran’s missile program).

Third is the vexed issue of access to military sites in Iran, which the US argues might provide insights into Iran’s progress in developing a nuclear weapon. Iranian officials have aggravated the debate by suggesting that international inspectors would never be permitted into military facilities, which Trump depicts as intimidation of the IAEA. The deal does allow for such access, and IAEA director-general Yukiya Amano has confirmed that he would seek it were there to be a need — but in a clear rebuff to the United States, he said he would not authorise a “fishing expedition,” and has confirmed that the IAEA had been granted access to “all locations that it has needed to visit.”

The fourth issue: what happens after the current deal runs out? This is a critical concern to all parties to the deal. In 2015, buying time was the immediate goal. No one disagrees that the biggest challenge ahead will be to close all paths to an Iranian nuclear weapon, and the United States and its partners should be directing maximum attention to engaging Iran on that issue. This requires negotiations for the period after the deal, not walking away from the deal.

THE FOG OF WHITE HOUSE POLICY-MAKING

Much of Friday’s speech was directed at the domestic American audience. The Obama administration was attacked for its failure to conclude a better deal and for numerous other foreign policy mistakes. A foreign policy distraction temporarily diverts attention from the administration’s many woes.

But the president’s tendentious assertions, relentless bombast and threats do not enhance US standing. The Iran nuclear deal is imperfect and its sunset provisions need attention: there is an urgent need for global leadership, but instead the president has passed the parcel back to Congress and unnamed “allies.”

US allies in the Middle East, the Gulf states and Israel will take comfort from the assertive anti-Iranian stance. But key allies in Europe and North Asia must be horrified by the president’s implications that they have somehow endorsed the new US strategy on Iran. To add insult to injury, Trump also appears unhappy that some countries have taken advantage of the economic openings in Iran and hints at dire consequences for any that might engage with the Revolutionary Guard, now a major player in the Iranian economy. The US only has itself to blame for failing to seize these opportunities.

The fog surrounding White House decision-making is creating a more dangerous environment for policy-makers around the world. It is becoming increasingly difficult to paper over the gaps between the interests of key US allies. We insist we stand for strengthening a rules-based international order, yet freely negotiated agreements between states are trashed before our eyes.

A final thought for our region. Some sixty eminent experts from the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament recently issued an appeal to the US to respect the Iran nuclear agreement. They argued that abandoning the deal would cast doubt on the integrity of the global nuclear monitoring system of the IAEA, which has assessed that Iran remains compliant. It would also threaten the viability of the multilaterally negotiated JCPOA, and reopen a pathway to an Iranian nuclear weapon. The cascading effect would further deepen the East Asian nuclear crisis, raising doubts about the commitment of the US administration to any international negotiations to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis peacefully. This would benefit Pyongyang and damage the East Asian non-nuclear weapon states. The logic of these experts is compelling. •

The post Iran, Trump and the art of deal-breaking appeared first on Inside Story.

Numerous frontlines still need to be resolved before we see anything approaching a stable outcome across Syria, as does the question of who will control many existing and likely “liberated” areas. But there are reasons to believe that the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian allies have locked in a favourable swing in the conflict’s direction. While ISIS has used every desperate ploy to delay the inevitable, it is now virtually finished west of the Euphrates, clinging only to small, isolated areas east of Hama and Homs.

ISIS elements are also holding out in some pockets of Raqqa city (amounting to perhaps 20 per cent of the urban area) against the Syrian Democratic Forces, a predominantly Kurdish grouping with on-the-ground backing from US special forces. The role of the Kurds on that front highlights the wider conundrum posed by Turkey’s unwillingness to accept large swathes of Kurdish-controlled territory across northern Syria and the Syrian Jazira. Whether Ankara has reached an understanding with Washington about a future Kurdish presence is unclear, but Turkey has moved decisively to take a major role in restoring normal life north of the Euphrates. None of the players seems to envisage a return to Syrian control.

Turkey has also made particularly vigorous efforts to ensure that the Afrin Valley, east of Turkey’s Hatay province, does not come under Kurdish control.

Map of Syria by Ross Burns

In the Lower Euphrates, where many of the oil and gas fields are located, US-backed forces were competing with Syrian units to take the town of Abu Kemal, the crossing point to Iraq. Although the United States made a sudden decision to withdraw, it seems to have established a new red line to prevent the Syrians from crossing the Euphrates. It is difficult to define what US interest might be served by this gambit: does it envisage a “Shia corridor” stretching from Iran across Iraq, southern Syria and on to Lebanon — a new tentacle of Iranian influence — as some observers argue? This imaginative scenario seems poorly based in terms of practicality.

A little further up the Euphrates, the town of Deir al-Zor (the main base of the Syrian oil and gas extraction industry) is also largely back in government hands. Backed by Russian air power, the Syrian army has steadily rolled back the ISIS contingents holding out on the steppe east of Palmyra. Russia has been quick to wheel in logistic support so that Syrian forces can move into the Syrian Jazira, north of the Euphrates, and along the Khabur River.

In southwestern Syria, from the Jordanian border up to Damascus, firefights involving a range of groups are reasonably common but short-lived. Further north, east of Damascus, al Qaeda offshoots are still holding on within two kilometres of the eastern walls of the old city. This conflict has perhaps lost some of its intensity but none of its persistence.

To the west of the capital, and also in the mountain crossings into Lebanon to the north, via the Anti-Lebanon Range, exchanges of fighters under “de-confliction” agreements have taken much of the intensity out of long-simmering firefights. The process has been managed within the broad framework of the multi-party Astana talks, often under Russian and international humanitarian supervision.

The final, and by far the toughest, challenge is in the area largely covered by Idlib province, between Hama and Aleppo. Many fighters (now virtually all al Qaeda–aligned) have been consigned to this zone following the de-confliction agreements reached around Damascus, Homs and Aleppo.

For the moment, the Syrian regime seems to be treating this pocket of the overall conflict as a too-hard case, perhaps confident that the fighters will weary of their internal rivalries, wear out the patience of the two million civilians trapped inside, and take their turn at the end of the queue for de-confliction. The latter would require Turkish cooperation to prevent the free passage of arms, funding and personnel across the border. Ankara’s initial tolerance of ISIS operations across the northern Syrian border eventually led to a series of brutal ISIS bombings in Turkish cities; a more positive role in a reconstruction phase might now be a better option.

Dismantling these confrontations would be difficult enough if they could be sealed off from the outside world. But it is external backers that have made these conflicts possible and sustained them. We would be fooling ourselves, though, if we believed that outsiders can now simply snap their fingers and call off the fighters, allowing peace suddenly to descend. The fall of Aleppo and the rolling back of ISIS have been important turning points but another factor is required.

Syrians themselves, who have spent more than six agonising years watching their country being torn apart, would have to accept that their hopes of outside intervention to implement the dreams of the peaceful demonstrators of 2011 are not going to be fulfilled. Well-meaning countries, mainly in the West, made numerous calls for Bashar al-Assad’s regime to dissolve itself. This stoked a confrontation that rapidly turned violent, providing platforms for numerous externally backed groups, whose ambitions were in many cases even more vicious than the regime’s.

Nikolaos van Dam, who has been following the politics of Syria since his posting as a Dutch diplomat in Damascus four decades ago, has recently published a uniquely well-informed analysis of the course of the conflict. Van Dam reminds us of how dangerous it was for Western leaders to let hearts overrule rationality on Syria, giving the impression to Syrian protesters (and later the civilians who tolerated the presence of armed insurrections) that help was coming. In van Dam’s words, Western politicians “unintentionally contributed to prolonging the war and helping Bashar al-Assad move towards partial (or total) victory.” It is a perfect case of the old “ethical war” dilemma: the desired outcome may be morally right but is it ethical to promote it without making an informed calculation of whether it can be delivered without even worse suffering?

In Syria’s case, we now have the answer. From September 2015 on, the regime felt compelled by the strength of the rebels’ offensive in the Orontes Valley to invite the Russians and the Iranians to scale up their support for Syria’s own forces. From that point on, there was no chance that the regime could be persuaded to deal other domestic players into the power equation that had long locked Syria’s generals and intelligence chiefs in a Faustian pact with the Assad family. As a result, the levers for positive intervention by the international community are virtually non-existent, save for working through Russia and Iran.

With no common factor joining the postwar ambitions of the regime and those broadly grouped under the “coalition,” numerous flashpoints may still ignite. The embers of lingering confrontation could still be fanned by wishful thinking, even by the best-motivated outsiders. Any thoughts that the intensity of the confrontation can be fixed by lopping off bits of Syria, for example, should immediately be set aside. The integrity of Syria has to be a common starting point if the present conflict is not to be an abundant source of new conflicts for decades to come.

While the endgame may still be some way off, for the exhausted and demoralised people of Syria it can’t come soon enough. In a situation in which Syrians might increasingly be asking themselves whether the struggle was worth it, it is too late simply to hope for miracles. ●

The post How close is the end of the war in Syria? appeared first on Inside Story.

Funds to the tune of $110 billion were promised to the Saudis to buy what President Trump describes as “lots of beautiful military equipment because nobody makes it like the United States.” US secretary of state Rex Tillerson maintained that the deal was directed at preventing “malign Iranian influence” and went on to assert American support for those “elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government.”

In between these two events, on 7 June, twin Islamic State attacks targeted two of Tehran’s most symbolic sites, Iran’s parliament and the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, killing many civilians. The attacks were motivated by Islamic State’s belief that the Shi’a, who dominate in Iran, are apostates. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards accused the Saudis of “complicity.”

In the United States, the Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher described the attacks in Tehran as a “good thing,” adding that “it’s a good idea to have radical Muslim terrorists fighting each other.” President Trump’s response was to “underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote.” The military and economic pressures seemed designed to escalate an already dangerous confrontation. Equally strikingly, they also overshadow developments taking place inside Iran that hold out the possibility of a very different future.

After all, the Riyadh summit had begun just a day after a landslide re-election victory by Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani, who sealed Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers during his first four-year term. At campaign rallies and in televised presidential debates, Rouhani promised to bolster civil society, fight corruption and open up Iran to the world, going beyond the normal realm of Iranian electioneering rhetoric. He attacked human rights abuses and spoke of the populace’s disapproval of the “executions and jailings throughout the last thirty-eight years.” He denounced the group of young extremists who stormed the Saudi embassy in Tehran in January 2016 for stoking regional tensions. He accused the Revolutionary Guards of trying to sabotage the nuclear deal by writing anti-Israeli messages on test-missiles, and scorned their “cheering” of Trump’s pre-election promise that, in Rouhani’s words, “he would tear up the [nuclear] agreement.”

Rouhani had gained the endorsements of many prominent political figures, including Mohammad Khatami, the former reformist president (1997–2005), as well as Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, key protagonists of the “Green Movement” that erupted after the contested 2009 presidential election, who are now under house arrest. In the end, his victory over the conservative Ebrahim Raisi was decisive, by 57 to 38 per cent on a 72 per cent turnout.

Earlier, the parliamentary elections of February 2016 had seen reformists gain a working majority in the Iranian majlis. Many conservative MPs and prominent opponents of the nuclear deal were decisively rejected by voters. The city and village council elections, held on the same day as the presidential vote, also saw sweeping victories. In the key Tehran city council, all twenty-one seats were won by reformists, six of them women.

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the head of the powerful Guardian Council, which vets all parliamentary candidates, described these elections as a “vast calamity.” The vetting of candidates for council elections is carried out by designated local parliamentary groups, circumventing the Guardian Council. In April, Jannati issued a communique that “non-Muslims” and religious minorities be barred from running. The reformist-dominated parliament ignored the Council’s assertion that the ruling was binding.

City and village council elections were initiated in 1999, and are a legacy of Mohammad Khatami’s efforts to strengthen civil society during his presidency. In one province alone – Sistan and Baluchistan, a predominantly Sunni province bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan – 415 women councillors. In the village of Afzalabad, ten out of the eleven candidates were women. One candidate, a thirty-three-year-old named Farahnaz, told reporters that “our men are either border guards or farmers; they do not have time to deal with village affairs.” Having gained her high school diploma, she had given up a university place after family opposition. Her aim was to improve paths to further education, because “educated women can create jobs.”

Fatemeh Kazemi is the returning councillor for the village of Beshareh, near the holy city of Qom in Iran’s conservative heartland. One of six sisters, she is single, believing that “marriage would create limitations for me.” When she was elected, not a single woman in her village had health insurance. She tapped into regional training and job creation schemes that allowed the women to work as carpet weavers, and managed to gain insurance cover for them. “When a lady can pay her own way, why freeload or get beaten on the head?” Kazemi says she told the women.

Another councillor, Nahid Eskandary, returned to her ancestral hometown of Sarakan equipped with a degree in law and criminology. She recounts having to overcome sexist attitudes and a local governor who persistently ignored her. With determination and after manoeuvring around the caveats of the health ministry’s funding programs, she established a screening clinic that offers mammograms, ultrasound and health checks to the residents. In Shahrekord, in Iran’s Kurdistan province, Parichehr Soltani argues that “society will not be developed” until women are fully represented in the political process, as “unfortunately some of our men are a hundred years behind the times.” Soltani was a prominent campaigner for Rouhani, maintaining that supporting him “would keep the shadow of war and sanctions at bay” and allow opportunities for women to continue to grow.

Only time will tell if such civic activism will increase accountability and prove to be “great free schools” of democracy. For now, a bulletproof glass ceiling bars women from running in the presidential race, and countless obstacles are placed in the way of political candidates in Iran. For many, though, the council elections have been a path to more senior positions. The governor of Hamoun, Masoumeh Parandvar, recalls telling the state governor, “I don’t want to be the token woman governor on display,” to which the governor responded, “Well, prove that a woman can do the job.” Parandvar maintains that ultimately constituents “don’t care about your sex” as long as you get the work done.

All this may well read like a list of inconsequential anecdotes, especially as it is often said that elections in Iran don’t herald tangible change. Yet these examples should not be too easily discounted. It was the city and village council elections of 2003 that saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad elected mayor of Tehran, paving the way to his becoming president two years later. His 2003 victory was made possible by a 12 per cent turnout during a voting boycott by many who had lost hope in the promises of the reformist government.

The decisive election victory of reformists in 1997 had inspired hope in the electorate. Khatami’s victory was based on an astounding 90 per cent turnout, of which he garnered 70 per cent of the votes. His tenure saw a temporary blossoming of grassroots movements and of the press. Even relations with the United States seemed on the up, and Iran actively supported the US campaign in Afghanistan after 9/11. Yet the government faced a brutal backlash at home and met with hostility abroad, with president George W. Bush branding Iran as part of “an axis of evil.” Khatami’s promise to end economic and political isolation collapsed, allowing the belligerent Ahmadinejad to come to the fore.

Following Ahmadinejad’s dubious re-election in June 2009, Iran saw the largest street protests in the history of the Islamic Republic. The demonstrators’ unifying mantra was “where is my vote?” They met a brutal crackdown: killings, arrests and purges. With the election of Rouhani and the signing of the nuclear accord, many Iranians believed that they were about to consign a revolutionary clique that thrived on war and isolation to the dustbin of history.

Zohreh, a senior academic sacked from her job following the purge of university faculties during Ahmadinejad’s tenure, describes her reaction to Rouhani’s re-election as “cautiously hopeful.” “For years I’ve lived with the sense of fear,” she goes on, “trying to second-guess people around me as I make my way round Tehran. Now they have to look over their shoulders knowing that we are the majority, we have the councils, parliament and now the presidency – and we made it impossible for them to steal our votes again.”

But she adds, “Let’s just hope there’s not another war.” Like many Iranians, she cannot ignore the eerily familiar pounding drums. In 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran, starting a war that would go on for eight long years and leave more than a million dead. Iraq was backed by the United States and its Western allies; Saudi and Gulf rulers fearful of Iranian-style uprisings joined in.

“It’s a pity both sides can’t lose” was Henry Kissinger comment on that war. Saudi Wahhabism was championed as a counter to the Shi’a by the United States and its allies, and its extreme ideology spread to mosques around the world, from the streets of Karachi and Mumbai to Brussels, Paris and London. Then the “war on terror” made Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq a hospitable breeding-ground for extremist groups. The precursor of Islamic State/Daesh was founded in 1999 by Jordanian radical Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; it thrived in the battlefields of Afghanistan and grew more powerful during the ensuing conflicts in Iraq and Syria, sending millions of people in search of refuge. The deadly wars of the Middle East now play out in Western capitals, and the “great game” is no longer a spectator sport. In the end, we were all losers.

The opening salvo of the Iran-Iraq war began on 30 April 1980 with the siege of the Iranian embassy in London. The building was seized by a quasi-Iranian Sunni Arab “separatist” group, trained and equipped by the Iraqi regime, which claimed to be acting on behalf of Iran’s deprived border province of Khuzestan. There is no denying the difficulties that face that area of Iran, or others such as Kurdistan. But unlike much of the Middle East, the borders of Iran date back over two millennia; they are not lines in the sand drawn in 1916 by Messrs Sykes and Picot. The Arabs of Khuzestan were at the bitter frontline of the Iran–Iraq war, but a much-touted “fifth column” didn’t transpire then and is unlikely to emerge today.

What always emerges from war is brutality and retribution, hawks and jingoes. Before that war, in its post-revolutionary ferment, Iran had myriad political groups. Once the war began, they became brothers in arms fighting a greater enemy. The 1979 revolution and the aftermath of the Arab Spring are proof enough that the mere fall of dictators does not free a people.

Iranians know too well that freedom must come from within. During Iran’s constitutional revolution of 1906, hopes of democracy were dashed and authoritarian rule was implemented with the help of colonial powers. A generation later, the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh was finished off in a coup backed by the United States and Britain.

What has emerged today is an Iranian populace that voted in large numbers for civil liberties and greater engagement with the world. They again face entrenched opposition at home and hostility abroad in their uphill struggle for democratic change. •

The post “We made it impossible for them to steal our votes again” appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s worth recalling the circumstances of the mosque’s construction 845 years ago. Nur al-Din was the first Islamic leader to see the need to unite the central Islamic lands under one leadership, a goal he saw as a precondition for any successful campaign to expel the Crusaders from the Middle East. What Nur al-Din lacked, however, was the manpower and materiel needed to conduct a sustained offensive against Jerusalem.

Twenty years after taking control of the territories of Damascus and Aleppo, he still lacked control of the resources of northern Mesopotamia, which were centred on Mosul. His opening came in 1170 with a dispute over the succession to the Zengid dynastic line installed there by his father. Nur al-Din used allegations that the designated successor was subject to excessive Christian influence as an excuse to take direct control.

One of his first acts in Mosul was to build a splendid new Great Mosque. In a brilliant article published in 2002, the Syrian-American expert on Islamic architecture Yasser Tabbaa analysed the building and its Koranic inscriptions and came to two conclusions: that the minaret – with its forty-five-metre cylindrical form piercing the sky – pays tribute to the influence of the Iranian Seljuk style in architecture, and that the building as a whole conveyed the message to Christians that they should stay out of higher politics in the city. Nur al-Din died two years later but Mosul’s entry into the jihad program was sustained under his successor, Saladin, who ushered in a new phase of aggressive Holy War.

Why, then, would ISIS have a problem with the mosque’s message? It’s a mystery. It may well be that no rationale exists for the masterfully planted detonations that ripped the building apart in seconds on Wednesday, and then toppled its minaret, some distance away on the northern side of the courtyard.

Many Iraqi commentators have rightly seen the explosions as a sign of ISIS’s desperation as the struggle for Mosul enters what looks like its last days and the offensive against their Syrian co-capital, Raqqa, is about to open. With Raqqa’s inevitable fall, ISIS will have lost virtually all the major population centres it held in Syria and Iraq. Its hold on the territories in between – mostly sparsely settled semi-arid lands – has also been made precarious by the relentless coalition bombings and the recent campaigns by the Syrian army via the oil and gas fields east of Palmyra in Resafa (south of Raqqa) and east of the Hauran in southern Syria, and through the constriction of ISIS-held terrain along the middle stretch of the Euphrates.

If ISIS were anything more than a bunch of spoiled, thrillseeking delinquents – inspired and lavishly funded by the very protectors Donald Trump claims to have enrolled in his version of the “war on terror” – then sparing Nur al-Din’s great lighthouse of jihad might have been a wise move. No greater signal of the impoverishment of its cause could have been chosen.

The demolition echoes ISIS’s ahistorical selection of the remote north Syrian village of Dabiq as a rallying point on the basis of a couple of obscure Islamic legends that suggest the village would lie at the centre of an “end of days” confrontation with unbelievers and the West. Again, it might have been wiser to have read up on history a little more closely. In reality, Dabiq was the mustering point for an Islamic offensive against seventh-century Constantinople that petered out without success, and was also the scene of the heart attack that felled a Mamluk commander in the heat of battle and gave rise to the Ottoman Turks’ conquest of Syria in 1516. Historical analogies are always tricky, particularly if badly researched.

It would be rash, however, to see ISIS’s role in Syria as definitively over. The organisation has shown a capacity for profligately suicidal missions that can still do great damage and distract from any sustained efforts to bring the conflict to an end. Numerous battlefronts remain in Syria, and the number of outside parties to the conflict is growing rather than declining. Whatever surgical interventions the sponsors of these campaigns might have in mind, virtually no fights in Syria come out as planned. A selected list of the current conflict fronts helps underline their complexity:

• Raqqa is yet to fall, but at least four parties to the conflict – US-backed forces (both Syrian Democratic Forces and the Kurdish YPG), elements of the Turkish army and the Syrian official armed forces – are intent on taking it in a “race for Berlin” scenario. There is little evidence that any exhibit a strategic understanding as to the likely outcomes.

• Kurdish-controlled areas in the north highlight a host of problems in relations with Turkey that American intervention could further empoison.

• Little information has emerged from the black hole of Idlib province, west of Aleppo, the dumping ground for Islamist fighters and supporters evacuated from Damascus, Homs and Aleppo under “reconciliation agreements.” There, the largely al Qaeda–based forces now control the numerous villages along the Turkish border so tightly that even Facebook and Twitter can’t breach the gravitational field created by their restrictions on the internet. It isn’t at all clear whether efforts are focused on standing down the squabbling Islamist factions, sending them over the Turkish border, forcing a tighter siege on the whole province to secure its submission, or some other strategy.

• Confrontations with largely Islamist-based factions still splutter into life around Damascus, in and around Deraa, and east of Homs and Hama, though the Islamists’ attempt to move on Hama seems to have petered out.

• American efforts to revive the Free Syrian Army are proceeding east of the rich agricultural lands of the Hauran in southern Syria. The strategy seems to envisage a race across the steppe north of the Jordan–Iraq border to prevent official Syrian forces from retaking territory still nominally in ISIS’s hands. Though no explanation has been offered, the strategy is presumably intended to give the United States and its preferred surrogates a seat at any peace settlement. But given the lack of any success so far for the main surrogate, the Free Syrian Army, this looks like a risky operation that could backfire, with the rebel elements again defecting, with their weapons, to one of the Islamist factions or vanishing back over the southern borders.

This list leaves out many other instances of outsiders backing local factions. Among others, they include Hezbollah, Russian “advisers” on the ground, Russian Air Force support for Syrian official operations, Iranian support via Hezbollah, possible continued Turkish replenishment of the Idlib enclave, coalition air strikes, and local militias and Palestinian units vaguely operating at the behest of the Syrian Defence Forces. The risk of misunderstandings is great.

While the conflict may not be in its final days, the trend is towards the Syrian government’s holding a greater spread of territory, the restoration of some semblance of normal life in a few areas retaken in 2016, and a growing capacity among Syrian infantry to sustain campaigns (in tandem with militias and foreign contributors) without being surprised by conflicts breaking out to their rear.

Few reports are emerging from areas recently taken back under government control. The little we hear suggests a fitful return of essential services coupled with freely operating militias or gangster elements, all of this under little or no government control (or indeed with some encouragement). The task of reconstruction is enormous; where to start is still impossible to say.

The demise of ISIS would represent a scaling down of at least one element of the conflict that has intensified in many areas since 2015. It would clear the way for a restoration of something resembling normal life to civilian zones subject to the worst brand of Islamic fundamentalism and the regime’s efforts to bomb or shell the opposition into submission.

But the proliferation of non-Syrian parties still threatens to push the conflict into new forms. Unless Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf states and the United States see the need to stop stamping their agendas on Syrian territory, no end seems possible. It’s time that a few of these players read up on Nur al-Din, the Zengids and why it took 120 years from the building of the Great Mosque in Mosul to end the confrontation with the unbelievers. •

The post A turning point in Syria? appeared first on Inside Story.

This is not to argue that the American attack was reckless or high-risk. It could have been much more effective, though, if it had been more carefully planned and executed. Damage to the base was not extensive and the Assad regime has endured worse humiliations. The fact that president Donald Trump may have been partly motivated by a desire to be seen as decisive may have worked against the effective use of military power for defined ends.

Chlorine has been used as a weapon in Syria on several occasions since 2013, and not just by the government. But Assad’s decision to resort once again to binary chemical agents, such as sarin, represents an open defiance of the norms it agreed to be bound by under the inspection-and-disposal program overseen by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, and underwritten by Russia. For the outside world to turn a blind eye to use of the same weapons would amount to standing with arms folded while the level of savagery in this conflict rose to new heights.

Although the Syrian armed forces are the likely perpetrators, an independent assessment is vital in underlining the seriousness of the red line the regime has crossed. Reports relayed via Syrian opposition forces, particularly those close to al Qaeda, or by the Turkish authorities should be counter-checked carefully before being recounted.

Doubts have been raised as to whether the Syrian regime would have been bent on self-destruction so soon after its retaking of Aleppo on 6 December last year. But this is a total misreading of what is happening on the ground. The Syrian conflict has one key theme: the regime has huge difficulties in holding terrain because of two things: the poor quality of its conscript-based armed forces, and the capacity of its opponents to crop up almost at will, crossing the vast central steppe to suddenly appear in inhabited areas around the western rim and in the Euphrates River valley.

This misreading has been on vivid display in the news media’s reporting since Aleppo fell, which has overlooked numerous firefights along the southern rim of Idlib province, where Islamist fighters have been dumped following “ceasefire” deals concluded in and around Aleppo, Damascus and Homs. These fiercely committed forces (mainly al Qaeda offshoots) have been resupplied across the Turkish border and have begun pressing south towards the next provincial capital, Hama.

Hama is one of a handful of Syrian cities to have remained relatively quarantined from the conflict. It is no coincidence that it was the final battleground in the Muslim Brotherhood’s rebellion against the government thirty-five years ago. The punishment meted out in the regime’s bombardment of the city in 1982 was so brutal and decisive that Hama has remained in clampdown ever since. If Hama can be drawn directly into the struggle, the regime will suffer a moral loss that would more than outweigh the victory it has claimed in Aleppo.

The skirmishes over the past month in the Orontes Valley rim area between Hama and Idlib thus pose a new challenge to the government. Rather than Assad’s being on a high – and therefore concerned not to offend the community just as he hoped to be acknowledged as a winner – he was possibly experiencing the opposite, more like panic. The risk is that he might choose to echo his father’s brutal razing of central Hama. And being tough in the face of a US president who seems to have no stabilising principles (and is isolationist at heart) might seem like an opportunity not to be lost.

The probability is that Assad saw the chemical attack as a means of discouraging any drive by Islamist forces towards Hama. The Russians’ counter-claim – attempting to pin the incident on the town’s rebels, who were said to have concocted sarin in an empty shed – simply signals that there is no credible alternative explanation and that the Russians might have been caught flat-footed. Assad may not have told the Russians he was scrapping the 2013 agreement they underwrote, though it could not have escaped their notice given their shared use of the base at Shayrat.

Trump has promised a strategy, but does he have the makings of one? The OPCW admits that 5 per cent of identified chemical weapons have still not been accounted for. Trump’s improvised rhetoric tried to give the impression that the Shayrat raid addressed that problem. But the fact is that it was Obama’s measured working through of the options (now endlessly recycled as an example of irresolution) that saw the removal of 95 per cent of the nerve agents held in Syria. The Shayrat raid has done nothing to neutralise the other 5 per cent, sufficient for a few more Khan Sheikhuns. Obama had the credibility to engage the Russians in the OPCW process; Trump seems intent on using Khan Sheikhun to shake off the charge that he has been soft on Putin.

The only way of replacing Assad is to engage Russia (and Iran) in the process. Getting rid of Islamic State still remains the logical first objective in the fighting. Will Assad provide further distractions to taunt Trump, demonstrating that the president of Syria still calls the tune? He has never given any indication that he cares how long the war lasts and how many more die in agonising circumstances. He seems determined to wait out all his opponents.

Perhaps, though, Assad needs to be more careful with his friends. Moscow must wonder whether it should have him on a tighter lead. Trump, meanwhile, plays a dangerously short-term game, obsessed with old animosities, driven by impulses and uninterested in strategy, preferring the one-off deal. Given the big battles that still await Syria in Idlib province and around Raqqa, the conflict’s capacity to regenerate itself stretches on endlessly. Shayrat was barely a blip on that horizon. •

The post After Khan Sheikhun appeared first on Inside Story.

If it was recounted in a work of fiction it might satisfy conspiracy theorists, but otherwise strain credulity. Yet we now know how and why it happened.

It went like this. On 12 April 2003, as Iraq descended into chaos after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the government of prime minister John Howard and the then chief of the defence force, Peter Cosgrove, ordered the armed forces to fly emergency medical supplies into Baghdad, possibly the most dangerous city in the world at the time. The supplies were flown in by RAAF C-130 Hercules, which during the actual invasion had been deliberately restricted to relatively safe areas. The plane carried with it three journalists, who up till then had been kept away from any Australian military operation. The medical supplies were rapidly off-loaded but never left the airport. Instead, they were left to rot.

As a manufactured news exercise, Operation Baghdad Assist was a triumph, played out not for the benefit of desperate Iraqis but for a domestic audience in Australia. It’s taken thirteen years for Australians to learn the facts. They come to us now thanks to a long-suppressed and still heavily censored account of the army’s role in Iraq, written by military historian Albert Palazzo of the Directorate of Army Research and Analysis.

We only know about Palazzo’s book thanks to a freedom-of-information request by Fairfax journalist David Wroe, whose reporting of its contents rightly focused on Palazzo’s key finding – that John Howard joined US president George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq solely to strengthen the alliance with the United States. The story attracted little follow-up, which is a pity because Palazzo’s history contains more than one insight.

What’s clear from Palazzo’s account is that the aim of winning maximum diplomatic credit from a minimal military contribution involved deft handling of purely domestic politics, which ultimately took precedence over our strategic alliance aims. Since the war was deeply unpopular and the Labor opposition was against it, the need to minimise casualties, control information and manipulate the media were all interlinked.

Controlling the message continues. Palazzo’s book, classified SECRET AUSTEO (Australian Eyes Only) and submitted to the army in 2011, has been locked away. In the version released under FOI, some 500 passages are redacted.

In releasing the censored version, the defence department gratuitously distanced itself from its contents, stressing that it is an “unofficial history” even though it was commissioned by the army and written in Palazzo’s capacity as an official historian with access to classified material. The current chief of the defence force, air chief marshall Mark Binskin, has questioned the book’s validity, status, academic rigour and conclusions, even though he’s admitted that he hasn’t read the full document.

Information and media control during the Iraq war predated Operation Baghdad Assist. It was central to the initial planning stages, when the ADF was sorting out the bare minimum of forces it could offer Washington in the event that Howard formally committed to supporting the invasion. Palazzo reveals that Cosgrove insisted on a direct line of command to officers in the Middle East so that he could “provide timely and accurate advice to the government” on a range of matters, including “any issue, no matter how tactical in nature, which may attract significant parliamentary or media interest.” As Palazzo notes, “almost everything fell within this mandate.”

It was in this context that Cosgrove, a soldier with sharp political skills honed during his time commanding troops in East Timor, could micro-manage from Canberra a media event like Operation Baghdad Assist. As Palazzo puts it, a nominal relief operation was quickly transformed into “an information operation targeting the Australian public rather than the humanitarian mission as it was first described… [T]he mission’s target was the Australian media and the Australian nation.”

It’s worth pausing to consider the term “information operation.” According to one official Australian definition, it means information-related activities involving the “execution of coordinated, synchronised and integrated lethal and non-lethal actions against the capability, will and understanding of target systems and/or target audiences.” Clearly, by this definition, these are operations directed at an enemy. Yet in this instance, the operation was aimed at swaying the minds of Australian voters, in which case “political propaganda” might be a more apt term.

Palazzo relates how, in a middle-of-the night call, Cosgrove instructed the Middle East commander, Brigadier Maurie McNarn, that the operation was going ahead and to facilitate media coverage. When McNarn protested that Baghdad airport was not secure and there was no way to distribute the supplies, he was told to “make it happen” by Cosgrove, who was about to announce the operation at a news conference in Australia. Palazzo doesn’t mention this, at least in the redacted version, but the insistence that journalists be given seats on the flight sharply contrasted with the suffocating restrictions the ADF usually imposes on media coverage. Palazzo notes that the mission “attracted considerable and highly favourable attention from the Australian media and achieved the objective of portraying the ADF in a good light. In a war that some had questioned, it was a definite ‘feel good’ story.”

While it was a public relations coup, it raises a troubling question for Palazzo about “the acceptability of government manipulation of the media” to influence the domestic politics. “In seeking a media effect on the Australian public Cosgrove and the Howard government played a dangerous if calculated game, perhaps the most risky act they committed” during the war, he writes.

This is a serious charge to make against the Cosgrove and Howard, and it’s worth restating: the government and Cosgrove are accused of using the apolitical armed forces to carry out a dangerous and partisan political stunt in the midst of a war. Yet it’s a conclusion Palazzo and his readers can reasonably draw, based on the accounts of McNarn and special forces commander Lieutenant Colonel Rick Burr. McNarn regarded the operation as a complete failure, cynically describing it as “photo opportunity.”

Burr was appalled, writing in his diary:

This was unbelievable. We had not been allowed to do anything without getting CDF [Cosgrove’s] approval, and only then after painstaking detail and risk assessment etc. next thing we know we are throwing a group into the supposedly the most dangerous location, with no preparation as a team, with no idea, and with no identified C2 [command and control] structure, and with no advice to me on the risk my blokes will be subjected to (because no one has thought of that). With regard to our C130, they couldn’t fly anywhere near western Iraq to support us, in what is a known low threat environment now, but out of the blue, they are allowed to fly into Baghdad.

Baghdad Assist confirms high-level military sensitivity towards the government’s domestic political interests. At the very least, it raises questions about the limits of the military’s obligations in a democracy to carry out the wishes of an elected civilian government.

Domestic politics – more than any military need – clearly influenced what forces Australia was prepared to offer the US in Iraq. Army planners who considered sending the cavalry’s light armoured vehicles to the war were acutely aware that the government was “uncomfortable with the prospect of losses due to the possible negative effect on the domestic political environment.” This was a key factor in the army ruling out sending in the cavalry for the invasion. Later, when they were despatched after the invasion phase, the government ensured they were assigned to an area where there was little chance they would actually have to fight. The obsession with controlling the news reached what Palazzo labels absurd levels when defence officials drafted an elaborate media strategy in the event word got out that a soldier had been involved – but not hurt – in a minor traffic accident. In all of this, the ADF “succeeded in meeting the government’s desire to avoid allowing Iraq to become a larger domestic concern than it could otherwise have been.”

If controlling the message and media manipulation are threads in Palazzo’s history, official secrecy has stifled his attempts to tell it. His book started as an effort to write an account of the army’s role in Iraq, with junior officers the intended audience. It was meant to be unclassified. But he recounts how this original mandate soon unravelled as his access to secret information meant the book would have to remain classified. His work “was not helped… by the ADF’s practice of minimising the amount of information it released to the open domain.”

The extent of the redactions in the version released under FOI – whole pages are blacked out ­– confirms the defence bureaucracy’s deeply entrenched tendency to overclassify information. Material that’s already in public– such as the fact that the army used bases in Jordan, Kuwait and Doha – is redacted. A footnote suggests that one redacted passage cites material already published in the Australian.

As to why the book was suppressed, defence chief Binskin gave a confused answer when questioned in a Senate estimates hearing on 1 March. He confirmed the “document’ was commissioned by the army, but then described it as “unofficial.” Palazzo’s conclusions, based on three years of research and the accounts of more than seventy current and retired military officers, were his “opinions.” Binskin dismissed the book as lacking “academic rigour.” Yet questioned by Greens senator Scott Ludlam, he conceded he had only read the redacted version.

In an exchange with Ludlam, Binskin disputed Palazzo’s conclusion that Australia’s sole strategic objective in joining the invasion of Iraq was to improve relations with the US. Pressed on whether such an objective was sufficient reason to put soldiers in harm’s way, Binskin replied, “Again, it is his [Palazzo’s] opinion. We operate in accordance with what the government's strategic intent is on the day.”

Ludlam: “What strategic objectives did Australia achieve through its involvement in that war?”

Binskin: “I think if we go back into that we could be here all day. I am happy to take all of that on notice and provide those details to you.”

While the chief of the defence force ponders what, if anything, Australia achieved in Iraq, there seems little chance the army is willing to overcome what Palazzo calls the “challenge” imposed by secrecy to allow the book to be distributed as widely as possible. Yet, he says: “The memory and recognition of those who served in Iraq warrants no less.” •

The post A dangerous game appeared first on Inside Story.

The signs of trouble were on display during the election campaign. Among Trump's security themes, three were particularly prominent: a promise to destroy radical Islamic terrorism, especially Islamic State, within months if not weeks; a commitment to greatly increase US military strength; and a pledge to put “America First.” He also criticised America’s overseas allies, advocated better relations with Russia, and called for a tough line on China and Iran. In each case, he brashly advocated a break from past practice.

One thing that worked in favour of Trump the iconoclastic candidate was the failure of US strategic thinking following the declaration of a war on terror after 11 September 2001. The weapons of mass destruction fiasco; the invasion of Iraq and the chaos that followed; and dropping the strategic ball in Afghanistan – these have cost trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives and an incalculable amount of American credibility. Meanwhile, China’s resurgence continued, Iran’s role in the Middle East grew, and Russia became aggressively self-confident. Civil war continued in Iraq and Afghanistan despite the moral and legal obligation on the invading powers – America, Britain and Australia – to ensure a basic level of post-war order.

A new approach seemed to be in order. Perhaps the new president could bring something valuable to the table, as he promised?

Typically, Trump had claimed back in 2015 to know more about Islamic State than American generals. He had a “foolproof” plan to bring about “total victory” over ISIS “very, very quickly.” Later, he said:

There is a way of beating ISIS so easily, so quickly and so effectively and it would be so nice… I know a way that would absolutely give us absolute victory…

[It’s] so simple. It’s like the paper clip. You know, somebody came up with the idea of the paper clip and made a lot of money and everybody’s saying, “Boy, why didn’t I think of that, it’s so simple.” This is so simple, so surgical, it would be an unbelievable thing.

Trump said his plan had to be kept secret to avoid tipping-off the enemy. But there’s no evidence he had any special insight into ISIS or the best way to deal with it. Time will tell if the commander-in-chief really has a heavily camouflaged magic bullet, but he’s already passed his implied deadline to destroy the organisation. ISIS has indeed been squeezed hard on the battlefield, but this reflects strategies adopted before Trump’s election. In any case, the difficulties ahead are considerable.

Thwarting potential terrorists is an ostensible aim of Trump’s immigration policy. Critics see his position here as essentially racist and encouraging the inflammatory and counterproductive idea of a war against Islam. Add to this his earlier comments suggesting families of terrorists ought to be killed, and the claim that torture works (and should be “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”), and it’s easy to understand why US officials might be alarmed about how relations with the Islamic world could unfold.

America’s fight against ISIS hasn’t been hampered by lack of money. Despite Trump’s claim that US forces are dangerously depleted, the defence budget is running at a relatively high level in historical terms. In any case, aside from a small fraction of the air force, the military component of the war on terror mostly involves special forces rather than the big-ticket items that dominate the Pentagon’s budget. Even so, Trump has called for an extra US$54 billion per year (an almost 10 per cent increase), despite the fact that the United States continues to spend more than double the combined totals for Russia and China.

Trump’s thinking is simple: the stronger the US military, the safer the country. This is not a new idea; every president has said much the same thing. Indeed, President Barack Obama had already set in train significant and costly military upgrades. But Trump’s bombastic rhetoric suggests he wants to go further:

We’re also putting in a massive budget request for our beloved military. And we will be substantially upgrading all of our military – all of our military. Offensive, defensive, everything. Bigger and better and stronger than ever before… nobody is going to mess with us, folks. Nobody.

It will be one of the greatest military build-ups in American history. No one will dare to question – as they have been, because we’re very depleted, very, very depleted… Nobody will dare question our military might again.

Strategic dominance is being equated with security. The overwhelming focus is on hard power. This point was underlined by the fact that the military spending boost would be partly funded by cuts to the US foreign service and overseas aid, something that 120 retired American generals and admirals described as short-sighted and counterproductive.

The prominence given to the US military is often difficult to separate from one of the oldest tricks in the book – highly politicised flag-waving. This merges with another conspicuous feature of Trump’s agenda, “America First,” a close relative of his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

On one level, strident nationalism has been standard fare in US politics for as long as anyone can remember, mostly playing to a domestic audience and without significant ramifications, at least since the Second World War. This time, though, it seems different. First, Trump disparaged longstanding US allies. During his election campaign, he called NATO – a cornerstone of post-1945 American foreign policy – obsolete, and suggested he favoured the break-up of the European Union. He generally considered traditional US allies to be freeloaders who had become prosperous at America’s expense. He also implied that the US security guarantee could no longer be taken for granted, which critics worried would undermine deterrence in Europe, South Korea and Japan.

Since his election, though, Trump has back-pedalled, presumably at the prompting of those in his cabinet with more experience in world affairs. The US security umbrella over South Korea, for example, is currently being strengthened by a new missile defence system.

Most remarkable is the fact that the nature of the relationship between the Trump administration and the Kremlin is unclear. At one extreme are suggestions that President Putin is a brilliant puppet-master, or has significant leverage over Trump’s administration. Trump’s defenders, on the other hand, say that he simply wants to break through the deadlock of the past several years and take US–Russian relations into an era of peaceful cooperation. This would presumably mean working closely together on Syria, for instance.

When it comes to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, candidate Trump appeared to lean towards letting bygones be bygones and moving away from sanctions. If Democrats had proposed this sort of reset, Republicans would have shouted appeasement. Yet it makes sense for two of the most heavily armed states in the world, which between them account for a very large proportion of the world’s nuclear weapons, to try to get along. Not that this is predestined: their perceived national interests often diverge, and Putin might be just as uncertain as anyone else about where Trump will jump next.

And Beijing? During the election campaign, Trump said China was “raping’” America with unfair financial and trading practices. He has also questioned America’s “One China” policy, a hot-button issue for Beijing, though he soon backed off. In January, Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, said that Chinese access to disputed islands in the South China Sea “is not going to be allowed.” If the threat had been followed through, this could easily have started a shooting war; in the event, the idea seems to have been shelved or abandoned.

But the waters off China remain a combustible mix. In addition to the South China Sea and Taiwan, a dangerous dispute has been simmering between Beijing and Tokyo in the East China Sea. And both Beijing and Trump seem prepared to play the nationalist card, although in the South China Sea it is Beijing, with a more direct stake, that has the stronger hand. Whether that’s enough to contest America’s strategic edge remains to be seen. Perhaps in a crisis Trump will imagine himself a brilliant poker player, in which case the scope for miscalculation and inadvertent escalation will be considerable.

Something similar might be said of the Iran issue. Candidate Trump heavily criticised the complex multilateral deal struck in 2015 between the community (led by the United States) and Tehran to defuse Iran’s nuclear program. The agreement was the subject of one of Trump’s more worrying campaign pronouncements on security: “My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran… it is catastrophic for America… I’ve studied this issue in great detail, I would say actually greater by far than anybody else. Believe me. Oh, believe me.”

On advice from his more level-headed colleagues, Trump could back away from this overheated rhetoric. That would be a good thing: the deal was the best that could realistically have been hoped for. Yet he has kept the door open to ditching it, which might spur Iran to resume its nuclear program. Where US policy would go after that is anyone’s guess. Abandoning the diplomatic answer worked out in 2015 would imply moving towards armed conflict.

Trump has so far been remarkably quiet about two other major security challenges: Afghanistan (and the related problems in Pakistan) and North Korea. This is despite the fact that the military operation in Afghanistan represents America’s longest war, with still no end in sight. It’s probably fair to say that Trump doesn’t have a clue what to do (although it must be said that his predecessors were also short on effective answers).

North Korea – less integrated into the system (and more dangerous) than Iran – is a wildcard that could destroy North East Asia. Apart from containment, though, it’s unclear what Washington can do. Time will tell whether the blustering showman in Trump will be provoked into reckless behaviour by the even more reckless North Korean leader. Both men seem animated by the “performance” aspect of their roles, something that could work out well or very badly.

This brings us to who, if anyone, will become the central figure in Washington’s foreign and defence policy-making. Will it be Trump, possibly steering policy via hit-and-run tweets? Or secretary of state Rex Tillerson, who (apart from his early South China Sea comment) has so far kept a low profile, and may already have been sidelined? It could be the dubious Steve Bannon, chief White House strategist, perhaps working with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, neither of whom is likely to inspire much confidence outside the administration. Many US soldiers and diplomats, as well as most foreign leaders, are probably hoping replacement national security advisor H.R. McMaster and secretary of defense James Mattis (both well regarded former generals) will provide a steadying influence.

Trump’s presidency started inauspiciously. The crassness of his campaign style carried over into his tenure and looks set to continue. Within weeks, he lost his first national security advisor, the deeply unsuitable Michael Flynn. Trump’s first high-profile security initiative, to prevent entry into the US from a range of Muslim countries, ran into constitutional and court challenges. His response was a swaggering “See you in court.” It didn’t happen; he pulled back and his team spent weeks redrafting the ill-conceived executive order.

All this feeds concerns that Trump prioritises self-importance and dramatic impact (including unpredictability) over the likely consequences. Apparently convinced of his superior gut instincts, he shows little sign of reflecting deeply on issues. Applied to global security matters, this self-belief often looks like strategic illiteracy. Stay tuned. •    

The post “Offensive, defensive, everything” appeared first on Inside Story.

The Arab world accounts for 36 per cent of global terrorist attacks, and 43 per cent of global deaths from terrorism. It supplies around 58 per cent of the world’s refugees. And while it has had some success with specific social and economic reforms, the upward trend in human development indicators has slowed.

When the report turns to its focus for this year, the prospects for young people, it is especially bleak. The region’s education systems are struggling, and student performance is poor and below average for the size of most countries’ GDP. Young people face private labour markets that don’t provide enough work, and governments that can no longer absorb them into the public sector either. The youth unemployment rate, at nearly one-in-three, is double the global average. With some two-thirds of the region’s population under thirty years, this state of affairs matters.

A common lament from those of us who observe and analyse the Arab world is that there is so little space for optimism. In my time working in both government and academia, I’ve had numerous debates with colleagues about whether our assessments of the region are excessively grim. To a majority of observers, there is no alternative: the region’s overall outlook is grim, they argue, and to claim otherwise is to deceive oneself and perform a disservice for others. A couple of colleagues who have tried to write more optimistic analyses have become more negative as their research has evolved. There are pockets of success and some room for optimism in certain countries and in some respects, but any holistic analysis of the region is likely to be quite sombre.

But is there nevertheless room for a more optimistic view? Perhaps. I sometimes wonder if there is too much caution among scholars and other observers of the region: to print a positive perspective and be proven wrong is far riskier than to present a negative one and be erroneous. Partly this is because when things go wrong, the evidence is very clear: a civil war, revolution or economic collapse is an emphatic thing. When things go right, it can take years for the outcome to be noticeable, and risks will still remain. So erring towards the negative is perhaps the safer thing to do: a broken watch, as the saying goes, still tells the time correctly twice a day, while a working watch can constantly report the wrong time.

Nicolas Pelham’s Holy Lands is a brief and highly readable analysis covering much of the Middle East region. He is well-qualified to write such a book, having been a reporter in the region for most of the last twenty years, a career punctuated by roles at the International Crisis Group and the United Nations. He doesn’t provide a blindly negative or positive analysis of the region; rather, he steps into the debate about what has gone wrong by putting it into an historical context. What he ultimately offers, after a rather pessimistic tour of the region, is an optimistic possibility for the region that would require it to look back in time.

Pelham argues that sectarianism is the key to understanding both what has gone wrong with the region in recent times, and what could fix it. He shows that sect has become an overstated and abused part of identity politics, with twentieth-century secular nationalist leaders either trying to deny the region’s religious – and religiously tolerant – heritage, or using sect as a tool to mark themselves out or legitimise their rule. The results were territorial exclusionism, sudden new suspicions and hostilities, and more inward-looking and repressive governments. Islamic State represents the most extreme case, with its medievalist brutality not only towards non-Muslims, but even more so towards Shia. But Pelham’s critique covers much of the region: the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars are tainted with sectarian hostility, and tensions and suspicions between sects and ethnic groups is a feature of politics from Afghanistan to Bahrain to Lebanon.

In making these points, Pelham argues – a little too earnestly perhaps – that the inclusivist ways of the Ottoman Empire are a partial solution to the region’s maladies. The Ottomans were Sunni Turks who ruled much of the region from the 1500s to the end of the first world war, although they spent the better half of that time in decline as European power grew in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Pelham argues that this Ottoman-era tolerance is the real tradition of the region, not the hostile and divisive intolerance that is now so ubiquitous.

The Ottomans had a remarkably liberal political and social outlook compared to most of the region today: key political figures were Christian, for example; European culture was sought out and often embraced; and a great deal of power was devolved to religious communities. This was not egalitarianism, Pelham is quick to stress: non-Muslims were a special, submissive category at most times, paying a special tax and sometimes lacking equality in law. They were the source for slaves and concubines, but even then, as Pelham argues, there was social mobility: “From the lowliest captive, a slave girl could rise to the most powerful person in the empire [as the mother of a Sultan]; an Albanian guttersnipe could become a grand vizier.”

This is largely true, but Pelham probably stretches this claim to breaking point. The Ottomans were indeed remarkably open-minded, and some of their cities at times were cosmopolitan, even by today’s measure. But while Christians and Jews were accepted by the Ottomans, others – especially polytheists – were not. In giving Muslims more rights than others, the Ottomans were also seeking to convert non-Muslims. These non-Muslims also had many social outlets closed to them, from mosques, perhaps fairly obviously, to less obvious places such as coffeehouses, which undermined their ability to build the same social, political and commercial connections enjoyed by Muslims. Muslims rioted in some cities when, in the mid eighteenth century, the Ottomans announced plans to give all citizens equality under the law.

As the empire weakened, communities became increasingly isolated from each other. The education system split into a dual system, one of them provided by the Ottoman rulers and a separate set of schools funded by minorities and outside powers. And at times there was communal conflict: Christian–Druze conflict in Lebanon in 1860, for example, and most infamously, the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman officers during the first world war. Overall, though, the Ottomans were more tolerant and inclusive than much of Europe, but not as much as, say, post-revolutionary France, or arguably even nineteenth-century Britain.

Pelham’s argument is that the region needs to recapture the sort of tolerance and communal inclusiveness that very broadly and commonly marked the Ottoman Empire. He gives some examples of how some of this tolerance already exists, but is rarely reported on. He cites a firebrand Hamas preacher who spouts vehement Islamist rhetoric yet also has a noteworthy tolerance towards other “People of the Book” (Jews and Christians). He discusses the Shia holy city of Najaf, in southern Iraq, where around a quarter of marriages still cross sectarian lines – and given Iraq’s recent history of civil conflict, this is indeed extraordinary. He looks for hope in the words and actions of Jewish, Armenian and other groups as well.

But is there really hope to be found? Can the region return to a decentralised pluralism and the more tolerant communal relations that were once routine there? Certainly, Pelham should be lauded for offering a rich argument that it is possible, and it’s true that there are plenty of examples of communal harmony and inclusiveness in the region if one is willing to look for them. But the possibility that the region can revert to what it once was, after so much conflict and hampered by so many pressing problems, should not be exaggerated. Unfortunately, analyses such as the latest Arab Human Development Report, along with the nightly news beamed to us from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Gaza, Libya and elsewhere, provide a pretty strong incentive to keep erring on the side of cautious pessimism. •

The post Looking forward by looking back appeared first on Inside Story.

The inquiry found that “the judgements about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, WMD, were presented with a certainty that was not justified” and that “despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated.”

The sequence of events Chilcot describes has its parallel in Australia. From the early preparations for war through to the post-invasion excuse-making, George W. Bush, Blair and John Howard kept strictly to script. The reasons for going to war – principally the threat of a WMD-armed Saddam – were carefully coordinated in terms of timing and content.

In the war’s aftermath, there have been no admissions of guilt or wrong-doing. In response to Chilcot, Blair expressed “more sorrow, regret and apology than you will ever know” for the war’s outcome. He apologised for the failures in planning, but maintained that he had not misled his country: that he had taken the right decision and that it was taken in good faith. In his National Press Club speech this week, Howard, too, maintained that he had made the right decision but that the intelligence was flawed.

In Britain and Australia there have long been questions about when, and on what terms, Blair and Howard committed British and Australian military support to Bush. Chilcot found that Blair had agreed to provide British troops long before he acknowledged it publicly, writing to Bush in July 2002 that “he would be with him ‘whatever’ – but if the US wanted a coalition for military action, changes would be needed in three key areas: progress in the Middle East Peace Process; UN authority; and a shift in public opinion in the UK, Europe and the Arab World.”

Many believe that Howard made a similar commitment to Bush during his June 2002 visit to Bush’s Crawford ranch. Howard’s own memoir, Lazarus Rising, certainly leaves the reader with that impression:

In our discussions during that visit, President Bush and I were careful to avoid specifics about Australian troop commitments to a possible invasion of Iraq. He knew that close discussions were under way between the US military and their Australian counterparts. He was entitled to assume on the basis of that, and also the tenor of our discussion, that if the military option was chosen by the United States then, in all likelihood, Australia would join. But he knew that I had not made any commitment to this effect and that for understandable political and other reasons I would keep my options open until the time when a final decision was needed.

Howard and Blair helped Bush create the Coalition of the Willing and engage in what former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright described as the “greatest disaster in American foreign policy… in terms of its unintended consequences and its reverberation throughout the region.”

The 2003 decision of the US-appointed head of Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, to institute a de-Ba’athification program and dissolve the Iraqi army left disaffected Ba’athist military leaders to join with Islamists to create the precursor of Islamic State. The combination of religious fervour and strategic calculation has proven deadly for Iraqis now forced to live with shocking levels of violence and bloodshed. Estimates of Iraqi deaths as a result of the war vary between 150,000 and 382,000. Just this week, we have seen images of Baghdad residents picking through bombed sites for the charred remains of their relatives on the deadliest day since 2003.

Chilcot found that “the planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were wholly inadequate.” Blair was also warned that “attacking Iraq with cruise missiles would ‘act as a recruiting sergeant for a young generation throughout the Islamic and Arab world’” and that the “terrorist threat to Western interests would be heightened by military action against Iraq.” Despite these explicit warnings, he pushed ahead.

The inquiry found that “the assessed intelligence had not established beyond doubt either that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons or that efforts to develop nuclear weapons continued.” At the time, Blair’s speeches argued for military intervention to address the “threat of chaos and disorder” arising from “tyrannical regimes with weapons of mass destruction and extreme terrorist groups” prepared to use them.

Chilcot’s findings echo those of the December 2003 report of the Australian Joint Parliamentary Committee on ASIO, ASIS and DSD chaired by government MP David Jull. It found that:

the case made by the government was that Iraq possessed WMD in large quantities and posed a grave and unacceptable threat to the region and the world, particularly as there was a danger that Iraq’s WMD might be passed to terrorist organisations. This is not the picture that emerges from an examination of all the assessments provided to the committee by Australia’s two analytical agencies.

The Jull committee detailed Australian intelligence agencies’ advice to the Howard government that made it clear there was no compelling case for war. According to the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the Office of National Assessments, Saddam Hussein “did not have nuclear weapons,” had “no known chemical weapons production,” and had conducted “no known biological weapons testing or evaluation since 1991.” At most, Saddam may have had some residual, ageing and depleted stocks of the chemical weapons he had used against the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. Under sanctions, said the ONA, “Iraq’s military capability remained limited and the country’s infrastructure was still in decline.”

Surprisingly, the fallout from Jull’s report was muted. It sparked media interest for just a couple of days, but failed to gain longer-term traction. On 2 March 2004, the day after the report’s public release, the Australian ran the headline “PM’s Spin Sexed-Up Iraq Threat” over a front-page article by their defence journalist, Patrick Walters. Howard announced a further inquiry, headed by former senior diplomat Philip Flood, and then went silent, starving the “sexing up” claim of oxygen. Inexplicably, Labor senator Robert Ray took the wind out of his own party’s sails when, in an interview with Tony Jones on ABC’s Lateline on 1 March 2004, he said that he did not believe the government had been deliberately misleading.

The lack of media interest may have had its roots in an incident two weeks earlier. In a clear breach of parliamentary privilege, sections of Jull’s draft report were leaked to a leading political journalist from the only major Australian daily that took an anti-war editorial position. The same media management strategy had been used in Britain to contain the media response to the Hutton inquiry into the death of scientist David Kelly. In this case, judging by the Sydney Morning Herald’s17 February 2004 front-page headline, “Case for War Not Sexed Up, MPs Find,” only those sections of the report favourable to the government appear to have been leaked. (Howard denied he had either leaked or authorised the leaking of the report.)

Deflecting attention away from the government, the leak framed the key issue in the Jull report as the divergence in advice between the two intelligence agencies, ONA and the Defence Intelligence Organisation, with the ONA “tend[ing] to produce material to fit with government policy objectives.” This framing of politicisation of the intelligence persisted for almost two weeks without contradiction and clearly influenced the public view, as well as other journalists’ reading of the Jull report when it was finally released. Several news organisations suggested that the report had cleared the government – which it had not. The “dead cat on the table” trick had worked.

Both Howard and Blair have accepted responsibility for their decisions to go to war but blamed flawed intelligence. In Howard’s case, his claim does not square with the advice of his own intelligence community, which failed to find a compelling case for the invasion. This detail was hidden in plain sight. Would another inquiry succeed in engaging our political elites in honest reflection where the Jull inquiry failed? •

The post What Britain’s Iraq inquiry means for Australia appeared first on Inside Story.

He was an adviser to US general David Petraeus and helped design the “Surge” in Iraq. He worked for US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, served as a strategist in the US State Department, and has advised, among others, the British and Australian governments. He founded a Washington DC–based consultancy that specialises in complex and frontier environments. As an Australian army officer, he served in East Timor in 1999, where he played a central role in a fatal cross-border exchange of fire with Indonesian forces that could have got much worse had he not helped defuse it. He has a PhD in guerilla warfare. Blood Year is his fourth book.

But if he’s not really an ordinary guy, he has written an informed account that’s accessible to any ordinary citizen who hasn’t paid close attention and wants to know what’s gone wrong in the fifteen years since the United States launched the War on Terror.

His focus is on the rise of the Islamic State, or ISIS, in Iraq and Syria during the bloody year that started in mid 2014. Despite his professional background and front-row seat in some of the events he describes, he insists Blood Year is a personal account of “an ordinary guy caught up in extraordinary events.” He seeks to explain not only why the War on Terror has failed, but also “where ISIS came from, what it all means, and what happens next.”

The War on Terror began well, or so it seemed back in 2001, with the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Then it went off course, diverted by George W. Bush’s folly in invading Iraq in 2003, which, after the rapid collapse of Saddam Hussein’s forces, descended into a debacle. The invasion, Kilcullen concludes, was “the greatest strategic screw-up since Hitler’s invasion of Russia.”

This is familiar territory for anyone who’s taken more than fleeting notice of the news from the Middle East, but it’s worth traversing again. Kilcullen tells it with a punchy, crisp and engaging style and the bare minimum of military jargon, informed by a perspective that comes from having witnessed the screw-up.

He is scathing in his assessment of US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and vice-president Dick Cheney, who ignored the need for post-invasion planning. As a result of their ignorance, hubris and complacency, things went downhill from the start. Iraq’s elites squabbled, resistance festered, sectarian slaughter ripped the country apart. Al Qaeda in Iraq emerged from the ruins and added to the mayhem, and a war-weary Washington soon looked for a way out. And when al Qaeda in Iraq morphed into ISIS, things got even worse.

All of this, Kilcullen says, was not merely predictable, it was predicted – by military, intelligence and academic analysts whose advice was ignored by the Bush White House and the coterie around Rumsfeld and Cheney.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, and Kilcullen tries to spread it evenly. Yet having blamed Bush for the biggest strategic blunder since 1941 – for leading the West into the wrong war in the wrong country with disastrous results – he also praises his leadership of the 2007 Surge.

But while he tries to give a balanced account of Bush, he makes no allowances for the political realities confronting his successor, Barack Obama. Bush had committed to withdrawing US troops from Iraq, and Obama had been elected on a promise to extricate his war-weary nation from the war. In both cases, military strategy was not drafted in isolation from these political realities.

Kilcullen doesn’t resolve the tension between an ideal strategy and the political facts, and this failure leads to basic flaws in his outline of what should come next in the War on Terror.

He is particularly scathing of Obama’s performance after he took office in January 2009, faulting him for squandering the gains made during the Surge, and for conflating leaving Iraq with ending the war. He faults him again over his failure to act in 2012 when Syrian president Bashar al-Assad used chemicals weapons, crossing one of Obama’s “red lines.” Kilcullen likens Obama’s failure to act against Assad to Bush’s decision to act against Saddam Hussein: “Where President Bush was reckless, President Obama seemed feckless, and it was hard to know which was worse.”

Kilcullen’s best insights and most compelling writing are in his sweeping account of the rise of ISIS and its eventual dominance of the Iraqi battlefield. His sparse style and grasp of detail help make sense of the madness ISIS unleashed.

Born of the bloody mess created by the US invasion of Iraq, ISIS had its origins as a Sunni extremist group that fought American forces while simultaneously seeking to foment a sectarian civil war. It was more or less destroyed after Sunni tribes partnered with Americans during the Surge, according to Kilcullen. Yet it managed to re-emerge, this time under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, showing its ability to morph and adapt.

When the Americans left, ISIS fed on the resistance to Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s pro-Shiite agenda, emerging from the shadows to wage a conventional war of rapid manoeuvre, fighting like a state. In the face of the ISIS blitzkrieg, Maliki’s army “collapsed like a rotten outhouse.”

In its May 2015 assault on Ramadi, ISIS used tactics that were simultaneously intelligent, precise, determined and relentlessly savage. “No wonder [the Iraqi] troops broke,” Kilcullen writes, “almost any troops in the world would have done so.” (When Ramadi fell, by the way, Australian army advisers were less than sixty miles away, where Australian voters had been assured they were safely “behind the wire.”)

The collapse of the Iraqi army in 2014–15 wasn’t just a military defeat, Kilcullen writes, “it was the collapse of the entire post-Saddam social and political order.” It represented not only a failure of Iraq’s leadership, but also US complacency and the failure of the West’s military and police assistance to produce Iraqi forces capable of defeating a terrorist threat.

In areas ISIS controlled – and by mid 2015 it accounted for half the territory and people of Iraq and Syria – it imposed its savage rule through a combination of slaughter and civil works, or “exemplary violence then essential services,” as Kilcullen puts it.

In these passages, Blood Year is compelling reading. Yet when it comes to the strategy Kilcullen proposes, a truly ordinary guy might find frustrating contradictions in his suggested approach to a devilishly complex conflict.

Kilcullen accuses Obama of dithering in the face of the initial ISIS offensive. At the same time, he says the Pentagon moved fast in response to the disaster. American troops returned in small numbers, special operations advisers helped the Iraqis plan and train, and US aircraft went into action. On whose orders, one wonders?

In Kilcullen’s eyes, the White House was in disarray. But another way of looking at it suggests that perhaps Obama was adopting a cautious, incremental, prudent and nuanced approach, constrained by the lessons of recent history and his own political reality. Given his predecessor’s calamitous performance, it’s not surprising that Obama reportedly regards the first task of a US president in the post-Bush international arena to be “Don’t do stupid shit.”

Kilcullen condemns the political “timidity” of western capitals, reluctant to take on ISIS and commit combat forces. Yet which Western leader had the domestic political capital then or now to expend on such a decision? Tony Abbott, who apparently had the inclination but didn’t follow through? Or would Britain be willing to retake the field after its disastrous experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan?

And what is a truly ordinary guy to make of Kilcullen’s call for a full-scale conventional campaign to destroy ISIS, one that would require only a “moderately large number of ground troops”? How many is a moderately large number, and who would provide them?

He suggests the campaign be backed by projects similar to the US Lend-Lease program and the Marshall Plan, which supported allies and rebuilt Europe during and after the second world war. Who would fund these programs? The logical answer is the United States, but could it afford it and, more importantly, would the American people allow it?

The strategy would require the West’s Middle East partners to improve their governance and human rights standards, something they haven’t shown they’re capable of. Kilcullen is not blind to the challenge. He concedes that if Iraqi governments won’t change, and continue to treat Sunnis with disdain, then even if every ISIS fighter disappeared overnight “a new ISIS would simply emerge in another year or so.”

To his credit, Kilcullen quotes counterterrorism strategist Audrey Cronin, an American academic and, like Kilcullen, an adviser to US governments, who argues that a full-on conventional war against ISIS “would be folly.”

“After experiencing more than a decade of continuous war, the American public simply would not support the long-term occupation and intense fighting that would be required to obliterate ISIS,” Cronin argues. “The pursuit of a full-fledged military campaign would exhaust US resources and offer little hope of obtaining the objective. Wars pursued at odds with political reality cannot be won.”

Kilcullen acknowledges the force of this argument, yet fails to counter it. Instead, we’re left with the feeling that he’s frustrated by the failure of political facts to bend to strategic theory.

Even so, an ordinary citizen shocked by recent events in Brussels and Lahore might still accept Kilcullen’s melancholy and sobering conclusion about what’s ahead of us.

“This conflict will not be going away anytime soon, and it certainly won’t end quickly or cleanly,” he writes. “On the contrary: this is, and will be, a multigenerational struggle against an implacable enemy, and the violence we’re dealing with in the Middle East and Africa is not some unfortunate aberration – it’s the new normal.” •

The post An “ordinary guy” in extraordinary times appeared first on Inside Story.

As events unfolded in the Middle East, an element of synchrony came to sharpen the loss. Halliday was an extraordinary public intellectual. His work of four decades covered many fields, as the titles of his twenty books indicate: among them are Arabia Without Sultans, Iran: Dictatorship and Development, The Ethiopian Revolution (co-authored with Maxine Molyneux), The Making of the Second Cold War, Revolution and World Politics, and Two Hours that Shook the World.

Moreover, its wide range was combined with great social depth. Halliday’s mind was capacious and forensic, his lens panoptic and microscopic. (“The personal is the international” was one of his many aphorisms.) His rights-based universalism, reached via a lengthy marxisant prologue, was never arid, and was watered by immensely rich and loving empathy with national and local particularities, from architecture and dialect to cuisine and humour. Never was this more true than in connection with his beloved Yemen, one of his book-length studies being Arabs in Exile: The Yemeni Community in Britain. (“My one remaining ambition in life,” he once wrote, “is to have a bookshop, library or street named after me in Yemen.”)

Halliday was also unafraid: ready in argument to express uncomfortable truths and test lazy assumptions, bold in rethinking his own ideas and absorbing new ones, but also prepared to contest breaches of fundamental principle from whatever source. Two very different examples of the latter are his defence of Kuwaiti sovereignty following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of the emirate in 1990, which was reinforced by inside knowledge of the nature of the Ba’athist dictatorship, and opposition to his own London School of Economics accepting money from the Gaddafi coffers in Libya. The first caused a permanent breach with many former allies, the second – which emerged posthumously – fuelled a burgeoning scandal (though Halliday’s forewarning sought only to uphold the LSE’s integrity and self-interest).

Such stances were far from contrarian. Halliday’s compass took its bearings from the ground, “the analysis of what actually happens,” and from solidarity, “the shared moral and political value and equality of all human beings, and of the rights that attach to them.” Whether the topic was Cuba or Libya, terrorism or 1968, his work matched detailed familiarity with independence of political judgement. His grasp of complex subjects, and his ability to explain them clearly, informed his contributions in every forum: from seminar room and lecture hall to journal and broadcasting studio, and in hundreds of articles and dozens of chapters on top of those books. Halliday was one of those rare people who appear a lot on the intelligent media while never becoming a “media figure,” his voice – lucid, informed, careful, robust, educative, morally serious – a force for reason as well as the healthy contention he loved.

Behind it all lay Halliday’s inimitable presence, or anima, which flourished in those public or semi-public arenas where a wealth of personal memory, cultural reference or vernacular insight made bonds and gave his ideas sparkling life. The insights had been earned, not merely acquired, by a lifetime’s vigour, curiosity and empathy: learning those languages, travelling and listening (and he was as good a listener as he was a linguist), looking behind; what he liked to call “doing the work.” (Halliday, who spoke nine languages fluently and others more than passably, including several dialects of Arabic, was fond of saying, “You get to speak a language the way you get to swim: learn a few basic moves, and then dive in!”) Whether a solitary study, a warm cafe, a bubbling salon, a teeming street, a yawning lecture room, or a desert or mountain night among men with guns – Halliday was at home in the world, and capable, time after time, of turning that faculty into enlightenment.

These textures were revitalised when, after two decades at LSE’s department of international relations, he began to shift base towards a “new professional triangle,” the IBEI/CIDOB/CCCB research institutes in Barcelona, a city whose genius for conviviality matched his own. Carmen Claudin recalls his arrival from the airport as a one-month guest researcher: “He came directly to CIDOB, as we had agreed and, coming through the door, before as much as saying hello, he exclaimed with a knowing smile, ‘I think I could live in this place!’”

The incremental move sealed Halliday’s recovery from an illness partly induced by overwork during the post-9/11 period. A new balance was reflected in several books, including The Middle East in International Relations, 100 Myths About the Middle East, and Shocked and Awed: How the War on Terror and Jihad Have Changed the English Language, and in prolific media output, including columns in the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia and frequent essays in openDemocracy. The Latin America historian James Dunkerley, latterly a neighbour in London’s Tavistock Square (where Halliday stayed when working in the city), offers a characteristic, and suitably newspaper-related, vignette from this period:

He liked to read the morning papers in the beautiful garden centred on the statue of Gandhi and dedicated to the cause of peace. Always jovial, even when palpably suffering, he would regale me in his burnished baritone with the latest news from Bishkek, ask about the balance of forces in Quito, and deconstruct conspiracies in Sana’a.

Barcelona’s benign influence on Halliday leavened the coincident darkening of world politics, not least in and around Iraq following the United States–led invasion of 2003. Much of Halliday’s reputation had been built on prodigious engagement with the Arab and Iranian worlds. He came to see their modern experience of revolution, dictatorship and war in terms of a “greater west Asian crisis,” a term he coined in 2001, denoting the impact of post-9/11 geopolitics on “a wide arc of nation-states – the Arab world, Israel, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.” In the same period, ideas forged in the preceding decade found fresh relevance: ideas about the modernity of nationalism and of the Middle East itself, about the fates of solidarity and about “patriarchy with guns.”

In 2010–11, the uprisings of the “Arab spring” – beginning in Tunisia, then spreading to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Syria, but leaving nowhere untouched – opened tantalising hopes of a historic turn towards freedom and democracy in the region, many soon to be drowned in blood. A year earlier, Halliday had written about the student-led protest wave in Iran after the presidential elections. No one was better qualified to make sense of these new events – their origins, character, dynamics, and place in the global map. Yet when people looked around, he was gone.

A natural consequence of death is to invite attention to a person’s whole life. In Halliday’s case, the first of three commemorations held in London, attended by a large crowd at London University’s Senate House, suggested that his intellectual and ethical wellspring was intimately linked to his family and social milieu. (The other two events were a panel discussion and day-long seminar focusing on his work, both at the LSE.)

Simon Frederick Peter Halliday was born, the youngest of three brothers, in Dublin on 22 February 1946 – the very day, as he once noted, that the American diplomat George Kennan despatched his “long telegram,” the cold war’s formative document, from the United States embassy in Moscow. (The text was published early the following year as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” under the pseudonym “X,” in Foreign Affairs. Halliday would interview “Mr X” at Princeton in 1995, as part of a series of conversations with strategists of the era; the others were Paul Nitze, Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara and Robert Gates.) He was brought up in the town of Dundalk, on the border of a politically divided Ireland, which was often a refuge or base for Irish Republican Army operatives (as in the stuttering “border campaign” of 1956–62). His father Arthur was from Yorkshire in England, the caring owner of a shoe factory, and of Quaker background; his mother Rita was Irish and Catholic.

These dualities may account for a lot. Halliday observed of his hometown in 2004: “The whole agenda of international relations is there: state formation, frontiers, revolutionary struggle, nationalism, industrial rise and decline, illegal transnational flows, environmental damage, and perhaps now a bit of international cooperation.” Yet it’s worth recalling too that such “mixed” backgrounds, in politically charged contexts, often result in demonstrative nativism. (Ireland has prominent examples, as have Scotland and Wales, to name only those.) Halliday himself was always highly critical of ultra-nationalism, in Ireland as elsewhere. He also had a ready answer to any safety concerns while on the road: “I was brought up in Dundalk!”

During his early years, Ireland was establishing itself in the international arena, becoming a republic in 1949–49 and joining the United Nations in 1955. Frank Aiken, the pioneering foreign minister of the 1950s–60s, carved an activist foreign policy that included championing the rights of beleaguered Hungary, Tibet, Algeria and Taiwan, and bold advocacy of pacts over nuclear weapons and the Arab–Israeli conflict. The patriotic internationalism represented by Aiken, whom Halliday greatly respected, may also have exerted an influence.

The closing speaker at the Senate House was Halliday’s elder brother Jon, whose books include a biography of Mao Zedong, co-authored with Jung Chang. His contribution ended on a moving note by quoting Fred’s reference to him on a past occasion, using an affectionate Irish phrase, and then, very quietly, returning the words. “Here’s to me sound man.” The bonds between home and world never seemed so close.

Halliday’s schooling was at Ampleforth, a Catholic college in north Yorkshire with roots in the nearby Benedictine abbey. Edmund Fawcett, a co-pupil, recalled Fred, around the time of China’s invasion of Tibet, studying a Tibetan-language textbook to try to grasp more of what was happening. A reference backing his Oxford application in 1963, quoted in a thoughtful survey by Adam Roberts for the British Academy, described him as “a most conscientious person of high ideals and admirable performance.”

Halliday stood out even amid the student ferment of mid 1960s Oxford, where he gained a first-class degree in philosophy, politics and economics and, as political editor, wrote for the student magazine Isis. His invitation to Francisco Caamaño Deñó, the exiled ex-president of the Dominican Republic, in 1966 is an example of his outward-facing maturity at this time. Their meeting had a profound impression on Halliday, whose later research produced a valuable book (“heteroclite,” in his own description) on Caamaño and this moment in the country’s history.

There followed more study at SOAS, work in London’s innovative radical press, membership of the editorial board of the influential New Left Review, or NLR (which would last fifteen years, until 1983), a translation of Karl Korsch from German and an editing of essays by Isaac Deutscher, and extensive travel, including for his books on the Arabian peninsula and Iran. All were underpinned by vital partnership with the international sociologist Maxine Molyneux. What’s notable too is that for all the atmosphere of the time and Halliday’s political leanings, his travels were at heart those of an honest, empathetic inquirer, not a “tourist of the revolution.” (A photo of him sitting on the ground and tapping on a typewriter among his Dhofar radical hosts is emblematic.) The Harvard historian Roger Owen, a decade older, said of Halliday that “he always seemed to have been somewhere first, to have summed up the situation there before I or those with similar interests had even begun to put a few first incoherent thoughts about it together.”

Amsterdam’s Transnational Institute and Washington’s Institute for Policy Studies gave important sustenance at a time when the “international left” seemed more than a chimera. But the broader authority of Halliday’s work was reflected in 1984 with his appointment (against some internal opposition) to a lectureship at the LSE, and later a chair. Thus began a mutually productive association of over two decades. (In 2015, the LSE’s Language Centre inaugurated an award in his name.) He taught, supervised and mentored generations of students, played a leading role in the international relations department, and encouraged younger scholars such as Katerina Dalacoura, Umut Özkirimli and many others towards professional achievement. His emphasis on the centrality of gender to the field, as in Rethinking International Relations, had a keen influence on the discipline.

Dalacoura, also a speaker at that London meeting, began in the present tense by saying that Halliday “influences us by what he does and who he is as well as what he writes. We were it, part of his wider engagement with the world. He made us think, he was without discrimination, and liberal with time and praise. His generosity of spirit will stay with me more than anything.”

In a fine valedictory, his colleague Christopher Hill noted the wider respect in which Halliday was held (he “carried personal, intellectual and political weight, and thus could never be taken for granted”). He saw the department not “as a home, in which to retreat behind closed doors,” Hill said, but as “a castle, from which he could venture out,” including “to the world of policy debate in which he continued to join so vigorously.”

The point carries weight. For Halliday, the instruments of enlightenment, used well – reason, dialogue, research, analysis, knowledge-based argument – were also means towards a better world. James Dunkerley remembers an unusually harmonious NLR party to mark Halliday’s unexpected (and in a red-baiting redoubt of the press, scandalous) elevation to the LSE. “What does it mean, Fred?” he asked. “It means I have twenty-six years to make a difference!”

The years since Halliday’s death have seen excellent assessments of his work by academic colleagues of the calibre of Stephen Howe, David Styan, Toby Dodge, and Alejandro Colás and George Lawson, as well as Susie Linfield’s fine essay in the Nation. In addition, scrupulous work by a small team at the LSE, led by Benjamin Martill, has catalogued Halliday’s academic bibliography, almost a quarter of whose eighty pages is composed of unpublished manuscripts. It is open to researchers, as is Halliday’s personal archive, a separate project also under the LSE’s auspices.

These are foundations of what might one day become an intellectual–intellectual biography, which by default would also encompass the history of the post-1945 world (and several of its tributaries, including the cold war, communism, jihadism, and the left, and ideas of revolution, nationalism, and solidarity.)

Yet there is also a sense that in an international arena threatened by insecurity, violence and extremism of attitude, Halliday’s work and example could contribute far more than they are being allowed to do. At any rate, the rational principles to which he gave large-minded and grounded expression – above all the “unceasing belief in universal values” he shared with an ally, Maxime Rodinson – are acutely relevant.

Such universals, moreover, are not at odds with the particular, but crystallised in it. Halliday had little use for “identity” or “tradition,” far less essentialist, relativist or postmodernist conceits. The pithy sparks lighting his trail included: “No nation is older than the oldest living person claiming to be a member of it,” and “When I hear the word ‘community’ I reach for my exit visa!” Among his list of “the world’s twelve worst ideas,” number four was “The world is divided into incompatible moral blocs or civilisations.” Politics and culture are not the same. Separate them, reinstate politics, and much could follow.

Halliday’s last article before the onset of his final illness was about Barcelona. It describes a lively debate, or tertulia, he took part in on Catalonia’s TV3 channel, then moves outwards. While attentive to the city’s “dark” and “grey” worlds, the tone is life-affirming:

This is the Barcelona, above all, that I have come to know and love: the Chilean waiter in Sant Gervasi who teaches me left-wing slogans in Mapuche justifying mass land seizures; the Moroccan family I met on the beach at Barcelonera, who speak only Berber and Catalan; a sprightly gentleman of some eighty or more years, sipping coffee with his wife in a bar next to the offices of La Vanguardia, who, when I drop my pen, immediately jumps down and picks it up, and then presents his card, identifying him as the president of the Catalan Association of Republican Aviators, a veteran not only of the civil war, but, in exile, of the French air force as well; an Australian co-author, long resident in Papua New Guinea, now a leading translator of Catalan literature, ensconced in her book-lined eighteenth-century flat in the Born, with the volumes of Joan Corominas as backdrop; a man in his shorts, alone on the Carrer de Comercio on a torrid Sunday afternoon, singing the “Mediterráneo” of Joan Manuel Serrat; my Icelandic designer friend who brings a small bottle of Brennivin, a 40 per cent proof northern liquor from her country; the Filipino waiter who, on advising me of the best meat dishes in his country, after indicating which can be taken with chicken, pork or beef, then whispers that, of course, the best is dog; an Italian student, expert in Romance languages, and now working on Occitanian poetry, who consults me on the possible Arabic roots of this vocabulary; and my Catalan language teacher, a Palestinian translator from Los Angeles, to whom I have awarded the nickname Abu Tarjoma, “the father of translation,” whom I meet once a week for coffee and an exchange of linguistic and intercultural anecdotes. And many more.

That this comes from a man of deep political seriousness, whose life’s purpose was to understand the world in order to change it, only adds another layer. For once, forget the evidence. The world has not seen the last of Fred Halliday. •

The post Fred Halliday’s futurity appeared first on Inside Story.

Perhaps regimes across the Arab world have failed to see their own volcanoes, too. They manifestly failed to grasp how their interests would be affected by growing educational opportunities, evident in a rise in literacy from 18 per cent to 82 per cent since 1960. There was a thirty-fold increase in the number of Arabs online between 2000 and 2012, but regimes paid little attention to the impact of the internet and social media on alienated Muslims in Arab and Western societies. They welcomed foreign direct investment without appreciating that it also brought the values and disciplines of global business models and raised expectations of individual empowerment and gender relations.

Most importantly, perhaps, they failed to recognise the significance of each of those factors in shaping inchoate desires within their societies to be modern, and Arab, and in many cases Muslim, in the twenty-first century.

Western policy-makers shared in that analytical failure. We were too close to, and too comfortable with, Arab regimes. We wanted to believe their assurances about how they were reshaping their countries. Like all good diplomats and salespeople, they made us feel good about ourselves, and so we were inclined to discount our concerns about the real-time performance of ageing, sclerotic, parasitic leaderships. We anticipated that their time at the helm would pass, to be followed, surely, by a new generation more attuned to our vision of a globalising world.

In short, we didn’t pay enough attention to the gaps between rhetoric and political and social reality. We underestimated the resilience of elites determined to protect their privileges and identities from encroachment by others. We conflated popular enthusiasm for elections with a coming triumph of democratic values.

With a handful of exceptions, we didn’t see the uprisings of 2011 coming. We didn’t think we had to look. We had missed the enthusiasm for change on public display. And we failed to see that reform, when it came, could modify the functioning of systems but not the values underpinning them.

So when Mohamed ElBaradei arrived at Cairo airport in early 2010, having completed his term as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to a tumultuous reception by Egyptians who saw him as a fresh political force, and then left again barely forty-eight hours later, we missed the point. We focused merely on what we saw as his political ineptitude, or on the capacity of the Mubarak regime to stare him down.

We also missed, and most Arab intellectuals dismissed, the significance of the rejoining of student and labour activism in Egypt from 2009 onwards, mostly because that initiative at first went nowhere. We did not appreciate how it could rebound, leveraged by the internet and social media, into a key factor in the unfolding events of 2011.

We should have been focused, in other words, on the underlying factors making the turmoil of the Arab Uprisings a real possibility.

In 2002, under the sponsorship of the United Nations, Arab intellectuals had begun publishing a series of detailed analyses, known as the Arab Human Development Reports, identifying key regional social, economic and political deficits. Together with publications by Arab experts in other think tanks in the Western world, they warned that the Arab world was “richer than it was developed.” We were placed on notice that reform was urgently required in areas ranging from gender empowerment to education if the gaps between the Arab world and other countries were to be closed.

Clearly written, evidence-based, intellectually cogent and devoid of self-pity and excuses, the analyses identified the causes of Arab ill-performance as arising for the most part from institutions Arab governments had created but failed to reform. The political implications of the analyses were not clearly stated, but they were obvious enough.

Within the Arab world, the analysts were mostly ignored, condemned or dismissed for their lack of political correctness. They had failed, in effect, to pin responsibility, or even causality, elsewhere, and that was unacceptable.

As the fifteenth anniversary of the first of those reports approaches, it’s clear that none of the key concerns articulated by those Arab intellectuals have been addressed. Nor have the changes in the region during that decade and a half made achieving the reforms they called for any easier.

Instead, the collapse of the Arab Uprisings has seen a reaffirmation of authoritarian values and practices. This has been reinforced by the abject failure of supposedly liberal Arab voices to rise above their political differences and defend a robust separation of powers. No one (except perhaps in Tunisia, and even that is questionable) is insisting on respect for the values of inclusive politics and empowerment. Nor is there evidence that Arab governments have harnessed, mobilised and empowered creative talent in business, politics or the arts.

Meanwhile, across the Middle East, the demographic time bomb ticks on. Amid ongoing weakness in oil prices, budget deficits are worsening. Graduate unemployment is at a record high. Timorous responses to consumer demand for cheap energy and water, and the impact of global warming on ill-equipped infrastructure have created increasingly obvious environmental problems. Government have shied away from unpalatable choices in response to financial pressures, for fear of the political and security consequences.

By failing to capture the political imagination of the young middle class, governments in the region have struggled to find a sustainable balance between satisfying the expectations and demands of their political audiences and meeting the imperatives of national survival in a globalised security environment.

In seeking to find that balance, some countries will cope better than others. In Syria, Libya and Yemen, the structures of government have effectively collapsed. Iraq is unlikely to see a full restoration of central authority. Egypt, long the Arab centre of gravity, is regressing politically: its human rights record is appalling but few Egyptians appear to care; its economic and environmental problems are manifest; and it maintains – with the blessings of its major Gulf financiers – a steadfast refusal to accept inclusive politics as part of an effective response to persistent domestic security woes.

The small Gulf oil exporters are in a different situation. Although the sustained downturn in oil prices is hitting the property market and consumer spending, sovereign wealth funds are amply resourced. If necessary, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar can introduce a value-added tax, impose excise duties on vehicles, and tax expatriates in order to manage financial pressures. Risks exist within the patriarchal, intimate political systems that have applied since the 1970s, but in general they appear relatively stable.

The challenges for Saudi Arabia are greater. The Saudi population is larger, the relationship between the House of Saud and its conservative religious allies is complex, and the leadership is undergoing generational change. Concerns about an ascendant Iran are linked to anxieties about the Shia minority in the kingdom and the challenge to the political authority of the Sunni leadership in Bahrain.

There are fewer high-income expatriates in Saudi Arabia who can be taxed to help reduce growing financial deficits. Capital expenditure can certainly be cut back. Introduction of a value-added tax is being considered. But unless the country’s leaders persuade Saudi citizens to move from a culture of entitlement to one that can cope with diminishing oil revenues, and unless they introduce tax-based revenue streams from Saudi nationals to supplement their income from oil, they face the prospect of a major financial crisis within a decade.

As with the smaller Arab oil producers, these are manageable problems for Riyadh. But they also steer Saudi priorities towards securing a predictable regional order in which to deal with the complex challenges they present.

Always inclined to be risk-averse, the Saudis are set on shaping that regional order to counter not only the perceived challenge of Iran but also, where possible, the demands and values that flowered briefly across the region among the popular and Islamist activists of 2011.

The counter-revolutionary impulse – a gadarene rush back to the familiar comforts of authoritarian rule at the expense of creativity, empowerment, human rights, accountability and transparency in government – can only succeed, even in the short term, with a strong, balanced economic performance. To be sustainable, it also requires a demonstrated sensitivity to popular expectations of dignity in circumstances where interaction with the state is unavoidable.

Political leadership, not terrorism, is the key to meeting that demand, and critically important to the Arab future. But such leadership is in short supply. Nor is there necessarily a political solution to be found to many of the most pressing challenges of the coming decade.

Significant gaps remain between urban and rural Arab populations, and between elites and others, not only in terms of literacy and numeracy but also in terms of their daily experience of dealing with instruments and agents of state authority, from police to bureaucrats and teachers.

Webs of privilege, patronage networks and corruption, and fear of open-ended change in social and political spheres limit the scope for systemic reform. The avowed secularism of “modernising” Arab regimes was always a phenomenon of the urban elite, closely linked to issues of class and visceral rejection of the Islamist “other.” But whereas political Islam is now in retreat, the sophistication, connectivity and lethality of jihadist forces has increased dramatically.

The vast majority of Arab populations are unlikely to experience a closing of the gaps between their economic and social circumstances and those that prevail in the rest of the developed world. State authority – a critical factor if programmatic reform is to be delivered rather than merely announced – is increasingly at risk. Ordinary people feel little connection to national events and policies. Localised struggles for turf, or in some cases for survival, are privileging militias, traditional power-brokers and other regressive forms of rule.

Competing narratives of victimhood, and the newly fashionable rubric of grassroots empowerment are both open to exploitation by forces that are in practice deeply disempowering and increasingly sectarian in their behaviour and beliefs. They may prove to be the death knell of the progressive and creative elements within Arab society.

These circumstances bode ill, not only for Arabs but for all of us. There is little that Western countries can do directly to help in the rebooting of Arab values. But we do need to avoid policy approaches and rhetoric that can make matters worse.

The states and societies of the Middle East have had more than their share of unequal and conflictual dealingswith outside parties. Western policy-makers have eroded our own credibility by accommodating the corruption and human rights abuses of regimes – sometimes out of expediency, and sometimes for want of an alternative under the pressure of events – and failing to apply the same moral standards to Israel as we apply to other parties in the Middle East. Our failures have damaged the standing of those in the region who respect our values and sometimes pay heed to our advice.

A rarely acknowledged consequence (in the West, at least) of those failures, and one that is coming to haunt the region, is the fostering of Arab identities (both national and sectarian) framed by collective memories and mythologies of grievance where the West is concerned.

Like most other nations, Arab societies are shaped by their own versions of history and of popular aversion, in many cases to near neighbours. The region has too much history, and not enough geography, to expect anything else. Memories and mythologies in which external players – primarily the United States – are cast in such negative terms have been important in shaping the overall strategic outlook for parts of the Arab world. They influence Arab responses to efforts to restore balanced relations between Iran and the West; they are seized on by non-state actors to validate their antipathy to an established regional order in which the United States has long played a key part.

Australia’s increasingly close relations with the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, as well as the alliance relationship with the United States, mean that such perceptions matter to us. Our wider interests, including the protection of Australians at home and abroad, are also at risk when Arab governments are challenged from within by those they have been alienated or marginalised from national politics.

We need to be directing our attention to the likelihood, and the possible consequences, of these institutional and policy failures continuing. Indeed, we need to ask whether the political cultures in the region that remain bound by collective memories of victimhood, or dogma claiming divine sanction, will ever be able to understand, let alone compete in, a global market of ideas dominated by political cultures and institutions that draw primarily on mythologies of promise, achievement and adventure, intellectual and otherwise.

Heroism and heroes – whether they are politicians, artists, business leaders, scientists or educators – shape visions of the possible. And among its many deficits, the deficit of heroes in the contemporary Arab world is alarming. Different as they are in almost all other respects, Nobel Peace Prize laureate ElBaradei – surely the sort of positive role model that is required if the Arab world is to realise its creative potential – and Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi have in common that they inspired hope for an alternative future.

In the case of Baghdadi and others like him, we focus at our peril on their failures and shortcomings rather than on the groundswells – the volcanoes – into which they tap. In her magisterial analysis of the factors contributing to the outbreak of world war in 1914, Margaret MacMillan argued that popular mobilisation in Europe arose not as a result of despair and economic adversity, which was growing among the working classes, so much as in response to the promise, and excitement, of visions that proved to be catastrophic. The same can be said of the Arab world today.

Radicalisation is fed by humiliation and despair, but 2011 reminds us that Arab mobilisation is also driven by hope. There will be a surfeit of adversity across the Middle East in the next decade, including ethnic cleansing, sectarian conflict and economic malaise. The human cost of conflict will have corrosive social and political consequences enduring for generations to come.

From a strategic perspective, however, we face the further possibility that, after decades of unfulfilled promises, hope will be offered, possibly to increasingly radicalised audiences, by those whose views and values are deeply antagonistic to our own. We may well succeed over time in degrading the potency of the vision offered by Islamic State and other jihadist groups, partly through military measures to reverse their momentum. We can, and should, highlight their cynicism, debunk their narratives, castigate their brutality and condemn those governments who travel with them.

We should be consistent in upholding and defending our own values while we do so. The rules of war must be respected on our side, even when those we fight, and some of those who fight for us, choose to ignore them.

But if we fail to support hope among the peoples of the region for a future consistent with the values we would like to see emerge there, we will not have secured our future, or helped them to secure theirs. •

The post The Arab outlook: beware the return of hope appeared first on Inside Story.

The underlying situation in Ukraine did not improve, but the steady drip of casualties suddenly halted. For many Western commentators and politicians, this fuelled a hope that lasting peace was not far off. Few sufficiently noted the point made by political scientist Alexander Motyl, that the sudden suspension of the proxy aggression against Ukraine showed that Russia’s claims that it hasn’t been involved in Donbass were absurd. And what can be so easily turned off can easily be turned back on again – and in recent weeks has been, to some degree.

Other crises affecting Europe have been competing with Ukraine for space. The many permutations of the Greek insolvency crisis were sorely preoccupying EU leaders as well as attracting media attention, until it was pushed into the background by a growing avalanche of migrants. Increasing numbers were coming from Syria (and elsewhere) via refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, and crossing from Turkey to adjacent Greek islands rather than taking the longer and more hazardous journey from North Africa. Then, while the European Union struggled with its migration crisis, Russia launched itself forcefully into the already crowded Syrian war zone.

Next came the downing of the Russian Metrojet passenger plane over the Sinai Peninsula, followed by the terrorist atrocities in Paris, both claimed by ISIS, and exerting their usual hypnotic effect on Western publics. Most recently, the shooting down of a Russian military aircraft on the Turkish–Syrian border, after its incursion into Turkish airspace, led to yet another crisis involving an aggrieved and aggressive Russia.

All of these things relate to Ukraine’s still very precarious position in significant ways. What they have in common is that not only do they occupy column inches, but they also take a heavy toll on the attention spans, financial resources, political capital and collective resolve of Western decision-makers, all necessarily at the expense of other priorities. From Putin’s point of view, they offer a chance to change the subject from Ukraine and sanctions.

Most independent Russian observers thought that pursuing a better settlement in Ukraine and relief from sanctions was probably the most important motivation for Moscow’s Syrian intervention. But it was clearly also aimed at other objectives: to shore up Russia’s oldest ally in the Middle East, to lay a claim to great power status and a place at any negotiating tables, to demonstrate that Putin, unlike Obama, is loyal to his friends (compare Assad with Mubarak), and to defend and extend Russia’s only military base in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The intervention may even have been motivated in part by a desire to take on ISIS, as Putin proclaimed at the outset, though for weeks 90 per cent of Russia’s attacks ignored ISIS targets and were aimed rather at Western allies among the anti-Assad forces. It was certainly intended to impress on Western minds that Russia was a necessary ally against ISIS, an ally worth placating to bring on board.

After it became clear that Western governments rejected Putin’s pretence to be taking on ISIS, and particularly after the attacks in Paris, Moscow changed its line, belatedly acknowledging that the Russian passenger jet had been blown up by ISIS, which till then it had energetically denied, and offering sympathy and armed support to French president François Hollande. Russia summoned other countries to join a united front against terrorism, which it presented as analogous to the wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, a line it has been pushing since well before its Syrian intervention. These siren calls often explicitly proposed that Western countries put issues like Ukraine behind them. But while indicating a readiness to coordinate efforts against ISIS, most Western majors made clear that they were not ready to overlook other issues dividing them from Russia. The politically beleaguered Hollande, by contrast, responded with alacrity and enthusiasm to Moscow’s appeal, raising further doubts in some minds about the strength of his commitment to maintaining a strong line over Ukraine.

Like the Metrojet disaster, the Turkish shooting down of a Russian bomber was a severe reverse for Putin. This time he immediately went on the front foot, moving more forces into the region, launching the usual Russian trade war despite the considerable cost to Russian consumers, tourists and small businesses, and demanding a public apology from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A rising crescendo of propaganda was directed against this new enemy, much of it personal to Erdoğan. All this was probably an expression of Putin’s personal feelings of humiliation, but clearly such an affront could not be tolerated by a great power. Russia is maintaining its rage, and further escalation is possible, though unlikely.

The rights and wrongs of the incident may take some time to become fully clear, but it should be remembered that Putin has been deploying aircraft close to, or in, other countries’ airspace for well over a year. These overflights, especially though not exclusively directed at NATO members, often seem deliberately provocative or intimidatory. The Russian aircraft fly with their transponders turned off so that the air defence and air traffic control systems in targeted countries cannot contact the pilots. Nor was this the first time Russia had treated Turkey in this way during the current operations. The Turkish claim that the Russian crew had not responded to successive warnings is therefore plausible. Moreover, the bombers were attacking ethnic Turkish anti-Assad forces rather than ISIS. Putin has made much of Russia’s supposed right and duty to protect anyone who can be classed as belonging to the rubbery entity known as the Russian world – ethnic Russians, that is, or even just Russian speakers in foreign countries. Why should Turkey not feel some responsibility to its own co-ethnics?

While it may not have been the primary purpose of these dangerous operational procedures near the Turkish border, Russia has shown signs of satisfaction with the nervous NATO response the border incident evoked. This seems to have been the first time a NATO country has shot down a Russian or Soviet aircraft. Moreover, Erdoğan is not flavour of the month with either NATO or the European Union. Though Brussels is offering Ankara some $4 billion in funding and other concessions to persuade it to cooperate in stemming the vast flow of would-be migrants who have come through Turkey, this is a sign of EU desperation rather than esteem.

NATO is, of course, obliged under Article 5 of the NATO treaty to consider what it can do to aid any member whose security is under threat. But some NATO members will be asking themselves whether they want to come to the aid of a Turkey that feels emboldened in ambiguous circumstances to shoot down a Russian aircraft. Russian commentators are clearly hoping this will prove to be the case.

What these events illustrate is that while Moscow may not have provoked or planned all these situations, it has been quick to turn them to its strategic advantage. If Russia deals with Turkey in a contemptuous and threatening manner and NATO responds mainly by declaratory support and mediation efforts, tempered by evident unease, this may suggest that NATO membership is of uncertain value. And if the Paris atrocities in tandem with the Metrojet disaster do generate a wave of sentiment in favour of a new alignment with Russia, that may well weaken Western solidarity in defence of Ukraine. Divisions and uncertainty within NATO or the European Union are always welcome in Moscow.

Even Moscow’s involvement in the Grexit issue was clearly aimed at more than simply supporting a traditional Russian ally, particularly one gripped by anti-Brussels sentiment. Mutual high-level visits between Moscow and Athens, and symbolic gestures of support were timed in such a way as to encourage Athens’s resentment of the tough conditions attached to the EU bailout. Of course, Russia itself was not able or prepared to come to the financial rescue, given the vast sums involved. But the contrast between warm-hearted, sympathetic Russia and mean, hard-hearted Germany was good political theatre and stirred up extra trouble in the European Union. In the end, however, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras proved more soberly calculating than Putin had hoped, and he did not withhold his support for extending EU sanctions.

Though some Eastern European commentators believe otherwise, Putin appears to have had no significant role in creating the migration tidal wave in Europe, though his intense bombing raids in Syria might well add to it and perhaps partly reflect a desire to bring about such a movement. And Russia has indeed facilitated a rapidly increasing flow of some 5000 would-be migrants into Norway across the remote northern border linking the two countries, overwhelming Norwegian reception facilities. Oslo has demanded an explanation and amended its regulations to stem the flow. The numbers are small at this stage, but the intent is clear.

Putin would be delighted with the spectacle of EU embarrassment and disarray in the face of this human rights policy debacle. It threatens to open up a new and damaging divide between “core Europe” and new members in the east who are vigorously resisting efforts to make them accept allocations of refugees for resettlement. The refugee crisis is also a gift for Putin’s allies and admirers on the European hard right, including Marine Le Pen and her National Front in France. Le Pen is frequently invited to visit senior figures in the Kremlin, and her party has received funding from a Kremlin-friendly bank. Moscow supports all hard-right Eurosceptic parties, as well as hard-left parties, valuing their disruptive role in a European Union staggering under the weight of successive crises. The migration issue promises to be the mother of all of them, and of long duration.

Russia itself has a severe problem with its increasingly radical Muslim communities, which comprise over twenty million in a total population of 142 million if migrant workers from the “-stans” of former Soviet Central Asia are included. This may have been a key factor inclining Putin initially to avoid stirring up ISIS unduly in Syria, as that organisation had been recruiting substantial numbers of Muslim radicals from Russia, and especially from the turbulent north Caucasus. Stalin committed barbarous crimes against some of those national groups, including the Chechens and also the Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatars who have strong links with and enjoy official and public sympathy in Turkey. The Chechens and Crimean Tatars, like the overwhelming majority of Russian Muslims, are Sunni.

For all these reasons the Sunni Erdoğan keenly resents Putin’s annexation of Crimea, and his support for Shiite regimes in Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, as well as for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. In fact, Putin himself has done much to fan the flames of Muslim resistance in Russia and to push it in an increasingly Islamist direction, by his violent repression in the north Caucasus, especially in Chechnya. Having conducted a brutal war to pacify the province at the outset of his presidency (a war that greatly boosted his popularity), he has increasingly outsourced rule in Chechnya to the brutal but efficient and increasingly Islamist dictator, Ramzan Kadyrov.

So Putin has a serious problem with radical Islam domestically, which is one reason why he had till recently steered clear of armed involvements in the Middle East. The Soviet regime tended to support supposedly “modernising” anti-Western autocracies and movements in the region, including Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and the Baathist regime of the Assads in Syria. In the post-Soviet period, at least until recently, Russia has been less actively engaged in the Middle East, but Putin now seems ready to risk greater involvement.

Especially since Putin came to power, Russia has deeply resented Western support for regime change not just in former communist states in Eastern Europe, but also in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (where Putin seemed to take the fall and execution of Gaddafi personally). Moscow was, perhaps wisely, sceptical that the Arab Spring would lead to any kind of sweetness and light. Putin is convinced that the real Western motivation there is to strengthen its influence in the region at the expense of Moscow’s political and economic interests.

And he is apparently genuinely mystified that the West should repeatedly invest so much blood and treasure in such dangerous and volatile situations. It is not just damaging to Russia, it is damaging to the West as well, so why do it? To quote the rhetorical question in his UN address in September 2015 referencing Western-led regime-change operations in the broader Middle East: “Do you at least realise what you’ve done?!” It’s not an unreasonable question. Yet he now seems on the brink of a dangerous double investment of his own, first in the whole Middle Eastern Sunni–Shia civil war, and second in a vengeful feud with a man after his own heart, Erdoğan, which could severely damage his carefully cultivated relationship with Turkey, and possibly much more besides.

Russians generally, including opposition voices, find the Western attitude to the wider Middle East, and particularly to Muslim immigrants in their midst, deeply strange. The once prominent Russian banker Elena Kotova, writing about the Paris atrocities for the independent Russian online publication Snob, expressed amazement that Western elites react to all Islamist terrorist attacks in Western countries with the same clichés about solidarity, tolerance, courage, civilised values inevitably triumphing, and so on. After years of changing reality, she wrote, the tolerance mantras remain the same. They defy common sense, she argued, but more importantly they defy the wishes of the majority of ordinary citizens of Europe. And she went on to make some mordant observations about the tyranny of political correctness in Western Europe.

The common thread in all these recent headline issues from the Putinist perspective is that they carry the promise of, or present opportunities for, the weakening of NATO and the European Union, and the West generally. As Putin once frankly told a secretary-general of NATO, his mission was not to build a better relationship with NATO, but to destroy the organisation. And his attitude in recent years towards the European Union, especially its trade and governance outreach to its eastern neighbours, has become similarly hostile.

For Putin generally, as for his senior colleagues, the objective of policy is not to reach an honourable compromise, or to achieve peace as such, but to be in conflict with and defeat his numerous adversaries. All relationships are zero-sum games, and win–win solutions are an illusion – or would be if Russian had a word for them. What he wants is victory, not peace, domination not partnership (despite his frequent sly references to his Western enemies as “partners”). Kto kogo (who will dominate whom), as Lenin famously said; the weak get beaten, as Putin himself said. And he assumes that behind their hypocritical facades everyone else operates in the same way.

Because of the dismal state of Western education about the Soviet and post-Soviet operational code, Western foreign policy–makers (and often commentators, too) seem unable to internalise these sorts of basic Russian realities. They continue to try to create resets or peaceful win–win solutions, to “rebuild the relationship,” to reach out, until their patience runs out, or they lose the election, or they are replaced by a democratic party colleague with superior insight into the nature of things, who will also see a need to rebuild the relationship supposedly damaged by her predecessor. •

The post Making nice and making enemies appeared first on Inside Story.

Russia backed the resolution partly because its military actions in Syria have propelled the country to a more central position. If its intervention expresses Vladimir Putin’s aim of restoring his country’s status as a great power, its support for the resolution also reflects awareness of the Islamist challenge in Russia itself. The Chinese signed up out of concern over instability in the Gulf, the source of so much of their oil and gas, but also with their own Uyghur challenge in mind.

The practical outcome will be a concentration of the air war and the wider use of special forces. Russia has substantially expanded its air forces in Syria, France is once again deploying its aircraft carrier to the region, and Britain’s prime minister David Cameron may now get his parliamentary vote to bomb Syria.

But as the war escalates, three ominous elements present a cause for real concern.

The first is that the war against ISIS in Iraq and, especially, Syria is becoming ever more a Western war, with Russia included in what can relentlessly be publicised by ISIS to great effect as a “crusader onslaught” on Islam. All four Middle East states previously involved in airstrikes in Syria – Jordan, Beirut, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – have withdrawn. Even if they can be persuaded to mount renewed attacks, these will be little more than symbolic. In any case, the view from ISIS is that these states are the willing lackeys of the crusaders.

The second is the question of whether the heightening of military operations against ISIS, now clearly aimed at its complete physical destruction, can be remotely successful. The experience of the fifteen-month air war is a caution here. As of 13 November, the US-led Operation Inherent Resolve had seen attacks on 16,075 targets including 4517 buildings and 4942 fighting positions. Pentagon figures report that the strikes have killed 20,000 ISIS supporters, up from the 15,000 reported in July. On this basis, the 20,000 to 30,000 ISIS fighters reportedly facing the coalition a year ago should have been torn apart, yet the figure for active members remains unchanged.

Perhaps most notable of all, the estimate of a year ago that 15,000 people had joined ISIS from eighty other countries has now been increased to 30,000 from one hundred countries. In short, the persistent refrain from ISIS of being the defender against the crusaders is proving uncomfortably effective.

Moreover, destroying ISIS in Syria and Iraq will not be possible without ground troops, which is just what ISIS wants. And even if such destruction were possible, what would come next? Would it involve long-term Western occupation of Iraq and Syria, and what effect would that have? Would the war then extend to air and ground operations against ISIS in Libya and Yemen, and many more troops going back to Afghanistan? What about the al Qaeda groups across the Sahel, including those responsible for the attack in the Mali capital, Bamako, on 20 November?

The third element reflects a more long-sighted view. I began writing a weekly column for openDemocracy about security issues immediately after 9/11 and it has now run for over fourteen years, with most of the emphasis on trying to analyse the unfolding “war on terror.” If there has been one underlying concern, expressed as each of the major confrontations has evolved, it has been the persistent and dangerous reliance on the “control paradigm” and its consequences.

The attack on Afghanistan three months after 9/11 dispersed al Qaeda and led to the Taliban melting away. The prospect for the country looked superficially bright, yet fourteen years later the war there is once again intensifying. The rapid military success against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq was celebrated by George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech on 1 May 2003, yet US troops stayed another eight years before leaving behind a rapidly evolving ISIS. The intervention in Libya in 2011, which had a semblance of UN approval, saw Gaddafi’s lynching and the regime’s overthrow, yet four years later Libya is a collapsed state. The cascading of arms and ideas down across the Sahel has resulted in yet more conflict, as exemplified by the Bamako attack.

An enhanced war against ISIS may be the inevitable, and indeed fully understandable, response to the appalling events in Paris. Sadly, though, that does not make it any less of a mistake. That is especially so given that other options will do much more to prevent ISIS gaining further strength and may even end up undermining it.

What, then, should we do?” It is not enough to say, for example, that we should not have invaded Iraq in the first place, true though that is. But there are some clear steps that can be taken to start the multi-year process of curbing ISIS.

An early priority is to put far greater emphasis on ending the Syrian civil war, the necessary precursor to constraining ISIS in Syria. There are some small signs of progress here with the two recent meetings in Vienna involving all the proxies to the war including Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. But the process must be accelerated and, however difficult, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and key militia leaders must somehow be engaged. It is the most difficult of all the tasks and will require the best skills of highly competent conflict resolution specialists.

Close behind that in importance will be a huge and immediate effort to aid the three million or more refugees from Syria and Iraq, principally in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, many of them facing an appalling winter while the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and other agencies struggle to provide support. The core motive must be humanitarian – but if help is not provided, these camps will provide a remarkable recruiting ground for ISIS.

A third task is to work as hard as possible to encourage the Abadi government in Baghdad to reach out to the Sunni minority, especially in those many parts of Iraq where persistent neglect of that minority is helping maintain support for ISIS.

Finally, there is the issue of the expansion of ISIS, not least in Libya. The need to support UN attempts to bring stability to that country is urgent yet efforts are seriously lacking at present.

In this context, perhaps the most urgent need for any state seriously interested in preventing the further growth of extreme Islamist movements is to foster a change in the repressive policies of the Sisi government in Egypt. With more than 1000 Muslim Brotherhood supporters killed and well over 10,000 imprisoned – many under sentence of death – this is the main country that is ripe for Islamist expansionism.

None of these measures provides anything like a full answer to the many challenges of ISIS but they collectively point us in a different direction. We have recently entered the fifteenth year of what used to be called the war on terror – and that war is about to be intensified with little thought for the long-term effects or the reasons for past failures. If we do not take a new direction then we should prepare for a thirty-year war. •

The post What we should have learnt from the war on terror appeared first on Inside Story.

These barbarians of God… want France to be in a state of shock. To stun her, paralyse and divide her. But in the name of the real martyrs of yesterday, innocent victims, and in the name of the Republic, France shall remain united and stand firm.

Le Monde was also stoic:

In the face of panic, dignity. In the face of the sowers of death, resolve. In the face of desperation, lucidity. In the face of terror, sangfroid… And above all, the unity of the nation when put to the test.

These are undoubtedly fine words. But what would the stoicism they suggest really mean?

This question is one focus of attention on the website of Modern Stoicism, a group whose members are primed from their recent exchanges during Stoic Week, which ran on 2–8 November. Stoic Week, an internet forum with a wide following, is concerned with the application of principles from ancient stoicism to modern everyday life. Participants are guided through a succession of exercises and meditations based on the work of the Roman statesman Seneca and the second-century philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Stoicism differs from other philosophical traditions in its determination to focus on the realities of human life, including the political realities. It is not so much a school of thought as a school for the training of thoughts, in order to promote better action and reaction amid the circumstances we face. Extreme situations and experiences of ordeal are the real tests of the doctrine. It places much stress on the control of emotion in order to foster calm and stability.

Le Monde’s commitment to lucidity in the face of desperation and sangfroid in the face of terror is in accord with Aurelius’s identification of the stoic virtues as resilience, balance, dignity and grace. But to keep your cool in the face of terror is a tough challenge. The question of where that kind of psychological strength may come from is complex, and signals a point of departure between the modern rhetoric of stoicism and the mental disciplines practised in the ancient tradition of the stoic school.

“France is strong,” President François Hollande proclaimed, as he called “for unity, for a collective spirit and for cool heads.” The idea that national unity provides a centre of gravity from which all citizens can draw strength in times of war and crisis is deeply embedded in modern democracy. Calm and unity are inextricably related, as they were in Margaret Thatcher’s speech immediately after the bombing at the Brighton hotel where she and her cabinet were meeting in 1984. “The fact that we are gathered here now,” she said, “shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.” 

Thatcher’s idea of unity was strictly nationalistic, and nationalistic leaders tend to divide nations. Her rhetoric leading up to the Brighton conference had been full of venom about “the enemy within.”

Hollande may speak with a more consciousness, especially since he has been answered by a chorus of support from leaders of other nations, but he also speaks for a nation under attack. And a nation on a war footing typically looks to its borders, accentuating the distinctness of its historical identity.

Here is where the philosophical heritage of stoicism carries a more radical challenge. When Marcus Aurelius talked about unity, he was thinking on profoundly different lines. “Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected,” he wrote in his Meditations, “of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another, and in sympathy with one another. This event is a consequence of some other one. Things push and pull on each other, and breathe together, and are one.”

This sounds more like a spiritual vision of unity than a political perspective, but Marcus Aurelius was a head of state, and lived in turbulent times. He fought wars, and was witness to the atrocities of the battlefield. Politics was a way of life for him, and day in day out, he dealt with the crises of government. Seeing himself, his life and his sphere of action as part of a planetary cycle of creation and destruction was a technique for maintaining psychological stability amid the turbulence. Yet it was much more than self-therapy.

As a doctrine brought to bear on public life, stoicism aimed to lay the foundations for civil society. “When we talk of fellow citizens,” Aurelius wrote, “our state must be the world. What other entity could all of humanity belong to? And from it – from this state that we share – come thought and reason and law.”

There is much here to bring European and Islamic traditions of reason and law onto common ground. Indeed, stoicism may be said to have as enduring an influence in Islam as in Europe. While it is hard to imagine any contemporary head of state addressing his or her people as “citizens of the world,” the idea can come naturally to the people themselves.

During the night hours following the Paris attacks, when many people were stranded in a city under lockdown, residents welcomed strangers into their houses, sending the message around through the campaign #PorteOuverte. Cab drivers gave free rides to those who wanted to take up the offer. The #I’llRideWithYou campaign following Sydney’s Martin Place siege worked explicitly across a divide that threatened the unity of common citizenship.

When the unwieldiness and chequered history of the United Nations has made us sceptical about the political viability of being citizens of the world, campaigns like these are important acts of faith. It’s a form of collective consciousness that has to be built from the ground up. Social media have a part to play in it, albeit a somewhat volatile and contrary one – though that, after all, simply reflects human nature.

On Facebook on Sunday morning the tricolour wash spread from one post to the next, across profile pictures, shots of the Sydney Opera House as it was illuminated on Saturday night, and romantic images of the Eiffel tower. “We are all Parisians now” was the prevailing message, though it wasn’t long before a new wave of recognition began to break. Why just Paris? Only twenty-four hours before the attacks began there, Beirut had suffered a similar onslaught, leaving forty-one people dead and 300 injured. One man sacrificed his life to intercept a suicide bomber he’d spotted heading for the doors of the mosque.

By the end of the weekend, Beirut and Paris were appearing in parallel images on my newsfeed, and the tricolour wave was receding. You could call this political correctness, but perhaps that’s only a term to hide behind when the challenge of inclusiveness catches you out. There’s one post from the day that has burned itself into my mind. It’s a simple white card bearing a couple of verses by the young Somali poet Warsan Shire:

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere

The post Citizens of the world appeared first on Inside Story.

As the focal point of Daesh – to use the Arabic acronym the organisation detests – Syria is especially prominent at the moment. In Iraq, by contrast, the group is more constrained. Hemmed in by capable and hostile Kurds to the north and Iraqi Shiites to the south, it has few choices except to launch a major new offensive, an impractical proposition when it needs to fight off Iraqi forces and coalition air power to retain the areas it controls. Its alternative is to focus on Syria, which is what it seems to be doing.

The news of its destruction in recent weeks of several temples and towers at Palmyra – one of the great archaeological sites of the Middle East, which Daesh seized in May – is grim, if not entirely unexpected. Even more obscene was the beheading of the retired head of Palmyra’s antiquities, Khaled al-Asaad, for not divulging the whereabouts of various treasures, some of which had reportedly been buried when Daesh was advancing on the city. He reportedly survived a month of torture, giving nothing away, before he was murdered.

For the wider dynamics in Syria, however, the news is grimmer still. Over the northern summer and into the autumn of 2015, four risks and portents have converged. If even some of them come to pass, then things in Syria are likely to get much worse. These can be titled, if a little simplistically, as consolidation (of Daesh); isation (of the conflict); catastrophisation (of the human side of the conflict); and disintegration (of the Syrian regime).

Consolidation refers to the fact that Daesh is becoming increasingly entrenched in the parts of Syria that it controls. The community is extremely cautious about military intervention in Syria, and not only because they don’t want to strengthen the president, Bashar al-Assad. The legal basis for any substantial military action in Syria is much less certain than in Iraq, where coalition forces have been invited by the Iraqi government to assist.

The renewed involvement of Russia in support of its ally Assad is one of the few developments to have strengthened the Assad regime. This is part of the second dynamic, isation. In supporting Assad, Russia is not only being loyal to an old ally and protecting its economic interests; it is also protecting its longer-term strategic goals in the region, including its naval access to the Mediterranean port of Tartus and its image in other Arab countries. Perhaps above all, Russia’s actions also illustrate Vladimir Putin’s concerns about extremism among Russia’s own Muslim population; past incidents such as the uprisings against Moscow in Chechnya mean that Russia shares the same concerns as many other states about the radicalising effect of Daesh. About one in eight Russians is Muslim.

Russia’s role has shifted in the past couple of weeks. Once focused on diplomatic support and arms, it is now taking on an expanded role that includes Russian troops providing detailed training and advice to the Syrian army, possibly along with advanced weaponry and perhaps even with Russian airstrikes against Daesh to follow.

But the growing isation of the civil war goes beyond Russia. Recent weeks have seen a sudden and deep engagement by Turkey in the fight against Daesh, although it is motivated as much – or more – by its fight against the Kurdish PKK. It also seems likely that the United States will intensify its air campaign in Syria. And, of course, last week the Australian government announced that it would expand its air operations from Iraq into Syria as well.

What all these examples suggest, however, is an increasing risk of third parties either getting tied up in Syria for their own reasons, or perhaps even clashing with each other if they fail to coordinate their actions and focus on Daesh. Low on Western hostages, having murdered several of them over the past year, Daesh can be expected to make a very gruesome spectacle out of any coalition aircrew or others they might capture – as if the immolation of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh last December was not dreadful enough.

The third dynamic – catastrophisation – has dominated the news over the northern summer as Europe has been thrust further into a refugee crisis, driven in large part by events in Iraq and especially Syria. Almost one-fifth of Syria’s population has fled the country, with most of them forced into camps in neighbouring countries. With little hope of resettlement in these Middle Eastern countries – most of which are poor and overwhelmed by the numbers of Syrians they are hosting – and with an end to the fighting as remote as ever, mid 2015 was obviously the moment when a critical mass of refugees decided to take the risk of trying to reach Europe.

The refugee crisis is a sign of how grim the prospects in Syria must be: those with the most at stake in the country are not just staying away, but risking their lives to try to find a better, permanent place to resettle. Around 120,000 Syrians applied for asylum in the first seven months of 2015, but this could be only the start of a real crisis, given the numbers waiting in Turkey (around 1.9 million), Lebanon (over 1.1 million) and elsewhere.

Finally, disintegration. This year, Bashar al-Assad has lost Idlib, a northern provincial capital, and Palmyra, important not only for its archaeology but also for its location on the main road between the west of Syria – Daesh territory – and the capital, Damascus, with its populous surrounds in the south. He now faces a more concerted effort by another of his myriad opposition militias, the al Qaeda–linked al-Nusra Front, which has built a coalition of Islamist forces in the north of the country that, as Robert Fisk pointed out in the Independent in June, almost certainly has Aleppo, Syria’s second major city, in its sights.

Meanwhile, Assad is going through troops faster than he can recruit and train new ones, and is failing to ensure that many basic economic needs such as fuel are available in regime-held areas.

Then again, as Aron Lund of the Carnegie Endowment noted back in January, the Assad regime “is always either crumbling or on the verge of victory.” Assad’s fall has been predicted many times before, but although he may yet hang on, his position now is probably the weakest it has been since 2011.

If it came, his collapse would probably spell the end for Syria as a nation-state. At the humanitarian level, it could lead to a second phase of civil war between, for example, Daesh and al-Nusra; despite the fact that both are “Islamist extremist” in the broadest sense, their fundamental differences would very likely see them fight to the bitter end. In the process, Daesh could become further entrenched not only in Syria, but also in the wider region, and some religious minorities could face the prospect of extinction in Syria. Syria’s youth more generally would fare little better.

A victory by either of these groups would undoubtedly undermine Middle Eastern security, and the only question is how badly. A Daesh victory over al-Nusra could see the group try to expand into new areas, and even into Jordan – which could then draw the Israelis into a direct fight. The converse, an al-Nusra victory, would be little better; in effect it would give quasi-statehood to an al Qaeda offshoot.

If Assad fell, Russia and especially Iran would lose a key regional ally, and Iran its only Arab ally. If they judged Assad’s demise to be the product of direct US action or intervention, they would probably respond – although how, it is impossible to say.

Even if Assad falls by virtue of his own miscalculation, and even if alternatives like Daesh and al-Nusra are neutralised, the most likely prognosis is that Syria will fragment. This scenario is quite frightening, because the various groups in Syria are deeply intertwined. The population movements would be enormous, as would the aid needed for Syria to transition into several smaller, more ethnically or religiously coherent states.

Many years ago, at a conference in his honour, I met the famous secular Syrian intellectual Sadik al-Azm. It was not too many years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and he made a surprising comment: 9/11, he said, was not the start of a great war between Islamism and the West. Rather, he said, “it’s proof that the West has already won that war – at least the war of ideas between the two sides.” No one who can convince others of the virtues of their political views flies aeroplanes into buildings, he observed, and so terrorism like that on 9/11 is an inarticulate, enraged scream by proponents of an ideology that could never build any real or lasting appeal. It was a swan song, an acknowledgement of defeat.

Watching the rise of Daesh since mid 2014 brings those comments back to mind. Events seem to have confirmed his assessment in the case of al Qaeda, but does the same argument apply to Daesh? Probably: its focus on the spectacle of violence is a deliberate strategy, after all, to cow its opponents and appear stronger than it actually is. Yet even if al Qaeda’s fate is also to be Daesh’s, the Syrians, like the Iraqis, will have paid a devastating price for that swan song. •

The post Beyond the spectacle of violence appeared first on Inside Story.

Although he doesn’t explicitly say so, Patrick Cockburn would undoubtedly argue that bin Laden’s messages seem stale and passé because they are stale and passé. The slickly produced, seamlessly edited and uber-violent videos now coming from ISIS, or “the Islamic State,” reflect the new face and the new methods of Islamic extremism.

ISIS is the acronym for the “Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham” (“al-Sham” being an old Arabic term for what is now Syria), self-proclaimed as “the Islamic State” to reflect its claim to be the restored and resurrected Caliphate, the sole legitimate theocratic polity succeeding the Prophet Muhammad and governing the world’s Muslims.

ISIS’s claim to be the new Caliphate reflects both its theology and its political ideology. In fact, it would probably argue that the two are inseparable, even indistinguishable, politics being a necessary mechanism – and an opportunity – to spread and consolidate the group’s ideology. As Patrick Cockburn reminds us in The Rise of Islamic State, however, few if any groups have been able to master earthly necessities such as politics and military capability while propounding a religious interpretation as zealous, violent and selectively literalist as ISIS’s. Despite this tension, ISIS seemed to emerge suddenly when it conquered swathes of northwestern Iraq in June last year, and after a raft of military successes now covers an area of Syria and Iraq “larger than Great Britain,” as Cockburn reminds us, “and inhabited by some six million people.”

Several new books on ISIS have hit the bookshops recently: not only Cockburn’s, but also Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger’s ISIS: The State of Terror, Jay Sekulow and others’ Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can’t Ignore, and several more. It may be tempting to see these as hasty attempts to cash in on one of the great issues du jour. Yet Stern and Berger, for instance, have extensive backgrounds in terrorism and Islamic extremism, and Cockburn himself has a very impressive pedigree on Iraq. Yes, his book was obviously written and published in a hurry, with some silly errors (“July” rather than “June” on page 15) and some messy transliterations here and there, but he writes as a veteran observer of Iraqi politics and the waves of violence that have shredded its social fabric over the past dozen years.

Cockburn has spent close to a quarter of a century in the Middle East, first as a correspondent for the London Financial Times and later reporting for the Independent. He was co-author, with his brother Andrew, of the 1999 book Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, one of the best works on Iraq in the 1990s, a time when few journalists paid the country much attention. Even during the worst violence of the mid to late 2000s, he was one of the few journalists who, at great personal risk, ventured out into Iraqi streets, shops and homes, reporting with what must have been a depressing frequency on the awful bloodletting of those years.

All this makes Cockburn as good an observer and analyst as any on ISIS, and his book is, overall, a welcome contribution, useful not only for its specifics about ISIS but also for the broader insights it unveils in the process. Cockburn never spares ISIS, but nor does he shy away from identifying actions and policies of the United States and its allies that have handed the organisation opportunities it has so cleverly exploited.

A few of the scrutinies and assessments in The Rise of Islamic State are worth citing and dwelling on to illustrate the book’s style and some of its arguments.

To begin with, Cockburn takes us back a few steps. “The ‘war on terror’ has failed,” he writes, “because it did not target the jihadi movement as a whole and, above all, was not aimed at Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two countries that fostered jihadism as a creed and a movement.” This is a central theme of his book: the view that the “war on terror” and its various manifestations have failed or, indeed, have done more harm than good by driving people into the embrace of Islamic extremists. It is a theme he returns to many times.

He recognises that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were quarantined from the anti-terrorism standards applied to regional states less closely allied to Washington. Yet he tends to underemphasise the domestic settings in which Pakistan’s then-president, Pervéz Musharraf, and the Saudi monarchy operated. In the days following 11 September 2001, Washington gave Musharraf effectively no choice but to cooperate with the US-led war in Afghanistan; in fact, according to Musharraf, the only alternative offered by an American official was that Pakistan would be “bombed back to the stone age.” Yet a swathe of Musharraf’s support base, both among the Pakistani elite and in the population at large, resented the US intervention in Afghanistan, and even more so the fact that Pakistan was dragged into it. Musharraf would probably argue, rightly or wrongly, that in this case he had no choice but to be a political hypocrite.

The Saudi royal family also deserves some of the criticism Cockburn directs at it, but again the realities of Saudi politics get too little attention. The Al Saud do indeed head a wealthy, oil-rich state. But money flowing from the kingdom to extremists is not itemised in the national budget and managed by officials; it is mostly private money, or funds secretly siphoned from state or public sources, sent surreptitiously by sympathetic individuals and groups. Cockburn seems to assume that the Saudis can control every branch of their extensive royal family and all the individuals across their complex political system. No state can.

Cockburn is perhaps on stronger ground in criticising the strategy – or lack of one – of the US war on terror, a set of campaigns conducted in a haphazard fashion and with no central, long-term strategy to guide it (and to avoid such unwanted side effects as the rise of ISIS). For better or worse, though, the fitful US policy is probably mainly the product of a hesitancy in Washington about becoming bogged down fighting wars in the region – much as it has become mired there anyway. To be fair to the Americans, the only recent war they have fought by choice in the region is that in Iraq in 2003. Cockburn is right that ISIS has fed off US back-footedness and indecision, but had things been different there is still no guarantee that such a group would not have emerged. As Cockburn argues, ISIS has its origins in a variety of forces, problems and disastrous misjudgements.

Then there’s the “Arab Spring” and its impact. “The revolutions and popular uprisings of 2011 were as genuine as any in history,” Cockburn writes, “but the way they were perceived, particularly in the West, was often seriously awry. Real revolutions come into being because of an unpredictable and surprising coincidence of people and events with different motives coming together to target a common enemy such as Hosni Mubarak or Bashar al-Assad.”

Whatever the initial optimism, these upheavals have not delivered much substantive change. Only Tunisia has been somewhat successful (despite this week’s museum attack) in making a peaceful transition from autocracy to a more democratic political order. Egypt has struggled to stabilise since Mubarak was removed, while Libya and Yemen teeter on the brink of violent collapse. In Syria, the initial protests morphed, within barely a year, into what is now the nastiest civil war in modern Middle Eastern history.

ISIS is not just the mongrel offspring of al Qaeda and some like-minded clusters, it is also the product of the chaos that came from the Arab Spring; of the violence that accompanied the reactions to it, especially by extant regimes; and of the underlying social and political divisions of Syria and Iraq, which, ominously, exist across much of the region. Cockburn offers a set of insights into what went wrong with the post-2010 Arab uprisings, and these, for a book as brief as this, are quite nuanced. He shows how Western governments and media simplified the uprisings and skewed expectations about their potential; and he also delves into the failings of old authoritarian regimes – their repressiveness, poor economic policies and tolerance or even nurturing of corruption – and how they have fragmented and wedged societal forces and driven some Sunnis in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere into the arms of ISIS and other extremists.

The civil war in Syria, Cockburn writes, “has become like a Middle East version of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany four hundred years ago. Too many players are fighting each other for different reasons for all of them to be satisfied by peace terms and to be willing to lay down their arms at the same time. Some still think they can win and others simply want to avoid defeat.” In Syria, he says, “all sides exaggerate their own strength and imagine that temporary success on the battlefield will open the way to total victory.”

The Syrian conflict is complex even by the standards of the Middle East, where social and other divisions, intervention by regional and other outside players, the use of proxies, and shifts in alliances have often created complicated and opaque dynamics. (The 1975–91 Lebanese civil wars are another obvious example of this level of complexity.) The civil war began as an uprising, not much different in its early months from those that had just overthrown the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt. But, as Cockburn explains, the Syrian regime’s repression of the protests, and the rise of armed opposition gradually turned the conflict into a violent insurgency and then into a civil war shaped by dynamics beyond Syria itself. Sunni–Shia rivalries elsewhere in the region, regional power plays, even to some extent the new cold war–like tensions between the United States and Russia – all these have shaped the conflict.

(The comparison with the Thirty Years’ War may not be as extreme as it sounds. That conflict ultimately killed over a quarter of the population of the German states and claimed perhaps eight million lives all up. The main belligerents took up to a century to rebuild their societies, populations and economies.)

In Iraq, the dynamic is almost as complex. Saddam Hussein’s wars, the 2003 American invasion and subsequent civil conflict reduced Iraq’s GDP to roughly what it was in 1950. Iraq’s violence and the eventual rise of ISIS is a product of Saddam’s brutality, Sunni dominance during his rule, mistakes made by the United States at various points since 1990, sectarian and ethnic problems, and a host of other factors. Iraq’s prime minister between 2006 and 2014, Nouri al-Maliki, also deserves – and receives from Cockburn – a good share of the blame.

Like much of what we see and read about the Middle East these days, Cockburn’s book makes for depressing reading. Sadly, but convincingly, he argues that Iraq and Syria are almost certainly unsalvageable as modern nation-states. Syria as it was has either been physically destroyed or had its social bonds ripped apart. The Sunnis are so embittered towards the Alawites (from which Bashar al-Assad and his father hail), and various other social groups so wronged by Sunni extremists, that communal relations can probably never be restored.

In Iraq, Sunni–Shia tensions, already exacerbated by both sides, were pushed past breaking point by ISIS. Arab–Kurdish tensions were amplified by the Kurds’ opportunistic seizure of Kirkuk in mid 2014 while the Iraqi government and military were distracted by ISIS’s conquest of Mosul.

For the outside world, especially in the West, these events should not be dismissed as just a distant rumble. The Middle East matters to us. We should all be appalled by the beheadings, crucifixions and immolations ISIS conducts and films in order to terrorise us or attract the confused, the marginalised and the foolish. The Middle East is a cradle of civilisation and the origin of many of our religious and social values. It is a region that can shape our economic prospects because of the centrality of oil and gas in the world economy. And it is a region in which the Western world, including Australia, has intervened and, in the process, made plenty of mistakes.

We owe them something, including right now some assistance to counter and defeat the influence of ISIS and other such affronts to universal human values. This must include military support. While Cockburn argues, weakly I believe, that military intervention is bound to fail, I would certainly agree with him on the need for support across humanitarian, economic, governance and other spheres if ISIS’s appeal is to be eroded and the group brought to the point of irrelevance.

Otherwise, as Cockburn reminds us about ISIS, “it may not be long before an organisation renowned for its ruthlessness when seeking revenge sends its suicide bombers to destroy American targets.” Or Australian ones. •

The post Conflict out of chaos appeared first on Inside Story.

Up until the late 1940s, of course, the Jewish people made up the largest stateless nation. Despite the horrific slaughter by the Nazis, they numbered perhaps twelve million worldwide at the end of the second world war. The creation of Israel in May 1948 delivered them a homeland, even if Israel still remains to be recognised by some states and is yet to negotiate all of its final borders.

The creation of Israel highlighted the statelessness of the Palestinians, and to this day the Palestinians attract perhaps the greatest attention among stateless national groups around the world. Yet for all this attention and the tragedy of their modern history, there are barely eleven million Palestinians in the Middle East, whether in the West Bank, Gaza or Israel itself, or living in the states surrounding the Holy Land.

Other groups beyond the Middle East occasionally make the headlines, but in the case of the Uyghurs in China the numbers are perhaps eleven million, and the Tibetan population is in the low millions. Among the other groups that occasionally make it into our nightly news bulletins – Spain’s Catalans, the Canadian Québécois, the Kashmiris in South Asia, the Roma in Europe – numbers are nowhere near thirty million. The few “stateless” ethnic groups that exceed that figure – African Americans in the United States, for example, or the Tamils in India – make no widespread demands for independence.

So what is the answer? By most calculations, it is the Kurds.

The Kurds dominate the mountainous regions around the borders where Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey meet one or more of each other. Accurate demographic figures for the region are scarce, or at least rarely published, but very roughly, there are perhaps twelve to thirteen million Kurds in Turkey (which would make them around 15 per cent of Turkey’s population); seven million or more in Iran (about 10 per cent of the population); at least six million, and probably considerably more, in Iraq, mostly in the north (accounting for over 20 per cent of the national population); two and a half million or even three million in northeastern Syria (around 10 per cent); about a quarter of a million in the Caucasus, and perhaps another one and a half million scattered through Europe and further afield.

After the better-known Arabs, Persians and Turks, the Kurds are the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East. While they broadly share a sense of national identity and ethnicity, they are also quite diverse: in fact, many Kurds question the “world’s largest stateless nation” tag because they believe it brushes over the cultural, linguistic and other diversity. Kurdish dialects, for example, have separated almost into distinct languages. They may have the same origins, and sit next to each other in lists of Indo-Iranian and, within that, Persian language groups, but the two main Kurdish tongues, Kurmanji and Sorani, use different scripts and have patent grammatical differences, including such fundamental features as whether nouns have genders and use case endings. (Kurmanji has both, Sorani neither.)

The Kurds also have a variety of cultural traits, not only because they are spread across multiple countries but also because the mountainous regions in which they most commonly live are often a barrier to national cohesion and communication. Thus the strength of tribal affiliations, the stories they tell about culture, and even elements of their foods and handicrafts often vary, even if the basics of their culture derive from the same starting point and are still, for the most part, shared among the various Kurdish groups.

Thanks to geography, the Kurds have been unable to secure a state of their own. Any national homeland would need the blessing of several Middle East states – which have often opposed Kurdish independence or any moves, such as local autonomy, towards it – and would be a mountainous, landlocked territory. But it would also occupy a strategically important position, containing either oil fields or the pipelines that send oil off to the Mediterranean. It would also probably have enough water to support its population and a strong, viable agricultural industry, which is a rarity in the region.

The Kurds of northern Iraq showed both their strategic importance and their military capabilities in June last year, when the forces of the Islamic State, or IS, were seizing Mosul and other key areas of northern Iraq. As the Iraqi army fled in the face of the IS surge, the Kurdish peshmerga (their militia, meaning “those who confront death”) stood their ground. The IS fighters dared not challenge them directly or on any scale. To be blunt: the size of IS’s “caliphate” would be much larger than it is, and life would be more miserable for many more people than at present, if it were not for the reputation and capability of the peshmerga.

At the same time, the rise of IS gave the Kurds the chance to seize the contested and oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which lies on the line between the Arab-dominated centre of Iraq and the Kurdish-dominated north. This has boosted their economic power and their financial autonomy from Baghdad, and emboldened some to start talking more openly about an independent Kurdish state in what is currently northern Iraq.

The rise of IS and the conflict in Syria – where Kurdish groups have fought to protect their areas from Sunni extremists while also trying to push out the Assad regime – are only two very recent reminders of how central the Kurds often are to the dynamics of the Middle East. Yet they receive too little attention when the region is discussed in the media or, for that matter, among scholars. Among the academic specialists, the work of the University of Exeter’s Gareth Stansfield is one notable exception, as is that of Denise Natali at the Institute for National Strategic Studies and Michael Gunter at Tennessee Technological University.

Kurdish Iraq–based Mahir Aziz is rapidly establishing a reputation in the field as well. His latest publication, The Kurds of Iraq: Nationalism and Identity in Iraqi Kurdistan, is a revised version of a book that first appeared, with a different subtitle, in 2011. His focus is on Iraq’s Kurdish population, who are governed by the Kurdish Regional Government, or KRG, based in the northern city of Erbil. The KRG covers the three Kurdish-dominated northern provinces of Erbil, Sulaymaniya and Dohuk, and unofficially spreads into parts of other neighbouring provinces – including, famously, the contested city of Kirkuk and its surrounds.

Aziz goes back to the early 1920s – when the British had just taken control of the area from the defeated and disintegrating Ottoman empire – to develop his core arguments. The British encouraged the Kurds, and others, to think in nationalist terms but certainly not to seek independence. Although they were promised their own national state by the US president, Woodrow Wilson, as early as 1918, and also in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, the Kurds were unable to translate their growing sense of identity into an independent nation-state. Indeed, the role of external powers in denying independence to most of the Middle East at that time still infuriates many in the Middle East, and the Kurds are certainly not the only minority group that feels aggrieved by the British and the French, or by the local nationalist leaders who followed.

Aziz’s focus is on the Kurdish manifestations of what scholars call “ethnonationalism,” by which he means, in essence, the convergence and overlap between ethnicity and nationalism, and more broadly between ethnic community and national identity, among a self-consciously national group. This approach has considerable merit, given the sense of overall “Kurdish-ness” shared by so many people of Kurdish ethnic background in the region. Kurdish ethnonationalism is also shaped – and limited – by political and geographical divisions, including the experiences of the Kurds under different governments that have shown varying degrees of tolerance for sub-national Kurdish identities or historical narratives.

The political maturity and strategic shrewdness of the Kurds emerged, he argues, after the 1990–91 Gulf war and the creation of a Kurdish safe haven in northern Iraq following the failed uprisings against Saddam Hussein in early 1991. This autonomy allowed for a strengthening and consolidation of Kurdish nationalism which, over previous decades, had been smothered by the Kurdish elites’ preference for making friends in powerful regional and global capitals.

Aziz makes the convincing point that independence is not a prerequisite for a political tradition. The Kurds, he says, may never have enjoyed the former, but on any of a broad range of measures have created the latter. There is a Kurdistani loyalty and pride, he shows, and there is a sense among most Kurds of a link to particular “Kurdish” locations and areas where they are clustered. And there are exclusive Kurdish social and cultural markers, including particular Kurdish attachments to family, tribe and other primordial political units, as well as a unique language, or languages.

What should please – and benefit – non-specialist readers above all is that, despite its ethnonationalism approach, Aziz’s book is not predominantly a piece of academic loquaciousness, nor is it overly focused on theoretical intricacies. Aziz talks a lot about the complexities of identity and nationalism in order to make his approach work, but he also spends considerable time explaining and profiling the Kurds in a more general fashion. The Kurds of Iraq contains a useful background chapter on the Kurds’ history, their language and the types of communities they have formed. This leads into two chapters looking at the period 1921–2008, which provide a solid and very engaging modern history of the Kurds’ politics and social dynamics. Aziz’s final two main chapters bring this material together by looking at university students as an in-depth case study on Kurdish identity and nationalist sentiment, and making some wider observations about the characteristics and permutations of various features of Kurdish nationalism and Kurdish identity. It is only in a couple of early chapters, and again in Chapter 8, that there is a strong dose of academic theory to the book.

Aziz ends with a set of clear and convincing ideas. He shows that territory, and common or shared territory in particular, is central to “Kurdish-ness.” Yet he also acknowledges that there is only a very limited tradition of empowered civil society among the Kurds of Iraq. This means that they lack “a solid base upon which to build or develop a sense of responsible citizenship and the democratic mindset that would enable it [a Kurdistani state in northern Iraq] to stand on its own.” Loyalties are local and patriarchal, most strongly focused on the family and tribe, and Aziz argues that this fosters an inward-looking and miniature sense of group and of society. To formalise, institutionalise and democratise such societies is no mean feat, he writes, and it explains why Kurdistaniyeti (roughly, the promotion of Kurdistani identity, ethnicity and culture) is a complex process that could only begin with the quasi-independence that came after 1991.

Yet the KRG remains geared to governing, at best, a de facto state, not a fully recognised, self-sufficient, sovereign one, Aziz argues. The Iraqi–Kurdistani political elite has held elections, and representatives have come and gone on the basis of the popular vote, but “there is no broad-based democratic culture or fully developed civil society.” Aziz immediately adds that there is, therefore, a great deal of uncertainty about “the prospects for the emergence of a de jure Kurdish political state in the future.” With a growing likelihood that the KRG will take the political leap of seeking recognition as a full, sovereign state, Aziz’s assessment of its political readiness should also act as a warning about the risks of acting too prematurely or extemporaneously. •

The post The world’s largest stateless nation? appeared first on Inside Story.

Fatema is the lively matriarch of a family of twenty. Quick to laugh and brimming with stories from five decades of life in Syria, she explains how she ended up in the camp. “I saw myself dying,” she tells me. “We were all threatened. It was really hard for us. It was war. Would you stay in a place that had war? I had to take all my kids and flee. There was no food, there was nothing. Airstrikes every day.” She laments the loss: “Oh my village, oh my village. It is all demolished now. It is empty now.”

Jamal Ahmed is another of the millions of victims of the war in Syria. Although he isn’t part of Fatema’s family, he has joined us while we have been talking. With his greying stubble and moustache, he sits opposite me, smoking, next to Fatema’s son, Ibraheem. He has something to tell me, but I am preoccupied for a while with what others are saying. Eventually, though, our attention moves to Jamal, who tells me he was tortured by the Syrian regime and wants to show me the evidence. I am reluctant: I have seen enough of the remnants of torture, and it seems voyeuristic to comply. He also wants to show me YouTube videos of Syrians being tortured. I refuse the latter, but finally agree to look at his injuries.

He turns and lifts his shirt to reveal a scar the shape of a hawk stretching from one shoulder to the other. The skin, he says, was melted with a cigarette lighter by Syrian government torturers in the shape of the regime’s coat of arms. Now it sags unevenly.

“You have all that you want, but you can’t go out of here”: Jordan’s Zaartari refugee camp. Photos: David Corlett

Jamal was arrested after a neighbour reported him to Syrian intelligence, falsely and for profit, he says. What followed was a nightmare. For a year, he was incarcerated only a kilometre from his home in Sayeda Zainab. But it could have been a whole world away, and his family believed he was dead. As well as having his back mutilated, Jamal says that he was beaten with a hose and given electric shocks. His fellow prisoners thought he was doomed. “No one thought I would go out,” he says. “They slaughtered other people.” He saw these executions, he tells me, with his own eyes.

After his escape, he fled to Jordan with his wife and four children. Now he lives in the Al Zaatari camp.

From its highest point, barely a rise in the flat, barren landscape, the extent of the Al Zaatari camp becomes clear. Two and a half years after it was established here in northern Jordan, its seven square kilometres are home to more than 80,000 Syrian refugees, living just ten or so kilometres from the Syrian border as the crow flies.

This is an orderly camp, organised into districts and numbered streets. A remarkable variety of international agencies provide assistance with a wide range of services including housing, education, food and healthcare. The refugees are given vouchers to exchange for food; some sell them, losing value in the exchange, in order to have the greater flexibility that cash offers. Goods and services are bought and sold in the camp’s commercial district.

Although conditions are good compared with many other refugee camps around the world, and certainly preferable to the horrors that Syrians continue to flee, refugees in Al Zaatari are frustrated. Jamal Ahmed, for instance, complains that the medical care in the camp is inadequate. When he sought assistance, he tells me, his injuries, dramatic and unforgettable as they are, were documented as problems with his leg. He has trouble sleeping because of the pain, but says that he has not been given medicine to ease it. He believes that “no one cares.”

If you consider the international community’s commitment to Syrian refugees, he has a point. The UNHCR suggests it needs just over US$1 billion to respond adequately to Syrians who have fled to Jordan. It has received just over half that amount. This is consistent with the international response to the broader Syrian crisis, more than three million refugees and about six and a half million internally displaced persons, half of whom are children.

Fatema’s son, Ibraheem, is also dissatisfied with life in Al Zaatari. As we talk, he rolls cigarettes that are so strong that Fatema says they have branded them “Diesel.” His young sons come and go, variously sitting on or beside him; his niece asks him to repair a colourful and ornate hair clip. Someone brings him the newest addition to the family – the baby of one of his brothers. He delights in the children and they in him.

”I want to find a place where I can work,” says Ibraheem. 

But, having escaped his hometown, Ghabegheb, in southern Syria about a year and a half ago, after a Syrian army attack, Ibraheem says he is now “like a bird living in a cage.” It’s not that he doesn’t have his basic material needs met: “You have food, you have water, you have all that you want, but you can’t go out of here. It’s really hard. It’s really difficult for me to be in a place where I can’t leave and I can’t see anything around me. Our kids, they can’t see anything outside.” If the Jordanian government let refugees leave the camp, he says, “we would be able to enlighten [the children] and show them other stuff.”

Conditions, although safe, are austere. Housed in configurations of tents and demountable buildings, these refugees feel that their lives are on hold and unfulfilled. “Our daily life is that we go for water, go back to our tents,” Ibraheem says. “Then we bring the bread.” For him, and many others, employment is key. “I want to work. I want to find a place where I can work,” he says. He wants to be able to provide for his family.

Complaints about conditions at Al Zaatari are at once understandable and unfair. It’s hardly surprising that refugees who face an uncertain and extended period in limbo are enormously frustrated. Their lives are in turmoil, and now, years after Syria began to implode, a resolution seems an ever more distant hope.

But Jordan – like other countries in the region – shoulders a considerable burden. Officially, it is home to 618,000 Syrian refugees, but some estimates put the figure as high as 1.3 million. Most of the refugees don’t live in camps like Al Zaatari but in increasingly perilous circumstances in cities and towns, despite the relative generosity of a host government that allows them access to state education and healthcare.

With Jordan’s population standing at around seven million people, the ratio of Syrian refugees to long-term Jordanian residents is one-to-eleven, on the official numbers, or around one-to-five using the unofficial estimates. By comparison, even at the peak of overall refugee arrivals in 2013, when 20,500 people reached Australia by boat, there was just one asylum seeker for every 1150 Australians. In the financial year 2013–14, following the success of the government’s efforts to stop asylum seeker boats, Australia’s humanitarian program included 13,768 places, 11,016 of which were granted to offshore applicants; in other words, Australia accepted refugees and others in need of protection at a rate of one to every 1700 Australians in that year.

If the numbers of refugees in Jordan and Australia are of different orders of magnitude, so are the capacities of the two countries. Jordan has a per capita GDP (standardised to international dollars) of $11,782, less than a third of Australia’s per capita GDP. (Cambodia’s is less than one-fourteenth of Australia’s.)

Australia hasn’t entirely ignored the situation in Syria and its neighbouring countries. In August, the Abbott government announced that it would take 2200 refugees from Syria and a further 2200 from Iraq. It could do this, the government said, because “stopping the boats” had freed up places in the humanitarian program. This is disingenuous: the Coalition had already walked away from its bipartisan acceptance of the recommendation by the Gillard government’s Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers that the humanitarian program should be increased to 20,000; had it kept to that commitment, Australia could have resettled a further 6000 refugees this year. (Earlier this month, as part of the deal to get the Senate to pass radical new legislation granting the immigration minister almost Caesar-like powers over the lives of asylum seekers, the government announced that it would increase Australia’s offshore refugee intake to 18,750 over the next four years.)

But more significant than the government’s obfuscation is the broader discourse into which it fits. Asserting a link between boat arrivals and offshore refugee resettlement feeds into the longstanding claim that refugees who arrive in Australia by boat are not only “jumping the queue” but also taking the places of other, more vulnerable refugees stuck in camps and slums around the world.

Stripped of its specificity, this is a claim to fairness, a notion that seems to be central in the Australian national psyche. As David Marr argued recently, Australians “hanker as much for fairness as we do liberty.” This emphasis on fairness is linked to notions of egalitarianism, tolerance and decency and is encapsulated in the notion of a fair go. It was the offence to fairness that landed the Abbott government’s first budget in trouble. And it is the perceived lack of fairness that leads many to disapprove of asylum seekers who can afford to board boats for Australia.

Many people on the political left have failed to grasp the significance of fairness in debates about “boat people.” When they dispute claims that asylum seekers who come by boat are queue jumpers, their argument rests on the assertion that there really is no queue. Strictly speaking, this is true, but the deeper issue is left unaddressed.

By failing to understand the meaning of the queue jumper construction, the left dodges an important ethical (and political) question: how fair is it that people like Jamal and Ibraheem and their families languish in Al Zaatari while others who can afford it gain access to Australian territory and its refugee protection processes? Some might argue that they are all refugees, regardless of whether they have sought to enter Australia by boat or are in Al Zaatari. This may be correct in law – if they have a “well-founded fear of persecution” then they are refugees and entitled to protection – but international law is insufficient for dealing with the issue of fairness. It deals with rights, not with differing and disparate needs.

But if the left fails to look squarely at this impossible moral question because it would mean conceiving of ways of prioritising people with competing needs, then the right fails to articulate the ethical issues for other reasons. It is prepared to brutalise those it considers to be breaching the fairness principle, for example in Australia’s offshore detention system. If we are not just paying lip service to fairness then we need to confront the extraordinary unfairness in the realm of refugee protection.

“Like a bird living in a cage”: the commercial district in the Al Zaatari camp. 

From start to finish, the refugee experience is unfairness actualised. It is profoundly unfair that people are forced to flee their homes, families and friends because of war and the gravest of human rights violations. It is unjust that the poorest nations of the world do the heavy lifting – to use a phrase that has become popular in Australian political life – by hosting 86 per cent of the world’s refugees.

The unfairness extends to the resettlement programs of countries like the United States, Canada and Australia, which only provide places for a total of around 80,000 refugees annually. Of course, not all refugees want to be resettled in countries like these; many would prefer to return to their homes as soon as it is safe to do so. But according to the UNHCR, 960,000 refugees are in need of resettlement because returning home is not a realistic medium-term option. (Even with this disparity between supply and demand, the full global resettlement quota, strangely, is generally not met.)

Of course, resettlement is not the only way wealthier countries contribute to dealing with the problem of forced displacement; they effectively fund the international refugee system. For its part, Australia committed A$112 million to United Nations humanitarian agencies, including the UNHCR, in the 2014–15 federal budget. While this is not an insignificant amount of money, it is miserly in the context of the needs of refugees and Australia’s capacity to contribute.

In fact, the 2014 budget cut Australia’s overall overseas aid funds – money that might be directed towards assisting refugees or building capacities within countries to prevent the emergence of refugee-producing situations – by $8 billion over five years. In real terms, the Australian aid budget will fall by 10 per cent over the next two years, and will go only a third of the way towards meeting the OECD’s goal of each member country spending 0.7 per cent of gross national income on aid. By 2016–17, Australia’s percentage will have fallen to 0.29 per cent.

Naturally, there are those who argue that Australia’s economy is not in a position to assist more refugees or other humanitarian crises. Viewed from afar, however – from Jordan, Lebanon or Syria, or from Pakistan, Ethiopia or Kenya – the claim that Australia is in a weak economic position is hardly compelling. Australia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, ranking sixteenth by national income, with GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power) of three times the global average.

It isn’t a budget shortfall that prevents Australia from offering the UNHCR more funds: the federal government spent as much on its “stop the boats” policy in the first six months of Operation Sovereign Borders as the entire annual budget of the UNHCR. Or, to view the equation from a different angle: the United Nations has requested US$2.28 billion to assist 12.2 million Syrians in need within Syria – that’s a lot of people and a lot of money – yet Australia spends 3.8 times that amount (to take just one possible example) on superannuation tax concessions to the wealthiest 5 per cent of Australian earners. We are clearly dealing with priorities of a different order here.

Refugee children at Al Zaatari. 

Australia’s response to asylum seekers and refugees is rarely seen in its global context, and so the debate here never takes account of the full complexity of global displacement. Nor does our political discourse deal fully with the ethical questions involved. We don’t view the question of fairness in its totality, even as we obsess about that very issue. Our approach seems to reflect the provincialism of our debate – its exclusive focus on our domestic politics – as well as our inability to see the broader ethical frame. Now that the Abbott government seems to have stopped the boats, there is a real opportunity for Australia to engage more fully in questions of global displacement.

This is also an opportunity to deal with the plight of people who remain caught in the trap of Australian policy. There has been much discussion about the “legacy caseload” – about 30,000 people detained or living in insecurity within Australia’s borders – whose unnecessary suffering could be alleviated without a significant cost to the government’s absolutist border-control policies. There are also a handful of Syrians in Australia’s offshore detention regime who have no real prospect of returning to Syria and no real possibility of building a life in Papua New Guinea or Nauru. It is difficult to imagine that relieving them of their suffering by recognising that they are refugees, as the rest of the world does, would lead to a renewal of boat arrivals in Australia. The cost would be little; the benefits to these people, enormous.

Back in Al Zaatari, Fatema talks of her own powerlessness and resistance. When her granddaughter was born prematurely, she tells me, she was concerned about the baby’s health. She approached the Jordanian police and asked permission to take the baby to hospital. The police refused, saying she needed to go through the bureaucratic process. Lacking faith in the system, Fatema took the child, escaped the camp, and made it to the hospital. To her great relief, she discovered that her granddaughter was well.

With a twinkle in her eye, Fatema says that she wishes she could take me to Syria, where the water is clear and she would give me organic tomatoes from her land. But that seems a long way off. The millions of displaced people – internally and externally – are unlikely to be repatriated in the near future. And Fatema knows the risks. She doesn’t want me to take her photograph or film an interview. She is afraid that if her face becomes known then she may be in danger if she ever returns to Syria. Four women from her village in Syria were arrested the day before I met her.

“What will the government do to them?” I ask.

“What would you expect them to do?” she answers. •

The post “Queue jumping”: the view from afar appeared first on Inside Story.

In 2012, I wrote that “US policy responses to recent events [in the Middle East] appear to be incoherent. There is, however, a much deeper problem underlying these specific failures: there is no clearly defined US national interest at stake.” At that time, the US administration was:

• debating how much support to give to a Sunni insurgency against Bashir Assad

• cautiously endorsing the overthrow of longstanding, and dictatorial, US ally Hosni Mubarak and his replacement by a democratically elected government

• continuing its support for the government of Nouri al-Maliki, who had demonstrated his credentials by defeating anti-American Sadrist militias

• pressuring the regime in Iran, seen as the primary adversary of the United States in the region

• uncritically supporting whatever policies the Israeli government chose to pursue.

Although Washington’s policy was criticised from a variety of perspectives, the predominant theme was that it was not doing enough, particularly in relation to Iran. Senator John McCain was among the strongest critics, rejecting any notion of engagement with the Iranian government.

Two years later, everything has changed, and nothing. The US administration is now:

• debating how much support to give to Assad against the Sunni insurgents, now dominated by the ISIS group

• quietly accepting the emergence of an even more brutal military dictatorship in Egypt

• engineering the replacement of Maliki by new leaders who can mobilise the support of the Sadrists, needed to fight ISIS

• effectively allied with Iran as the main supporter of the Iraqi government

• uncritically supporting whatever policies the Israeli government chooses to pursue.

And, as before, the criticism is primarily that the Obama administration is not doing enough. McCain is yet again calling for military intervention, this time in effective alliance with Assad and the Iranians. Others are suggesting that if troops had not been withdrawn from Iraq (despite the refusal of the Iraqi government to countenance any extension of the schedule agreed with George W. Bush) the United States would somehow have been better able to impose a government of its own choosing. And, of course, the marginal qualifications of Washington’s support for the Netanyahu government have been the subject of bitter condemnation.

The current policy failures continue a long history, stretching right back to the early postwar era, when the United States inherited the poisoned chalice of Anglo-French imperialism, reflected most notably in the secret Sykes–Picot agreement (partitioning the area into British and French spheres of influence), the Balfour declaration (promising a Jewish homeland in Palestine) and the McMahon–Hussein correspondence (promising the same land to the Arabs).

The United States had some apparent successes along the way: the CIA coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected nationalist Iranian prime minister; the Camp David agreements between Israel and Egypt; and the first Iraq war. But these only paved the way for greater disasters to follow: the overthrow of the US-installed Pahlavi regime by the Iranian ayatollahs, decades of failure on the Israel-Palestine issue and, most of all, the second Iraq war.

How could it be otherwise? A rich and militarily powerful country has taken it upon itself to govern the affairs of millions of people on the other side of the planet, of whom it knows nothing. Its emissaries routinely elevate particular individuals, ethnic groups, religious sects and political parties as favourites, then just as quickly dump them in favour of new friends. Its tools vary randomly from overwhelming force to plaintive exhortation, with no clear or consistent rationale.

Unsurprisingly, the United States has no genuine friends in the region. The one constant beneficiary of US support, the Israeli government, correctly views the US state with contempt, recognising that Israel’s political powerbase within American domestic politics means that it need take no account of US national interests or of any attempt by Washington to maintain its long-discredited position as an “honest broker” in the dispute with the Palestinians.

Along with support for Israel, the only constant element in the US approach to the Middle East is a concern to maintain control over the flow of oil (even though the United States is effectively self-sufficient and European oil users are far more concerned about Russia). Both of these seem perfectly calculated to arouse the hostility and suspicion of the vast majority of people in the region.

The horrors now being perpetrated by ISIS on ground prepared by the 2003 invasion of Iraq are such that it is, effectively, impossible for the United States to stand by and do nothing. But its current actions are already producing the de facto partition of Iraq widely advocated a decade ago. A coherent strategy for intervention in Syria is as far off as ever, as is any constructive contribution to the Israel–Palestine dispute.

The best policy option for the Obama administration in the short term would be to stabilise the front lines in Iraq in a way that confines ISIS to Sunni strongholds. Assistance to the less extreme components of the Syrian resistance might also be tried, though this is unlikely to succeed for the reasons set out by Juan Cole.

The ideal follow-up would be an announcement that, from now on, the people of the Middle East would be left to sort out their problems for themselves. In particular, it would be useful to state that the United States has no strategic concern with Middle Eastern oil, and that energy policy is a matter for individual countries to determine according to their own priorities.

Given domestic political constraints, it would be necessary to maintain a commitment to defend Israel against any armed attack. But, as a lame-duck president, Obama could do a great service by honestly admitting that the United States has no capacity to promote a negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestine. Of course, it would be necessary for his successor to repudiate this admission. But once the truth was stated, it would be impossible to unsay.

In Australia, rather than pretending that we have any genuine concerns of our own in the Middle East, we ought to admit that the only question at issue is whether it makes sense to go to war whenever Washington calls us, and if so, how much we need to spend on this. There are good arguments on both sides, but the need to pretend to be something more than a client state means that they are never made openly.

The trillions of dollars and thousands of lives the United States and its allies, including Australia, have spent trying to direct events in the Middle East have produced nothing but bloodshed and chaos. Rather than waiting for today’s allies to become, yet again, tomorrow’s enemies, it’s time to let the people of the region make what they can of it, with whatever assistance the usual forms of foreign aid may be able to provide. •

The post Will today’s allies become, yet again, tomorrow’s enemies? appeared first on Inside Story.

By any conventional measure, Hamas should now be more than ready to agree to a ceasefire in its bitter war with Israel. Since the bombardments started on 8 July 2014, Israel has expanded its airstrikes on targets concentrated in heavily populated areas, leading inevitably to a gradual increase in casualties, the vast majority of them civilians. The damage to infrastructure in an already weak economy adds to the misery.

Hamas has continued its rocket attacks on Israel. Israel is intent on destroying Hamas’s launchers and munitions stores as well as its “infiltration tunnels.” It has the means to do this, given time; its military capacity is huge, it is the most powerful state in the Middle East, and it enjoys both close cooperation with the United States and technical reliance on its advanced weapons and radar systems.

Hamas has little external support, at least at state level. It is adamantly opposed by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government in Egypt; Syria and Iran have also withdrawn much support because of Hamas’s backing of Islamist movements. Qatar may remain an ally, but a more cautious one.

All this makes for a reasonable assumption that Hamas must be getting desperate and will shortly sue for peace, perhaps on terms falling far short of its aims. There may well be a ceasefire in the coming days, but the assumption nonetheless has two deep flaws. These must be grasped if any search for a tolerably stable peace is to be grounded in reality.

Israel’s troubles

The first is that Hamas, though facing great problems in Gaza, does not appear to be losing support among the population as a whole. There, Israel and of course the United States are being blamed for the destruction. There is also an upsurge in public support for Hamas across the region, enhanced by coverage of the war on Al Jazeera and other TV channels and the many social-media outlets. These show the human suffering and destruction in Gaza at a much starker level than the largely self-censoring Western media.

The second is that aspects of the conflict are very troubling to Binyamin Netanyahu’s government in ways that are just becoming apparent. Israel’s great projection of power, for example, has not stopped rockets from being fired; one even evaded the missile-screen to land in the Yehud suburb of Tel Aviv close to Ben Gurion airport. The airport was then closed on safety grounds to some of the major carriers (including Delta, US Airways, Lufthansa, Alitalia and Air France). The government immediately opened Uvda airport, north of the Red Sea resort of Eilat, to more traffic.

Ben Gurion airport may reopen to many foreign carriers, but the psychological impact of even a short closure is substantial, especially because many Israelis look much more to their contact with the world beyond the Middle East rather than the region in which they actually live.

The airport closure, as well as affecting national morale, has also damaged Israel’s tourist industry. This is one of the country’s main foreign-exchange earners, and losses are already estimated at $200 million. Here is a powerful symbolism: an impoverished, densely populated and hugely constrained community with hardly any external support was able to put together crude weapons that can affect the economics and psychology of a hugely more powerful country convinced that it can ensure its own security.

The only winners

Another particular worry for Israel is Hamas’s use of the infiltration tunnels it has built. The early phase of Israel’s direct military intervention has been a real shock to the army, for it has revealed a network of tunnels of astonishing complexity – far more wide-ranging than expected. In addition, the fact that Hamas paramilitaries could use a tunnel to penetrate Israeli territory at the height of the war is profoundly disturbing for Israel’s military and government.

Their concern is deepened by the level of casualties being inflicted as the army tries to find and destroy the tunnels. Much of the impact has been on the elite Golani brigade, one of Israel’s five regular army brigades, whose role dates from February 1948 and the war of independence. On a single day, 20 July, thirteen members of the Golani were killed, including a battalion deputy commander; the brigade’s commanding officer, Colonel Ghassan Alian, was wounded.

By late on 23 July, Israeli forces had identified twenty-eight tunnels with sixty-eight entry points, six of which had been demolished. But there were reported to be far more, and it will not be hard for Hamas paramilitaries to utilise many of them in the event of an Israeli withdrawal. If demolition is the only option to prevent further attacks, it also means the risk of continued occupation and more casualties.

Israel is now facing considerable pressure even as it intensifies the war. In a hard military sense this is not surprising: a force with overwhelming firepower facing entrenched urban paramilitaries will use that firepower rather than expose its soldiers. The result is almost certain to mean more civilian deaths and injuries, and greater opprobrium.

Israel is also turning its attention to Hamas supporters elsewhere. That includes destroying their houses on the West Bank, enhancing its existing program of demolitions. The result is more likely to increase than reduce backing for Hamas and hatred of Israel, even among Palestinians who would not normally be sympathetic to the movement.

Binyamin Netanyahu is now facing an unforeseen dilemma. He has both raised expectations of an end to the rockets and insisted that the tunnels must be destroyed; yet it’s almost certain that his armed forces cannot achieve this without recourse to a long-term occupation of Gaza. Such a move, however, would increase casualties on both sides and invite further condemnation.

In this situation, Israel may well accept something short of its own aims. John Kerry may therefore be in a stronger position than supposed. That makes a ceasefire possible within the next week. But even if it is, the greatest beneficiaries of the conflict will be the extreme Islamist movements in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. A continuation of the war would serve these movements’ interests even more. Israel’s actions, as so often, are aiding its worst enemies. •

The post Israel vs Hamas: the flawed assumptions appeared first on Inside Story.

The spectacular emergence of ISIS – the acronym stands for “the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” or, more precisely, “the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Shams,” “al-Shams” effectively meaning the Levant – appears remarkable at first glance. Seemingly out of nowhere, it has overrun several key towns and cities in the central-north and central-west of Iraq, including Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul. As they advance, ISIS fighters have brutally abused their enemies and imposed their extreme interpretation of an Islamic state on local populations. They seem to combine the fervour of an ideologically driven terrorist group and the strength of a well-organised militia, and few people appear willing to resist them.

But these are early days in this newest battle for Iraq’s future. ISIS may prove to be much less potent than it appears; certainly, it speaks for very few Iraqis. It faces formidable challenges in holding territorial gains and transforming into anything close to a functional government. And it has a lot more enemies than friends among the foreign governments with a stake in Iraq’s future.

ISIS’s dramatic rise is not so much a reflection of its capabilities as it is of the weak opposition it has encountered thus far. Its forces are highly motivated, for sure, and its leadership has “sold” ISIS very skilfully on social media and deftly created local sources of revenue in Syria. Many of its fighters have extensive combat experience in Iraq or Syria. This sounds ominous, especially since around 800 ISIS fighters overran some 30,000 Iraqi army soldiers and took Mosul on 10 June. But in Mosul, the Iraqi soldiers probably fled out of surprise and because of an unwillingness to fight for an unpopular government and prime minister in Baghdad, not just out of ineptness or cowardice. Because many of the soldiers were Sunni, moreover, they are less threatened by ISIS than the Shiites, who are seen as apostates by ISIS’s Sunni extremists. And Mosul, while certainly a mixed Sunni–Shiite city, is disproportionately Sunni and has long been in violent disarray. In other words, it was an easy target for a group like ISIS.

On the same day, the Iraqi army also fled from Kirkuk in disarray, this time in the face of Kurdish peshmerga militia who took the chance to seize the disputed city. The lesson here is that the peshmerga is a strong, very disciplined and well-trained fighting force, far superior to most units of the Iraqi army.

These events do not mean that ISIS is about to take Iraq as a whole, or even the Arab parts of it. There is even a chance that they will defeated on the battlefield – although what is left of them would almost certainly regroup in the future as a new group, just as ISIS is the successor of al Qaeda in Iraq.

The challenges to ISIS in the longer-term are several. Perhaps most obviously, the organisation is extreme and small in number. It probably has no more than two or three thousand fighters in Syria and perhaps 7000 in Iraq, although these figures are little more than guesstimates. Any higher number, however, would probably include like-minded or opportunistic Sunni militias. Weak as it is in many respects, the 270,000-strong Iraqi army is so much larger, and among its ranks are many Shiites who see ISIS as a grave threat to themselves and their families. More importantly, ISIS would have little chance against up to 200,000 well-organised and well-trained peshmerga from the Kurdish north.

As several observers have noted, ISIS has proven effective at taking territory, but holding it is another matter. To control, exploit and govern a territory, it would need a sympathetic (preferably ideologically supportive) population, almost certainly Sunni. Only a few places in Iraq will give it that base – the mostly Sunni provinces of Anbar and Salahuddin, and corners of a few other provinces; otherwise, it will have to operate in unfriendly areas, perhaps even outright hostile ones in areas where there are sizeable Shiite populations.

Finally, ISIS has few friends and plenty of opponents beyond its own territory. It has been quite effective at taxing the population in areas of Syria under its control, for example, and it might attract a few donations from sympathisers abroad. But it has no real external sponsor. As much as some Gulf monarchies might prefer ISIS to Iraq’s Shiites, they are not likely to openly support it if that means clashing with the United States. Above all, ISIS is opposed by Iran, which would go to great lengths to support the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. It is noteworthy, and bad news for ISIS, that one of the few things on which Washington and Tehran agree is the need for ISIS to be stopped.

The fall of Mosul to ISIS and Kirkuk to the Kurds means that, although Iraq is not necessarily lost to the central government, it has now changed significantly and irreversibly. Even if ISIS doesn’t gain substantial control in Iraq – say, by capturing several provinces and establishing themselves there – it might still prove to be a spoiler. It could also end up controlling a small, unhappy corner of the country, using it as a base to create wider mischief in Iraq or elsewhere.

ISIS could be defeated and all but destroyed as a military force, but this would probably only come through US or Iranian intervention. If Iran intervenes, it would exacerbate Sunni grievances; in saving al-Maliki and his colleagues from the immediate ISIS threat, it would thoroughly undermine him as prime minister.

US intervention is now looking quite likely, but the exact nature of any support is being very vigorously debated in Washington – and with good reason. Not only do many policymakers equate Iraq with past policy failure and an eight-year quagmire – meaning that the chance of ground troops being sent to Iraq in any significant number can be ruled out – but the United States will also limit its actions so as to avoid handing Tehran any advantages. If al-Maliki stays as prime minister – which is looking less likely by the day – he’s close enough to Tehran that American intervention will focus not on helping him, but on defeating ISIS.

The United States only has a few safe options. In the short term, to stop ISIS and then roll it back, the Americans could provide the kind of intelligence that the Iraqi army has little capability to collect. Unmanned aircraft could help collect this material, and could also conduct limited but opportunistic strikes as ISIS targets are identified. More extensive airstrikes are possible, as are a special forces commitment on the ground.

Washington is reportedly considering both of these options: airstrikes, of course, would be easiest to sell to American voters, but would not be very effective without better tactical intelligence on ISIS locations, movements and key figures. For that, they need either Iraqi human intelligence, which is probably not available, or their own special forces on the ground helping gather information and coordinate Iraqi army operations. It is not surprising, therefore, that as the United States considers its options more closely, it is reportedly leaning increasingly towards special forces (although if they do choose this option, it may not become public until well after the fact).

Washington probably has no choice but to intervene somehow. If Iraq collapses, it will pose new threats, both as a base for terrorism and to the stability of other states in the region. If Iran steps in instead, the United States risks handing Tehran a victory, or at least greater influence in the region. Many American allies in the region will be unnerved by a lack of US action against ISIS. At the same time, doing something requires a delicate balance and a great deal of care to avoid getting dragged into supporting Iraqi security or serving Iran’s interests.

The only real winner from these events so far has been Iraq’s Kurds. They have long had semi-autonomy, administering three of Iraq’s northern provinces through the Kurdish Regional Government, or KRG. Almost a quasi-state, the KRG has its own parliament and makes many of its own laws, and its peshmerga militia as, in effect, its army. It has been the only part of Iraq that has been stable and safe over the past decade. Under Iraq’s 2005 constitution, the KRG is promised 17 per cent of Iraq’s oil income, although it has started trying to supplement or replace this with oil contracts of its own in recent years: in fact, the news about ISIS has obscured the other major event related to Iraq in the past week, the KRG’s attempt to sell oil directly on the market. A tanker with one million barrels of oil is currently sitting in the Mediterranean while the KRG and Baghdad argue over whether the Kurds have the right to sell it.

Events since the rise of ISIS have strengthened the Kurds’ position but also increased the risk of Iraq fragmenting and falling apart. The KRG’s leadership must be quietly satisfied with events. The Iraqi army’s flight from Kirkuk has shown the peshmerga to be, by far, the superior military force, an assessment arguably endorsed by the fact that ISIS has been careful not to engage the peshmerga in fighting. The KRG will not let Kirkuk go: expect to see the KRG integrate it into the rest of their territory as quickly as possible.

Reportedly the Kurds have already connected the main Kirkuk oilfield up to their own pipeline, letting them drill and export to Turkey. The KRG now will almost certainly meet its goal of exporting 400,000 barrels of oil a day by the end of the year, which would come close to equally the revenues it is promised from Baghdad under the constitution. If it can expand and secure its pipelines the Kirkuk superfield could produce 1.4 million barrels a day or more. If the KRG can fully exploit this field, or even develop it further, they would do so at Baghdad’s expense. Iraq’s planned daily 2014 production rate of four million barrels, with up to one-sixth going to the KRG, would instead see the KRG produce about half of this figure and Baghdad the other half. The impacts on Iraq’s central government and its capabilities would be substantial, and would be a further incentive for the Kurds to seek full independence.

The challenge for the Kurds remain significant, however, and include significant opposition to them formally becoming independent and breaking up Iraq, as well as practical concerns in Turkey especially that this would motivate Turkey’s own Kurdish population to seek independence from Ankara. The Turks have enormous power over the KRG, since Kurdish oil has to travel through Turkey, along pipelines and out of Turkish ports, and they could yet use this power if they thought Iraq’s Kurds were pushing for independence and saw this as a threat.

In other respects, however, the current crisis is probably a boon for the Kurds. Few other Iraqis would take any joy in events, however. Iraq has a violent modern history, but its last decade has been especially horrid. Sectarian and ethnic identities have become entrenched, politics has become fragmented, and a weak state has given often-extreme groups, ISIS among them, the chance to gain a foothold.

To avoid yet further catastrophe, a number of things probably need to happen. Prime minister Nouri al-Maliki needs to withdraw from politics; he has become too divisive, too pro-Shiite, and too authoritarian to unite Iraqis against ISIS. This is becoming increasingly likely. Far less likely, a longer-term reconciliation effort needs to be made, including a final agreement over the control and exploitation of Iraq’s enormous oil wealth, but also a program to give all the main groups in Iraq a stake in its stability. And least likely of all, the United States, Iran and Saudi Arabia need to agree on what roles they will play long-term in Iraq.

Otherwise, Iraq’s future is bleak, and there will continue to be extremists who will fight to control the country or a part of it. If ISIS does not succeed this time, another group will quickly succeed it, exploiting the same fears and grievances and soon posing just as much of a threat to its security and that of the region. •

The post Avoiding a catastrophe in Iraq appeared first on Inside Story.

By now, one thing is obvious: there is no single story of Israel–Palestine. In the broad sense, what we have are two competing narratives: Israeli and Palestinian. There is the War of Independence and there is the Nakba – the Catastrophe – and there is all that unfolds from each of these radically different perspectives. The conflict at the core of the creation of a Jewish state in what was Palestine elicits powerful, personal, often heartbreaking responses among Jews as well as Palestinians, whether they live in the region or not.

In 2006, Antony Loewenstein published My Israel Question, his open repudiation of Israel as an Australian Jew. As an American-born Jew with family links to the pioneering Zionists whose history I was researching, I had come to agree with Loewenstein’s position, and penned a long review of his book during Israel’s bombing of Lebanon in that same year. For non-Jews, especially those who have struggled to overcome their prejudices in the light of the Holocaust, these stories can seem impenetrable. What is at issue? Israel is a modern miracle, the Middle East’s only democracy, Western civilisation’s bulwark against Islamic extremism. What’s to argue? they will ask.

Inside Israel, the spectrum of opinion has been wider, the controversies more nuanced. There are human rights groups like B’Tselem, Machsom Watch and Breaking the Silence; and there are the West Bank settlers, supported by the government and, brutally, by its army, yet blatantly contravening international law (the Abbott government’s position notwithstanding). But as Israel’s existential predicament becomes ever more apparent, as its internal contradictions become sharper, Israelis have retreated into what its critics have dubbed “the bubble,” a technocratic, hedonistic, consumerist sanctuary where Palestinians are unseen and attitudes have hardened.

Ari Shavit is such a critic, if not an unsympathetic one. A leading public intellectual, he has been a civil rights activist and is a regular contributor to Haaretz, Israel’s left-of-centre newspaper. My Promised Land is a remarkable book, one of the best to come out of Israel, up there with Tom Segev’s One Palestine, Complete, Susan Nathan’s The Other Side of Israel, and the trenchant works of Jeff Halper or Ilan Pappé. Unflinching in its revelations, highly readable, it has been warmly received in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, barometers of shifting American liberal opinion. Like Loewenstein’s book, it is a memoir that breaches the parameters of the genre with a patient, detailed exposition of Israel’s history. It remains idiosyncratic, of course, and Shavit has omitted whole swathes of opposing interpretation, which I will come back to later.

Shavit begins by identifying intimidation and occupation as the two key factors that inform Israeli policy and determine the kind of state Israel has become. In May 1948, by the very act of unilaterally declaring itself a state, it became a colonial power, the Catastrophe for the displaced Palestinians and an affront to the surrounding Arab nations. Its enemies vowed to “push into the sea” this mere sliver of land on the shore of the Mediterranean. Tempered by spells of truncated negotiation, Israel managed to maintain a fragile peace in what might otherwise be characterised as an ongoing state of war. Victorious in the Six-Day War of 1967, when Shavit was a boy of nine, Israel occupied yet more Arab land. Retaining the occupied territories was initially justified as a way of securing peace but, as Shavit concedes, it has only intensified the sense of intimidation: “For as long as I can remember, I remember fear.” It might have been exacerbated by years of Israeli intransigence, but the Israeli feeling of being intimidated cannot be denied. It is buried deep in the Israeli psyche and that of many Jews in the Diaspora.

ZIONISM began as a reaction to nineteenth-century European anti-Semitism and the parlous condition of the Jews in tsarist Russia. It had significant support among English evangelical Christians, men like Lloyd George who saw Hebrew irredentism in Palestine as both a just resolution of Jewish statelessness and a means of establishing a British foothold in the Levant (a similar, though in many ways strikingly different, championship to that of today’s American Christian Zionists). In April 1897, four months before the first Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Ari Shavit’s great-grandfather, Herbert Bentwich, participated in a fact-finding tour of Palestine charged with reporting to the Congress. A prominent London solicitor and pillar of the Anglo-Jewish community, the fervently Zionist Bentwich was blind to the pastoral runs, the tenant farms, the mills, the fields, the olive groves and villages dotted through the land. Instead, he saw backwardness and emptiness. When he emigrated to Palestine years later, he joined in what had already become a dedicated colonial project.

By 1920 that project was in full swing. With the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Palestine was now ruled by Britain, mandated to provide the Jewish people with “a national home,” though not to the “detriment” of the existing inhabitants. American Zionists bought a large swathe of land in the lower Galilee known as the Je’ezreel Valley, and there the Gdud HaAvoda, or Labour Brigade, a roving collective of Jewish pioneers, began replacing local farmers. The Gdud drained the swamplands, built the roads connecting the Galilee with the coast, and set up their kibbutz, Ein Harod, at the base of Mount Gilboa. Ein Harod represented the socialist Zionism of the Third Aliyah – in Shavit’s reckoning, the true “genesis of the Zionist adventure.” But British complicity in wholesale Jewish immigration and the consequent removal of Arab tenant farmers from their holdings provoked riots in 1920, 1921 and 1929. As a result of the last incident, the British introduced quotas for Jewish immigrants, at the very moment when the threat to European Jews was deepening and countries like Britain, Australia and Canada were closing their doors.

Patiently, courageously, Shavit tells his story. It is not a pleasant one. Even in the 1930s, when the British Mandate economy was finding its feet, with the citrus groves of Rehovot and Petah Tikvah carving out an English market for their “Jaffa” oranges, tensions between the colonists and the Palestinians sharpened. A reprise of the 1920s riots, but far bloodier and more widespread, segued into an outright revolt that lasted three years, from 1936 to 1939, on the brink of the second world war. The Arab Mufti aligned himself with Hitler, and as Rommel achieved his early successes in North Africa it looked for one truly frightening moment as if Palestinian Jews would share the fate of Jews in Europe.

It was that fate, the industrialised murder of six million Jews, that clinched it for the Zionists. On the one hand was a determination that such a calamity would never be repeated, that the Jews would have a refuge; on the other was the guilt of the entire Western world. It is no little irony that the Holocaust made the state of Israel possible. After the British washed their hands of Palestine (and its seemingly irreconcilable internecine conflict, largely of their own making) the member states of the new United Nations proposed a partition. The Zionists were content with almost half the loaf, but the Arabs were appalled that with three-quarters of Palestine’s population they were being asked to forfeit so much of it. A civil war erupted. In the following year the Zionists unilaterally declared the independent state of Israel and the United Nations voted its support. The surrounding Arab states came to the aid of the Palestinians but failed in their mission in the face of Israeli resolve. The driving belief among the Zionists was that, while Palestinians could find a home in neighbouring Arab countries, the Holocaust was undeniable proof that, when push came to shove, Jews had nowhere else to go.

NINETEEN FORTY-EIGHT: Israel’s War of Independence; Palestine’s Nakba. These are the opening chapters of the two narratives that have shaped the region’s history. Shavit negotiates between them fearlessly and fairly. For a long time Western understanding held that Israel lost its innocence with the occupation, but historians with access to the archives have knocked that notion on the head. There was no innocence in 1948. Though we don’t like the term applied to a country like Israel, ethnic cleansing was there at its inception. Shavit doesn’t deny this. To illustrate what happened, he focuses on the destruction of the Palestinian city of Lydda, a modernised city of 19,000 that enjoyed the boom of the 1930s, and the forced dispersal of its inhabitants. But he doesn’t claim that Lydda was unique, a single unfortunate incident. The Jewish National Fund, which I contributed to as a teenager, helped plant the pine forests that cover what remains of hundreds of obliterated Palestinian villages. As it is in so many settler societies, the landscape of modern Israel is a palimpsest, with its barely suppressed layers of pain and bitterness.

But having acknowledged this, what does Shavit make of it? Or of the occupation, approaching its forty-seventh year? The reason his book has been so well received in quarters where you’d expect these unpleasant facts to be denied, and excoriated in those you’d expect to applaud his acknowledgement of them, is that Shavit believes they were necessary. It was necessary for Jewry to settle in Palestine because of Russia’s Jewish Pale and its pogroms, and because of the strident anti-Semitism gathering force in Europe. It was necessary to remove Arab peasants from their holdings to make way for the kibbutzim. It was necessary to discriminate against Arabs when the very existence of Jews was at stake. It was necessary to refuse to negotiate with “terrorists.” It was necessary to bomb Iraqi and Syrian nuclear reactors, as it’s been necessary to nip Iran’s nuclear capacity in the bud, if not by outright bombing then by assassinating its nuclear scientists. Only the illegal West Bank settlements may have been a mistake, but now that they exist they are just another fait accompli, another “fact on the ground” that cannot be undone. Threaded throughout Shavit’s narrative is his own blind acceptance that all along the way Zionist intransigence was necessary. There was no choice and, however sadly, it must ever be so:

The Jewish state does not resemble any other nation. What this nation has to offer is not security or well-being or peace of mind. What it has to offer is the intensity of life on the edge. The adrenaline rush of living dangerously, living to the extreme.

The trouble with all this is that it’s far from the whole story. Shavit omits the Zionism that, right from the start, was eager to find a homeland in Palestine but wary of establishing a Jewish state. He ignores those who gave voice to the necessity of a binational state, and were jailed for their views. Theirs was the road not taken, but it’s salient to realise that there was such a road. The push for a specifically Jewish state came from Theodor Herzl and the political Zionism that was essentially his creation. It was opposed by a Zionist thinker we rarely hear of these days: Ahad Ha’am, or Asher Ginsberg, whose cultural Zionism had a significant following in Zionism’s early years.

Shavit’s selectivity is particularly marked in his chapter on the Gdud HaAvoda’s work in the Jez’reel Valley and its kibbutz Ein Harod. I know about this because of my research into the life of a great-aunt who was a member of the Gdud, and Ein Harod was only part of its story. The Gdud split into factions, only one of which was involved in the settlement at Ein Harod. The rest preferred to proceed as a roving collective, and after leaving the valley they took what jobs they could get, mining potash by the Dead Sea, lending a hand in building Tel Aviv. They took a stand against the exclusion of Arab workers in the Histadrut, Labour Zionism’s Jewish trade union, and were crushed for their socialist views and Arab sympathies. A group of them became communists and were jailed by the British for supporting the Arab riot of 1929. The jurist Judah Magnes spoke out strongly for a binational state, as did the philosopher Martin Buber, but they too were sidelined.

It’s important, if tragic enough, to recognise that these strands of Zionism existed. And it’s arguable that had that road been taken, the conflict Shavit claims can only be resolved by further war might have been dealt with differently. Despite that alternative, however, critics like me are invariably reminded that Israel, the Jewish state, has been in existence for nearly seven decades, and is an undeniable “fact on the ground.” But this has always been political Zionism’s way, right back to the 1890s: bit by bit, establishing these “facts on the ground.” It is the way today with the West Bank settlements, which Ariel Sharon encouraged by offering cut-rate mortgages to prospective buyers when he was demoted to housing minister after the disgrace of Sabra and Shatila. The combined effect of the settlements, with populations nudging half a million, and of Sharon’s “security wall,” which sliced off even more bits of occupied Palestinian land, is to render any future Palestinian state unviable, even as it’s finally been accepted in principle and promoted as a means to peace by Israel and the Western powers. “Israel will never be the ideal nation it set out to be,” Shavit writes, “but what has evolved in this land is not to be dismissed.”

The supremest irony is that it looks as though the single-state proponents have won the day after all. Israel, along with the occupied territories, or Judea and Samaria, or Greater Israel, as the right wing is disposed to call it, or Israel–Palestine as it is in more leftist parlance, does in fact comprise one state. Only it’s an apartheid one. Moreover, flanked by unstable regimes in danger of succumbing to Islamic extremism, its fate is uncertain, to say the least. Instead of contemplating giving Palestinians and Jews equal rights within a single political entity, Shavit would have Israel revert to the pioneering zeal of old – the macho militarism that put backbone in the Zionist struggle and made of its dream the nation it is today – and fight to the death for it. For what could be the result if one way or another Israel were overrun, or if Israel–Palestine were no longer essentially Jewish?

The answer is to be found in Shavit’s introduction. It is his profoundest belief, shared by many, that were it not for Israel’s existence, Jewishness as we have known it was destined to fade away. In a sense, what kept it going was the ghetto, the very ghetto we sought to escape. In reality, though, most Jews have found their freedom in English-speaking countries like Shavit’s great-grandfather’s, and of course here and in America. But Shavit seems to fear assimilation more than he does war, and only in the Jewish state has the erosion been halted. But if that is its raison d’être, the question to ask is whether the price is too high. Is assimilation really the danger, the lamentable alternative Shavit makes out?

The truth is there has never been a single Jewishness. Rather than our disappearing into a Jewishless space, think how we have made that space Jewish, with our Yiddishisms, our humour, our talents and cuisine, and how such a culture could enrich rather than deny the Palestinian one, and vice versa. Even WASPS eat bagels now, and Jews love hummus. Yes, we’ve had a tragic history; but bending may well be our most humane, our bravest option. Far, far better than defending another ghetto, and blowing up the Middle East in the bargain. •

The post The land of living dangerously appeared first on Inside Story.

It is often said that when a film pitched in an area of major conflict draws disapproval and argument from both sides, they must be getting something right. What, on the other hand, can we conclude when both sides actually approve the representation of the struggle in question? This seems to be the case with Dror Moreh’s superb feature documentary The Gatekeepers, which presents the retrospective thinking of six former directors of the Israeli intelligence organisation Shin Bet. Its functions have been (and still are?) like those of ASIS and ASIO, the CIA and FBI combined; counter-terrorism, counter-espionage. The evidence from the six eloquent talking heads should set John le Carré fans off into an ecstatic spin: take these and these tracks into problem-solving, and you become part of the problem in no time flat.

As documentary, the film deploys a conventional range of tactics: the interviews, which take up most of the film’s time; archival film from many sources; and air-surveillance footage, with sights sliding and wobbling as a vehicle moves on an urban grid far below the helicopter, and then a fix on a suburban house, with fragmentary dialogue on the intercom: take them out or not? How much collateral damage? Still shots from the archive, and eloquent moving footage from the Six-Day War: never has that much-referenced chapter of recent history seemed so real. Footage of the Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin moving round, deliberating and arguing, in the days before his assassination on 4 November 1995, letting us see that he wasn’t so saintly; and his busy presence in the huge, surging pro-peace rally in the moments before the event. Here, I’d have liked more on the mentality of the assassin, Yigal Amir, and the part played by religion in impelling his action (he’s still there, jailed for life).

The assassination is the film’s pivotal moment; before it, The Gatekeepers takes in snapshots of the history, including the famous hesitant handshake on the White House lawn, with Yasser Arafat as the more willing of the two, and Bill Clinton (surely intent on his own role in the drama) standing back and between. These registrations of history provide the field in which each of the Shin Bet leaders speaks reminiscence and evidence, beginning with the first in sequence, Avraham Shalom. He’d be quite endearingly elderly, in check shirt and braces, if it weren’t for his unabashed ownership of Shin Bet’s tactics. One of the film’s chapter headings notes that it’s a story of tactics without strategy, a point reinforced by Shalom’s and his successors’ accounts; in supporting the settlements on the West Bank (and failing to comment on the overwhelming oppression of Gaza) they have a lot of trouble reaching the conclusion that – as I once heard a Jewish Australian mildly concede – “yes, the Palestinians do have a case.”

The other, younger witnesses are somewhat more ready to recognise the claims of the dispossessed; and speaking out as they do from privileged positions in the Israeli political establishment, they offer hope against hope. Shalom sees the future as dark; if there’s any light it can be glimpsed in the manifest honesty of the last speaker in the sequence, Ami Ayalon. With his lean, troubled face, he emerges as the most searching of all these highly intelligent operatives; as a presence, he could have been cast by Ingmar Bergman. Moreh gives him the last devastating line: “We’ve won all the battles, but lost the war.”

That clear assessment is the framework for the film’s making, and its circulation. Across the Western world, the recognition of the rights of the Palestinians and the extent of their oppression has been gathering force through the past decade. Thus the film’s appearance assumes a degree of receptivity in the audience; but when it comes to the Australian audience, a question floats around, as it were in the air in the cinema; how many understand what’s happening here? How many see and feel how startling it is that a film thus allows Israel’s agents to answer for their own record? The audience can only do so if they know Middle Eastern history, at least in outline, for the time since 1948. There have been many films; we can retrieve, among others, Paradise Now (2006), Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008); then this year’s The Other Son and The Attack, seen at the film festivals. All these filmmakers get beyond the obvious terms of conflict (and there’s one book I know that lengthens the view invaluably, Ilan Pappe’s History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples). The struggles in this arena are everybody’s business, not least when we too belong to settler societies; and more than ever in this particular moment here, when one unmerciful government is followed by another which seeks to apply always colder and harder forms of examination, exclusion and surveillance to the strangers within the gates.

YOU may have experienced the delights of the much-awarded The Rocket at the film festivals; they are worth revisiting now that this modest local film is on the circuits, not least its evidence of anthropology transformed as cinema. Entirely suitable for children from nine or ten upwards, it carries political freight, legibly but lightly; when governments and rulers, of whatever political stripe, determine on major construction projects, and small sustainable villages are swept away, who really benefits? A boy of ten, Ahlo, contemplates a giant dam, from the base of its wall and then from the walkway above. He goes swimming, and finds drowned statuary, pieces of a lost culture. A second dam will be built; Ahlo, his family and their neighbours will be dragooned away, and chivvied from one campground to another in the mountains of northern Laos. The filming of the settings, the forests and pathways, the beautiful open timber structures which are not quite houses, has both conviction and poetry; these places are well and truly known, and we can therefore be taken a long way into them.

The producer and director team, Sylvia Wilczynski and Kim Mordaunt, were there earlier for their documentary Bomb Harvest (2006); some of that film’s political elements are registered here, when we see that these forests are still littered with lethal ordnance. The story of a lone boy’s high aspiration is a very old one, but here it is stronger because Ahlo’s ambition, and a good deal of his screen time, are shared with his sane and determined little girlfriend Kia; both are motherless, but they have attending angels in Ahlo’s father Toma and Uncle Purple, who is something like a magician. The two kids are wonderfully played by Sitthipon Disamoe and Loungnmal Kaisano – and for them, the film leaves a trail of questions: what next for them? will other films be made in Laos? They should be; these filmmakers have opened a trail into a landlocked, poverty-stricken country which could well be better known. If The Rocket is something of a fairy-tale, there’s documentary bedrock underneath it. •

The post Losing the war appeared first on Inside Story.

IRRESPECTIVE of the popular and military moves against political Islam in Egypt last week, the likelihood of an Islamic state emerging in the Arab world has always been extremely low.

Over the 1352 years since the death of Imam Ali (Prophet Mohammed’s cousin and the fourth “Rightly Guided Caliph”), not a single Islamic state has emerged in the Arab world. None has had a legislative structure based exclusively on Koranic jurisprudence; none has been ruled by a leader selected on a theological basis; and all have been conspicuously based on national, tribal or familial foundations, with Islam only an overarching frame of reference.

There is no space here to analyse every Arab (not to mention Persian or Turkish) state over the past thirteen centuries. But it is useful to dissect the ruling structure of the largest and most important of them.

The Umayyads, the first dynasty to rule the Islamic world after the death of Ali, anchored their rule in a familial hereditary system that was established after fighting (and massacring) Prophet Mohammed’s own offspring. They subjugated North Africa, Andalucía and Iran, and also entered the Islamic republics in southern Russia. The Umayyads’ legitimacy – which was never fully established – rested on the buy-in of the religious establishment, initially in Al-Hejaz (Islam’s birthplace) and later in various Islamic learning centres in the Levant.

The Umayyads never claimed that their family-heads (the Islamic caliphs) were the religious leaders of the Islamic nation; that position was left to the venerable scholars of Mecca and Medina (and later in Damascus). The Umayyad rulers were emperors of the expanding state that bore their name, and it was no coincidence that their courts were modelled on those of the eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople. On the many occasions when the Umayyads’ rule was challenged by those who had a solid claim to be the real guardians of the principles and teachings of Prophet Mohammed, their response came in the form of military campaigns. In one instance the Umayyads’ armies burnt down the Kabba, Islam’s holiest shrine in Mecca.

Over the past thirteen centuries, numerous dynasties in the greater Middle East have copied the Umayyads’ ruling scheme. First, grab power militarily. Then uphold the notion that the state is “Islamic.” Next, ensure the recognition and obedience – though not necessarily the approval – of the most venerable (and famous) of the Islamic scholars of the age. Afterwards, rule as you please without any serious regard to Islamic jurisprudence, principles or identity.

An Islamic pretext was sometimes used to establish legitimacy, or to gain momentum before militarily challenging the ruling dynasty of the day. The Abbasids, descendants of an uncle of the Prophet Mohammed, used the notion of a “just Imam from the house of Mohammed” as the slogan for a vast clandestine operation that built an army of followers (the majority of them were Persians). They developed a sophisticated funding and money-distribution system spanning what is today Iran, Iraq, and the eastern Mediterranean, before openly challenging – and obliterating – the Umayyads. Around 250 years later, in the tenth century, the Fatimids used their claim of descent from Prophet Mohammed’s daughter, Fatima (Imam Ali’s wife), to entrench their rule in what is today Tunisia, and later to launch a military challenge to the Abbasid rule in Egypt, conquer the country, and establish their new capital, Cairo (the city victorious). The Ottomans followed a similar path in the sixteenth century, only cementing their claim as the political leaders of the Muslim world after expanding their rule to the Levant and Egypt (the home of Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s most venerable seat of learning), and after taking control of Al-Hejaz and assuming guardianship of Islam’s holy shrines.

In all of these examples, and others, the ruling format remained the same. And never did these different rulers, even those directly descended from the Prophet, claim that they were the theological authorities of the Muslim world. That remained the job of the scholars in the centres of Islamic learning, towns that were increasingly detached and geographically distant from the political capitals.

THE format has continued in modern times. The state that Mohammed Ali Pasha established in Egypt in the first half of the nineteenth century became the model for almost all the states that emerged in the Arab world in the second half of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century. Ruling Egypt until the 1952 coup d’état that ended the country’s monarchy, the successors of Mohammed Ali maintained the “Islamic nature” of their state and ensured cordial relations with – and control over – Egypt’s powerful religious establishment, Al-Azhar. But all the legislative, judicial, economic, social, educational and political systems that they built were imported from Europe. Even in Arab states whose ruling families anchored their legitimacy in a religious pedigree – the Hashemites in Jordan and the Alawites in Morocco, for instance – the same pattern endured.

The social and political modernisations that accompanied the Arab liberal age from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth century posed a significant threat to religious institutions. Secular education, Western social norms (the mixing of men and women in public spaces, for instance), and the new cultural orientation of Arab societies (towards Paris, London and Vienna) in the early twentieth century not only diluted the religious establishments’ traditional sway over their societies; more importantly, they were perceived – and not just by the religious establishments but also by different social segments – as a challenge to the overarching Islamic identity of these societies. Some luminaries sought a meeting of minds between “modernity and the heritage and teachings of the religion of rationality,” in the words of Egypt’s grand scholar at the dawn of the twentieth century, Mohammed Abdou. Others saw an impending confrontation: a need to defend Islam from the “West and its subjects,” the subjects being the Arab and Muslim liberals who spearheaded advancements in Arabic education, translation, literature, theatre, music and, later, cinema.

Two narratives gradually emerged. The first, fuelled by the cultural developments of the Arabic liberal age, invoked the Arabic or Mediterranean identity of the societies in this part of the world. Some of the thinkers of this movement completely ignored the influence that Islam has traditionally commanded in these societies, and their highly secular Arab philosophical currents had their days in the sun (mainly in the 1930s and 1940s) but quickly vanished from the limelight. The views that lasted were those of leading thinkers who tried to merge the traditions of the Islamic heritage with modern thinking. Although they emphasised that Islam (loosely defined as a “civilisation”) is the overarching frame of reference for Arab societies, they worked to build the emerging Arabic states on modern political, economic and even cultural institutions. The results were the 1923 Egyptian constitution (the model for many constitutions in different Arab countries), the acceptance of the notion of a constitutional monarchy (initially in Egypt and later to a lesser extent in Syria, Iraq and, briefly, Libya), and the beginnings of credible checks and balances between different authorities (the monarchy, the parliament, the judiciary, in addition to formidable political-economy power centres).

The support of the religious establishment, a key pillar of the old ruling formula, was increasingly waning, and Arab nationalism further strengthened this trend. The tsunami that Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser unleashed in the Arab world from the mid 1950s to the late 1960s, which continued for roughly a decade after his death in 1970, was strictly secular, though the notion of independent state institutions was sacrificed to hero-worship. Arab nationalism, at least in its first two decades, imbued Arab politics with something new: the consent of the middle and lower middle classes to a conspicuously secular governing ideology – one not imposed by Europeanised elites but supported by the masses.

The potency, momentum and immense success of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s antagonised not only religious establishments across the Arab world but also the movements born in the early twentieth century to “defend the religion” – most notably Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. But in the 130 years between the emergence of the Arab state in the 1880s and the “Arab Spring,” the forces of the Islamic movement never managed to stall the advance of secularisation.

OVER the past two years, the rise of political Islam across the whole of North Africa and its commanding presence in the Eastern Mediterranean (Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the various Islamist groups in the Syrian opposition forces) have fuelled the belief that some Arab countries face the prospect of a gradual Islamisation. This movement takes many forms, but two are paramount. The first is the attempt of various Islamist groups to Islamise state institutions: stressing the Islamic nature of their societies in the new constitutions of their countries, linking the penal code of their countries to the laws of the Islamic jurisprudence, putting religion-related restrictions on freedom of expression, and significantly enhancing the influence of Islamist political economy power centres. The second form, championed by some assertive Salafist groups, aims to Islamise “societies,” which such groups see as having strayed from the “correct Islamic path.”

These forms of Islamisation – and of course the rapid rise of Islamist groups to power – have overwhelmed many Arab liberals, most of whom are isolated and leaderless and have tenuous links to the masses of the lower middle classes and the poor. The result has been nervousness, antagonism, detachment, increasingly violent social confrontations and, sometimes, emigration. In fact, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean are witnessing alarming levels of departure among the well-educated who are able to find jobs ly.

But this Islamisation will not succeed. First, despite the piousness of the vast majority of Muslim Arabs – the commanding majorities of the region – Islamisation inherently challenges the national identities of each country. Despite clever rhetoric, it means the domination of one component of Egyptianism, Tunisianity or Syrianism over other components that have shaped these entrenched identities. This is especially true in the old countries of the Arab world, the ones whose borders, social compositions and, crucially, identities had been carved over long, rich centuries. And the more the Islamist movements continue to thrust their worldviews and social values, the more they will disturb these national identities and the more agitated – and antagonised – the middle classes will become.

Second, these efforts at Islamisation take place when almost all of these societies are undergoing difficult – and, for many social classes, painful – economic transitions. And there is no way out. The ruling Islamist executives are compelled to confront the severe structural challenges inherent in the economies they inherited. Some can buy time and postpone crucial reforms with foreign assistance (which comes at a political price). But sooner or later they will have to make the tough socioeconomic decisions that these structural reforms require, and they will be blamed for the pain that ensues. Some of the constituencies that had voted them into power will rapidly seek other alternatives.

Third, demographics will work against Islamisation. Close to 200 million of the Arab world’s 340 million people are under thirty. As a result of the many failures it has inherited, this generation faces myriad socioeconomic challenges. A culture of protest and rejection has already been established in its ranks, and young people will not accept indoctrination – even if it is presented in the name of religion. Almost by default, the swelling numbers of young Arabs, especially in the culturally vibrant centres of the Arab world (Cairo, Tunis, Beirut, Damascus, Casablanca, Kuwait and Manama), will create plurality – in social views, in political positions, in economic approaches and in social identities and frames of reference.

Finally, this Islamisation project will suffer at the hands of its strategists and managers. The leaderships of the largest Islamist groups in the Arab world have immense experiences in developing and managing services and charity infrastructures, in operating underground political networks, and in fundraising and electoral campaigning, especially in rural and interior regions. But they suffer an acute lack of experience in tackling serious political-economy challenges or administering grand sociopolitical narratives. This lack of experience will translate into incompetence.

These factors will take time to unfold. The second decade of the twenty-first century will be transformative not only for Arab politics, but more importantly for Arab societies. Amid the gradual fall of the old order and the highly likely failure of Islamisation, young Arabs will be searching for their own narratives. In some countries the process will be smooth, in others it will be bloody, and in most it will be protracted with spikes of tension. The result will be a plethora of different, competing social narratives. In many cases, we will see interesting mixes of various ideologies (Arabism, Mediterraneanism, Islamism and others). But just as Arab states have never been exclusively Islamic for over thirteen centuries, Arab states will not be Islamic in the foreseeable future. •

The post The Islamic state in context appeared first on Inside Story.

THESE days, any Israeli story can also be an Australian one. The case of Ben Zygier, the Australian Jew who migrated to Israel, took out Israeli citizenship and ended up working for Mossad, the Jewish state’s notorious overseas intelligence unit, puts this in high relief. Despite the fact that fighting in Syria is illegal for Muslim Australian citizens, Jewish Australians can volunteer with impunity for service in the Israel Defence Forces.

Yet there’s a deep reluctance to address such anomalies, for reasons that aren’t too hard to find. In the decades after the second world war, Australia had the highest per capita concentration of Holocaust survivors outside Israel. The Holocaust legitimised Zionism as had no other event in Jewish history, giving tragic credence to Herzl’s warning fifty years earlier about the lethal results of European anti-Semitism. In that light, to criticise Israeli policies or even to question the wisdom of opting for a Jewish-dominated state in the Middle East is tantamount to heresy in the mainstream Australian Jewish community. While claiming that all Jews ever wanted was to have a nation like any other, with its own respected legitimacy and undisputed territory, Israel and its supporters maintain that the Jewish state is special, that it is not bound by the laws that hold for other countries, and they defend this position with a combination of denial, indifference and that specifically Jewish sophistic argumentation that has its origins in the Talmudic tradition of pilpul.

Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the ongoing refusal to acknowledge that the rights of the Palestinian people – the majority in British Mandate Palestine – have been ruthlessly and cunningly abrogated. After the opening of archives on the 1948 war of independence, or what Palestinians remember as the Nakba, Israeli “New Historians” such as Ilan Pappé, Tom Segev and Benny Morris drew on the record to revise the official history. Yet almost as soon as the archives were opened they were closed again. Pappé, effectively in exile now at a British university, has been ostracised for his work on the expulsion of Palestinians, including those who were forced from their homes but were able to stay within the 1948 borders. Segev has moved further towards a binational narrative. Of the three, only Benny Morris has recanted, accepting that Jewish forces did commit atrocities but claiming they were justified.

It is perhaps in Israeli fiction that the existential complexities of the legacy of 1948 have been most sensitively dealt with. A caveat here: I can no more keep on top of the fiction than absorb the wealth of historical material. But there aren’t many recent novels I’ve come across (though I confess to a reliance on books written in English or translated) that haven’t exhibited concern for the Palestinians.

A case in point is Edeet Ravel’s 2003 Ten Thousand Lovers, the first in a trilogy that was completed in 2005. Born and raised on a kibbutz in the Galilee, Ravel divides her time between Israel and Canada, and writes in English from a Canadian perspective.

Lily, the narrator of Ten Thousand Lovers, is also half-Canadian, a student at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University who hitchhikes on weekends to Tel Aviv. She’s picked up by Ami, a well-paid ex-actor who is immediately upfront about his job as an interrogator of war prisoners. Lily makes clear her uneasiness:

We should try a little harder to make peace. We should withdraw unilaterally from the territories for a start. It’s the least we can do. A Palestinian state would solve everything. It’s only fair.

As they get closer Ami reveals to Lily that it isn’t the army he belongs to but Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence agency, though the work has become increasingly difficult for him. “This is what we’ve decided,” he says, trying to justify it. “We’ve decided torture is OK. Detention is OK, war justifies everything. We’re doing this to survive, to avoid repeating our history.” Yet when he makes a crucial decision to reject that life, it’s a Palestinian friend who will play an important role in the novel’s resolution.

The most celebrated recent Israeli novel – and possibly the most celebrated of all time – is David Grossman’s Woman Flees Tidings, published in 2008 and published in English as To the End of the Land. Near the novel’s beginning, after a prologue set in the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel won what we call the occupied territories, the heroine, Ora, takes a taxi ride. It is now July 2000, the time of the Second Intifada, and the Israel Defence Forces are mobilising. Ora is accompanying her soldier son to the Gilboa region, where the forces are meeting. Their Palestinian taxi driver Sami, who has driven for the family for decades and is almost, in the way of these things, considered part of it, came without question when Ora called, but is quieter than usual. Fixated on what she feels is the certain loss of her son, Ora overlooks how Sami might feel about this journey. Israel is a tiny country for such overwhelming considerations, and a taxi ride from Tel Aviv to Gilboa is no great distance. But the road, a convoy now, is crowded, and no one, not even Ora, can fathom where it might actually lead.

Both these novels have Israeli Palestinian characters who are central to their themes yet remain somehow peripheral. Perhaps there’s a limit to how much Israeli Jews, even the most sympathetic, can afford to arrogate to themselves the sensibility of the “other.” It’s not that they may not comprehend it, though that is too often the case, but writers can be reluctant, even when empathy does exist, to usurp that sensibility for their own aesthetic purposes. Whatever the limitations, though, these fictions were an advance on much of what preceded them.

WE MIGHT expect that the latest fiction would move forward from that position. If we’re to read Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever Are Not Afraid for signs of this, though, we can only be disappointed. There are hardly any sympathetically portrayed Palestinians in this book. In fact, there are few sympathetically portrayed characters full stop, although their stories, perhaps for that very reason, do elicit compassion. They are narrated by each of the three protagonists: Lea, Yael and Avishag, born in 1983 – adolescents when we meet them, women in their twenties at the novel’s close. The subject of their stories is the rite of passage they share with all Israeli Jews, male and female, aside from the orthodox, after they graduate from secondary school. That is to say, their stints in the army.

It’s noteworthy too that the women come from Mizrahi or Sephardic backgrounds, the children of Jewish immigrants hailing from Middle Eastern countries, one step above Israeli Palestinians in the peculiar Israeli pecking order that has had the European Ashkenazim as its aristocracy. Only Lea, with a German-Jewish parent and “European looks,” has access to this privilege, pitifully played out on the high school playground where other girls clamber round her for acceptance. But Lea’s claims are compromised by her other, Moroccan parent, and consignment to this dusty ghetto-like village, dangerously close to the Lebanese border and peopled for the most part by Mizrahim and struggling single mothers. “A whole town of crazy bitches,” a teenage boy casually, cruelly, remarks. Avishag’s family has been shattered by the suicide of her older brother Dan. Yael, whose first-person voice opens the novel, has been in love with Dan, yet so much of the tragedy is buried under that special brand of toughness Israelis have cultivated since the earliest pioneer days and which, by the 2000s, has spread to every corner of society.

Everything is blanketed by the ubiquitous presence of war. Both Lea’s and Yael’s mothers work for companies making machine parts that one way or another end up in planes. Soon enough the girls are in boot camp, suffering the standard, sanctioned humiliations. Then they are given postings in the army proper.

For Yael it’s on Route 433, close to a Palestinian village, where she is a weapons instructor. Discovering that boys from the village have managed to steal her helmet, a colleague observes, “These boys are like rats… they’d steal the entire base if they could.” Next, the boys take the “closed military area” signs off the base fence, and then the bullets from target practice. Then they are shot at.

Apart from the ramped-up tensions with Israeli Palestinians, Israeli society has been increasingly separated from West Bank Palestinians ever since the building of the wall. Lea is sent to the military police, guarding the Hebron checkpoint, in a year when Israel “closed the sky” for other foreign workers and needed Palestinians for construction work again. “We needed them, but we were also a little afraid they’d kill us, or even worse, stay forever. These were both things the Palestinians were sometimes into doing. That’s why I existed.”

In both these instances, the girls’ interaction with Palestinians takes place through a military barricade; for neither of them is it possible, as it is in previous Israeli novels, to begin to know Palestinians as people. Palestinians, separated by the roads and the wall, are now entirely “other.” In Avishag’s case, down at the Egyptian border, Sudanese refugees appear as mere pixels on her green computer screen.

Shani Boianjiu was born in Jerusalem in 1987 and is the youngest-ever recipient of the American National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award. That means she’s younger than her characters, though Yael, for one, appears to be at least partly autobiographical. As well as this first novel, released in the United States last September, she has published stories in the New Yorker and other US literary journals, making her something of a wunderkind, especially when the fact that she is writing in English rather than her native Hebrew is taken into account.

The reviews of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid have been mixed, the book frequently panned for the very reasons I like it. Its terse, colloquial prose, the irony, its shifting tenses and points of view all lend the novel a rhythm that overcomes the anomie to which her characters seem condemned. That many parts of the narrative betray their origins as stories might bother some but poses no problem for me. Yet I admit that my interest in this novel has as much to do with how it demonstrates what has happened to Israel over the years, especially since 1977 when Likud first came to power, as it does with my passion for literature.

SO WHAT has been happening? Diana Pinto’s Israel Has Moved charts these developments from the perspective of a sympathetic outsider. She describes herself as an intellectual historian and policy analyst, and comes across as a kind of Jewish-intellectual Eurocrat. Based in Paris, she’s been associated with London’s Institute for Jewish Policy Research and has spent many years studying the place of Jews in post–cold war Europe. Most pertinently for us, she relates how she told an Israeli friend that “I had never personally considered Zionism to be a valid life choice for me, that I criticised Israeli politics, but at the same time I could not conceive of a world without Israel.”

Pinto argues forcefully that Israel is thumbing its nose at its European benefactors and at this juncture is even prepared to ignore the United States. The reasons are manifold, but largely derive from the creeping Jewish settlement of Palestinian land since 1967, the changing demographics within the Jewish population, and the current engagement with the non-European world through Israel’s new emphasis on consumerism and developing and marketing its cybertechnology. In other words, like the rest of us, Israel is looking towards Asia, and especially China.

But Pinto delineates a paradox. As Israel looks ever outward, away from its European origins and the boiling Middle East tensions, its gaze is inward in a way it has never been before. Again, both the cause and expression of this – Israel’s “autism,” as Pinto calls it – are complex. The old Ashkenazi attachment to the land, manifest symbolically and materially in the kibbutz and its agricultural base, has all but disappeared, while the strident if often cynical militarism born from the need to protect the land has grown exponentially in size and power.

When the children and grandchildren of the generals who fought in Israel’s many wars are conscripted for their mandatory two years’ service they are not to be found on the frontline posts where Boianjiu’s characters serve, but in the elite branches of military command and civilian intelligence where Ben Zygier sought to make a name for himself. But, as Pinto tells it, Israel isn’t all that interested anymore in Diaspora Jews making our aliyahs. Our role is to remain where we are in order to better defend her, though Israel is making it harder than ever to do so, and many, like me, have given up pretending.

Yet this fascinating group of essays gripped me throughout. Pinto is skilled at plucking out details of everyday Israeli life and highlighting their significance – noting, for instance, the efflorescence of intricately decorated skullcaps (kippot) on more and more male Jewish heads, even those of secular Jews, or walking the streets of the Muslim quarter of old Jerusalem and seeing “young ultraorthodox women with their strollers coming out of houses that seem to contain no visible sign of previous Jewish life.” She writes of the roads that separate Jews from Palestinians, among them Route 433, where Boianjiu’s Lea is stationed, the route that “incarnates perfectly the schizophrenia of Israel’s history.”

Pinto’s text is crowded with intriguing symbols – the menorah, the Hill of Evil Counsel, the bubble, the tent. And if in one sense they are telling, and in another their very abundance can unmoor their separate meanings, the argument is clear. The Oslo Accords are dead; the “two-state solution” is merely the rhetoric of Western politicians. Israel is going its own way, global in its economic orientation while ever more insular in its politics, with the Palestinians ever more invisible in this evolving outlook.

Israel Has Moved is depressing and oddly futuristic in its outlook. “Israel’s old agronomy,” Pinto writes,

the one of much-heralded orange and avocado miracles, sang the praises of an ever deeper rooting in the nation’s soil, whereas the military values of the young state were all based on the notion of defendable terrestrial borders. The new technology instead is all about mobility and flexibility, with little, if any, anchoring in any soil or with any clear national identity. Can this change hearken back to the Middle Ages when the Jews, before their emancipation, incarnated these same values in the financial and commercial realm?

With the proliferating start-ups having global transnationals like Google as their clients, Pinto asks, “Does this strategic choice echo in its own way the old Jewish tradition of dialoguing with kings rather than their people?”

If this, indeed, is the future, it threatens to be as scary as the past. But the fact remains that the old agrarian Zionist solution has borne its own crop of bitter fruit. •

The post Israel’s shifting moorings appeared first on Inside Story.

THE French film Le fils de l'Autre, currently in circulation as The Other Son, has been dismissed in various critical quarters for reasons which are of some interest in themselves. Because of its reservedly hopeful view of Israel–Palestine relations, it’s been put down as a superficial, feel-good exercise; Slant magazine’s respected critic Chris Cabin wrote that while there might be hope for peace with younger generations, “another sentimental film made by a blatant outsider doesn’t make this hope any clearer or convincing.” He misreads; he also fails to listen to the film, in which dialogue is conducted in four languages, Arabic, Hebrew, English and French. Lorraine Lévy’s winning lightness of directorial touch isn’t sentimentality; the intractable problems are not shortchanged. If there’s a smear of soap at the end, a certain comedy rescues it. More importantly, she is not an outsider. It could be argued that when it comes to the Israel–Palestine conflict, nobody is; the tension is registered in one way or another in every Western community. In this film, however, France is recurrently present offscreen; with Israel and Palestine, it works as an operative third term. One of the two young men at the centre of the story has been studying in Paris; returning, he brings in the consciousness that there are wider worlds from which to think about his life as a Palestinian – or an Israeli – and he has to work out which of those he is.

The film is built from the ancient plot device of switched identities – go back to The Comedy of Errors and its sources in antiquity. Two male infants, born in Haifa on the same day in 1991, are evacuated during a Scud bombardment, then handed back to their supposed parents; the Jewish couple’s son is raised in a Palestinian family, the Palestinian child by Israelis. When they reach eighteen, and the supposedly Jewish son must prepare for military service, a blood test triggers investigation; the truth comes out, and all concerned must deal with it. Here we’re called on to suspend disbelief, as the fable solidifies into realism in real settings. In the tense, austere sequence in which a doctor brings the two couples together and offers the hospital’s inadequate, long-overdue apology, the film takes off from its moorings. The doctor sets out to explain in Hebrew, but the Palestinian couple won’t understand; he continues in English, which is the language generally used by both of the young men (“you’ve got my life – don’t mess it up”).

Thus two decent, ordinary families, cast by history as opponents in a seemingly deadlocked struggle, must engage with each other through their children. Nothing could be harder, since they are quite literally on opposite sides of the fence, the massive concrete wall that cuts through communities, separates workers from workplaces, friends from friends and kin. It is seen recurrently in the film, not to force political points but as a grimly inescapable part of the environment. The stages of the story are marked by passages through the checkpoints, where the guards treat Israelis and Palestinians rather differently. Israeli teenagers disport happily on a beach, where we can see the Tel Aviv Sheraton in the background; there, Joseph (Jules Sitruk), the young Palestinian who has grown up as a Jew, moves away from his contemporaries to struggle with the news. The depth of the problem, and the force of Jewish identity, emerge in his interview with the rabbi (Ezra Dagan). The Palestinians’ supposed son Yacine (Mehdi Dehbi) returns from study in Paris to discover that he is in fact Jewish.

The French–Israeli mother, Orith (Emmanuelle Devos), is seen running her medical practice, and, when she wants time to think, walking out on a pier to watch the waves: images of freedom and authority unavailable to her Palestinian counterpart, Leila (Areen Omari). They make friends, however, with an ease that’s impossible for their husbands, and despite the manifest inequality of households and living conditions; we’re given a strong sense of the ramshackle lanes and cramped quarters in the homes of the West Bank. The Palestinian father, Said Al Bezaaz (Khalifa Ntour), is an engineer who can’t get professional work inside the fence, and consequently works as a car mechanic. Sharing an uneasy social visit with Orith and Alon (Pascal Elbé), an Israeli military officer, Said breaks into rage; the word occupation is used. Later, the men move into a stop-start process toward co-existence – there’s little prospect of friendship. They’re seen sitting, in wordless discomfort, over coffee. That emotional gulf; the men’s struggle to deal with it; the anger of Leila and Said’s older son Bilal, who feels not only the loss of the brother he thought he had, but also a deep sense of betrayal – all these build an account in which none of the problems are softened or abbreviated.

The mistranslation in the title becomes pertinent: Le fils de l’Autre (with a purposeful capital A) means not “the other son” but “the son of the Other,” and that’s rather different. It sets the viewer in a strange double position, a kind of suspended ambiguity; she must try to look on that otherness from both sides, and also from within its force-field of questions. She is sitting in an audience in this Western country where pro-Palestinian expression, even when it comes from respected academics, can incite charges of anti-Semitism and quite vicious abuse; where Australians of Middle Eastern origin are subjected to taunting and violence; and where the first Australians themselves are – still – marginalised, impoverished and derided. The film invites a liberal, humane response, and some proper discomfort as well. We note, repeatedly, that there’s no way you could sit on that fence; it’s topped with coiled razor wire from end to end.

MIRA NAIR’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist was written, in part, by Mohsin Hamid, whose novel was the film’s groundwork. In a cafe in Lahore, handsome young Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed), caught up in a high-profile kidnapping, sets out to tell his story to an American journalist, Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schreiber). The privileged son of an esteemed Pakistani poet, Changez found his way through Princeton to a financial world mentor (Kiefer Sutherland) and thus to a promising Wall Street career. Sutherland does a great job projecting the certainties, and the half-masked unease, of the masters of the universe (from his part of the story, go back and take another look at the documentary Inside Job; it’s around on DVD, and very much worth having). Then the twin towers fell, and as a Muslim abroad, Changez found himself harassed, arrested on no pretext but his appearance, strip-searched and humiliated; and his American girlfriend (Kate Hudson) disastrously underestimated the effects of anti-Islamic stereotyping. Here, a certain sexism threatens; she is guilty of American cultural blindness, while it’s the young man who takes the ethical journey. As he must; in the present of the film, Changez is back home, entangled in events, teaching and questing, a kind of prodigal son.

The central dynamic is in his complex interplay with Bobby in the cafe, where each has reason to doubt the other’s credentials; perhaps Changez really is, or could become, a terrorist; perhaps – a lot more likely – Bobby is really working for the CIA. The Lahore marketplace mills around them, vibrant, overcrowded, vivid; in stark contrast, the New York offices are glassy and cold. All a bit simplistic, too much of us-and-them, and it’s not surprising that American critics have attacked the film for heavy-handedness. With Islamic religious fundamentalism in play, Nair poses the notion that there’s another kind of fundamentalism, that of capitalist money markets; Changez has refused that one too. The suggestion of a conceptual symmetry doesn’t really work; the worlds are too far apart. But the film is still a noisy, commanding entertainment. Mira Nair films from the Indian diaspora, looking across and back from west to east; it’s a very powerful storytelling position.

IN THE Portuguese Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, story and allegory entangle in beautiful black and white. In the first section, “Paradise Lost,” aged gambling addict Aurora (Laura Soveral) is found in terminal illness and distress; her long-ago lover appears to return; her vanished daughter will not. Here, in present-day Lisbon, there are strong presences around her, a black African servant called Santa (Isabel Cardoso) and a concerned neighbour, Pilar; the latter, for whom Aurora’s plight supplies her need for a role, is made a particularly interesting character by Teresa Madruga.

“Paradise Lost” was shot in 35 mm; the second section, “Paradise” comes from further off, in 16 mm, and therefore has a different kind of beauty. There’s a crocodile watching in a river, and an African estate below a mountain named Tabu. The old lover, Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo) recalls the story of his adulterous love affair with the young Aurora (Ana Moreira); his own younger self (Carloto Cotta) evokes all the stories he belongs to, wearing pith helmet, old-time explorer’s gear and an Errol Flynn moustache. Music and natural sounds are heard, while dialogue is silent. Memory and history take over; we don’t get back to Lisbon. It’s as though the end of colonialism meant the end of Portugal too, and Portugal is condemned to remember.

Tabu has divided the critics, not all of whom are cinephiles. Some saw it as so much overwrought home movie; they fail to imagine how the lengthening past of cinema can be called back to serve new perspectives in the present. In a rather struggling interview (seen on ABC1’s At the Movies on 21 May) Gomes seemed to me to be explaining his aspiration for a cinema that reaches through the visible to the invisible, one that has to do with memory, both its vitality and its possible deceits. If that was the goal, he has reached it; this is cinematic poetry and fable, release from realism into reimagined reality. •

The post Sons and others appeared first on Inside Story.

“A king is history’s slave.” It is tempting to view Tolstoy’s reflection as an apt comment on British military policy in the early twenty-first century. So much in Britain’s invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, and so much of the draining campaigns against local insurgencies that followed, seems predestined by the experience of forgotten ancestors. From the Afghan wars of 1839–42 and 1878–80 (with a reprise in 1919) to the seizure of Mesopotamia from the Ottomans in 1916–17 and its troubled suzerainty over subsequent decades, Britain’s later violent involvement in these two regions can be read as eternal recurrence.

A long imperial history with its sheer abundance of precedent lends itself to the idea that the deeds of the powerful are “not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history” (War and Peace again). Where Afghanistan and Iraq are concerned, such determinism has potent right-realist and left-populist variants (respectively, our leaders never learn from history or their conquering instinct is perennial) which often overlap, and converge on the need to break the cycle of martial adventurism. At the same time, the modern architects of these wars – step forward, Tony Blair – are seen as free agents whose responsibility for the resulting disasters is limitless. Trapped by the past and blind to the present, yet refusing to choose a better future, Britain’s political elite lives down to the worst of a shameful imperial record: deceit and illegality on the road to war; murder and torture in its waging; humiliation and abandonment in the retreat.

This, at least, is the dominant media and public view a decade after the launch of the “shock and awe” attacks on Iraq on 20–21 March 2003 and the tumbling of Saddam Hussein’s statue on 9 April. YouGov finds 53 per cent agreeing that “the US and Britain were wrong to take action against Iraq,” 27 per cent thinking it right. Half of the respondents agree that Blair “deliberately set out to mislead the British public in the run-up to the war over Iraq’s possession of ‘weapons of mass destruction’,” and 31 per cent disagree. Moreover, asked if Blair “knowingly misled parliament and the public about the scale of the [WMD] threat and should be tried as a war criminal,” 23 per cent agree. A thousand columnists, a hundred comedians, and a score of poets have echoed Shelley’s “The Mask of Anarchy”: I met Murder in its lair / He had a mask like Tony Blair.

There is also, though, a notable contrast in much of the local coverage around the anniversary. The most enlightening focuses on conditions in Iraq itself and highlights the lives and views of people there. Roula Khalaf’s fine survey in the Financial Times, the formidable Patrick Cockburn’s reports in the Independent, and David Blair’s conversations with Baghdadis in the Telegraph all come into this category. (According to the latter, the Iraqis he meets “tend to qualify whatever opinion they hold” about the war, and voice “no easy judgements or strident opinions.”) In addition, there have been several conferences around London hosting in-depth assessments from academics and other specialists, again including Iraqis from the country and the diaspora.

Overwhelmingly, by contrast, the domestic political media has fixed its gaze on the moment of invasion (with the question “was it worth it?” framing almost every discussion). High-profile polemicists such as Mehdi Hasan, Max Hastings, Owen Jones, and Seumas Milne tick off familiar arguments: about the invasion’s illegality and its catastrophic impacts on Iraq and the region, the corruption of British governance by an elite culture of secret deals, and the cynical use of phantom WMDs as a pretext for war – all of which vindicates its opponents and discredits its advocates. Again, the evidence of the polls suggests that a good part of this case has in effect won the public debate (though the fine detail is often more nuanced than the headline numbers). On the other side, prominent supporters of the invasion such as David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, John Lloyd and John Rentoul have restated their case, citing Saddam Hussein’s exceptionally brutal record, legitimate uncertainties over WMDs, the demands of solidarity, the tense but defensible calculations of Blair’s diplomatic and legal strategy, subsequent progress in Iraq and recent events in Syria. (On my own account, I believed that force alone could remove Saddam, that this was justified and, most importantly, that it was the only way that Iraqis could reclaim their ability to shape their own history.)

But if Iraq’s brief, concentrated return to Britain’s public arena creates the impression that the argument over the invasion is stuck while discussion of Iraq’s new realities is moving ahead, taken too far this would be facile, for there is a deep connection between the two. A decade of war – invasion, occupation, insurgency, sectarian conflict and local campaigns – has affected every Iraqi, transformed the country’s political and social landscape, and released forces that will endure for years to come. A decision that eventuated in the killing of at least 111,000 civilians (as recorded by the meticulous Iraq Body Count project, though the total is almost certainly thousands more), and led to a displacement and refugee crisis that uprooted four million Iraqis, will long influence the lives of survivors.

Charles Tripp, the doyen of historians of Iraq – and one of a number invited in November 2002 to meet Blair, ostensibly to impart their expertise – makes the important point that violence of this scale and nature carries its own effects deep into society. The violence intrinsic to the invasion “precipitated much that followed”: for “the use of violence, whatever its motive, has its own baneful logic. The deeper and more prolonged its use, the more distinctive and disturbing the consequences will be.”

It is far too early, then, to close the invasion file and everything that surrounds it. Nor will that be possible, as the official inquiry into the United Kingdom’s involvement in Iraq, appointed by Gordon Brown in June 2009 and chaired by John Chilcot, has yet to report. When it does (perhaps in 2014), the establishment verdict will be in on the most traumatic episode in British foreign policy since the Suez crisis in November 1956. At over one million words so far, it will be exhaustive if not definitive. The Chilcot inquiry succeeds two others: the Hutton inquiry of 2003–04 on the media–political furore that followed the death of the weapons inspector David Kelly, which toppled the BBC director-general and provoked a carnival of conspiracism, and the Butler review in 2004 of the use of WMD-related intelligence (chaired by Robin Butler, cabinet secretary 1988–98), which criticised the government’s embrace of unreliable sources to make the case for war.

In minute detail and mandarin prose, these documents seek to reconcile the judgements of the powerful across various agencies. As part of the methodology of elite British governance, it is impressive to behold. But it is also a performance in which all involved are conscious of their core function, namely to record, criticise, recommend, move on – while leaving everything fundamentally as it is. What they leave untouched is the deeper context of policy: the accumulated inheritance of experiences and impulses that help to frame and influence state behaviour. Yet where this inheritance is germane to decisions such as the one to join in the United States–led invasion of Iraq, it deserves to be included as part of the total picture.

IRAQ came late to modern statehood, with Britain present at its creation. The process, as messy and contingent as any colonial episode, was part of the remaking of the Middle East after the great war, when the retreat of the Ottoman empire from its eastern flank left a political vacuum that the rulers of France and Britain saw a need to fill.

The opportunity to “take” Mesopotamia – the ancient land of two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates – was forged in war, and initially had less to do with oil than Britain’s desire to so weaken the region’s Ottoman overlords that their subjects would be inspired to revolt. Such is the case made in the historian Charles Townshend’s tremendous book, When God Made Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia and the Creation of Iraq, 1914–21. The book’s centrepiece is the disastrous late-1915 campaign by an Anglo-Indian force led by Major-General Charles Townshend (apparently no relation) that moved north from Basra, stalled at Ctesiphon, and retreated to Kut-al-Amara, where a four-month siege ended in surrender and the death in captivity of over half the 17,000 exhausted survivors.

The baton was passed to Lieutenant-General Frederick Maude, whose rebuilt force – like Townshend’s, operating under the authority of the imperial government in India – retook Kut in February 1917 and entered Baghdad on 11 March. A week later the latest of Baghdad’s many conquerors issued a reassuring proclamation: “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.”

The two Ottoman provinces of Basra and Baghdad were now in British–Indian hands (with the political tensions between London and Delhi very real). As so often, a fluid strategic environment encouraged imperial minds to consider how the temporary spoils of war could be turned into something permanent. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company had begun production in 1912, its local oilfields and pipeline to the refinery at Abadan on the Shatt al-Arab – the very border between Persia and the Ottoman empire – thus acquiring geopolitical significance. But Mesopotamia’s own sources of oil “did not loom large in British strategic calculations when the war broke out,” says Townshend. “By the time it ended, this was changing. The potential oil resources of Mosul province were beginning to exert an influence on the developing idea of establishing an Arab state in the conquered territory.”

In Europe, collapsing empires gave way after 1918 to a swathe of independent nation-states. Across the post-Ottoman lands, the postwar settlement thwarted local aspirations to the same status. In the event, the surviving empires’ instrument of choice was the League of Nations’ territorial “mandate,” under which Mesopotamia, Transjordan and Palestine were allocated to Britain, and Syria and Lebanon to France. The latter enforced its rule in Syria only after suppressing a revolt and ejecting the Hashemite ruler, King Faisal – to which the British responded, following the tireless advocacy of the indefatigable Gertrude Bell, by installing him on the throne of the new “Kingdom of Iraq.”

An entity born of imperial war, with borders drawn in the interest of its overlords, lacking the natural allegiance of its many nationalities and faiths: Iraq was always going to be interesting. The incorporation of territory, such as Mosul, largely populated by Kurds emphasised both the artifice and the self-interest of Iraq’s construction. The sporadic Kurdish resistance was met by aerial bombardment from the early Royal Air Force, in a crude campaign governed by the larger aim of facilitating oil exploration in the north. (An invaluable source on this innovation in colonial policing is David Omissi’s Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919–1939, which notes that it had also been used against “rioters in Egypt, tribesmen on the Frontier, pastoralists in the Southern Sudan and nomads in the Somali hinterland.”) The process reached a critical stage in 1927 when oil in commercially viable quantities was found around the northern city of Kirkuk.

To the south, opposition to British domination had been evident from the start: in the landmark Ath Thawra al Iraqiyya al Kubra (“great Iraqi revolution”) in 1920, in the formation of several incipient anti-colonial organisations, and even in indifference towards King Faisal, whose noble descent the British presumed would accord him legitimacy among the faithful. (“I’ll never engage in creating kings again; it’s too great a strain,” wrote Gertrude Bell.) A bitter dispute over oil concessions in Mosul was a focus for these sentiments, and heralded the nominal equality Iraq acquired under the Anglo–Iraqi Treaty of 1930. (A superb account of this period and the shadow it cast is Toby Dodge’s Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied).

Britain retained oil rights, military bases and influence, in a settlement described by Hanna Batatu as having “virtually reduced Iraq into an appendage of the British Empire.” But the instruments of control were becoming less certain. An anti-government coup in 1936, quickly reversed, was a signal, but far more significant was the seizure of power by a nationalist (and pro-German) military cohort in April 1941. The strategic risk to Britain, already at a low point in the new global conflict, was acute; if the popular acclaim that greeted Rashid Ali al-Gaylani’s venture was alarming, even more so was the prospect of seeing Iraq move towards the Axis camp. The old order had to be restored, and was – by force, and via the “second British occupation.” But a new course had been set amid a complex social landscape where a range of forces – religious notables, merchants and landowners, workers and peasants, administrators and officers, many ethnic and confessional groups, and emerging movements such as communists and Ba’athists – was in movement.

It was hard for London to make sense of it all, let alone to see how effective dominion could be maintained. (A foreign office telegram of September 1943 confesses the “weakness of our long-term position in Iraq.”) The trend was again made visible by Al-Wathbah (“The Leap”), a popular revolt in January 1948 sparked by protests against a revision of the 1930 treaty that would guarantee dependency on Britain for another generation.

The Portsmouth Treaty was passed, but – this time – there would be no “third occupation.” A year after the Baghdad Pact of 1955 had linked Iraq and Britain (along with Turkey, Pakistan and Iran) in an anti-Soviet alliance in southwest Asia, the humiliation of Britain’s Suez imbroglio changed the regional terms of trade. Baghdad’s political ferment led to a republican coup in July 1958 that eliminated the monarchy and brought to power the “Free Officers,” led by Abdul al-Qassem. This kicked off a tumultuous decade that culminated in the decisive Ba’athist takeover of July 1968.

The sweep of the era is indicated in the full title of Hanna Batatu’s great work of historical sociology, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Ba’athists and Free Officers, published in 1978. Its 1300 pages of astounding scholarship open with the judgement that the events of 1919–20 began “the painful, now gradual, now spasmodic growth of an Iraqi national community” and end by stating that the main task of the regime in power in the late 1970s should be “one of elaborating the institutions and building the skills that could employ the huge oil revenues in a socially effective way.” Britain seems barely visible in the whole story, also an indicator of the way its colonial power was exercised. But the next three decades were to reposition this now fainter relationship in unimagined ways.

THE renowned Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, born in 1950, once replied to a question about her upbringing in Baghdad by saying, “Everything was modern, modern, modern!” Despite periodic instability and violence, the 1960s and 1970s were indeed good years for many. But the larger project of using the fruits of oil wealth to modernise Iraq was to take a new direction around the time Batatu’s book was being finalised. Its architect was the Ba’athist functionary Saddam Hussein, who had risen unobtrusively to Iraq’s vice-presidency before pushing aside the weakened Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr in July 1979. He inherited his party’s pan-Arab and nationalist ambitions, but turned them into an instrument of aggression against neighbouring states (in the war with post-revolution Iran of 1980–88 and the invasion of Kuwait in 1990) and domestic enemies (with large-scale purges of political rivals, including fellow Ba’athists, communists, Shi’a and Kurds).

The 1980s were a time of fear and national mobilisation, as a centralised security apparatus imposed a form of totalitarian control on a newly cowed society. The Ba’athist debt to Europe’s fascist models of the 1930s is familiar, but Saddam’s biographer and sometime confidante Said Aburish also cites direct evidence that Stalin was the leader’s inspiration. None of this prevented Western (and of course Soviet-bloc) states trading with and indulging him in the 1980s, not least because of hostility to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. But when Saddam’s forces occupied Kuwait in August 1990 – fulfilling a territorial claim Iraqis had harboured since Britain (who else?) had separated the Gulf emirate from former Ottoman land in 1921 – the result was diplomatic isolation and then military retreat amid a pulverising US-led assault.

Saddam’s regime was exposed, as Shi’a in the south and Kurds in the north stirred in expectation of change. But they needed help, and in a turning-point moment the United States and Britain allowed Baghdad to regroup. Saddam crushed the Shi’a, with an estimated 50,000 killed, and only the desperate recourse to a “no-fly” zone in the north protected the Kurds from a repeat of the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s, when up to 100,000 had died. In the aftermath, the regime was squeezed by a UN-approved sanctions package and a weapons-inspection process to curb the regime’s WMD capacity. The ensuing decade of “containment” allowed Saddam to consolidate power with sufficient boldness to seek to thwart sanctions, circumvent the “oil-for-food” program and stymie the inspectors’ work. By December 1998, a year after the inspectors had been expelled, American and British warplanes were being dispatched to conduct raids of doubtful value, which prompted the other three members of the Security Council to call for an easing of the sanctions on Iraq (including the crucial oil embargo).

The combination of 9/11 and the new political environment in the United States was decisive. Plans were laid inside the George W. Bush administration to “deal with” Saddam almost as soon as the anti-Taliban campaign in Afghanistan in late 2001 was concluded. A year of inflationary rhetoric, diplomatic manoeuvring, bureaucratic infighting, exile politicking, military preparation and intense worldwide protest culminated in the air assault and land invasion of March 2003. Britain was foremost among the forty-nine states that committed themselves to a role in military operations or (the vast majority) post-war security and governance. Its initial deployment, tasked with occupying Basra and the region, reached a maximum of 18,000 troops in May 2003. (The US figure at this point was 150,000.)

So this British invasion of Iraq sent the infantry and naval forces of 2003 to the very place from which their (predominantly Indian) antecedents had trudged north in the ill-fated venture of 1915. As ever, most performed with valour and a few were responsible for gross abuses and violations of discipline (some of which are still going through the courts). By the end of operations in April 2009, 179 had been killed, 136 in action. Troop numbers had fallen gradually over these six years, to 4100 at the point of withdrawal.

In military terms, the verdict on the overall strategy and performance is as bleak as in 1915. The case is made in Frank Ledwidge’s book Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, a pitiless analysis of inadequacies in understanding, leadership, planning and operations. The author, a former officer in naval military intelligence, charts the British forces’ inability to prevent Basra’s descent into chaos or to subdue the militias who took control of the city. He exposes their retreat to ineffectual confinement in a local base and the unfounded complacency of their claim to superior expertise in counterinsurgency vis-à-vis the Americans. His judgement is stark: “The British were at sea in both places, devoid of viable doctrine, without awareness of their environment, lacking adequate forces and minus any coherent strategy to pursue. All this was coupled with a hubris which attracted its inevitable riposte – nemesis.”

The Chilcot report will provide the official version of the military and political aspects of the Iraq campaign. But even if it confirms Ledwidge’s assessment, it won’t turn a searchlight onto the much longer context of British military involvement in the country, and nor will its equivalent do that for Afghanistan. This is in part because Britain’s inquests on matters of state tend to remain circumscribed, not just by their terms of reference but also by the informal formalities of the elite political culture. It’s also because much of the past – empire and all that – is still too uncomfortable to examine closely. All the more reason, many would say, to do just that.

BUT Afghanistan and Iraq are not just a retread of old wars. They also belong to the geopolitical era that arrived with – or perhaps was bookended by – the collapse of communism in 1989–91 and the collapse of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. The end of a “short twentieth century” dominated by world wars, superpower rivalry and grand ideological schisms vindicated the West’s economic system and political values, and seemed to herald a “unipolar” world in which American-led power would secure a “new world order.” In the 1990s, however, a series of regional conflicts and ethno-nationalist eruptions – from Somalia to Rwanda, from the Caucasus to the Balkans – put the schema to the test of reality and made it look naive. (The sparkling analyst Ivan Krastev even suggests that 1989–2001 might be regarded as “the short twenty-first century.”)

Britannia, as is her wont, claimed more vindication from the fall of the “evil empire” than anyone bar the United States itself. The evidence included Margaret Thatcher’s co-starring role with Ronald Reagan in the “second cold war” of the 1980s, and the profile she had established in the Soviet Union and its bloc. More broadly, London was both Washington’s most loyal ally and a nuclear-armed state that had never quite abandoned its pretensions to an independent world role (indeed, these elements worked at different times to reinforce each other). But these certainties, too, were put under pressure by the changed strategic circumstances of the early 1990s.

The wars in a disintegrating Yugoslavia in 1992–95 became the crucible of trans-Atlantic tension when the Conservative government of John Major made strenuous efforts in every diplomatic arena (NATO, the United Nations, the European Union) to resist any “humanitarian intervention,” far less measures that could halt the “Greater Serbia” genocide project. (The fiasco of British policy in these years is dissected in Brendan Simms’s brilliant work, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia. One of Simms’s themes is the astonished fury of American politicians and diplomats at the lengths to which their British counterparts would go to block any initiative that might constrain the perpetrators.)

The massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995 at last shamed – or at least forced – Britain’s government into giving consent to a more proactive NATO policy. But the Dayton diplomatic agreement that ended the war also left the Albanian-majority province of Kosovo in the line of fire. When the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic prosecuted his latest ethnic-cleansing campaign there, the inglorious NATO air campaign of March–June 1999 – of which the government of Tony Blair (prime minister since May 1997) was the most vigorous advocate – eventually precipitated his withdrawal.

It was in the very midst of the eleven-week war that Tony Blair, in a speech in Chicago, made Kosovo (“a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values”) the instance of an ambitious “new doctrine of international community.” His sweeping appeal was to “a new internationalism” bound by “new rules” and backed by “reformed international institutions with which to apply them.” He cited Saddam Hussein alongside Milosevic as “two dangerous and ruthless men [who] have been prepared to wage vicious campaigns against sections of their own community. As a result of these destructive policies both have brought calamity on their own peoples.”

The speech made almost no reference to military action, beyond saying that war “is an imperfect instrument for righting humanitarian distress; but armed force is sometimes the only means of dealing with dictators.” If this echoed the protection of the Kurds in 1991, the “Desert Fox” operation of 1998, and even the modest peacekeeping contingent sent to East Timor in 1999, it also anticipated the British operation in Sierra Leone the following year. This saw an 800-strong military force charged in May 2000 with ensuring safe evacuation of foreign citizens from a vicious civil war supporting, by default, a weak government and a fragile UN military mission against the threatening Revolutionary United Front militia. This force and its replacements altered the dynamic of the war, which ended in January 2002.

The Sierra Leone operation was shadowed by fears of “mission creep” and – like Kosovo – conducted against vocal domestic political and media opposition. Perhaps because it can be judged – again like Kosovo (albeit more qualified in that case) – a success, not least in the eyes of those in whose interests it was fought, it tends in Britain to be consigned to the memory hole. (A rare and neglected study is Andrew M. Dorman’s book Blair’s Successful War: British Military Intervention in Sierra Leone.) In any event, these four interventions in the three years of Blair’s premiership – which also saw the settlement, in April 1998, of the thirty-year war in Northern Ireland – represented a new burst of military activism justified by national interest now clothed in internationalist and humanitarian dress. Blair’s “Chicago doctrine,” as it was inevitably called, seemed more the beginning than the end of something, or more accurately part of a wave that had been gathering force since Bosnia and Rwanda.

In September 2000, for example, an International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty – founded by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, and working under the auspices of the Canadian government – began to examine how the international community should respond “to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity.” This culminated in a report, The Responsibility to Protect, which was published in December 2001.

The timing was fateful. Two months after the commission was created came the election of a new US president armed with a self-aggrandising vision of restoring the country’s greatness after the perceived drift of the 1990s. The George W. Bush–Dick Cheney administration was committed not to any sort of revived internationalism, but to securing “a new American century.” Where Iraq was concerned, this meant completing the unfinished business of 1991. Whatever else happened in coming years, here at least Bush and Blair were bound to converge, even if in other respects they were slaves of different histories.

The immediate post-9/11 global mood plausibly supported the belief that something like “R2P” – the responsibility to protect – would gain real traction. The gathering response over Afghanistan just about kept the hope alive, though the stridency of Bush’s State of the Union address in January 2002 – whose “axis of evil” included Iran, which had condemned the 9/11 attacks, as well as Saddam’s Iraq, which had celebrated them – drenched it. After all, it was indeed the beginning of something else, although Tony Blair was not about to concede it.

BEFORE it could be waged, the “war of choice” over Iraq had to overcome immense diplomatic and political obstacles. How and when Britain’s participation was assured continues to be bitterly controversial. But the thing about history is that it doesn’t stop, and ten years on the argument is being restaged in an environment part-shaped by that war but also transformed by subsequent events, and by the popular uprisings in the Arab world in particular. The success of Tunisians and Egyptians in replacing their rulers by their own efforts and with relatively little bloodshed was the high point of the “Arab awakening.” But the repression of the second wave of revolts in Libya and Syria, as well as the Islamist advance in Mali, made the issue of intervention relevant again in ways that not only echoed the concerns of the 1990s but also posed fresh challenges to a new generation of British politicians.

As the poisonous fallout of Iraq seeped across the public culture, the Conservative opposition leader David Cameron qualified his admiration for Tony Blair with notable scepticism about any foreign adventures. It was a stance he carried into government in 2010 and shared with most of his senior colleagues, including foreign minister William Hague (though the clever Michael Gove, now education minister, and the ambitious hawk Liam Fox, briefly defence minister, had always been more gung-ho). The eruptions of 2011 forced a rethink, in practice if not in doctrine. Cameron and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy were in the vanguard of military and diplomatic support to the anti-Gaddafi rebels in Libya, and the prime minister forged a similar alliance in 2013 with Sarkozy’s successor François Hollande over Mali. The jihadi offensive there, in the wake of an insurgent assault on a multinational gas facility in Algeria, provoked Cameron to Blairesque rhetoric about the need for a “generational struggle” against Islamic extremism.

This more proactive stance is partly a reaction to Washington’s greater caution after its chastening decade and its strategic tilt towards Asia. The tone of command also has something of the enthusiasm of the convert, though even without grand foreign-policy ambitions Cameron has never had a problem looking “prime ministerial” (an important requirement in Britain, and a facility his Labour opponent Ed Miliband has still to acquire). There is also a certain relief in the government’s repositioning, even amid widespread suspicion that it might entail further open-ended wars. (That sentiment has helped restrict engagement with Syria, where the death toll in two years is fast approaching Iraq’s.) Britain, after all, seems to prefer leaders who cut a dash – within limits that they must periodically renegotiate – on the world stage.

But the domestic circumstances in which this new phase of intervention is evolving are also very different from even a decade ago. Under way, for example, is a welcome “process of introspection, reappraisal and adaptation within the military” in light of the recent wars (see the well-judged study by Aaron Edwards, Britain’s “9/11 Wars” in Historical Perspective: Why Change and Continuity Matter). But the most obvious constraint comes from the seemingly permanent slowdown of Britain’s economy, where a mixture of zero growth, low productivity and escalating debt is reinforcing structural weaknesses. Any international security policy has to be calibrated in terms of what a state can afford, and Britain, with its multiplying spending obligations and its shrinking capacities, is able to afford ever less.

The mismatch between ambitions and resources is exacerbated by the longstanding problem that Britain continues to “want it all” in strategic terms. The headline commitments are an expensive upgrade or renewal of its notionally independent Trident nuclear force and the construction of two giant aircraft carriers (both to guarantee a “global reach”). The routine commitments are to maintain its core services and upgrade their capability, defend overseas territories such as the Falkland Islands, and play a full part in NATO. The low-profile commitments are to protect domestic security and core infrastructure (including from terrorist threats) and sustain a strong intelligence network with up-to-date risk-assessment. And the emerging commitments involve adapting to new challenges such as cyberattack and biosecurity.

For a middle-ranking European power with an infirm economy, amid international trends that press ever harder on its ability to compete in a “global race” (a favourite David Cameron phrase), this range of tasks looks Sisyphean. Even more so since, under the strategic and defence review published in October 2010 – A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty – spending in these areas is being reduced by 8 per cent over a decade. The personnel of all three services is being cut, with Britain’s army scheduled to have only 82,000 regulars by 2020, its smallest in modern times.

Yet any major rethink seems remote. The review says that “Britain’s interests remain surprisingly constant,” and that “in order to protect our interests at home, we must project our influence abroad” via “continued full and active engagement in world affairs.” For Britain’s leaders, the desire to “punch above our weight” (as Douglas Hurd put it in 1993) is a given. Britain, it seems, both needs and can have it all.

THE broad public opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and scepticism over any further large-scale interventions, might be expected to pose a challenge to this elite consensus. But as so often in Britain, behind the brutal certitudes of public argument – on full display in the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s death on 8 April – there is much ambiguity. For example, the military experience of the past decade and more has worked its way into the media, popular culture, and the orchestrated routines of national memory. (The Armed Forces Memorial, for instance, instituted in 2007, honours those killed “in more than fifty operations and conflicts across the world” since 1945.) There has been a palpable increase in the social visibility of Britain’s military, from homecoming parades and charity collections to public demonstrations and TV programs (which in their focus on women personnel or family members, for example choirs of “military wives,” reflect a notable gender shift).

The media aspect of this phenomenon at least tends towards a glutinous patriotism, and more generally recycles a discourse of the brave, chivalrous British soldier that – as Michael Paris’s Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 shows – has been current for generations. At the same time, some senior military figures reportedly worry about the consequences of sentimentalisation: that bringing the army closer to the people may, for example, also undercut the latter’s ability to “take” mass casualties in any future conflict. The deeper point, though, is that the military history of the post-2001 years is being assimilated into what went before, and this works – in a coded but also powerful way – to legitimate the experience of Afghanistan and Iraq if not the wars themselves.

A striking illustration hit me when visiting my local branch of Waterstones – the only national bookstore chain to survive the Amazon hurricane. The history section has sixteen large stacks arranged according to category: one on Ancient history, two on World, two on European, four on British – and seven on Military (“chronological by campaign/war/conflict”). Beside the narrative accounts and scholarly analyses, a few of them admittedly dealing with wars in which Britain was not involved, are many autobiographical tales of derring-do in regiments, bomb-disposal units, or “special forces” such as the SAS whose clandestine image reinforces their glamour.

Perhaps this gradual assimilation of the recent past into the national story is yet another example of “the way Britain, and especially England, works” – namely the ability to “keep everything as it was, so that everything can change.” It hints that the appeal of what might be called military patriotism is capable of taking new forms which too can become part of the legacy of wars otherwise regarded as inglorious. In turn this will make the argument for a substantial reorientation in Britain’s security policy – including intervention – even harder to carry through. After all, martialism in Britain is self-replenishing: since the late nineteenth century, 1968 is the only year that no British soldier has died in action (and that was the very eve of troops being deployed in Northern Ireland at the beginning of the long “troubles”).

From the imperial and colonial eras, through world wars, cold war and small wars, to the present age of multipolar governance and asymmetrical threats, Britain’s military adventures have remained at the heart of the way the country likes to see itself. Iraq and Afghanistan, like Suez, have left Britain chastened. But it is hard for kings, even – perhaps especially – when reduced to pauperdom, to break free from one history and begin to write another. •

The post Britain’s military complex appeared first on Inside Story.

IT WAS an ordinary Monday morning in Australia when the White House announced that Barack Obama was about to give a special televised address. The internet buzzed with speculation about what could be important enough to warrant a presidential speech, at short notice, very late on a Sunday evening Washington time. And then Keith Urbahn, chief of staff to former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted the bombshell: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.”

Broadcasters across the world scrambled to prepare for the president’s announcement and cover what looked like being the biggest news story of 2011. In Australia, ABC television decided not to break into regular ABC1 programming, instead running rolling coverage on its twenty-four-hour news channel from lunchtime on. As the scale of the story outgrew the network’s limited resources, ABC24 handed over to one of its partners. Aunty’s choice on this particular day – Al Jazeera English, or AJE – surprised some people. As the Australian’s Caroline Overington wrote, the ABC “normally uses BBC coverage of world events.” At one point in the coverage, she added, “bin Laden was being described as a ‘hero’ to some in the Arab world.”

A few commentators were incredulous. “When the ABC switched to live coverage of the death of Osama bin Laden on Monday, it didn’t take the BBC or CNN. It took the Middle East network, Al Jazeera,” reported the Australian’s media diarist. “The ABC says that wasn’t because no other feed was available. It actually took Al Jazeera by choice.” “What on earth is the ABC’s agenda?” asked News Limited’s Andrew Bolt. Implicit in these criticisms was the view that AJE couldn’t possibly deliver rigorous and balanced reporting on bin Laden’s death because it is based in the Middle East.

In my experience, criticisms like these often come from people who haven’t seen much of AJE’s news output, which has been extremely difficult to view on broadcast TV in Australia. (AJE has only recently been added to Foxtel’s basic package, and since the end of 2011 it has been broadcast for a few mostly overnight hours each day on ABC24 and SBS1.) Add the fact that AJE sports a calligraphic Arabic logo and its name starts with “al,” and the misreading of its character is even easier to understand.

So why did the ABC decide that a relatively new Middle Eastern satellite channel was a more appropriate source for its coverage of bin Laden’s death than the BBC or an established American network? What propelled AJE from little-known foreign satellite channel to key news partner for Australia’s national broadcaster?

IN JANUARY 2011, I was in Sri Lanka cursing the fact that I’d flown out of Qatar just six days earlier. My first freelance contract as a director for AJE had concluded but, despite having a very pleasant holiday, I would have preferred to have been back in the control room. Instead, here I was, sitting in a guesthouse watching AJE on my laptop as Cairo descended into urban warfare. It was the Day of Rage – day four of what we now call the Egyptian Revolution. Despite an uncertain internet connection and faltering, pixelated images, the scale and significance of the events were clear. Through the window of its bureau, AJE cameras were capturing unprecedented scenes in the Egyptian capital: dramatic parabolas of white smoke trailing behind canisters of tear gas fired by riot police on one bridge towards protesters on another; protesters stumbling through the streets, tears streaming from their eyes and handkerchiefs held over their mouths and noses; crowds of men running away from armoured vehicles, blood streaming from their heads, while others ran towards the vehicles armed only with rocks. It was incredible news and incredible television, and Al Jazeera was about the only place you could watch it.

That night, AJE’s live internet streaming figures rose by an almost unbelievable 2500 per cent as people around the world, desperate for coverage and finding nothing on other twenty-four-hour news channels, turned to the internet. Partly by luck and partly by design, Al Jazeera found itself best equipped and most capable of covering the revolution, and it felt the eyes of the world on it.

By 11 February, when Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down after eighteen days of protest, AJE had simply outplayed and outclassed its competitors. According to Robert F. Worth of the New York Times, the network “provided more exhaustive coverage than anyone else”; Laura Washington in the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that the channel was delivering “first-rate, incisive content”; it has been reported that White House television sets were tuned to AJE during the revolution.

As I watched during those weeks, I couldn’t help but wonder how the workplace I’d come to know over the past three months was dealing with such a massive and all-consuming event. Former colleagues told me that they were working double shifts and seven-day weeks, and my experience directing the channel’s output gave me some insight into what was going on behind the scenes. Having worked hand-in-hand with journalists and producers, I also understood the size and complexity of the organisation.

After Mubarak’s fall, AJE’s attention turned from Egypt to a more prolonged and complicated crisis in Libya, and I continued to watch its coverage on the internet in Australia. Then, two weeks after the announcement of bin Laden’s death, I flew from Sydney to Doha and began my second freelance contract, back in a newsroom that had changed in subtle but significant ways since the Egyptian Revolution.

WHEN we talk about Al Jazeera, it’s important not to conflate its constituent parts. Al Jazeera Arabic, or AJA, and AJE are related but separate entities with largely independent newsrooms and operations. They share content, some bureau resources, and a commitment to the same editorial charter, but not much else. Recently, however, there have been efforts at upper management levels to integrate the two channels more closely, with cost-cutting being one of the most frequently mentioned motivations.

The sprawling Al Jazeera Network features no fewer than sixteen sports channels, a children’s channel, a documentary channel and a live events channel. In news coverage, AJE and AJA are complemented by the newly launched Al Jazeera Balkans, and plans are well advanced for Turkish and Urdu channels. And anyone who has been following the recent battles over TV sporting rights in the United States will know that Al Jazeera’s non-news reach is expanding at a similar pace to its news operation. Yet this media giant emerged from the sands of the tiny Gulf state of Qatar just seventeen years ago.

Its genesis is found in the story of one man, the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. After he seized power from his father in a peaceful coup in 1995, Sheikh Hamad set about liberalising the country’s media by abolishing the Ministry of Information and launching a major new broadcast network. Al Jazeera (“The Peninsula”) was launched on 1 November 1996 with an initial grant of 500 million Qatari rials (approximately US$137 million) and a recurring annual grant of about US$100 million.

Most analysts agree that Al Jazeera was, and is, a diplomatic exercise by the rich and savvy ruler of a small and geopolitically vulnerable nation. But from the moment it was launched, this news network was a radical departure from the kind of state-owned television that is standard across the Middle East. Al Jazeera expert Philip Seib argues that it “reshaped the Arab public sphere by discussing government corruption, the role of women in Arab society, and other matters long ignored by the staid government-run news organisations in the region.” Nor was the fledgling channel afraid of making enemies in the region – by 2002, most Arab League countries had protested at Al Jazeera’s coverage of their affairs, and six (Saudi Arabia, Libya, Morocco, Kuwait, Jordan and Tunisia) had at some stage withdrawn their ambassadors from Doha. By 2005, over 450 official complaints had been made to the Qatari government by other states.

Even on that most fraught of Middle Eastern issues, Israel–Palestine, Al Jazeera was breaking new ground, even if it didn’t always get the balance right. As the New Statesman’s Mehdi Hassan writes, AJA was “the first Arab broadcaster to offer a voice to Israeli officials.” Hassan refers to British journalist Hugh Miles’s observation that “the interviews with Israeli army officers and military spokesmen were ‘truly shocking for the Arab public,’ especially because ‘many Arabs had never seen an Israeli speak before.’”

As far as the rest of the world was concerned, there was nothing much to worry about. Al Jazeera, broadcasting in Arabic and to a fairly limited audience from a global perspective, was not perceived as a threat to Western interests. If anything, in its early years, it was seen as something of a democratic force in a region light on democracy. But then everything changed on 11 September 2001.

With the Middle East suddenly central to US foreign policy, Al Jazeera’s coverage of events in the region now came under intense global scrutiny. The channel’s reporting on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, coming from a very different perspective than that of Western media organisations, attracted severe criticism from governments and commentators. Al Jazeera was called “Jihad TV,” “killers with cameras,” and “the most powerful ally of terror in the world.” It earned a reputation for airing terrorist videos and bin Laden statements (even though these statements were newsworthy enough to be played by other networks including CNN) and for broadcasting beheading videos (which it never did). For many in the West, Al Jazeera became synonymous with al Qaeda.

AL JAZEERA English went to air for the first time on 15 November 2006 after months, if not years, of delay. It was launched to eighty million homes around the world, costing the Qatari government around US$1 billion on top of existing funding for Al Jazeera.

Conceived as early as 2002 as a translated, subtitled and dubbed repackaging of the Arabic broadcast, the AJE model transformed a number of times before it eventually went to air. An English-language website, run somewhat separately from the Arabic operation and as a precursor to a future television operation, had come online in 2003 but was immediately brought down by repeated cyberattack.

At around the time planning began for AJE, the Qatari government was attempting to moderate the excesses of the original Arabic-language operation in reaction to foreign pressure. In late 2003, the Bush administration downgraded the status of planned visits by the Qatari foreign minister and the emir’s wife, and Qatar cancelled the trips because of this perceived insult. “According to AJE architect Steve Clark,” writes Shawn Powers, a media specialist at Georgia State University, “it was this cancelled trip that solidified [the emir’s] decision to invest substantially to create a news network that would once and for all clear Al Jazeera’s name in the West.”

Al Jazeera International (AJE’s pre-launch moniker) was designed not only to fill a perceived market niche, but also to be another cog in Qatar’s foreign policy machine. As William Stebbins, AJE’s Washington bureau chief until 2010, recalls, “There was an expectation that the English channel would be a more sober and sophisticated Al Jazeera, less parochial and operating with higher journalistic standards. While this perception may have played to the English service’s favour, it reflected poorly on the broad Al Jazeera brand, and that implication was never strenuously enough denied.”

Originally slated for launch in late 2004, there was still no sign of an on-air date by early 2006. At the original Al Jazeera operation, animosity was growing as staff watched their English-language counterparts working in a larger building with superior technology on better pay and conditions. “We felt used, unappreciated, and even ‘colonised’ a bit,” one AJA presenter told Powers. “Over the short period of two years, we had gone from Kings and Queens of the Arab world to peons when compared to a ‘British Boys Network’ that is trading on our names, our blood, and our reputations. Many of us are heartbroken.”

In an effort to ease the tension, Wadah Khanfar was promoted from managing director of the original Al Jazeera operation to director-general of the entire Al Jazeera Network. In May 2006, Ibrahim Helal, one of the launch recruits of Al Jazeera, was appointed deputy managing director at Al Jazeera International, and he set about integrating the new channel with the old. Helal was successful in having the launch put back to the end of 2006 and used the time to recruit from around the world in order to spice up the relatively monocultural flavour of the channel.

A mere three weeks before the channel’s launch – scheduled to coincide with the ten-year anniversary of the launch of Al Jazeera – its name was changed from Al Jazeera International to Al Jazeera English at the urging of Helal. He argued that the new name signposted that AJE and AJA would be sister channels of equal status rather than one being a superior worldwide version of the parochial other. And so, by the time AJE launched, it was a very different machine to that envisaged by the Qatari government. “The initial Qatari design to launch a news network independent from the Arabic channel’s origins had failed due to core opposition from the network’s journalists and managerial core,” writes Powers. “As a result, at the time of its launch in 2006, AJE’s operations and mission were very much tied to the overall management and reputation of the Al Jazeera Network.”

To this day, AJA and AJE are defined by their different audiences – AJA’s in the MENA countries (Middle East and North Africa) and the Arabic-speaking diaspora, and AJE’s in the entire English-speaking world. Naturally, this means that each channel has its own set of news values and reporting methods and its own on-air tone. The distinction also allows AJE to cover events taking place in Qatar’s immediate neighbourhood more freely than AJA might for fear of causing domestic political concern.

The official line at AJE is that there is a high level of cooperation between the two sister channels. But AJE’s head of news-gathering, Heather Allan, told me that the two work “totally separately” and that AJA services a more “conspiratorial” audience. Head of output, Sarah Worthington, said AJA’s news planning is more “ad hoc” and its approach to reporting more “aggressive” than AJE’s. While both channels excelled in covering the Egyptian Revolution, each did so in its own way.

BY THE time Hosni Mubarak resigned as president of Egypt two weeks after the Day of Rage, AJE had cemented itself in many viewers’ minds as the channel of record not just for the Egyptian Revolution and the Arab Spring but also for news more generally.

Even after the incredible spike in viewer numbers during the Egyptian protests, more and more people continued to tune into AJE throughout 2011. Because it is distributed by global satellite, viewership is very hard to gauge with accuracy, so traffic to the internet live-stream is a better measure. After the record highs of Egypt, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami set a new benchmark, and AJE claims that four weeks after Tripoli fell to anti-Gaddafi forces in August 2011 it had retained around 28 per cent of the surge in new traffic generated by that event. Around 40 per cent of AJE’s total web traffic comes from the United States, where the reluctance of major cable providers to carry the network means that it is available to only a few tiny pockets of viewers.

There’s no denying that AJE’s capacity to provide broad, in-depth and responsive reporting is due largely to its generous budget and freedom from commercial pressures. AJE maintains twenty-eight bureaus around the world and shares another few dozen with AJA – a news-gathering footprint simply unrivalled by competitors. The newsroom and television operations are robustly staffed, and little expense is spared on technology and the day-to-day activities of journalists and producers. This financial advantage was obvious throughout its Egypt coverage.

During the eighteen core days of the revolution, AJE had more reporters in more places across the country than any other network, including no fewer than five correspondents who were either Egyptian-born or who had Egyptian heritage. Other reporters boasted long experience covering Egypt and were supported by producers with similar backgrounds. On the Day of Rage, AJE had at least five reporters plus their teams in three cities across the country, coordinated from the channel’s bureau in Cairo. And unlike other networks that largely relied on journalists “parachuted” into the story, AJE’s journalists were equipped with local knowledge and often spoke the language.

As most viewers during the revolution would have noticed, AJE broadcast the developing crisis in Egypt to the exclusion of very nearly everything else. For over two weeks, the schedule was cleared and the regular day-to-day pattern of news bulletins and recorded programming was suspended. AJE dedicated itself to reporting events in Egypt and airing special in-depth current affairs programs, which meant that viewers knew they could tune into the channel at any time for information on events in Egypt.

Crucially, AJE could afford to move people and equipment around the world at a moment’s notice and drop (already scarce) commercial breaks for days at a time without fear of diminished revenue streams. Once the decision was made to roll with the Egypt story, the prevailing attitude at AJE was “whatever it takes,” and it had the resources required to do whatever it took.

WHEN I arrived back in Doha in May 2011, the AJE team was still on a high from the success of its Egypt coverage. Everyone was conscious of the need to continue their efforts in reporting news from around the world, but coverage of the latest countries playing host to the Arab Spring, Libya and Syria, was obviously going to be a priority. There was a definite sense in the newsroom that the world was watching – a tangible burden of expectation.

For the next few months, the Libyan rebels’ conflict with Gaddafi dragged on with no signs of significant progress for either side. But AJE continued to feature fresh, on-the-ground, daily reporting while other networks lost interest or bumped the story down their running orders. And as with other news organisations, AJE’s coverage of the uprising against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was hobbled by an inability to operate journalists within the country, but it did its best despite a necessary over-reliance on Syrian activists’ YouTube material. In the cases of Libya and Syria – and earlier, Bahrain – legitimate questions were asked about how the Qatari government’s involvement in the Libyan and Syrian conflicts may have affected AJE’s editorial lines.

And then, in September 2011, to the surprise of employees and commentators alike, director-general Wadah Khanfar resigned. The reasons behind his decision still remain unclear, but Khanfar is adamant that he departed on his own terms, that it was simply time to move on. Some have suggested the Qatari government forced him out, noting that Khanfar’s replacement is a member of the royal family and has a background in natural gas. Frequently highlighted are allegations in leaked US diplomatic cables that Al Jazeera, at Khanfar’s direction, altered editorial content in response to pressure from Washington.

The cables, published in 2010 by WikiLeaks, paint an interesting picture of the relationship between Al Jazeera and the US embassy in Doha. They reveal frequent meetings between the two parties on a range of issues including content, guest selection, quality control and the airing of sensitive material such as hostage videos. Taken together, it is easy for readers to form the impression that Khanfar and other Al Jazeera employees were responsive to the US embassy’s concerns about the network’s output. On at least one occasion, according to the cables, Khanfar allegedly agreed to alter specific content.

Speculation about Khanfar’s departure led the New York Review of Books to wonder if “the Qatari government may now be more concerned about the appearance of foreign influence than of its own.” It’s an interesting point given that when analysts and commentators have searched for editorial weakness at the network, they have usually gone straight to the emir’s diwan.

In the newsroom, however, there is certainly no evidence of systematic interference in editorial matters from inside or outside the building. I’ve interviewed around two dozen AJE managers, journalists and operations staff, and most of them argue fiercely that the newsroom is independent of the Qatari state. A few alluded to isolated incidents involving possible attempts by upper management to change a line or suppress a story – and these incidents should not be discounted or dismissed – but in most cases the newsroom fought back. This is key.

AJE’s twenty-four-hour newsroom is staffed at all times by dozens of journalists drawn from a pool of employees representing over fifty nationalities. Internal editorial disputes are frequent and fierce; people stand up for what they think. This active streak of independence in the newsroom, combined with the increased global scrutiny of AJE’s output in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution, are the channel’s best (although not flawless) defence against editorial interference by the network’s benefactor.

The Al Jazeera network is still a teenager and AJE is not even six years old. The company has expanded at such a rate that its organisational structures haven’t had even a remote hope of keeping pace and adapting to the ongoing change. There is a certain controlled chaos about the way AJE and the Al Jazeera network operate, quite at odds with conspiracy theories of an unbroken and compliant chain of command direct from the emir’s palace to the newsreader’s autocue. As an employee and journalist this chaos can be extremely frustrating – from constant and soul-sapping battles with the human resources bureaucracy to amorphous newsroom workflows – but it can also be inspiring. Everyone feels like they’re part of something a little bit pioneering.

Like any news organisation, AJE has its editorial quirks; and a critical news consumer should never blindly accept the reporting of only one news network, whether it’s Al Jazeera or another. But with a news-gathering operation that dwarfs that of most other broadcast news networks, a unique perspective born of having one foot in the Middle East and one in the West, a growing reputation for intellectually robust reporting, and a broadcasting ethos that eschews brainless chat and empty opinion, AJE’s place within the ABC’s portfolio of broadcast partners back here in Australia makes an awful lot of sense. •

The post How Al Jazeera took on the (English-speaking) world appeared first on Inside Story.

GÜNTER Grass has done it again: he’s put himself on the front page and at the head of the evening news bulletin by styling himself as the lone voice defending the truth and speaking out against an injustice.

On 4 April, Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, Italy’s La Repubblica and Spain’s El País published a poem in which Grass articulated his concerns about Israel’s arsenal of atomic weapons and criticised Germany for selling it a submarine capable of firing missiles armed with nuclear warheads. For more than a week, the poem, or rather the outrage it triggered, dominated the German print and electronic media. Never before in the history of the Federal Republic had a work of poetry caused such a storm.

Most of the response in editorials and from politicians, fellow writers and other public intellectuals was damning. Outside Germany, the reaction was overwhelmingly unfavourable, ranging from irritation to outrage. The Israeli government went so far as to blacklist Grass and ban him from entering the country. Only the government in Tehran, predictably enough, was delighted by his intervention: “I read your literary work of human and historical responsibility,” deputy culture minister Javad Shamaqdari was quoted as telling Grass in a letter, “and it warns beautifully.”

Ordinary mortals who want to voice their concern, indignation or outrage resort to writing to the letters pages of their local paper or to calling talkback radio. They might share their views on blogs, via Twitter or on Facebook. Those more confident of their standing might issue a press release. The eighty-four-year-old author of The Tin Drum and other highly regarded novels, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, poet, sculptor and graphic artist, a man often portrayed as “the conscience of the German nation” – who is also (and this is important for understanding the response to his words) a former member of the Waffen-SS – penned his thoughts in the form of a prose poem, “Was gesagt werden muss” (“What Must Be Said”) . He would have known that whatever German broadsheet he approached, the poem was going to be printed in full, appear on the front page, and capture Germany’s full attention.

While the text’s content has been controversial, there has been no dispute over its merits as a poem. “A literary mortal sin,” prominent songwriter Wolf Biermann found. A professor of aesthetics, Bazon Brock, believed Grass’s scribbles gave poetry a bad name. Fellow Nobel laureate Herta Müller called Grass a megalomaniac for sending his text to three newspapers in different countries, and said it contained “not a single literary sentence”. Wordy, clumsy and overly didactic, “What Must Be Said” would have to rate among the worst of Grass’s poems. Reminiscent of the didactic poetry of Bertolt Brecht, but without the latter’s rhythm and economy, it is little more than an unedited stream of consciousness. Obviously the editors of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a highly regarded liberal broadsheet published in Munich that has one of Germany’s best arts sections, hadn’t made the decision to publish on the basis of its merits as a work of art.

In the poem, Grass takes issue with the delivery of a German-built submarine to Israel. He objects to the arms deal because the submarine is capable of carrying nuclear missiles which could be used to attack Iran and “wipe out the Iranian people.” He criticises what he regards as the West’s hypocrisy: insisting that Iran not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, while condoning Israel’s nuclear capability, which, Grass claims, “jeopardises an already precarious global peace.”

Grass devotes much of the poem to pondering his failure to speak out earlier. He says that a German who criticises Israel is likely to be punished, not least by being labelled an anti-Semite. But, in what reads like an act of heroism, he has decided to “break his silence” because the matter is urgent and because “we, who as Germans are already sufficiently encumbered, / could become accessories to a crime / that is predictable, which means that our complicity / could not be erased / by any of the usual excuses.”

Grass has been taken to task, rightly, on several accounts. He misrepresents the situation in the Middle East. The Israeli government has indeed considered a pre-emptive strike against Iran to foil that country’s nuclear program. These plans have been hotly debated in Israel itself, and have engendered critical responses from Israel’s allies. “What must be said,” the Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev noted in Tel Aviv’s liberal Haaretz newspaper, “did not have to be said because it has already been said by many others, in Israel as well.” Such a strike would almost certainly target Iran’s nuclear facilities rather than its people. And the rationale for an Israeli attack would be the declared intention of the Iranian leadership to wipe out the people of Israel – something Iran could conceivably do quite easily once it has built an atomic bomb.

Grass also suggests that it is impossible to criticise Israel in Germany. If by “Israel” he means the Israeli government, then such a claim is patently wrong. German politicians and intellectuals have long criticised Israel for its policies in the Occupied Territories, in particular. In February last year, Angela Merkel called Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu to remonstrate with him on account of Israel’s dilatory approach in its negotiations with the Palestinians. In December, Germany, together with three other members of the UN Security Council – Portugal, France and Britain – condemned Israel’s settlement policy. After a visit to Hebron only last month, the leader of the Social Democrats, Sigmar Gabriel, opined on Facebook: “This is an apartheid regime which cannot be justified by any means.” Gabriel was roundly criticised for this comparison and eventually apologised, but his comment nevertheless is evidence that Grass’s insinuation of a taboo against such criticism was not justified. Incidentally, Gabriel has been one of only a handful of prominent German politicians who has stood by Grass in the current controversy.

GABRIEL’s intervention may have been prompted by loyalty as much as by sympathy for the sentiments expressed in the poem. Grass has long been associated with the moderate left and has often campaigned for the Social Democrats. As a prominent public intellectual of the left, he is intensely disliked by many on the right. The poem presented his political opponents with a golden opportunity to remind the public of Grass’s achilles heel.

In 2006, Grass published his memoirs, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (published in English as Peeling the Onion). A few weeks before the book’s eagerly awaited release, he gave an interview in which he revealed that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS, the elite military units that were formally the armed wing of the Nazi Party and which existed alongside the regular army. While the Waffen-SS was not in charge of concentration camps, some of its units were responsible for war crimes; after the war, the SS as a whole was declared a criminal organisation.

The interview may well have been designed to raise the public’s anticipation ahead of the memoir’s publication. But it set off a discussion about Grass’s war record which also ensured that the 479-page memoir is known mainly for an episode that Grass explores in a little more than a page.

The mere fact that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS should have mattered little. He was born in 1927, and drafted for the Waffen-SS as a seventeen-year-old. He did not join the Waffen-SS as a volunteer (although he had volunteered to join the regular army as a fifteen-year-old). He was not involved in any war crimes.

In Peeling the Onion, he doesn’t try to reinvent himself as a seventeen-year-old anti-fascist: “There is nothing carved into the onion skin that can be read as a sign of shock, let alone horror… I did not find the double rune on the uniform collar repellent.” Nor is he professing innocence: “Even if I could not be accused of active complicity, there remains to this day a residue that is all too commonly called joint responsibility. I will have to live with it for the rest of my life.” When he was taken prisoner by the Allies, Grass didn’t hide the fact that he belonged to a Waffen-SS unit.

The reason that the revelation in 2006 caused a sensation was because it came so late. For sixty years, he had chosen not to own up to the fact that he had once belonged to an organisation that was instrumental in the Holocaust.

Mathias Döpfner, chairman of the board of the Springer Corporation, the publisher of the tabloid Bild and one of Grass’s perennial targets, would have taken pleasure in denouncing Grass in an opinion piece titled “The Onion’s Brown Core,” which appeared in Bild the day after the publication of the poem. His opening sentence identifies why he (and many others on the political right) dislike Grass so strongly: “Günter Grass likes nothing more than to remonstrate with the Germans and appeal to their conscience.” Döpfner draws a connection between Grass’s self-confessed silence before the publication of the poem, and the silence that preceded Peeling the Onion: “‘But why did I remain silent thus far?’, Grass writes. One is inclined to ask in return: Why did he remain silent for sixty years about his membership of the Waffen-SS?… ‘Peeling the onion’… Grass has now arrived at its very centre. And the onion’s core is brown and stinks.”

The claim that Grass forfeited the right to speak out because he was coy about his Waffen-SS membership may be a vengeful ploy by those who have long borne the brunt of Grass’s moral indignation, and a cheap attempt to match the poet’s self-righteousness. But Döpfner and others have also accused Grass of being a Nazi and anti-Semite, suggesting that the seventeen-year-old and the eighty-four-year-old shared a hatred of Jews and a fondness for Nazi ideology. Their argument is anything but subtle: whoever criticises Israel by failing to distinguish between the Iranian aggressor and the Israeli victim is guilty of anti-Semitism.

Yet the suggestion that Grass’s poem reeks of anti-Semitism shouldn’t be dismissed lightly. The poem is remarkable not so much because of its ludicrous claims about supposed Israeli designs to annihilate the Iranian people, but because of its insinuation that a taboo prevents Germans from speaking out against Israel and that anybody violating that taboo would be accused of anti-Semitism. Such an argument is reminiscent of the claim that there is a taboo preventing, say, non-Aboriginal Australians from criticising Indigenous people, or Americans of European descent from criticising African or Native or Asian Americans, and that any violation of such a taboo triggers accusations of racism. It resembles the tactic of the racists who introduce an odious statement with the preamble, “political correctness prevents me from saying this,” and then go on to say exactly what they think. A variant of the “but one of my best friends is Aboriginal/ African American/ …” line also appears in “What Must Be Said”: Grass refers to Israel also as “a country I am and always want to be close to.”

While Grass is no anti-Semite, his poem gestures towards the vocabulary and the mindset with which he grew up. Nazi ideologues successfully conjured a Jewish conspiracy that thwarted legitimate German ambitions and could therefore be held responsible for German ressentiments. Grass does not blame Jews or Israel for feeling resentful – but there is no doubt that his views about the legacy of the Nazi past, both Germany’s and his own, are tainted by resentment. He resents the fact that he has to live with “it” – be it guilt, responsibility or shame – “for the rest of [his] life.” In the poem, he is concerned about potential German complicity in an Israeli pre-emptive strike because the burden Germans have to carry is already heavy enough. Raphael Gross, director of the Leo Baeck Institute in London and of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, has rightly pointed out it is so difficult to overcome National Socialism precisely because of the failure to recognise the longevity of Nazi mentalities and morals.

Günter Grass is one of the greats of postwar German literature (although, in my view, he does not come close to being the greatest). His reputation as a writer shouldn’t be mixed up with his standing as a public intellectual. In his latter capacity, he did play an important role on many occasions, not least because he could be counted on as somebody who wouldn’t shy away from speaking out in the face of a seemingly overwhelming consensus. Thus he criticised the rushed process of reunification, and he resigned as a member of the Social Democrats when his party agreed to the so-called asylum compromise of 1992, which led to a change of the German constitution’s guarantee of a right of asylum. In both those cases, it was courageous of him to take a stand.

But when it comes to his own past, he has been a troubled soul. And since he has long been convinced that his views deserve a broad audience, the readers of his books and the public at large have been privy to his inner conflicts. Much of his writing, while purporting to be about Germany (or, in the case of “What Must Be Said,” about Israel), is in the last instance about his own demons. It is telling that his controversial poem begins with the words, “Warum schweige ich,” “Why do I remain silent,” and thus with the writer’s “I” (rather than with Israel, which is mentioned only twenty-eight lines later).

The publication of “What Must Be Said” was not the first time that Grass got into trouble in Israel. Only six months ago, in an interview with Tom Segev, Grass opined that “the madness and the crime were not expressed only in the Holocaust and did not stop at the end of the war. Of eight million German soldiers who were captured by the Russians, perhaps two million survived and all the rest were liquidated.” The use of the verb “liquidate” and the (incorrect) reference to six million dead German POWs could be read as saying that there was a German equivalent to the Holocaust and that Germans were as much victims as Jews. At the time, Segev himself excused Grass, saying that the figure of six million German victims came up “in the heat of the moment.” That was a kind interpretation, but perhaps one with more than just a grain of truth to it.

In the poem, Grass refers to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a Maulheld, a loudmouth. It is one of Grass’s mistakes in the poem not to take seriously the man who wants to wipe Israel and its people off the map. If there is a Maulheld in this story, it is Grass himself. He has the tendency to pontificate at the top of his voice, to speak before he thinks, and to exaggerate first and qualify later.

NOTWITHSTANDING his prominence, Grass’s recent intervention, much of it politically silly and artistically of little merit, should not have preoccupied the German opinion pages for many days. Neither should it have prompted Israel’s government to declare him a persona non grata (which then prompted Grass to liken Israel’s interior minister to Erich Mielke, the East German minister responsible for the Stasi, who once banned him from visiting the German Democratic Republic). It is unfortunate, too, that the controversy failed to raise a few issues that are probably worth more consideration than the Nobel laureate’s ill-chosen words.

First, Grass actually made a suggestion in his poem that is worth further discussion: namely that an agency ought to have the right to inspect Israel’s nuclear facilities. In an ideal world, that agency would also have unfettered access rights in all countries, including the United States and Russia.

Second, the spectre of anti-Semitism, raised by Grass himself, deserves closer attention. What is the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, particularly in Germany? And what is the link between anti-Semitism and the rabid pro-Zionism that has long been advocated by the Springer Corporation via Bild?

Third, the controversy over “What Must Be Said” has been remarkable more because of the response to the poem than because of the poem itself. What moved so many of Germany’s public intellectuals to rush into print or onto television shows to distance themselves from Grass? What does it mean when fellow writer Rolf Hochhuth told Grass in an open letter, “I am ashamed as a German of your preposterous silliness”? Did he seriously believe his reputation would be tarnished by Grass’s intervention?

German newspaper editors and talkshow hosts seem to have concluded that this particular debate is over. All those who conceive of themselves as opinion-makers have said their piece. If it was a contest then Grass’s critics seem to have won it convincingly. Besides, Grass himself retired hurt; he fell silent because he was admitted to a Hamburg hospital on 16 April, apparently with heart problems. But a survey of opinion pages and of Germany’s famed Feuilleton, the culture sections of the print media, provides a skewed picture. Grass has had his backers. During the last TV debate about the poem, on 15 April, the studio audience applauded those who defended Grass (and criticised Israel) rather than Grass’s critics. The German blogosphere, the comments sections of news media websites, the letters pages and numerous non-representative opinion polls suggest that a majority of Germans sympathise with Grass’s views.

Some of Grass’s critics, such as the historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen or Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung editor-in-chief Martin Vogler, noted that his views resemble so-called Stammtischparolen, opinions uninhibited by political correctness and informed by prejudice and jingoism. Little attention has been paid to the fact that the Stammtisch, the proverbial regulars’ table in the pub, came out in support of Grass, and that its views appear to be at least as much informed by a deep-seated resentment as Grass’s. Grass himself, by the way, has been surprisingly unconcerned about the applause he has been receiving from unreconstructed anti-Semites, and about the legitimacy he has bestowed on certain Stammtischparolen.

Perhaps the week-long debate, which, as many observers noted, was peculiarly German both in its tone and in its intensity, reflected a realisation that the silly claims of a self-obsessed old man have provided a glimpse of something unpalatable that has no place in how the new Germany likes to be seen by the rest of the world. Today’s Germans have tried hard – building memorials, prosecuting war criminals and paying restitution to former slave labourers – to prove that they have nothing to do with yesterday’s Germans; yet the past tends to catch up with them. Günter Grass seems to have been only too aware of the past’s propensity to insert itself uninvited into the present. “History,” he wrote in his 2002 novel Im Krebsgang, published in English as Crabwalk, “or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising.” •

The post Günter Grass, again appeared first on Inside Story.

THIS month’s outbreak of violence in Gaza sent thousands of Israelis into bomb-shelters and left twenty-five Palestinian militants and civilians dead. While Hamas forces in Gaza did not participate in the exchange of fire, the movement failed to rein in competing militants. Groups affiliated to the Popular Resistance Committees responded to the assassination of one of its leaders by the Israeli military with a barrage of rockets and mortars, and within hours the situation escalated. For now, it seems that Egyptian mediation has re-established a fragile ceasefire.

While Hamas’s decision not to return fire is certainly a welcome development, the internal political struggle over how the movement should position itself in relation to Israel is far from over.

As Israeli planes circled the skies of Gaza, representatives of different wings of Hamas embarked on two competing diplomatic missions. Khaled Meshal, head of Hamas political bureau and overall leader of the movement, paid a surprise visit to the Turkish capital, Ankara, a fortnight ago, briefing Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on what was described as “recent developments in Palestinian politics” and the prospects for reconciliation between the competing Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah.

Meanwhile, the Gaza-based leaders of Hamas dispatched strongman Mahmoud Zahhar to Tehran. Zahhar, one of the closest aides of Ismael Haniyeh, the Gaza prime minister, thanked Iran for its “unlimited and unconditional support.” Zahhar also underlined the fact that the “principles and strategies of Hamas” – synonymous with the movement’s commitment to armed struggle and terror operations – had “not changed” despite the ceasefire.

Both diplomatic initiatives are clear attempts to rally support behind competing wings of Hamas. As such, they are only the most recent examples of a series of regional moves in the past few weeks that illustrate growing tensions within the organisation, as separate centres of power vie to determine the future course of the movement.

The contenders are the leadership in Gaza, represented by Haniyeh and his interior Minister Fathi Hammad, and the exiled overall leadership represented by Meshal. While Haniyeh maintains control of a breakaway branch of the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza strip, Meshal is supported, by and large, by Hamas members from the West Bank and the Palestinian Diaspora, though he also enjoys the backing of many Gazans critical of Haniyeh’s authoritarian regime in the coastal strip.

Early assessments assume that the struggle centres on the implementation of reconciliation documents signed by Meshal and the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is leader of Fatah. Agreements were ceremoniously concluded in Cairo in May 2011 and again in Doha in February 2012. Both agreements were welcomed by many Palestinians but were concluded in the face of ill-concealed opposition by Haniyeh’s Gaza branch.

The Gaza prime minister, fearing a challenge to his position in the coastal strip, attempted to torpedo the initial Cairo agreement by praising the “martyr Osama bin Laden” on the eve of the concluding ceremony. Likewise, the Gaza leadership opposed the Doha agreement by labelling it “unconstitutional” and by refusing to accept President Abbas as an interim acting prime minister, as stipulated in Doha.

The question of who will lead the interim Palestinian government until elections are held is still far from concluded. But there is clearly more at stake than personal ambition. What lies at the core of the conflict between the Hamas leaders in Gaza and the leadership abroad is a fundamental struggle over the future of Hamas as a movement. Certainly, recent shifts within Hamas suggest the possibility of a transformation from terrorist organization to legitimate political party. While the outcome remains unpredictable, signs of internal strife have escalated to a tipping point.

In December, Ismael Haniyeh embarked on a western-bound Mediterranean tour in an attempt to gather political support from post-revolutionary regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. He was granted a hero’s welcome. In mid-February, he started a second diplomatic circuit that brought him to Qatar, Bahrain and Iran. To the dismay of more conciliatory Hamas members, Haniyeh vehemently and repeatedly stressed Hamas’s commitment to “armed resistance,” “the futility of peace negotiations” and the movement’s commitment to fight “until all Palestinian land has been liberated.” Haniyeh’s hosts in Tehran reacted warmly, swiftly increasing the flow of financial support to Gaza.

Emboldened by this wave of outside recognition, Haniyeh has continued to lobby against the implementation of the reconciliation agreements. By preventing the Palestinian Central Election Commission from updating voter registers, he is effectively preventing elections that were scheduled in the Cairo and Doha agreements in order to cement his hold to power.

Haniyeh’s regional rallying of support has not gone unnoticed by Khaled Meshal. In contrast to the Gaza prime minister, Meshal silently backed “exploratory talks” between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators hosted by the King of Jordan in Amman in January. Likewise, Meshal has on numerous occasions expressed his acceptance of a Palestinian State in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – a tacit acceptance by the faction of the right of the State of Israel to exist in secure borders side by side with a future Palestinian state.

At the same time, Meshal has attempted to bring Hamas closer to the secular institutions of Palestinian political life as he pushes for the organisation’s integration into the Palestine Liberation Organization, which at the moment does not include the movement. Integrating Hamas into the PLO would close Palestinian ranks and effectively mean a formal cessation of violence from Hamas. At the same time, it would represent a further implied acceptance by Hamas of agreements previously signed between the PLO and Israel.

Meshal’s change of heart can be partly attributed to the ongoing public revolt against Syrian President Bashar a-Assad, who has hosted Hamas’s diaspora leadership since the 1990s. Assad’s violent response to an uprising that is at least partly backed by Hamas’s umbrella organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, has strained relations. Reacting to turmoil in Syria, Meshal has been forced to relocate Hamas’s diaspora headquarters from Damascus to Doha, the Qatari capital, in February. This relocation from Iran-backed Damascus to Washington’s closest remaining Arab ally in the region is an important symbolic gesture towards what Meshal may very well envisage for the movement: a comprehensive re-invention of Hamas.

Whether or not Hamas as a unified movement would follow Meshal on this change of course has been the subject of much speculation. Notably, Meshal recently expressed his outrage at Gaza’s refusal to fall “in line” by announcing he would step down as leader of the political bureau. Elections for the Hamas Shoura Council, the group’s highest decision-making authority, which appoints the movement’s leader, are due in April. It is unclear whether Meshal will ultimately follow through on this threat, as observers speculate that he could be re-elected despite his recent declaration. Alternatively, it seems he might be elected to head a new and independent Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The outcome of this power struggle within Hamas is far from pre-determined. Current developments present Western decision-makers with an opportunity to influence the outcome and to support the shift from a renegade terrorist militia to a necessary partner in what could very well be an all-encompassing peace process with Israel.

Hamas leaders such as Khaled Meshal need to be engaged not isolated. Washington has embraced moderate Islamists in Cairo and Tunis, and representatives of political Islam in the Palestinian territories should not be treated any differently. Instead of resorting to ineffective undifferentiated boycotts, Washington and European governments should engage with reformist groups from within Hamas.

While it does carry political risks, such an approach might just tip the scales in the right direction. Violent escalations such as this month’s exchange of rockets in Gaza will continue to bring suffering to Israelis and Palestinians, but will also strengthen forces from within Hamas that thrive on a political vision that fosters isolationism and extremism. •

The post The Hamas split and the future of the Palestinian peace talks appeared first on Inside Story.

IT was a year of protest: uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa that overturned governments; encampments in southern Europe that resisted economic austerity; an occupation of Wall Street that incited the seizure of financial centres and town squares in many hundreds of places across the planet. Why did this happen? How was it organised? What is the lasting significance of this rising of popular energy and anger?

The commercial media were inconstant and unreliable chroniclers of the unrest during 2012, and few reporters posed these questions. Cyberspace is awash with documents, and fragmentary perspectives, but their proliferation can provoke uncertainty and confusion at least as much as illumination. Thankfully, two recently published books attempt to record current events and to provide careful if frankly sympathetic analysis. They also provoke further questions concerning the role of the writer and of the book in the unfolding of contemporary political movements.

Paul Mason is the economics editor of the BBC’s current affairs program, Newsnight, the author of several books, and a blogger of some notoriety. Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is a highly ambitious combination of traditional reportage, primer in radical social theory, and original analysis of contemporary global crises and campaigns. As Mason explains, he has attempted to “capture the moments of crisis and revolution” around the world, to “give them context,” and to explain their “links.” Structurally, the work is something of a hodgepodge: reportage sits cheek-by-jowl with tweets and anecdote; episodes of radical history are recalled alongside essays on the stuttering of the global economy and ventures in cyber-psychology.

The mixture is inconsistent, but heady. Mason is a consummate journalist, and in reports on Egypt, Greece, the United States and the Philippines he provides sensitive and insightful accounts of life and struggles among the world’s poor and dispossessed. In his respect for individual experience, he offers sometimes startling and moving stories; in his capacity for synoptic description, he helps to convey the excitement and the terror of history being made.

Why It’s Kicking Off also realises its aim of providing a context to the increasing visibility and success of recent radical campaigns. Mason outlines the role of new technology in the promotion and organisation of protest that even those hopeless dinosaurs without a mobile phone (such as this reviewer) can easily understand. His knowledge of the dismal science helps him to connect recent economic changes not just to the Wall Street protests and to European unrest, but also to campaigns in the Middle East and elsewhere. Equally, his impressive knowledge of radical history helps him to discern points of commonality with – and the influence of – earlier moments of revolution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book will help readers to better understand why 2011 was a year of protest. It will also help to persuade sceptics that these campaigns matter.

If Mason’s book succeeds handsomely as reportage and explication its wider aims are perhaps less fully realised. The author’s attempt to find a commonality in so many distinct campaigns sometimes smothers important points of difference. If all of the protests he examines seek to “defy fatalism,” as he argues, they do so in quite distinctive ways, and for particular purposes. In his emphasis on the common use of new technologies Mason sometimes overlooks the continuing importance of mobilisation in physical space, as well as the many uses of the printing press, radio and television by radical activists. In his stress on the capacity of networks to defeat hierarchical institutions he tends too often to overlook the tensions within decentralised and often short-lived combinations, and the evidence of failure alongside admitted success. His attempt to show that a new kind of “individual” is emerging through interaction with new technologies is similarly challenging but one-sided. Mason insists early on in the book that he is writing journalism rather than social science, so presumably this releases him from the requirements of disciplined argumentation and systematic evidence. In its most ambitious sections the book works better as a provocation than it does as an integrated explanation.

But perhaps the seriousness of these criticisms is itself open to dispute. As Mason notes, the status of “the book” as an object of superior prestige and public intervention is increasingly being rethought by contemporary activists. Why It’s Kicking Off is in part a reworking of a blog post Mason composed in early 2011, “Twenty Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere.” This piece promoted discussion and some dissent among many activists around the world, and traces of that debate are included within the pages of this book. The new movements seek no oracles and Mason aims to act as a source of education and incitement rather than a philosopher-king. In this sense, the incomplete and fragmented nature of his book may be considered a mark of its interest and novelty rather than a simple deficiency.

A RETHINKING of the notion of “authorship” is perhaps a more obvious feature of another welcome publication, Occupying Wall Street. This book was composed by “Writers for the 99%”: a collective of some sixty participants in the Occupy Wall Street campaign. Though not an officially sanctioned work (the wider movement could not agree on the need for such a book, or on the principles that might guide its production), it bears the obvious traces of a radical construction: dozens of interviews; reflections on personal experiences and tensions; vivid prose; evocative cartoons and illustrations; a listing of pertinent websites; an attempt to counter common misunderstandings; a sometimes breathless preoccupation with tactics pursued and victories won.

Occupying Wall Street aims to “tell the story” of the “beginning” of the Occupy campaign, an aspiration it fulfils completely. In just a little less than twenty concise chapters, the authors relate the many events that spanned the few months of the New York encampment, ranging from the initial call to protest in July through to the eviction of activists from Zuccotti Park in December. Far more than a simple chronology, the book also provides much more: an account of the movement’s international inspiration; a clear explanation of the importance and operation of democratic processes; a record of official harassment by police; a reflection on the alliances that underpinned local success; a sensitive analysis of media reports; and an interesting if not exhaustive consideration of the movement’s influence on others around the world.

Two features of the book grant it particular import. First, it provides a very detailed portrait of the experience of squatting in central Manhattan and of the diurnal round of committed activism. The movement was notable for its attempt to model an “intentional community”: a space of democratic openness and respect that embodied the values of an alternative society. This means that those who hope to understand its contribution, and its significance, must try to comprehend the sometimes prosaic details of its daily life. In helping to provide insight into these matters, the book performs a fine service.

But if the Occupy movement attempted to anticipate the methods of a new and better way, then this has in fact been a quest marked by tension, criticism and many defeats. Doubt has been cast on the representativeness of those who gathered in Wall Street (apparently they are too educated and too white) and their methods of decision-making (too slow; marked by the hidden hand of power), and the viability of tactics and appeals has been subject to the most searching and persistent critique. Here the book performs its second valuable role. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Occupying Wall Street is its willingness to register the movement’s problems, to record the attempts to struggle for solutions, and to admit of the imperfection of this experiment in radical democracy. It is only in a confrontation with these failures that the movement might hope to learn the lessons of its recent history. In discharging this function, the book offers something significant to the broader cause.

Australia, of course, has been marked by its own version of the Occupy campaign. While the complacent huffed that our national economy has so far avoided a recession, they were not as quick to grapple with the broader challenges of the year of protest now passed. Like most other societies, Australia is marked by great and increasing inequality: the wealthiest 1 per cent of us earn around 10 per cent of national income. The power of business has no counterweight in the power of labour or government. Formal politics, like the established media, is regarded by many with indifference or contempt. Equal provision of public goods is now barely contemplated as a realisable aim. Young people are more educated than ever before, but also far from certain of their future prospects. One of the lessons of 2011 is that uneven and alienated societies such as what we have become will not remain forever quiescent. These excellent books incite reflection on why that might be and on what it might mean in the years to come. •

The post The new global rebellions appeared first on Inside Story.

PETER Kosminsky’s four-part drama series, The Promise, has produced the same deeply divided response in Britain, France and Australia. From official Israeli and Jewish establishment sources there has been fierce condemnation, nowhere more so than in the formal complaint to SBS, which screened the series in Australia, by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, or ECAJ. From most other sources the series has received high praise, both as a film and as a contribution to the discussion of the tragic Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

The Promise takes up a problem that has troubled Jewish thinkers since the Zionist project of creating a Jewish homeland or state was first mooted. Since the world had run out of uninhabited lands, what would happen to the people who already lived in the chosen territory? The question was debated with admirable frankness and calmness, but little consensus, by theorists who did not foresee the terrible urgency that the Holocaust would one day bring to it. They asked whether the inhabitants could be lured away by bribery or subterfuge or whether force would be needed. The optimistic view, expressed in Theodor Herzl’s novel Altneuland, was that life in the Jewish state would be so attractive that the indigenous people would happily submit – Israel’s “immaculate misconception” as the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit described it to me.

That was never going to happen in Palestine, the land ultimately chosen. The Arabs believed they too had a historic right (some saw it as a divine right), and a British promise, to what an American analyst has dubbed the “much too promised land.” To the Arabs of Palestine it was already their home, where their ancestors had lived for generations, and where they had a right of self-determination as part of the Arab homeland promised by the British in return for Arab help in the first world war. When they were told that the fine print left Palestine out of the Arab promise, and that Britain would instead honour its promise of a Jewish homeland, the Arabs felt betrayed and threatened, and predictably resisted.

As the ECAJ’s complaint about The Promise notes, Arab objections to Zionist-inspired immigration go back to its beginning in the late nineteenth century. But the objection was not, as the ECAJ may expect the reader to assume, an irrational objection based on prejudice; as the historian Benny Morris emphasises, it was a well-grounded, and indeed prescient, fear that the Zionists wanted to take their country. The official recognition and support of the Zionist project resulted in acute and growing conflict during the British mandate, and open warfare when a Jewish state emerged with UN blessing. Although Israel triumphed in the wars of 1948 and 1967, and remains in military control today, the question remains: what is a just solution to the competing claims of Jews and Arabs? What could once be debated as a historical or theological problem is now an existential human problem: what is going to happen to the five million Jews and five million Arabs who today live in Palestine? They all need a home.

This is the question implicitly asked by The Promise. Kosminsky does not answer it, but he gives a powerful reminder to a readily forgetful world that the question has always been there and remains there, and that the failure to answer it has had and continues to have terrible consequences. He does this by interweaving two stories, one of Len, a British sergeant serving in Palestine in 1946–48, and the other of Len’s eighteen-year-old granddaughter Erin, who visits Israel in her gap year in 2005. Initially the purpose of Erin’s trip is to give moral support to Eliza Meyer, her Jewish school friend who is returning home to Israel to do her military service. But in her grandfather’s diary she finds a house key that Len had promised to return to its owner, and she sets out to fulfil his promise.

The interwoven stories, rich in incident, character and plot, provide two snapshots of the ongoing conflict between two peoples seeking to live in the same land. In 1948 the Jews are the people without a home, desperately seeking to create not just shelter for the wretched refugees from the Holocaust but also a refuge for all potential victims of anti-Semitism in the future. The snapshot shows the length to which desperate people will go, and shows how the conflict is starting to make Arabs into refugees. The second snapshot, in 2005, shows that Jews now have a homeland but Palestinians do not. Established but isolated in their homeland, symbolised by the Meyer family in the bubble of the coastal town of Caesarea, Israelis are ignoring the needs of the Palestinians, who see Israel taking more and more of the only land that could provide their home. Israel has a monopoly of military force and Palestinians respond with the shocking weapon of the weak, suicide bombing, to which Israel retaliates by demolishing houses.

Kosminsky has emphasised that he did not set out to take sides or offer solutions; his first responsibility was to present an image that did justice to the complexity of the situation. Historians and political commentators have written many volumes about this complexity, and the film was based on years of research. In contrast to a historian, the artist and film-maker must choose a few characters and events to capture the viewers’ attention, stimulate their minds, fire their imaginations and touch their consciences. It is inevitable that people with an existing view about Palestine will be disappointed that this or that point dear to them was not made or emphasised, but they can still be grateful that Kosminsky has put the fundamental problem on the table in a high-quality film with great human impact.

Apologists for special interests have a choice. They can be open to The Promise as one of many ways a film about the Israel–Palestine conflict could be made, they can accept its challenge to seek solutions, they can learn from it, even if some of the lessons may be painful, and they can offer competing views and interpretations and emphasise different points if they wish. Alternatively they can firmly close their minds, refuse to recognise the challenge or seek solutions, resist any lessons they could learn, and seek to suppress the film. In that endeavour they may seek to place stereotyped and demeaning interpretations on the film. Antony Loewenstein, in his 2006 book My Israel Question, was far from the first to deplore the tendency to portray criticism of Israel and its policies as anti-Semitism, a practice he saw as wrongly conflating Zionism and Judaism.

IN ITS thirty-one-page complaint, the ECAJ compares The Promise with Jud Süss, a “Nazi propaganda film” praised by Goebbels and made compulsory viewing for Nazi death squads. The complaint asserts, without particulars, that “the ancient libel that holds all Jews throughout history to be collectively guilty of killing Jesus has been segued into the equally ludicrous proposition that all Jews are collectively guilty of the wanton shedding of innocent blood.” It complains about the historical background but its major allegation is that “all of the principal Jewish characters (and thus by implication Jews generally) are portrayed negatively and, ultimately, without any redeeming virtues. They are cast as variously cruel, violent, hateful, ruthless, unfeeling, amoral, treacherous, racist and/or hypocritical... The series also panders to stereotypes about Jews being immoderately wealthy and having acquired their wealth unfairly.”

In contrast, an English reviewer for the Israeli website Eretz Acheret noted that “the Israeli characters are drawn sympathetically and realistically, with not a hint of demonisation.” The ECAJ reaches the opposite conclusion only by itself imputing unfavourable attributes to the Jewish characters, judging them by harsh and unrealistic standards, interpreting their conduct in the worst possible way, and making quite absurd comparisons. There is a striking irony in a Jewish organisation’s striving to show that every Jewish character is a demon and every Arab character a saint. One by one, the ECAJ’s submission proceeds to do a hatchet job on every Jewish character of any importance, rejecting the humanity with which Kosminsky endows each of them, and substituting an anti-Semitic stereotype of its own manufacture.

The ECAJ gives what it calls “seventy-five examples of negative stereotyping of Jews” in its complaint. I can only deal with a few here, but an extended response to the complaint can be found here. The complaint itself can be found here.

Much of the calumny is directed at Erin’s hosts, the Meyer family. The complaint says that “none of the Arab characters speaks with a raised voice, in stark contrast to the violent, quarrelsome, hate-filled Jewish families.” It is in the nature of the plot that viewers see an Arab family only briefly on the special occasions of entertaining an important visitor, when they are naturally on their best formal behaviour. In contrast, Erin is asked to treat the Meyer household as her home, and becomes a part of the family. She sees everyday family life, in which a father has heated arguments with his youthful son over politics but rushes frantically to his side when he is injured, a younger sister calls her older brother insane but has deep affection for him, a mother reacts angrily to those who blow up her son by calling them “animals,” and parents treat their daughter’s friend with great care and responsibility. Erin finds the parents “the kindest and most generous” people she has known and, despite his despair at their politics, their argumentative son agrees.

By no stretch of the imagination is this a “violent, quarrelsome, hate-filled” family. It is a normal family. Its members are human beings, neither demons nor saints. Viewers who have been confronted for the first time by someone experiencing an epileptic fit will know that when the Meyer parents are momentarily paralysed with shock when Erin collapses in front of them, they are not being shown as “cold, insensitive, unfeeling, callous, cruel,” in the ECAJ’s words.

It is, however, a family whose members are awkward and at a loss for words or actions when, owing to Erin’s naivety, they find Omar, a real, live Arab peace activist, in their luxurious home. Omar shows similar unease, his only conversational gambit being to needle his hostess by asking where her family came from. In its search for an anti-Semitic interpretation, the ECAJ accuses Kosminsky of using this incident as “the vehicle for conveying the alien-ness of Leah and her husband Max (and by extension all Jews) to the land, further estranging them from the audience’s sympathy,” and of portraying them as “ungracious and racist,” “cold, insensitive, unfeeling, callous”and “cruel.”

Such an interpretation may appeal to anti-Semites who are trying to discover an anti-Semitic meaning. They will miss the more reasonable interpretation. What the film is doing, in effect, is dramatising Benny Morris’s observation that a “mutual lack of empathy” has characterised the Palestinian conflict from the beginning. Palestinians, he says in his book, Righteous Victims (1999), “never really understood the Zionist claim to the land” and Zionists “were uninterested in the Palestinian Arabs’ nexus with the soil.” “Thus, the Zionist–Palestinian conflict, which was the origin and remains the core of the Israeli–Arab conflict, has been characterised by a crude and brutal perceptional symmetry.” The message of The Promise is that Israelis and Palestinians must get beyond this and see each other as human beings who, among other things, need a home.

The lengths to which the ECAJ will go is illustrated by its attempt to demonise the convicted terrorist Avram Klein by comparing him with the Zionist leader Dov Gruner, on whom he is loosely based. The ECAJ presents Gruner as admirable in every respect, whereas Klein is said to be portrayed as “a blinkered fanatic who could have saved his own life by appealing his sentence to the Privy Council,” who uses “words that demonstrate that he refused to do so in a vainglorious quest for martyrdom,” and who in contrast to Gruner failed to win the respect and admiration of his guards. In fact, the film depicts Klein more favourably on all three scores.

First, Klein refuses to appeal whereas Gruner refused to defend himself at all. Second, speaking to Len in a friendly tone, Klein quietly utters the succinct and dignified words, “If you kill me you’ll regret it. Every movement needs its martyrs,” whereas Gruner bombastically told the court that nobody “could sever the tie between the Jewish people and their one and only land” and that “whosoever tries to sever it – his hand will be cut off and the curse of God will rest on him forever.” And, third, whereas Gruner won the respect and admiration of his guards, Klein is given a greater accolade: he wins the respect and friendship of Len, the sergeant who is the leading British character.

The ECAJ complains that because of the lack of certain background historical detail the film “shuts off any possibility that the viewer might understand how Jews who saw themselves as fighters for a noble cause could commit atrocities.” The reverse is true. The sympathetic portrayal of the terrorist Klein has been mentioned. Eliza Meyer’s grandfather, who lost most of his relatives in the Holocaust, was also a 1948 terrorist, and explains that after the Holocaust members of his generation were determined to carve out a land that could be safe for Jews forever. The British stood in their way, so the Jews “wiped them out. It was as simple as that.” Far from shutting off the possibility of understanding his implicit claim to act in a noble cause, the film shows a concentration camp and wretched refugees. It presents Eliza’s grandfather as an ordinary, civilised human being and passes no judgement on him. It is the ECAJ, not the film or the normal viewer, who finds him “obdurate and unapologetic for his part in an atrocity” and “lacking a moral compass.” Why does the ECAJ make this harsh judgement? The case put in his mouth is the case made by the real-life terrorist Menachem Begin, who blew up the King David Hotel and was later prime minister of Israel; it is the case made by Benny Morris, a historian admired by the ECAJ, when he justifies the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinian villagers from Israel as necessary for its ethnic “cleansing” (the term used at the time).

Viewers who have lived comfortable lives in peaceful countries like Australia and never faced challenges like those faced by Jews in Palestine in 1948 may be horrified by what was done and unable to identify with the case made in support. It does not follow that they will share the ECAJ’s harsh condemnation of those involved as people without a moral compass. Rather they will see them as vulnerable human beings with strong moral compasses pulled off course by experiences of anti-Semitism, culminating in the overwhelming effect of the Holocaust and all the tragedies that went with it. They will not join the self-righteous rush to judgement of those individuals, and certainly not the ridiculous extension to Jews generally that the ECAJ postulates.

What the ECAJ seems incapable of understanding is that the film is not making or inviting judgements. It is implicitly saying that it is too late for that; here is a terrible human problem that has to be faced.

AN IRONY of the ECAJ’s complaint is that Kosminsky has gone out of his way to discourage people from drawing anti-Semitic inferences from his film. Far from trying to blacken Israel, he shows that practices for which Israel is unfavourably known have been practised, and indeed were invented, by others. He shows the gratuitous humiliation of Palestinian civilians by soldiers and political assassinations as practised only by the British, and the retaliatory destruction of houses used by terrorists as practised by both Britain and Israel.

It would have been very natural for the film to mention the history of Caesarea, where Erin is staying, and it would have helped explain why the Meyers are so taken aback when an Arab turns up in their home. The Caesarea community website records without any indication of embarrassment or regret the expulsion of all Arabs in 1948. Benny Morris adds the details that they were expelled by the Haganah (which the ECAJ invokes as a symbol of Jewish rectitude) in mid February 1948 (three months before the Arab invasion to which the ECAJ attributes the war), despite the fact that according to Jewish sources the villagers had “done all in their power to keep the peace in their village and around it… [and] supplied agricultural produce to the Jewish market in Haifa and Hadera.”

Telling this story would have been easy pickings if Kosminsky had really been out to put Israelis or Jews in a bad light. It would also have pre-empted the ECAJ’s criticism that The Promise shows a Jewish swimming pool but not an Arab swimming pool in Caesarea. Perhaps the ECAJ is unaware that in Israel generally, far fewer Arabs than Jews can afford swimming pools. In Israel 58.5 percent of Arab families (as compared with 20.7 percent of Jewish families) are defined as living below the poverty line

The ECAJ is not only ungenerous in failing to recognise Kosminsky’s restraint. It acknowledges his Jewishness by a quotation about “self-hating Jews” who “betray their own people,” and speculates that he set the film in 2005, instead of 2010 when it was filmed, so that Erin could say to the soldiers about to blow up a house in Gaza: “Don’t drive them out of Gaza.” It ignores Kosminsky’s explanation that, having done his research before 2005, he wanted to include events like suicide bombing, which had ceased several years before 2010.

IT IS reassuring that the SBS complaint process rejected ECAJ’s complaint and showed no difficulty in recognising the true character of the film. But this does not mean that no harm has been done, or that no harm would be done by similar baseless attempts to smear individuals, organisations, books or films in the future. A number of groups are entitled to feel fearful, angry or dismayed by the ECAJ’s attempt to use the smear of anti-Semitism to suppress access to this film.

First are the viewers of SBS, who watch its programs because they are distinctive and open windows on the world not readily available elsewhere; they do not want it confined by unjustified rulings and, more importantly they do not want its future decision-making intimidated by the mud that will stick from this exercise or the fear of other baseless attempts to smear it in the future.

More generally, the people of Australia want freedom of access to information, points of view, and artistic representation in all their media in order to conduct their intellectual, political and moral life, without its being confined because some people are so sensitive to criticism of themselves or their cherished interests that they will go to any lengths to protect them. As citizens they also want those who make decisions on their behalf to be able to exercise Australia’s influence in the world not only on an informed basis but also free of similar intimidation. Those who have a special concern about the achievement of just solutions to problems of the Middle East, and would like the millions of Jews and the millions of Palestinians who live there to do so in freedom and justice, uncorrupted by the temptations of power or the temptations of powerlessness, will be particularly concerned.

There are many who value the great contributions that Jewish people have made to the intellectual, moral and artistic life, and particularly to the pursuit of social justice, in our civilisation. They are dismayed to see their contributions limited and their moral compasses sometimes distorted by the acceptance of the duty of short-sighted and uncritical defence of Israel, right or wrong, which the ECAJ’s complaint exemplifies. There are many, too, who believe that it would be a tragedy if all the courage and sacrifice and idealism that has gone into the building of Israel should result only in a pariah state because of its denial of justice to Palestinians.

If it is to maintain balance among the destabilising forces raging within and without, Israel is in desperate need of trusted but frank and independent critical voices such as the Diaspora could provide. Australian Jews can play such a role only if they open their eyes and ears and hearts and minds to the messages of the writers, artists, thinkers and people of insight and goodwill in the world, rather than attempt to shoot the messengers. Fortunately more and more are doing this. •

The post Much too promised land appeared first on Inside Story.

IMAGINE waking one morning to the news that you will be given an instant pay rise of 60 per cent – 120 per cent if you are lucky enough to be a military officer. For those Qataris who work in the public sector – which is most of them – this was exactly what happened last September, when just such a proclamation was made, out of the blue, by the government.

Almost as quickly, locals began debating what had prompted such a pay hike. After all, as the country’s main employer, the government was taking on an astronomically larger wages bill because of the decision. Productivity was nowhere near high enough to justify such lavishness – in fact, it was not long since inflation had been a real worry for the country, running to double-digits for a couple of years in the late 2000s. Perhaps, some mused, the government was being truthful when it said that the rises were to offset cost-of-living rises over the past couple of years and help people lower their very high levels of household debt. But the timing and the manner of the announcement made that claim seem dubious to many people.

Instead, most people linked the announcement to the Arab Spring, the uprisings which had already claimed the political scalps of the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and were about to claim the Libyan former leader’s life. Although Qatar’s royal family and political system are widely tolerated by Qataris, and indeed are quite popular in most quarters, the Arab Spring ought to have caused some nervousness. In neighbouring Bahrain the two centuries–old dynasty nearly fell after massive protests in February and March last year, surviving only through a combination of wily political tactics against the protesters and the deployment of friendly Saudi security forces. In Saudi Arabia itself, pockets of poverty, the prospects of Sunni radicalism, and an unhappy Shi’a minority made the monarchy there nervous as well.

Just as the Saudi leadership had promised some US$130 billion – yes, billion – in “gifts” to their population in February 2011, many Qataris assumed that their own 60 per cent pay rise, although arriving a few months later, was a gift from their own leaders in exchange for political compliance. For all of Qatar’s economic success in the past decade, coming as it did as an accompaniment to Qatar’s high profile and yet murky domestic politics, the pay rise was almost certainly some form of patronage.

QATAR has come a long way in recent years, and its economic development since the mid 1990s has been nothing short of spectacular. Twenty years ago, most people – even those who considered themselves quite well-travelled or knowledgeable about world affairs – would have had trouble rubbing together two facts about this tiny Arab state or even finding it on a map. A great many still would. Despite the popularity of Qatar’s Al Jazeera television, and then its successful bid to host the 2022 soccer World Cup, it is a small Arab Gulf state that few know much about and fewer still have visited. At 11,586 square kilometres it is considerably smaller than East Timor or Fiji, and its population of about 1.7 million are mostly foreign workers – only perhaps 300,000 are Qatari citizens.

But Qatar is now, by most measures, the wealthiest country in the world per person; its nominal GDP is just under US$100,000 per person, but per citizen the figure is several times higher. Its total GDP, at about $110 billion in 2010, was about one-tenth that figure when the current emir, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, took power in 1995. Qatar’s wealth has been built on its gas reserves, which are among the largest in the world: its North Field, which it shares with Iran (where the field is known as South Pars), is the single biggest reserve in the world, holding about 13 per cent of the world’s proven gas reserves just on the Qatari side.

The physical look of Qatar has changed greatly too. A visitor to the capital, Doha, in the 1980s would have thought the place to be quiet and only modestly developed. While by no means poor back then, it was a backwater among Gulf states and nowhere near the present-day city of high-rises, shopping malls, urban developments and cultural attractions. As recently as a decade ago, the capital had only one modern shopping mall, basic sports facilities, and decent but no-frills infrastructure. Now, it’s on a building spree, constructing new hotels, residential complexes, shopping centres and major assets including a new airport and educational institutions. After hosting the 2006 Asian Games, Doha can boast world-class sporting venues, but even these are slated for redevelopment before the World Cup teams arrive a decade from now.

PERHAPS the most interesting change since the mid 1990s is in the style and ambitions of Qatar’s government. Where the previous emir was cautious, reserved and keen to keep Qatar’s large neighbour Saudi Arabia happy, Hamad has been an activist force for change, turning Qatar into one of the most high-profile states in the Arab world.

First, it is an economic trendsetter. Of course, it is normal for governments in the Gulf to make much of their wealth from oil and gas sales, and to use this money to both repress and co-opt citizens – in effect, to buy legitimacy or at least toleration. With its bold plans for economic diversification, new infrastructure and the education of the population, Qatar’s government is different. It is a little like Dubai in terms of its energy and vision, but – unlike Dubai – its vision is backed by hydrocarbon wealth.

Problems do exist with these plans. Qatar’s economic diversification is still in many ways subsidised by oil and gas revenue. Despite massive improvements in education, a rapidly rising number of young people are entering the labour market, often poorly prepared for most jobs and willing only to accept the more prestigious and secure ones. Still, Qatar is one of the few states that has enormous energy wealth and is nonetheless trying seriously to diversify its economy and build the basis for a more global and competitive economy.

To this end, it has made several strides. It has reformed education, both in primary and secondary schooling and especially in the higher education sector. Qatar University, the flagship institution, was dramatically reformed in the early and mid 2000s. At around the same time, Education City was established in the suburbs of Doha as part of a bid to persuade the best universities in the world to set up campuses in Qatar. Texas A&M is there teaching and researching on engineering; Cornell University runs the medical program; Georgetown runs courses in affairs and diplomacy. There are many others, among them Carnegie Mellon University, Northwestern, and one of France’s grandes écoles, HEC Paris.

Beyond education, Qatar has cleverly leveraged as much wealth as possible from energy – through joint ventures with firms and the state-sponsored creation of key firms along the oil and gas supply chain – and also by developing world-class firms in other areas. Qatar Airways has very quickly become a global airline, while several Qatari banks, construction firms and transportation companies rank among the largest in the Gulf. It has done this, it must be stressed, in the pattern of what the political scientist Ian Bremmer calls “the new state capitalism”; Qatar is not an experiment in economic liberalism, even if it has made some market reforms. Instead, it has supported national “champions” – the mostly state-owned or heavily regulated and state-supported companies that are pushed to be efficient and profitable but also have near-monopolies or other advantages. It is a new and growing approach to development and diversification, but one which so far is showing considerable promise.

A second feature of Hamad’s Qatar is how uniquely and aggressively the country is “branded” to the world. Again, this has been a deliberate strategy of the emir. It began, most observers would argue, with the creation in 1996 of Al Jazeera, a trend-setting satellite television channel which, almost alone, transformed broadcasting and new media in the Arab world. The staid, distorted, state-owned media of the past has given ground – indeed, is almost extinct – in the face of Al Jazeera’s blend of informative and entertaining media and current affairs. The network has done wonders for Qatar’s image in the Islamic world, even if the glare of its journalistic gaze rarely pierces Qatar’s politics.

More recently, Qatar has branded itself as a modern, cosmopolitan and liberal state. By hosting major events such as the 2006 Asian Games and now the 2022 World Cup – and hoping to add a summer Olympics to the schedule too – the country is creating a global image way out of proportion to its size. Such events link to its plans for economic diversification, feeding as they do sectors such as aviation, tourism, construction and the media.

Finally, Qatar under Hamad has become a diplomatic leader in the Arab world. It was the only Gulf state to establish links with Israel during the Israeli–Palestinian peace process in the 1990s. It has been active in peacemaking in Lebanon and at the United Nations as a non-permanent member of the Security Council in 2006–07.

More recent has been Qatar’s military role in supporting the anti-Gaddafi revolution in Libya. It has given vocal support to the anti-Bashar opposition in Syria, including a call in mid January for foreign military intervention – the first Arab state to do so. Its military commitment to Libya was not just a token effort: it contributed around half of its entire air force capability to the NATO-led air operation, and accounts are starting to emerge of the on-the-ground special forces role Qatar played in support of the opposition.

IF ALL of this makes Qatar’s rise seem too good to be true, perhaps that will prove to be the case. There are many panegyrics to Qatar in the media, and the country markets itself very slickly, but impressive as its economic transformation and global political role have been, the changes since the late 1990s are not without a catch or two.

Perhaps the starkest observation to be made about Qatar is that there has been little political change or democratisation. Some see this as reason for Qatar’s progressiveness in other areas: economic change being the means by which the regime buys support from its constituency, and its diplomatic activism being a deflection of attention from its own very limited political reforms.

There is, perhaps, some truth to such claims. Certainly, thus far Hamad and the regime have been very successful in avoiding criticism or calls for democratisation from the United States, although this could just as easily reflect how effectively it has built up its diplomatic and military links with Washington. Qatar’s new constitution, which was endorsed by referendum in 2004, called for the creation of a popularly elected parliament. For a long time the emir seemed to be delaying this reform, which would have been a more significant step towards democratisation, even though the parliament’s powers under the constitution are limited. It was only late last year – again, many assume, as a result of the Arab Spring happening around him – that the emir finally announced that the long-anticipated polls would take place in 2013.

Regardless of this foot-dragging, the fact remains that there is a strong level of support for the emir – not least of all for the active global role he has created for Qatar – and there is little interest by most Qataris in challenging his dominance of politics. Perhaps that is to be expected in an environment where 60 per cent pay rises occur overnight, but there is also a genuine belief that the country is changing, overall, for the better. Qataris I met during a recent visit spoke positively about the image their country now has abroad, and seemed to relish the fact that Qatar had as much name recognition and “soft power” as much larger neighbours such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. If there were complaints, they were mostly about the pace of change; and among younger Qataris there was frustration at the strong hierarchies that remain in society and in major companies and public service agencies. Few saw such things as a failing of the emir, however.

There are occasional political complications, of course. In early 2011, according to local rumours, a coup attempt – the second in a few months – had to be violently, if discreetly, suppressed. By most accounts it involved a group opening fire on the emir’s palace, a normally graceful building in a fairly serene city. But this was not a popular uprising or anything like it; in fact, Qatar has had none of the Arab Spring protests that most countries in the region have witnessed in the past year or so. If the coup even occurred, it reflected elite discord and, in particular, sharp divisions within the large royal family itself.

As it builds and expands its economy, if it truly wants to diversify and develop at both a social and an economic level, other problems will have to be overcome. Women are a woefully underutilised resource, and still face considerable social pressures to put family and domestic roles ahead of their careers. But women are also some two-thirds of university graduates, and by many accounts they are generally more reliable and diligent employees than their male counterparts. So not to welcome them into the workforce is costing Qatar dearly.

Similarly, there is a concern that although Qatar is educating many more of its young people, it is not preparing them very well for working life. Few want to work in the more demanding or less prestigious areas of the economy – as tradespeople, technicians and the like – and, perhaps because of the country’s enormous wealth, there is an expectation of good, low-stress jobs among many Qataris. This occurs elsewhere, of course: in Saudi Arabia it’s sometimes called the “mudir (manager) syndrome.” Even in Australia, it could be argued that too many young people flock to universities while there is a shortage of labour in trades because of the prestige attached to the professions. This is why Qatar has such an enormous population of “guest” workers: about 1.3 million people, the majority of them South Asian, work in poor conditions and for very modest wages (if still attractive enough to entice them to come and work in Qatar). Critics are quick to point out, however, that foreign workers enjoy few rights, and even wealthier Western expatriates will acknowledge that their Qatari sponsor has most of the power in the relationship.

Many Qataris believe that Qatar has too many foreign workers, and local people ought to be trained to take over the roles they occupy. But for as long as most Qataris lack a sense of competitiveness and are unwilling to take on many (of the most in-demand) roles, and foreign workers remain preferred by employers, plans to nationalise (“Qatarise”) the workforce and build a globally competitive, diversified economy are likely to fail.

IN DOHA, the Qataris I met gave me what seemed like contrasting, even clashing, perspectives. They appeared to agree about where the country is headed, and to support the emir’s vision of a wealthy, cosmopolitan, ly active country, yet they disagreed about whether it is going about this transition effectively and smoothly. For many older Qataris, reform is alluring but dangerous, something to be done cautiously, with economic change setting the pace and social change happening only very, very slowly. For younger Qataris, however, this very idea is the problem with the current reforms. They felt as though changes in the economic arena were having little impact in their daily lives, while the more conservative or traditional forces continued to restrain them socially and in their careers. Young people, men and women alike, often feel as if there is an underlying conflict between the need for development and the unwillingness of older Qataris to allow change.

If there is a failing in Qatar’s development approach, then perhaps this is it. It is a very conservative society being transformed rapidly in many ways. Its economy, the face of its cities, and the size and composition of its expatriate workforce have all changed beyond recognition in just a decade or so. Yet in other ways too little is changing. There are frustratingly few opportunities for young people in the social and political realm, constraints still on women, and only haphazard and cautious changes in many of the institutions and social structures that guide everyday life. This is the real challenge of development: not just to use gas wealth wisely while moving gradually but successfully to a sustainable economic base, but also to manage all of the social and cultural demands that go with such change. Although the emir has handled all this quite aptly so far, it is a long-term challenge, much of which remains incomplete. •

The post The ambitious emirate appeared first on Inside Story.

THE sense of crisis that preceded Palestine’s application to the United Nations for admission as a state has entirely dissipated. The issue has disappeared from the media, the familiar deadlock over construction in the Israeli settlements has returned and – with the provocative timing to be expected from the present Israeli government – new construction has been approved in the disputed area in East Jerusalem, prompting the familiar ineffective Western protests. A return to business as usual? In all probability the answer is affirmative, at least in the short run, unless Western European governments can bring themselves to take an uncharacteristic initiative.

First, what of the crisis? It has become clearer that the tension was generated mainly by Israel and the United States. Both proclaimed that a unilateral move by the Palestinians would mean an end to negotiations for a two-state agreement and both threatened to withhold much-needed funding for the Palestinian Authority – in Israel’s case, taxes that it collects on behalf of the latter, in the United States’ case, that Congress would terminate financial support provided in recent years. The Palestinians’ claim that the move was intended, rather, to place the negotiations on a new foundation was more convincing, and points to the more plausible reason for the American and Israeli reaction: the move signalled an end to the acceptance of the US role as sole mediator in the relations between the two parties; in other words, it threatened the loss of American control over the “peace process” and the privileged position, and protection, that Israel enjoys within that framework.

As soon as the application was lodged, common sense returned. It was clear that it would be self-defeating for Israel to terminate negotiations or, even more so, to withhold financial support, opening the way for more extremist forces in Palestine. These dangers could be averted by the simple device of delaying decisions in the Security Council, which also saves the United States from a hostile Arab reaction should it veto the Palestinian application.

But the crisis was not wholly artificial. If a crisis is a moment when established practices have become untenable and new approaches suddenly become conceivable, then it is a moment of rare opportunity but also of serious risks. Netanyahu’s visit to Washington in May showed that the US-mediated “peace process” had become moribund, and the Arab Spring provided a favourable setting for a Palestinian initiative to place negotiations for a two-state agreement on a more favourable footing. But the move also held serious risks. If it proves fruitless the Palestinian Authority will be weakened or even wholly discredited, and Mahmoud Abbas will forfeit his newly won prestige; at worst, Palestinian frustration may lead to serious outbreaks of violence. The perception of a volatile regional environment provides a more valid reason for the Western sense of crisis, and Israel’s provocative move in approving new settlement construction shows a remarkable insensitivity to this environment.

The speeches to the United Nations by Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu and Abbas did not bring much new enlightenment. Obama’s was surprisingly one-sided, highlighting Israeli concerns but not Palestinian rights, reaffirming his support for a two-state solution but reiterating the implausible contention that statehood and negotiation were alternatives. Netanyahu went further, claiming that the Palestinians wanted a state but not peace, giving no hint of endorsing Palestinian rights, and roundly condemning the United Nations for its bias against Israel. Abbas had the far easier task of presenting to a sympathetic audience the case for recognising Palestinian statehood after so many years of fruitless negotiation, but also reaffirmed his readiness to resume negotiations based on the 1967 frontiers and conditional on a settlement freeze.

Within a few hours of the debate the Quartet on the Middle East (made up of representatives of the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations), which had been deadlocked during the preceding weeks, issued a statement calling for negotiations without preconditions to achieve an agreement by the end of 2012. This might be seen as undermining the argument that the Palestinian initiative ruled out negotiation, but perhaps assumed that a decision on statehood would depend on the outcome of the negotiations. The statement called on the parties to agree on a timetable within a month, to make proposals on frontiers and security within three months, and to reach substantial agreement within six months.

The statement had serious limitations, however. It omitted all reference to the “parameters” long regarded as necessary for an agreement – the 1967 frontiers, subjected to agreed exchanges of territory, each state to have Jerusalem as its capital, and adequate measures to ensure Israel’s security – and there was no mention of the settlements issue. It may be inferred that these omissions were at the insistence of the United States. The proposal was entirely to the liking of the Netanyahu government: it was committed to nothing, all the fundamentals were open to discussion, and it could engage in endless negotiation without having to move toward a two-state agreement, blame the Palestinians for obstructing agreement and continue unrestricted construction in the settlements. Not surprisingly, Israel accepted with alacrity, leaving the Palestinians to appear less accommodating by insisting on their precondition regarding the settlements.

Unless the “ community” is prepared to move beyond the Quartet’s formula, it will prove as abortive as Obama’s ill-fated call a year ago for a two-state agreement by the time of this year’s meeting of the UN General Assembly. The United States, it has become obvious, will do nothing constructive before the presidential election. The question is whether there is any other actor prepared to fill the ensuing vacuum and provide an impetus to the negotiations. In particular, might “Europe” – either the European Union or some of its leading members acting with its approval – be prepared to assume this role?

Major European interests are at stake, and European values have long been engaged. A loss of control by the Palestinian authority, desperate acts of violence by Palestinians and massive Israeli reprisals could prompt much wider disorder in the present regional environment, threatening Western economic interests (not only oil supplies, but also wider trading relations), and would make for unrest in Europe’s Muslim communities. And “European values” would appear ineffective and hollow if Europe passively watched such a process. But can it summon up the energy to intervene before such a deterioration becomes unmistakably clear? Can its leaders, under extreme pressure owing to the euro crisis, pay attention before it is too late? In the next phase, in all probability, the United States will press the Palestinians to abandon their precondition. Will the Europeans be prepared to take a contrary stand? There are likely to be frequent reminders of the dangers in the situation, such as recent acts of violence by extremist Israeli settlers against Palestinian lives and property.

The Israeli government’s spectacular deal with Hamas, exchanging over 1000 Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli soldier, introduces new complications. More than a little ironic in view of Israel’s expressions of outrage over the reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Fatah – announced earlier this year but yet to be implemented – it is seen as strengthening Hamas against its rival, and thus sending the message that violence pays. Abbas appears to be losing the initiative and may find it difficult to retain broad support for seeking a negotiated settlement. The situation surely calls for a move from outside to revive the ailing “peace process.”

The new diplomatic machinery available to the European Union under its foreign affairs and security policy representative, Catherine Ashton, provides it with the capacity to formulate policy. After a shaky start, Ashton is beginning to gain a certain diplomatic credibility. But her role could be no more than an initiator of proposals for the EU governments, and agreement among all member governments would require protracted negotiation, making for delay and lowest-common-denominator decisions. What might be conceivable would be agreement in principle to a course of action, the details to be worked out by whoever was authorised to implement the policy.

Alternatively, the initiative might come from a few members – the Libyan model – who would likewise have to seek broad agreement before taking up a position. The success of the Libyan intervention – at least as perceived by its initiators – might encourage this approach. But what might such an initiative attempt to achieve? The immediate aim, presumably, would be to overcome the present deadlock such that meaningful negotiations toward a two-state agreement could proceed.

But it would need to recognised that the Netanyahu government is fundamentally opposed to such an agreement, notwithstanding his own lip-service to it. Substantial progress is unlikely under the present coalition. It would seem prudent to focus on the first steps – the first three months of the Quartet’s schedule, and in the first place the immediate obstacle, the settlements issue. Here the Europeans would lose all credibility if they simply endorsed the American and Israeli approach.

But could a European stand, however determined, influence the Netanyahu government after it had successfully defied Obama on that issue? It would, of course, win strong support in the region, and the heightened isolation might disturb some Israeli officials, but this would not be decisive, as the recent rigidity towards Turkey would suggest. While any communication would have to be addressed to the Israeli government, its real message would have to be to the Israeli people – as always, divided but with many surely uneasy over the issue. The tone and content of such a démarche would be important, but so would its manner of presentation. A major address by a prominent European leader, delivered in the region, would have an impact of a different order from an anonymous statement issued in Brussels. It is not difficult to envisage themes that might form part of such an address: that the settlements constitute a form of aggression against a neighbouring people, the strength of feeling that they are illegitimate as well as illegal, that they have no place in the present century, that they are unworthy of a great nation, that they foster the kind of violence by extremist settlers that has recently been observed, and so forth. Needless to say, the speech would also have to be supportive of Israel’s well-being and security.

A successful diplomatic initiative would call for unorthodox thinking. Many commentators have recognised, for example, that if left to themselves, the two parties will be unable to reach agreement. The US approach, remaining in the background, favours the party that is stronger and averse to the kind of changes that any agreement would entail. A more active mediator would have to question and cajole both parties, but the logic of moving towards an agreement requiring asymmetrical “concessions” would tend to lead it to be more supportive of the party pressing for changes from the present status quo. The potential task for diplomacy is daunting. It must be hoped that, if Europe takes up the challenge, it will be equal to its demands. •

The post A Palestinian state within a year? appeared first on Inside Story.

THE Middle East is changing. An obvious statement, perhaps, given the protests of the past year, which have claimed the political scalps of leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, and seen near civil war conditions in Yemen and Syria, protests of varying magnitude in the majority of countries in the region, and reforms or concessions by leaders in other parts of the region.

But even in countries that are comparatively quiet, things are changing, not just because of the protests but also as a result of economic transformation, globalisation, and social and cultural change. Returning to the Jordanian capital, Amman, for the first time in five years – and for my first substantial visit in nearly a decade and a half – I found marked differences, some more positive than others.

Most noticeable is the local lifestyle, which seems both more Western and more expensive. There are still plenty of pious women around who wear a veil or headscarf. Far fewer here are the “ninjas,” as some secular locals irreverently call them – women covered in full black garb and head covering, sometimes with gloves hiding their hands as well.

Just a couple of hundred yards north of my apartment is a shopping mall, little different from the malls found across the leafier suburbs of Australia. I can go there and spend around $12 on a ticket at the movie theatre. The bookstore on the fourth floor sells the latest release novels and even a good selection of non-fiction, around half of it in English, for prices that are at best only slightly cheaper than in Australia. Some of the more fashionable boutiques remind me of those in the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney, and charge the same prices, which is amazing in a place where $1000 a month is a very good salary and many people raise a family on less than half of that.

In the Amman of 1996, my last extended visit, there were only two big, Western-style supermarkets. Supermarkets like these are now quite common, and Western goods – whether peanut butter, a new release DVD, or a Gucci handbag – are available all over the city.

The old Amman is still there, of course. The downtown area and the main roundabouts still look very similar to the way they did five, ten or even twenty years ago. The voices on the street are a little different – there are more Iraqis, Egyptians and other nationalities than I remember – but the same favourite shops are there, alongside sites like the impressive Roman amphitheatre and the Citadel.

Near my home, only a block or so from the upmarket mall, more traditional shops still sell basic family clothes for a few dollars, illegally produced DVDs for around $1.50, and locally printed books for a couple of dollars. You can still buy a felafel roll and a local drink for around $1, even if more and more people are spending $10 or $15 or more on a nice dinner.

Property is especially costly. The wealthier of the Iraqis here – who effectively have a right of abode here and who number around half a million – are blamed by locals for investing in real estate and pushing up the prices of housing. Whether it is the Iraqis’ fault or not, the cost of buying or renting property has certainly shot through the roof: the cost of ordinary property has probably trebled in the past decade or so, and the most upmarket suburbs are costlier than the average in Sydney or Melbourne. Considering the typical (good) salary here, the prices are crushing.

Back in 1996 there were probably as many Iraqis; in that period, they had fled the recent 1991 war. There was still a strong sense of hospitality on the streets: I remember several taxi drivers – most of them Palestinian refugees, who are a majority of the population here – explaining to me that there was an onus on Jordan to extend traditional, and unconditional, hospitality to Iraqi refugees. I haven’t heard that this time; if anything, I’ve heard a few people express the opposite view.

The political system is not greatly different from fifteen years ago, but Abdullah II, who took over after his father’s death in 1999, is a different leader. He is young and energetic, but that hasn’t always meant that he’s had a smooth ride. Educated almost exclusively in the United States and England, he was criticised at first because his Arabic was not very good. He was seen as too Western-leaning, and too much under the control of his wife. This changed, however: he improved his Arabic to near-flawless, built solid ties with the major tribal groups, and developed and refined his popular image.

He’s also been politically astute. The protests in the Arab world have not completely bypassed Jordan: earlier this year there were regular rallies downtown. But the king deftly deflected the focus of popular anger to the cabinet – which he appoints, though many people seem not to make the connection – and of course the bureaucracy, and has even developed a compassionate image among many of the protesters. (Reportedly he even sent police down to some protests to hand out drinks to the demonstrators.) In this way he is as skilled as his father. He probably shares many of the same advisers, but there is little doubt he’s just as smart, too.

Jordan is different from other countries in the neighbourhood. Jordanians are fairly relaxed and moderate in political terms, and notwithstanding a few radicals, have a lot more time for their monarch than the populations of several of the nearby republics have had for their presidents.

The dynamic of demography counts too. Along with the large Iraqi population, around two-thirds of Jordan’s residents are Palestinian. The key Jordanian tribes, already nervous about being a minority, don’t want to put their position and the advantages they often enjoy in jeopardy. The king is counting on this: it is why he improved ties with the tribes so quickly once he assumed power, and it is why, as much as he balances the competing political forces in the country, he takes particularly good care of the key social groups backing the regime, and especially the tribes. He has also handled Western aid donors carefully, which has given him additional largesse to spend on dealing with socioeconomic problems and building new infrastructure.

This does not mean there is no change, however. The king is acting to improve social and economic conditions in the country, enhance press freedoms, and strengthen some political institutions. And these reforms pre-date the Arab Spring. While he will probably not cede true political power, the landscape in which politics occurs is changing, and is likely to change further in the coming years.

In some ways, then, Jordan seems better. It has made an accommodation with globalisation – and with other social and economic changes – that seems happier than those of many other Arab states. Yet life is still difficult for many Jordanians, and social strains remain. Life is even more expensive than a decade ago – and it was tough enough to make ends meet back then. That most Jordanians can do so, and remain among the friendliest people in the world in the process, is testament to them and to the many positive characteristics underlying this unique society. •

The post On the edge of the Arab Spring appeared first on Inside Story.

THE current moment may reasonably be termed a crisis. A longstanding situation has become untenable but the attempt to deal with it is creating multiple tensions and prompting fears of an explosion of violence in the region. The Palestinians are seeking a radical change, Israel is resisting and claiming it would mean an end to direct negotiations for a settlement. The United States is supporting Israel’s objection to “unilateralism” and is prepared to veto a resolution endorsing a Palestinian state, even while dreading the consequences for its standing in the region. The Europeans fear that a UN vote may expose their divisions and finally discredit the idea of a common European foreign policy. Beyond these fears there is a fairly widespread apprehension that at a time of dangerous regional volatility, diplomatic moves may have entirely unpredictable consequences: unexpected outbreaks of violence, an escalation of tensions.

But could the crisis be turned into a moment of opportunity? In particular, does it not offer a chance to resume negotiations on a more satisfactory foundation, whereas the present framework, with the United States as the sole, ostensibly impartial mediator – though, at a deeper level, consistently in favour of Israel – is increasingly unable to move the “peace process” forward? The recognition of a Palestinian state does not entail the end of negotiations – a false alternative – and it should not be difficult for the Europeans to agree in pressing for their resumption, especially in view of the dangerous regional situation. The EU countries are also agreed on the “parameters” of an eventual settlement; where they differ is in their willingness to act against the wishes of the Israeli government. But even here, and in relation to other difficult choices that may arise, the diversity of perceptions and opinions may work to their advantage. It could make for more carefully considered policies than does the rather monolithic American policy “community,” which has had no difficulty in overcoming Obama’s initially heterodox intuitions in relation to the Palestinian issue – or, for that matter, in relation to Iran.

But why should Europe be able to succeed in restarting negotiations when the United States has been manifestly unable to do so? Before attempting an answer, it is necessary to examine another fundamental issue that Western policymakers and most commentators have been unwilling to confront. This is the fact that direct negotiations are bound to be fruitless if one of the parties rejects the ostensible aim of the negotiations. As Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer has recently maintained, Netanyahu’s diplomacy, his earlier record, and indeed his choice of coalition partners can best be understood as indications of his basic ideological commitment to Israel’s supremacy over the whole of Palestine. Thus, his goal is to prevent the two-state solution, long accepted by Israel as well as ly as the aim of the negotiations. To express this openly would mean the loss of all support and would alarm the Israeli electorate, so Netanyahu pretends to accept a Palestinian state while putting forward unacceptable preconditions for negotiating, as his diplomacy in Washington earlier this year made clear. Western policy-makers are reluctant to see this. Their recent diplomacy has focused on seeking to persuade the Palestinians to return to direct negotiations instead of going to the United Nations (as if the one excluded the other), seemingly oblivious of the reasons why the Palestinians have come to see this as fruitless.

The fundamental weakness in Western policy has been its longstanding toleration of Israel’s relentless construction of settlements on Palestinian territory. The not-infrequent Western protests have remained verbal, with no mention of sanctions or even a willingness to engage in a diplomatic confrontation with Israel. Obama initially appeared to make this a precondition for negotiations, but acquiesced in Netanyahu’s obdurate resistance; his diplomacy returned to a more familiar and comfortable posture, persuading and pressuring the Palestinians to resume negotiations in unfavourable circumstances – which, not surprisingly, proved short-lived and fruitless. Again, most recently, enormous diplomatic efforts have been made in seeking to persuade the Palestinians to avoid a confrontation at the United Nations. This effort has now failed. US diplomacy is trapped in its contradictions. Support for Israel – for the current Israeli government, that is – negates its endeavour to support the “Arab Spring” and diminishes its standing in the region and beyond. It is sad that Obama’s diplomacy has come to this.

There seems to be no good reason for the Europeans to support the United States in this seemingly contradictory and hypocritical stance – claiming to support a two-state solution but voting against a Palestinian state. Germany’s traditional role of supporting Israel in European diplomacy might leave it with no other option, but it may be hoped that in the ensuing discussions it will cease to equate supporting Israel with supporting every wish of its current government, however devious it may be. The European Union will not be so greatly damaged by another split vote. Chancellor Angela Merkel has rightly pointed out that the important thing is what happens after the UN vote. And here, at the time of writing, the available information is far more sparse.

It is not clear, for example, whether the Europeans, or for that matter the Americans, have sought to dissuade Netanyahu from taking the kind of provocative steps that have been threatened – withholding the transfer of taxes collected on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, proclaiming the end of direct negotiations or even declaring that the Oslo Agreements are no longer valid. Perhaps an awareness of regional volatility might restrain even this Israeli government, but Western diplomacy should not leave this to chance. There has been no mention of this in the public reporting, but it is clear that damage limitation must be an important aspect of Western diplomacy in the next phase.

Beyond this, is there a prospect of utilising the crisis as a diplomatic opportunity? Could the moment of danger be the occasion for a diplomatic breakthrough? Could there be a return to negotiations with more favourable prospects than before? This would not seem out of the question, but it could only be achieved against the will of the Netanyahu government. It would require, in the first place, a freeze and later an abandonment of construction in the settlements (perhaps excepting those to be transferred to Israel under the proposed “territorial swaps”) and later some form of monitoring to prevent wilful obstruction – in other words, a willingness to exert the maximum diplomatic pressure.

But is this credible, and could an effective strategy be devised? If the problem of the Netanyahu government’s real goals is directly confronted, such a reorientation of EU diplomacy becomes conceivable, even though little more than tacit support could be hoped from the United States. The more difficult question is whether an effective strategy could be devised. It is difficult to suppose that persuasion alone would influence Netanyahu, or that the kinds of pressure and sanctions usually considered would be acceptable to the Europeans. But the arts of diplomacy have been greatly diminished in the Cold War era and subsequently. Earlier, it was not so much a question of sanctions and the like, but more one of outmanoeuvring one’s adversary, or counterpart, leaving him or her with no better option than to act as one sought: one devious actor getting the better of the other. Could Netanyahu be placed in a position where ambition, and even the desire to remain in office, could lead him to opt for the role of the leader who achieves a historic settlement at the cost of his longstanding commitments and his preferred coalition?

His weakness is the gap between his real and his pretended goal. The challenge to diplomacy would be to exploit this, to make proposals that he would find difficult to resist but which would push negotiations in the desired direction. It may well be necessary to grasp the nettle of the settlements issue at an early stage, and here there might be a powerful message to the Israeli public, delivered by one or more of the main European leaders in the region itself, bringing out the strength of the objections to their continued expansion, as illegitimate not only legally but even more morally. These are no more than hints at an answer. More important is the question of how to become clear about the nature of the diplomatic challenge. The Europeans may well lack the power to coerce such a government, but they have a wealth of under-used diplomatic expertise that the ad hoc personal diplomacy of its leaders, and their approach to foreign policy in terms of electoral preoccupation, have left woefully neglected. •

The post Palestine and the United Nations: crisis as opportunity? appeared first on Inside Story.

In Go Back to Where You Came From, a three-part documentary screened last week on SBS television, six people retrace the steps of refugees who came to Australia as onshore asylum seekers or through Australia’s offshore humanitarian program. Over a five-week period, they travel from Australia via several transit countries to two of the main sources of global refugee movements, Iraq and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

At the beginning of their journey, the six stay for a week with refugees in Australia: a family from Burundi and the Congo living in Wodonga, and four Iraqi men living in Sydney. Then, in Darwin, they board what appears to be a leaky and entirely unseaworthy boat. Their next stop is Malaysia, where they are hosted by Chin refugees from Burma; later, they accompany Malaysian immigration officials on a raid to flush out illegal immigrants. Three of them travel on to Jordan and from there to Iraq, and the other three journey to the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya and from there to the Congo. In Jordan and at Kakuma they meet the relatives of the people who had hosted them in Australia.

In SBS’s publicity material for the series, the six participants – three men and three women – are consistently referred to as “ordinary Australians” chosen to represent a cross-section of the Australian community. Five of them embark on the journey with very strong anti–asylum seeker views, and at least three of those five don’t differentiate between asylum seekers and refugees or are antipathetic to refugees as well. Only one of the six, Gleny Rae, a singer and part-time teacher from Newcastle, believes that Australia should welcome refugees and asylum seekers. All six are deeply affected by the five-week journey, and several of them change their views.

The series was aggressively promoted by SBS in the weeks leading up to its first screening, and received a great deal of advance publicity in the media. As SBS’s Anton Enus put it this week, the show produced “nothing short of a phenomenon.” It is the highest-rating program screened by SBS so far this year and triggered an unprecedented response on Twitter and on blogs (including close to 5000 posts, and rising, on the SBS website). During the screening of the first episode, the hashtag #GoBackSBS briefly became Twitter’s number one trending topic worldwide. It is important to keep that in perspective, however; on Thursday, when Go Back to Where You Came From attracted 600,000 viewers in the capital cities, it only came nineteenth on the ratings table. MasterChef Australia, the highest rating show that evening, was watched by two-and-a-half times as many people.

The response to the program was overwhelmingly positive. At least six in every seven comments published on the SBS website praise the show, and these viewers use plenty of hyperbole. Kendall from Melbourne, for example, says: “The most important and topical television program I have ever witnessed.” “The most powerful and brilliant television I have ever seen,” writes Paul from Aldinga Beach. And Tony from Northcote comments: “Thank you SBS!!! I’ll be happy if I never get to watch television again after tonight.”

Many of these viewers liked the show because they found it moving. “Probably the most emotional, thought provoking & moving documentary ever produced on Australian television,” Mark Hearnden from Sydney writes. “This has been the most outstanding, influential, emotional and challenging thing that I have ever seen!” says Sarah from Adelaide. And Kelly from Mulgrave confesses: “I’m in bits here – nothing on tv or any screen has ever moved me as much. It is just so real, so powerful. It’s beautiful watching the changes in these people.”

This brings me to what I consider to be the key issue raised by the series and the public response. In a scene shot in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, Deo Masudi, the brother of the man from Burundi with whom three of the participants had stayed for a week in Wodonga, is talking to those same participants: Raye Colbey, who lives opposite the Inverbrackie detention centre in the Adelaide Hills, Raquel Moore, an unemployed self-confessed “racist” and Pauline Hanson admirer from Western Sydney, and Roderick Schneider, national vice-president of the Young Liberals, from Brisbane.

Deo says, “The big problem of this world is to educate the system to touch heart. If I touch your heart, immediately you are able to understand me. But if I don’t know how to touch your heart – no.” To which Raye Colbey replies, “I highly agree with you. I do think there’s a lot of people out there that do not really see what is happening. They look but they don’t see.”

The hearts of all six participants were touched by their encounters with refugees. In the course of the five weeks, they experienced a rollercoaster of emotions, including fear and anger. Overall, however – as far as I could ascertain on the basis of less than three hours of footage – one emotional response dominated: compassion.

It was their compassion that prompted the six participants to become interested in the issues. Most of them knew very little about asylum seekers and refugees, or about conditions in the countries they hail from or transit through. Their compassion towards the families whose lives they shared briefly in Australia, Malaysia, Jordan and Kenya made it possible for the six participants to look and to see.

Throughout the series, their “guide,” forced migration expert David Corlett, repeatedly refers to the project as a “social experiment.” The experiment demonstrated that the encounter with refugees could turn someone who hated asylum seekers into someone who was able to recognise them as suffering fellow human beings. Raye Colbey, for example, whose response to the Christmas Island boat tragedy of last December had been to say, “It served the bastards right,” wrote an opinion piece sympathetic to refugees that was published in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald on the day the first episode was broadcast.

The experiment wasn’t without its limitations, though. Not only were the refugees who participated in the series carefully selected, they were also put in the position of hosts: it was the refugees’ ability to extend hospitality to the six Australians, rather than the encounter as such, that produced a transformative effect. In The Response, a forum about the series which was broadcast this week, the six participants were asked to reflect on their experience. Raye Colbey said that the refugees she stayed with were “the most beautiful, beautiful people I think I’ve ever met” and later added what could be read as the main reason for her response: “These people, they open their heart to you… They would give you anything. That’s just the type of people they are.” In other words, for the participants in the social experiment to change and open their hearts, the film-makers needed to find refugees who were prepared to unreservedly welcome a group of privileged Westerners.

The other problem with the experiment is that it cannot be easily extended or even replicated. We – non-refugees – can’t all go to Kakuma and live with a refugee family for a week. We can’t invite ourselves into the houses of refugees resettled in Australia. There are, of course, avenues whereby non-refugees can get to know asylum seekers and refugees. But they tend to be used by people who are already sympathetic to refugees. I am sure there are a million or more Raquels out there – and, as the series amply demonstrates, to change their mind requires an enormous effort. To afford every racist in Australia the opportunity to feel for refugees can’t be the solution.

The producers of the series have emphasised the experimental nature of what was happening on screen. The more interesting experiment, however, took place in front of the screen. The series had a profound impact on those watching it.

GO BACK to Where You Came From is the second Australian TV documentary about asylum seeker issues to move many of its viewers to tears. The first was broadcast ten years ago.

The Four Corners program “The Inside Story” was first screened on 13 August 2001 by the ABC. It was largely about the Villawood detention centre in Sydney and about the persecution that three asylum seekers who’d fled to Australia had faced in Algeria, Iraq and Iran. It became famous, however, for its depiction of Shayan Badraie, a six-year-old Iranian boy who by then had been in Villawood for eleven months and had stopped speaking, eating and drinking. “The Inside Story” used footage of Shayan and his parents filmed three months earlier by Aamer Sultan, an Iraqi detainee who was a trained medical doctor, using a video camera smuggled into the centre.

“The Inside Story” became one of the most talked about current affairs television programs ever shown in Australia. After the broadcast, the program website received over 5000 emails, more than twice the previous record. It had the potential to change the dynamics of the conflict between the supporters and the opponents of Australia’s policy of mandatory detention. This was partly because the latter’s campaign had previously been hamstrung by the invisibility and inaudibility of refugees in detention. “These are voices the Australian public have not heard,” the executive producer of Four Corners wrote in defence of the decision to broadcast Aamer Sultan’s video footage. “Asylum seekers have mostly been faceless, voiceless problems. Seeing them as human beings, perhaps for the first time, led many viewers to respond.” But while viewers may have heard the voices of asylum seekers, they saw only one of them who, importantly, was not able to speak. As the journalist Margot O’Neill wrote in her account of the program, “For the first time, the boat people have a human face; a pale, tormented child’s face.”

“The Inside Story” had an immediate and powerful effect because it allowed viewers to extend their compassion to Shayan and, albeit to a lesser extent, his parents. Because the footage of Shayan and his parents was shot by an amateur under visibly taxing circumstances, viewers’ access to Shayan seemed unmediated.

But what to do about that outpouring of emotion? For the previous two years, the Howard government had been uncompromising in its response to protests in Australia’s detention centres – which included many incidents of self-harm – not least because it wanted to win back voters it had lost to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party. For a moment, it looked as if the government was on the defensive. Philip Ruddock, the immigration minister, suggested that it was the fault of Shayan’s parents that their child was suffering, but his argument had little impact. The child was pure. He was being hurt. Deliberately. By the government. Our government. Compassion gave way to shame – that is, to an emotion concerned not with the other, but with self.

Whatever emotions were aroused in mid August 2001 among the majority of those who saw “The Inside Story,” the program had largely been forgotten by the end of the month, when the Tampa arrived off Christmas Island with more than 400 asylum seekers on board – people whose faces remained invisible and who could be perceived as a threat. Another two weeks later, the terrorist attacks in the United States prompted Australians to associate asylum seekers, who at the time were predominantly Muslims from Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan, with terrorists. Seemingly having won the debate, the government didn’t, however, so easily forget the lesson of “The Inside Story.” The “children overboard” lies are, in my view, a direct, albeit belated, response to the Four Corners program.

WHAT’S the difference between “The Inside Story” and Go Back to Where You Came From? The SBS series does not, in the first instance, prompt the viewer to extend his compassion towards refugees in Australia, Malaysia, Jordan, Kenya or the Congo. Of course we (non-refugees) can feel for Deo Masudi, the man in the Kakuma camp who calls for our compassion. But that’s largely incidental. The focus of the viewers’ emotions are the six participants. The day after the third episode, Penny from Perth posted the following comment: “I’ve barely slept a wink over the last three nights. I go to bed churning over the sights that have confronted me in SBS’s unbelievably brilliant show.” And what are those sights? The post continues: “I loooove Gleny – go girl for showing such compassion and cultural awareness ie advising Raquel about wearing more clothes, and covering your head in Jordan (that scarf really suits you). I applaud Rae and Raquel on their changes of heart.”

Like many viewers, Jennifer from Bonnet Bay was deeply moved by the show: “I cried throughout the program as my basic instincts as a human being to sympathise and empathise with all involved just overwhelmed me.” But when referring to “all involved,” she seemed to have very particular people in mind: “It is gratifying to see that individuals with such set and negative views can be moved and changed by contact with others whose experiences are just so different and so abjectly harsh by comparison to our own ‘lucky country’ experiences here in Australia.”

In order to understand the impact the series had on its audience we need to take notice of the relationship that developed between the viewers and the six protagonists. The audience empathised with the protagonists, irrespective of their politics. The audience appreciated the significance of the challenge the six participants faced – not because they visited places that aren’t safe but because from very early on it was clear that they would be different people at the end of those five weeks (in fact, make that three nights). One viewer, who said she loved “watching their transformations,” aptly called the six participants “pioneers.” They went where many in the audience hadn’t dared to go – and again, I am not referring to the Congo or Iraq, but to a preparedness to open one’s heart to strangers and to reflect critically on one’s own prejudices.

“The Inside Story” left its audience lost for words. Shayan was so innocent, so pure and, thanks to television, right in their living rooms – yet also so far away. When the program had ended, viewers could only see themselves, and averted their eyes in shame.

The six “ordinary Australians” of Go Back to Where You Came From are by no means beyond reach. They are my next-door neighbour, the mother of my brother’s best mate, the young woman working at the corner shop.

Racist, ignorant and self-centred Raquel – and not any of the refugees featured in the program – ultimately became the star of the show. When some ten thousand viewers tweeted during the first episode, the main subject matter of their messages was Raquel. She was irritating and attracted a great deal of scorn and derision. It was difficult to empathise with her. But it was Raquel, more so than any of the others, who got the audience emotionally involved. The viewers’ emotional investment paid off when Rachel changed during the third episode. “Three cheers for Raquel. Raquel was amazing,” Peter from Geelong wrote after that episode. Jimmy from Sydney commented: “I love Raquel. From pariah to Princess in my eyes.” David from Perth said: “Fantastic & well done Raquel. Watching you mature and develop a lovely smile over three nights spoke heaps.” “You little beauty Raquel! So proud of how far you have come in this journey,” wrote Marianne from Darwin.

It’s worth remembering, however, that the director and his team were able to fashion characters. Condensing five weeks into less than three hours, they selected a small fraction of the footage they had at their disposal. At least one of the participants, ex-soldier Darren Hassan, felt misrepresented. In the show he played the role of the unrepentant tough guy who is incapable of being emotional. His role was as important as that of “pariah to princess” Raquel.

In fact, some of the characters seemed almost scripted. Matt Granfield had a point when he commented after the screening of the first episode: “The token characters were all represented.” References to what wasn’t broadcast, either in the documentary or in last night’s pre-recorded discussion in Sydney – one member of the live audience complained in a post on the SBS website that “all controversial questions” had been edited out – indicate that the show and its overall presentation were very carefully stage-managed.

While “The Inside Story” made viewers feel bad about their country, the SBS program had the opposite effect. “I feel so grateful living in Australia, especially after watching this show,” Chelsea from Newcastle wrote. While the Four Corners program had prompted viewers to identify with their government (and consequently feel ashamed), Go Back to Where You Came From encouraged viewers to barrack for the six participants as if they had been chosen to represent their country in a contest. “Thank god for SBS this is the most amazing series I have EVER seen on TV so proud to see all of the changes with these average Aussies,” Clinton from Melbourne wrote.

If the emotions triggered by Go Back to Where You Came From are foremostly about the six Australians, how useful is such a program in changing the hearts and minds of those whose votes can be bought with cheap slogans such as the Coalition’s “stop the boats”?

I think that in this respect the format of the SBS series actually worked. Compassion as a motivator for action that benefits those who suffer is overrated. Compassion is entirely dependent on a judgement made by the non-sufferer, and it is for the deserving. Imagine if Bahati Masudi, the host of Raquel, Raye and Roderick in Wodonga, had been pompous, aloof or critical of Australia. Imagine if he had ordered his wife around, screamed at his children, and lectured the three Australians. In that case, viewers wouldn’t have cared much about whether or not he will be reunited with his brother.

Compassion that relies on televised images alone is particularly fickle. Viewers are too cynical to believe every sob story they see on the small screen. And even if they are moved, their emotions tend to be fleeting. But the SBS series allowed viewers to rely on others when extending their compassion. They only had access to the footage broadcast on television, but they knew that the six Australians were there, and if they could show compassion against all odds (because they didn’t like refugees to start with) then those sentiments could act as a reliable yardstick.

According to commissioning editor Peter Newman and director Ivan O’Mahoney the aim of the series was not to make viewers take sides. They wanted viewers to appreciate the complexity of global refugee movements. To that end, SBS has provided a host of excellent material on its website – including a quiz, fact sheets and an online simulation that allows users to take on the role of a refugee fleeing an Australia that has descended into anarchy. The series itself also contained a lot of contextualising information. Viewers were able to learn a lot about the scope and complexity of the problem.

Again judging from the responses on the SBS website, many viewers were receptive. The emotions aroused by the series and the identification with the six participants were crucial in allowing viewers to hear that message (or, to use Raye Colbey’s words again, to look and to see). The audience learned with and through Raye and Raquel and Adam and Roderick and Gleny and Darren. And just as the six participants learned about the complexity of the refugee situation because they felt for and with their hosts, the compassion elicited by the series made it possible that the information – which wasn’t new and has always been readily available – was taken in.

Compassion is an important catalyst, rather than a useful end point. The compassion extended to the refugees featured in the series also allowed the six participants – and, by extension, their audience – to think of rights in a concrete way. The response to refugees and asylum seekers needs to be informed by our obligations and capacity, and circumscribed by their rights. Compassion, which focuses on a perceived need, does not take into account a sufferer’s right to relief. But the right to seek and enjoy asylum is too abstract a concept to have much appeal. Like most Australians, at least four of the six participants have a strong sense of entitlement. It was perhaps that very sense of entitlement that allowed them to appreciate that refugees have the right to have aspirations similar to those of Australians, and that they have the right to be given an opportunity to realise those aspirations.

I believe the moral philosopher Lawrence Blum had compassion’s role as a catalyst in mind when he wrote: “True compassion must be allied with knowledge and understanding if it is to serve adequately as a guide to action.” The knowledge that’s crucial here is about the contexts in which suffering occurs, and about how the non-sufferer may be implicated in the sufferer’s predicament.

Viewers of the SBS series didn’t refer to the Four Corners program about Shayan Badraie in their online posts. But they frequently compared the SBS program with the Four Corners report about live cattle exports to Indonesia, broadcast on 30 May. The response to that program led to a ban on that trade. It was watched by fewer people than each of the three episodes of the SBS series.

Many viewers demanded that Australia’s political leaders watch Go Back to Where You Came From and then respond in a similar manner, namely abandon the Malaysian solution. The contrast between the response to the Four Corners program last month and the SBS series last week is stark. The SBS series generated hardly any public debate in the conventional sense. Chris Bowen, Scott Morrison, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott have not responded to the series; in fact, the only politician I could identify who put out a statement was Lee Rhiannon, the newly elected Greens senator for New South Wales. The commentariat (on both sides of the political fence) was also unusually quiet.

That is not to say that the series hasn’t been intensely debated. But it seems that Go Back to Where You Came From is not so much a subject for parliamentary question time as for discussions at the water cooler or the photocopier. The debate rages on blogs and in the Twittersphere rather than on the opinion pages of newspapers. Those responsible for the program intended this to be something that got “ordinary Australians” talking. This intention was emphasised again in the forum broadcast this week. Combative Jenny Brockie could have hosted the usual experts and politicians; instead, kind, avuncular Anton Enus chaired a gathering of the participants’ family and friends.

I think the creators of the program have been right in not trying to use the show to campaign for a change of policy, but instead focusing on the paucity of the debate, which has been partly responsible for a lot of poor policy in the past. In the unlikely event that the government had responded with a policy announcement (as it did after the program on live cattle exports), such an announcement in itself wouldn’t have changed the parameters of the debate. That debate is marked by a profound lack of understanding (owing to a lack of knowledge of the most basic facts) and by the refusal to acknowledge that some problems are so complex that they defy quick-fix solutions.

It is too early to predict the long-term impact of Go Back to Where You Came From. I would like to see evidence for Peter Newman’s claim that “the series has managed to wrestle back this issue away from the political arena and put it in the hands of the people,” and can’t wait to find out whether or not the emotions aroused by the series will lead to a greater understanding of the complexity of the issues involved in Australia’s response to refugees and asylum seekers. •

The post Matters of the heart appeared first on Inside Story.

SUNRISE is perhaps the most beautiful time of day, much like sunset but with a sense of energy and optimism. On the few occasions over the past decade and a half that I’ve stayed up all night, my mind has returned to the night in Amman a decade and a half ago, when I stayed up, without intending to, until dawn and beyond. A string of encounters made it a far more interesting evening and early morning than I had anticipated, cementing my interest in the Middle East and giving me fresh insight into that fascinating, complex and at times infuriating part of the world.

The night’s experiences were already half over when I snuck up to the roof of my hotel in the downtown area of the city well after midnight, carrying a book that I didn’t end up reading, and found a small foldout chair to sit on. It was the middle of summer, and the temperature was almost perfect; opposite was the Roman amphitheatre with a major street running in front of it, and I could see across to the hill opposite, where an old citadel and the royal palace stood within the maze of buildings on the hillside. In the dark, of course, the details of the scene were obscured, but the streetlights and house lights illuminated just enough to create a magical vista.

Many people prefer the old buildings of Islamic Cairo, or the Mediterranean charm of Beirut and Alexandria, or the historical weight of Jerusalem, and Amman certainly can’t compete with those places in terms of history and complexity. From the air it looks similar to other Arab cities: dun-coloured, slightly chaotic and densely populated. On the ground, close up, it has a distinct atmosphere and mood.

In front of me and to my left, between the hotel and the opposite hill, ran Al-Hashemi Street, one of the main roads through the downtown area. During the day it had been abuzz with activity and bursting with traffic; blocks of cars surged past, with few breaks for the hapless pedestrian trying to get across the street. Now, it was almost silent, with only the sound of an occasional truck or taxi or a very occasional car or bike.

Before I knew it the first of the day’s prayers, at first light, were echoing out across the city. As the skyline quickly turned pink, then orange, the city came to life. The shops started to open, people began appearing in larger numbers on the footpaths, the traffic grew denser, and the noises of the city rose from the dawn murmur to a rumbling, honking, pulsating commotion. My visit to this remarkable city was almost over.

THE EVENING had begun when I decided to head out for dinner. I’d been in Jordan for a few months doing interviews and collecting material for my doctorate, and this was my last night in Amman. After that, I had only a few days in Bahrain ahead of me before heading back home. The plan was to have a pleasant dinner and then get some sleep before the flight. I had seen everything there was to see of the place – or so I thought.

Deciding to splurge on dinner, I went out early to a small Lebanese restaurant in Shmeisani. Back then this was probably the most upmarket of Amman’s suburbs, and to this day it’s not a bad place for a meal or some shopping. Lebanese food would have to be my favourite: it’s more than enough just sitting down to mezza, the little hors d’oeuvre–type dishes that to many people are Lebanese food. At a good restaurant, of course, there can be fifteen or twenty such dishes, including olives, dips, sausages, stuffed vegetables or vine leaves, and sardines. In a good restaurant in Lebanon itself, the breadth of mezza becomes an art form.

What we think of as Lebanese or Middle Eastern food in Australia can be quite different. For many of us the signature dish is felafel – deep-fried balls of spiced chickpea or broad bean paste – but in the Middle East felafel is a street food. Here, a restaurant serving felafel would be like an Australian restaurant serving up a battered sav or a meat pie (although I suppose some celebrity chef has done exactly that, with appropriate irony). Like everything else, even the humble felafel is politically contested in the Middle East: it is claimed by Egyptians (who call it ta’amiyya), Palestinians, Israelis and, of course, Lebanese, among others. The word itself – meaning “peppers” but also possibly a corruption of the adjective for “crunchy” – gives little away about its origins.

The region has seen so much intermingling of foods that these days little is authentically the product of one country. Much has been claimed from interactions with the rest of the world: chillies and potatoes – and so many other of today’s staples – from the New World, along with the now almost globally ubiquitous tomato; eggplants probably from India; many herbs and especially spices from South Asia and Southeast Asia; and tea, of course, from China. The Arabs claim to have invented the drying process for pasta, when they occupied Sicily, but they probably got the idea from the Chinese and their noodles.

The waiter in the restaurant that night was a member of the largest group in Jordan, the Palestinians. Although Jordan is ruled by a monarchy originally from the Arabian peninsula and backed by the local bedouin (tribespeople), the waves of migration after the 1948–49 Arab–Israeli War and the 1967 Six Day War mean that, by some estimates, 70 per cent or more of the population is Palestinian. Apart from creating some delicate politics within the kingdom, this means that many of the ordinary people one meets in Jordan – most of the taxi drivers, service station attendants, waiters, for example – are Palestinian.

This young waiter was charming and amusing, but when I eventually asked him about his heritage and his politics, the fire within him erupted. The rage he felt about his own family’s loss, and that of his people, was palpable. He was ardent in his belief that the Oslo peace process – which was still alive at the time, but just starting its long unravelling after Binyamin Netanyahu’s election win in May that year – was a distraction staged by Israel, with American blessing, to formalise Israel’s final borders on terms that would destroy the Palestinians and any chance they had for a viable state of their own.

He may have been right. At any rate, his claims were among the most common heard in the region. Besides, who if born Palestinian would not be a conspiracy theorist? Most Palestinians have a cheerless story to tell, and saddest of all are the oldest ones, who cling to memories from before 1948 and sometimes still keep a title deed or a photo as if it will let them reclaim for their families the land they lost. That land is now part of a rebuilt village, or a parking lot, or a warehouse, and however unjust it might be, they will probably never get it back.

My waiter was no fan of Jordan, either. He felt unable to afford a stable existence, which would mean he could get married, and said that “the Jordanians” – the local tribespeople, presumably – discriminate against the Palestinian majority living among them. It’s true that there is a glass ceiling of sorts for Palestinians in some government institutions and certain career paths, but the Jordanians have given the Palestinians citizenship – other Arab states do not – and have not just allowed, but often blessed, marriages and other links across Jordanian–Palestinian lines. They have been pretty good hosts, in fact.

The other interesting group represented at the restaurant were the expatriates. About half a million Iraqis had fled to Jordan from Saddam’s Iraq during the 1990–91 Gulf War, but at that time there were not a huge number of Westerners living in the kingdom. There are many more now, to the point where renting an apartment in Abdoun, one of the wealthiest areas of Amman and among the most popular among Europeans, Americans and others can cost more than a comparable place in Sydney or Melbourne. Gone are the 1970s when Jordan was a cheap place to live in or visit; even in 1996 it was more costly than Egypt, Syria or other favourite haunts of long-term backpackers.

I ended up talking to a group of Brits who were at the next table: a couple who had stopped and settled for a few years in Jordan after more than a decade travelling the world teaching English, and a couple of expatriate businesspeople of some sort. Almost immediately they were complaining about their respective lots in life: about the vagaries of the local culture, the inconveniences of adjusting to local norms, the isolation, the cost of living – yes, seriously – and the things that they missed being away from home.

I was gobsmacked – how many people could I think of who would love to have a life as flavoursome and stimulating as theirs – and yet it’s amazing how often such grumbling is heard. Jordan, moreover, is one of the easier places to live as a foreigner: its people are friendly, English is quite widely spoken as a second language, and most Western luxuries can be found there. Of course, expatriates who spend too long away from home can become isolated, no matter where they are, and I will never forget the melancholy – it was probably grief, actually – of the wife of a businessman I knew who, after more than thirty years moving around the world, said she had become so itinerant that she no longer had a place to be buried. That is a real sorrow born of losing one’s connections to place: to any place. Much more common are the expatriates who, having chosen the life they now have, squander all that is dynamic, insightful and educational about it, often for the very reason they chose to live abroad to begin with – because it’s not like home.

FOR WHATEVER reason, even after a very long and filling dinner I knew I would not be able to sleep, and so I went on to a nearby bar. I am not simply falling prey to the allure of a part of the world I fell in love with when I say that Jordan is friendly. It is also, in fact, a remarkably safe place, and in that respect not unusual in the region. I have walked through many cities of the Middle East at night; Damascus at two in the morning, Cairo many times in the late evening, even places like Beirut and Tehran, and there is generally a strong feeling of safety, at least from street violence or theft. Terrorism, war and generalised violence are a feature of very particular places at certain times – right now, I would not visit the Gaza Strip, or wander around Yemen, or travel in the Arab parts of Iraq, without being very, very nervous – but most of the region, most of the time, is very safe.

In decor and atmosphere, the bar was clearly targeting Western customers, but as is often the case with pubs in the region, as many locals as foreigners were gathered there. Some, I assume, were alcoholics – a couple of the patrons looked completely lost in themselves – probably drinking for the same reasons as alcoholics the world over. Others might have lived in the West at some point, or simply aspired to do so, and for them sampling beers in a smoky pub was exotic, a link to another culture. I struck up a conversation with one of the patrons – again a Palestinian – and found that he had a mix of reasons for being there. He was bored and not terribly happy with his daily routine, but as an engineer he was hardly among the destitute of the city. He was there, he claimed, partly to seek out foreigners, to meet people who were a little more exotic and interesting than those he normally saw at work or at home.

The bar seemed to act as a place for local prostitutes to meet people as well. Prostitution in the Middle East gets little attention in the West, even from academics studying the region, yet it is common enough. I once had a student ask me if prostitution even existed in the Middle East, to which the only answer I could muster was, “Only to the extent that sex exists there.” Certainly the industry in the Middle East is much more discreet than in Australia – there are no newspaper ads for escorts, and no women standing on sidewalks in seedier parts of large cities (or if they do, they are stopped very quickly and emphatically) – but it is probably not much smaller as an industry as a result. In poorer countries it thrives off tourism: in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, as examples, there are streams of European tourists who support it. Important, too, are visitors from the Gulf, who in the summer months will stay for weeks or even two or three months. In many cases, a couple of young men on one of these longer summer vacations will rent an apartment short-term, complete with a couple of “maids” to assist in various household duties. Most countries in the region have massage parlours, many but not all of which are legitimate therapy centres.

Common in bars like this one are women from the former Soviet Union who are technically employed as waitresses or cleaners or singers but who moonlight as prostitutes (with the bar manager’s blessing, of course, since he’s getting an often unfairly large cut of the takings). This type of bar is common in global cities like Dubai, and around the Mediterranean, and so this one in Amman that night was not unusual. Prostitution is a reminder of many things, I suppose: of a pathology in (male) human nature, of course, but also of how difficult and unfair life is for many women, especially those in poorer parts of the world. Some would have been aware of what they were coming to Amman to do, but most, I suspect, had little choice. Overrepresented in their ranks are Muslim women who have been disowned by their families for a sexual transgression of some kind: the concept of ’ird, or sexual honour, means that in all but the most Westernised or forgiving homes, such women are seen as having disgraced the family’s honour. Common too are widows and refugees, again with little choice and little power to change their circumstances.

AFTER leaving the bar, I went for a long walk, at one point passing a butcher’s area behind a shop. A man was killing and cleaning chickens; other details, including how these poor birds were being treated in their final moments, are best not shared in any detail. I could not help but glare at him, so needlessly aggressive and desensitised had he seemingly become in his job. Once he noticed me, he yelled something; such was my Arabic that I could only discern a couple of words, but to help me out he followed up with a couple of choice expletives in English.

I would see many unkind, and some very nasty, acts against animals in the region over the years. What is most striking about the abuse of animals is the enormous gap between theory and practice: Islam was over a millennium ahead of its time in giving animals and their welfare real consideration. Respect for the lives of animals is built into its laws and customs, which include a prohibition against harming them needlessly or for human enjoyment or sport, and a requirement that animals being slaughtered for food in a halal (“lawful”) way must be killed quickly and with as little stress or pain as possible. There are many stories of the Prophet Mohammed being kind to animals and enjoining others to do likewise.

Current practice, however, can be very different. While our record in the West is not good in this regard – to some extent with pets, but especially with industrialised caged-chicken farming and egg production, and the treatment of pigs in feedlots – it seems to me worse in the Middle East. Some of the investigations carried out by Animals Australia and others highlight the maltreatment of animals in the region, including Australian sheep exported live for slaughter during festivals. There also seems a lack of education about such things, and even a lack of concern: if you raise this issue with people in the region, the most common reply is a question along the lines of, “Why do you worry about this, given the state of human rights and human welfare?” The region has enough political problems and human rights abuses that – while I still think animal welfare is important, and have since that night in particular – such a response is understandable.

THE NIGHT in Amman ended strangely, too, with a taxi ride to the airport a couple of hours after dawn. I still felt energised by the night, and yet sorry to be leaving, and I talked to the taxi driver about this. Normally I avoid conversations with taxi drivers, or at least I have to be in the mood. If travel has tarnished or hardened me, it’s probably evident in the assumption I make that taxi drivers the world over are opinionated and intrusive. They’re not, of course, but it can feel that way after one too many bad experiences.

We talked all the way to the airport, and my driver gave me a great many ideas and insights about the Middle East. This he did without damning it or apologising for it: he was about as dispassionate an analyst as you could find. Only occasionally do you meet someone who has a finely detailed and sophisticated understanding of the politics of the society they are in. In this case, the taxi driver was incredibly sharp, with complex and cogent insights into tribal politics, business processes, and even how corruption works. He told me stories that I still recount, fifteen years later, in my classes – stories that illustrate the complexity of politics, social relations and political economy in the region.

He was a devout Muslim, but did not try to push the religion on me. He explained the origins of the religion, and although much of what he said was conventional, a couple of points, on the intersection of traditions with religion, would have caused a stir with most clerics. He gave one of the most convincing and rational cases I have heard for the validity of religion, or at least for keeping an open mind, and for the potential of religion to coexist with science and other modern, secular forms of knowledge. It is rare in any society to find pious people who can so objectively explain and defend their religion in a conversation, without trying to impose it on the listener in the process.

I have forgotten after all this time whether he had trained in something else, but many taxi drivers in the Middle East are in the industry as a second job to help support a large family or a crushing mortgage, so I suppose he could have been just about anything else when he wasn’t driving a cab. Perhaps he had trained in religion, or politics, or something else. But still, it was a remarkable conversation. Not wanting it to end, I invited him for a coffee when we got to the airport and we talked for another hour, until I had to go and check in, hastily, for the flight.

What most amazed me – at the time, if less so now – was that he would not accept any money for driving me out to the airport. I protested repeatedly, but his sense of hospitality defeated me. “We are friends now,” he kept saying, “there is no way I can take your money.” Of all the things I’d seen and experienced in the Middle East during those months, and in Amman over the weeks there and over that final night and morning, this is now one of the warmest memories – a reminder that no matter how complex or infuriating the politics, the bureaucracy, the social rules, or the economics of the Middle East can sometimes be, the region is a conglomeration of people who truly are the most generous and hospitable in the world. And on top of that, the Jordanians and Palestinians might be the friendliest and most open of all.

AS TUNISIA and Egypt erupted into protests, and as their leaders were pushed out and Libya’s Gaddafi and Yemen’s Saleh looked like they would follow, many people have been wondering why Jordan seems so much quieter. There are tensions, and significant concerns about aspects of the country’s political economy, but Jordan is very different from Mubarak’s Egypt or Gaddafi’s Libya.

The people who live in Jordan hold differing views about the government. To the “Jordanians” – those with tribal ancestry in the area that now encompasses modern Jordan – the monarchy is accepted, even keenly liked. The current king’s father, Hussein, was an elder statesman of the Arab world by the time he died in 1999, and the affection felt for him was palpable when I was there in 1996. His son, Abdullah II, had a rocky initiation into politics, and needed to work hard to build links with the tribes, but he now seems to have earned legitimacy. Provided he can deliver leadership in consultation (usually informal) with the tribes and key established elites, he will not face any substantial opposition from their leaders. Without the support of the big tribes and families, the system would be in profound peril.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, have a complex historical relationship with the government. At times it has been very tense: when Jordan became a battleground in the Arab-Israeli conflict in the 1960s and 1970s, it became quite unstable. Yet the Palestinians have long played important roles in Jordan and been part of its society, and the situation now is very different from a generation ago. Many Palestinians have married into Jordanian families, or do business with them. While many of them feel as though they’re not treated equally – and indeed, they are not – they still enjoy citizenship rights, which Jordan alone in the region has offered them, and they have considerable economic opportunities open to them. People in both groups often make a distinction between the king and the political system.

And, in fact, there have been many protests in Jordan in recent months. What is crucial, however, is that these have not sought to remove the king or profoundly alter the political order. Instead, they have been an expression of popular anger or discontent over the cost of living, unemployment and corruption. They have targeted the cabinet, junior politicians, and corrupt officials and businesspeople, but not the king. Abdullah has handled these rather deftly, removing the entire government at one point in response to popular protest, and offering economic concessions, but firmly asserting his own position and nimbly maintaining his legitimacy in the process. •

The post One night in Amman appeared first on Inside Story.

IT SOMETIMES seems as though the history of the Middle East can be characterised as stasis punctuated by the very occasional burst of great change. Are we witnessing one of those rare moments of transformation? A year ago, few observers would have predicted the extent of the popular uprisings that have claimed two presidents – those of Tunisia and Egypt – and are likely to claim the leaders of Libya and Yemen as well. Few would have imagined the type of civil conflict now occurring in Libya, or the involvement of NATO warplanes in that conflict. Nor would many have guessed that Osama bin Laden – the world’s most wanted man for nearly a decade – would be killed by US special forces in a custom-made house only a few kilometres from Pakistan’s equivalent of Duntroon.

As much as this looks like an impressive array of profound changes for the region, these events are of very different orders of importance. Ultimately, bin Laden’s death is unlikely to be significant in a strategic or political sense, and any impact will depend greatly on other political happenings in the region: on whether the current protests bring real change, on how governments that survive uprisings decide to respond, even on evolving economic conditions and policies over the next year or two – not to mention how al Qaeda and other extremist groups respond to bin Laden’s death and the challenges the other events pose for them.

Bin Laden’s fate will probably turn out to be far less important for the War on Terror and for security than it might seem. It no doubt improves Barack Obama’s image at home and his re-election chances next November, although that vote is still a long way off. And it no doubt brings the satisfaction of justice and revenge for the many Americans who were personally affected by the September 11 attacks, and for the many more who saw that day as a declaration of war on America.

But that is about the extent of the benefits. Bin Laden was no longer managing al Qaeda in any operational sense, apart from having a very local influence, perhaps, or making an occasional contribution more widely. He had become a symbolic or figurehead leader of a still-important group – or actually a set of groups – but was the mascot of al Qaeda rather than its CEO.

Any plans being made by al Qaeda’s various branches and assemblages for attacks against local figures or Western targets will therefore continue without him. His death will probably not stop such attacks, but nor is it likely to increase them greatly. While it is prudent for the United States to prepare for revenge attacks, these are likely to be opportunistic or crude. Serious reprisals by al Qaeda, if they come, will not occur for some time: a professional attack with a good chance of success takes a long time to plan, prepare and implement.

More important is the fact that al Qaeda is changing; it is fragmenting and transforming, sometimes mixing with like-minded groups. Its power has indeed been eroded by the United States and its allies, as American officials often claim. The very meaning of the name al Qaeda has changed: these days, apart from referring to a core leadership in the Pakistan–Afghanistan area, it is partly a brand name used for and by various groups, and partly a catch-all for the disjointed, loosely affiliated ideological associates of bin Laden and other top figures.

These include “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” a group that once posed a real military threat to US and coalition forces in Iraq, but which is now greatly weakened by the 2006 killing of its leader Abu Mus’ab al-Zarkawi. It now faces US and Iraqi forces that are fighting it in increasingly effective ways. The main Sunni tribes in central and western Iraq have turned on the organisation – to the extent that they ever supported it very much – and it enjoys few real safe havens in areas that were, back in 2006, among the most dangerous places in the world for an American soldier. The future of Iraq is by no means certain, but Al Qaeda in Iraq’s looks increasingly bleak.

They also include “al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” with its membership mostly of Yemeni and Saudis, formed by the merger of the Yemeni and Saudi branches of al Qaeda in early 2009. The organisation claimed, before bin Laden’s death, to follow his ideas devotedly, demonstrating the likely personal and ideological links that many of its members have with bin Laden or other core figures.

A quite different example is “al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.” This group was formed by the supposed merger of an Algerian extremist group, the Group for Preaching and Combat, with al Qaeda. It is less an anti-American or anti-Western group and, given its origins, is most focused on fighting the Algerian government. Its salafi origins are important as well: the salafi (meaning “predecessors” or “ancestors”) seek to emulate the earliest generations of Muslims, and thus are most often, if somewhat simplistically, described as ultra-puritans and literalists. This is somewhat in contrast to other al Qaeda figures, including bin Laden himself, who are most focused on anti-Saudi, anti-atheist and anti-American ideas, and who are not strictly salafi, even if they very often share a similarly extreme dogma.

IT MIGHT seem paradoxical, but the emergence of new al Qaeda–named groups is not a sign of health for the organisation – quite the opposite. Al Qaeda’s image and the support and sympathy it attracts in the Muslim world have been declining for some time, in many places markedly.

Research conducted by the respected Pew Research Centre for many years, most recently in 2010, illustrates the organisation’s problem. When asked whether they had “confidence” in bin Laden, only 19 per cent of Muslim respondents in Egypt said yes, significantly lower than the peak of 27 per cent in 2006. In Jordan the number was only 14 per cent, as against a peak of 61 per cent − yes, 61 per cent − in 2005. In Lebanon the figure was only 3 per cent, against 19 per cent back in 2003. Bin Laden had been losing his appeal in much of the Muslim world.

Most telling perhaps is that even in Pakistan – where bin Laden has always been assumed to enjoy considerable levels of support and where al Qaeda can operate more freely than in most Arab countries – bin Laden’s popularity has plummeted too, from 52 per cent in 2005 to 18 per cent in the 2009 and 2010 surveys.

In other words, al Qaeda has been struggling to maintain its base of support and its perceived relevance beyond a small, radicalised core. And in recent months, new challenges have emerged for the groups that now make up the organisation.

Far and away the most important have been the protests across much of the region. Very large groups of people, disproportionately secular, often young and mostly consisting of men and women protesting together, have managed to remove the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia, will probably claim the Yemeni president and Libyan leader, and have threatened several others. Al Qaeda has always promised that it would unite people and bring about change like this; not only did it fail, but when change finally did come it was dominated by political forces and ideas that were almost the opposite of al Qaeda’s.

All the current dynamics – a fragmented structure, a leadership on the run, popularly led change, new economic conditions – are serious for al Qaeda, and help explain why bin Laden’s death may prove less significant than it might have been even a couple of years ago, let alone back in 2001 or 2002. Nevertheless there remain important variations and nuances, by country, in the level al Qaeda’s support.

Support is lowest or declining most quickly where a variety of arguments and ideas compete with each other in the political realm, where the scope is greatest for people to express political views and frustration, or where economic conditions and opportunities are improving, even if only gradually and tortuously. In countries like Jordan and Egypt, and even increasingly in parts of the Gulf, the scope for political expression is now greater than it has been in the recent past.

It is also likely that the recent protests will cause many leaders to be more responsive to popular political and economic wishes and aspirations. New leaders in Tunisia and Egypt will obviously recognise and respond to the popular concerns that drove the protests in those countries. Even where old leaders remain in power, many are now on notice. If their policies and actions are more in line with public opinion then the space for extremist groups like al Qaeda to build a base of support will be greatly diminished. This was already happening when US troops stormed bin Laden’s compound last Sunday night.

Elsewhere the picture is more complicated, but no more promising for al Qaeda. In Syria, it is unclear how much sympathy for Islamists lies beneath a superficially quite secular society and political system. More moderate Islamism was probably sent into hiding, but not destroyed completely, by the government’s crackdown on opposition organisations in the 1980s, yet support for al Qaeda–type Islamism is not likely to be very strong.

In the Gulf, by contrast, al Qaeda has been running out of steam because the region is changing. Many states and cities are opening their economies, and most have fared well out of high oil prices for most of the last seven or so years. Some states, most notably Qatar, now permit considerably more political openness and discussion than they once did. Such change is, of course, not popular with everyone, and some regimes still struggle to ensure sufficient legitimacy and support, but the changes of recent years have for the most part created conditions that suit incumbent regimes and moderate politics rather than bin Laden and like-minded figures.

Yemen is probably the one exception. An autocratic leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh, has squandered the oil wealth that has flowed in over the past quarter-century, and which is quickly running out. Yet al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is not anything like a mainstream organisation there. It is more popular than in some other places, but that’s probably because it can operate freely, is emphatic in the politics it preaches, is seen as relatively incorrupt, and finds some consistency with the strong traditionalism that is found in Yemen.

That said, to think that the very traditionalist tribes of Yemen are natural partners for an ideology like al Qaeda’s is to misunderstand both: even those tribes who oppose Saleh do not want to replace his authority with al Qaeda’s, and al Qaeda, even if it appreciates the training and operational freedom available in Yemen, probably does not expect to be able to convert traditional Yemenis to its ideology en masse.

WHILE bin Laden’s appeal may have been waning along with al Qaeda’s, it is still important to remember the uncertainties and risks that lie behind all these recent trends and events. Various new political forces and groups are now appearing and operating more freely than used to be possible. These include, for example, some very puritanical Islamist groups in various countries of the Middle East.

It also remains likely that the protests in which people have invested so much faith and optimism will deliver only a fraction of the change that is expected of them. Where they have removed leaders, they have still not profoundly changed the political system; in Egypt, in fact, the political change so far has been minimal. Elsewhere, leaders have appeared to respond, but if this remains more rhetoric than action then popular disappointment and anger, or further rounds of protests, are likely.

Even the more moderate Islamist elements should be viewed with caution. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, for example, played little part in the uprising there and was initially seen as having gained not much, if anything, from events. But it has quietly, and elegantly, laid the groundwork for a longer-term development of its popular base and its political power, especially its legislative power. It can now operate much more freely in a political environment in which secular and moderate forces, while popular, lack the cohesion and discipline that the Brotherhood and other large Islamist parties often possess.

Once the Brotherhood is fully established as a legal political party, it will probably devote its energies to winning as many parliamentary seats as possible. This does not give it the amount of direct authority that a president still retains, but it will make it a force to be reckoned with when policies and laws are being considered and implemented.

When all these dynamics are placed together, a mixed picture emerges. Bin Laden, thankfully, was no longer the figure he was even three or four years ago, and al Qaeda too lacks the cachet and coordination of the years before and after September 11. Add in the protests of recent months and there is considerable room for optimism in and towards the Middle East – a region that once seemed immune to peaceful or profound political change and stuck in developmental and social ruts.

Still, there is a strong risk that bin Laden’s death will be overplayed – it may be satisfying to many, but is of little strategic meaning or importance – or that too much will be expected of other changes that are moving through the region. The Western world has a habit of expecting too much from the Middle East, and assuming too much about it: the stakes right now suggest that to repeat such habits would be particularly perilous. •

The post The Middle East after bin Laden appeared first on Inside Story.

By this account, oil was a blessing, both literally and metaphorically, which helped make the country. But the reality has proved to be much more complex. We no longer believe that large “rental” incomes, especially from oil, are a simple positive. Oil may bring wealth, but it also brings currency problems, employment challenges, other economic maladjustments and, above all, problems of governance and foreign relations – which together are now routinely referred to as the “resource curse.” It isn’t surprising, therefore, that another story from Saudi Arabia, originating barely a generation later in the 1970s, has the former oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Yamani lamenting, “All in all, I wish we had discovered water instead.”

If nothing else, oil has given Saudi Arabia the world’s attention. It is a strategically important country producing around 12 per cent of the world’s most strategic commodity – and closer to a fifth of the world’s internationally traded oil – and sitting on top of almost a quarter of the world’s proven reserves of conventional oil. It is also an important gas producer and downstream manufacturer. No one – not the protesters who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the assumption that it was about American control of Iraqi oil (it was not) nor those who worry about the attention showered on corrupt or authoritarian Arab regimes by Western oil executives and politicians – disputes the fact that oil is central to the fortunes of Saudi Arabia and its neighbours.

Indeed it is. As a result, there has long been an interest, among scholars and observers covering oil and energy politics, in how oil shapes and influences political dynamics. Scholars have developed a range of theories applicable to modern Saudi Arabia. These include “rentier state” theory, which seeks to show that “allocative leaderships” are the reason why democracy so seldom takes hold in oil states, and theories such as neopatrimonialism, which argues that patron–client webs at the elite level explain the pattern of rule and durability in closed authoritarian systems. It is now common for lists of “the best books of the year on the Middle East” or suchlike to include several about Saudi Arabia. There is now a range of scholars who would qualify as true experts on Saudi Arabia and who have produced great works about it.

How things have changed. Until a decade or so ago, the kingdom had long been notorious for being an extremely difficult place in which to do research, whether academic or journalistic. It was very closed, and felt that way: requesting one of the scant academic or research visas from Saudi officials back in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s was excruciating, most of all where the topic touched on politics. Even if one did gain entry, there was still the problem of building local networks and friendships to the point where people had enough trust to talk about the country openly.

Not that getting into Saudi Arabia has become easy, but at least some recent scholars have begun to spend significant time in the country and to back up their research with fieldwork, interviews, personal observations, and the anecdotes and insights that one only gets from an affiliation and affinity with a place and its people. As a result, the year 2010 was a bumper year for great books on Saudi Arabia. One was Steffen Hertog’s masterpiece, Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia. Hertog worked in Saudi Arabia and saw its public institutions from the inside, and it shows. This is bound to quickly become a classic in Middle Eastern studies and especially in the political economy of oil states.

Another book, also by an emerging expert, is Thomas Hegghammer’s Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979, which is already the most extensive and thoroughly researched work on the evolution of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. But both books are very academic works: to those with only passing knowledge of Saudi Arabia and the more salient political theories on Arab politics, they will probably prove dense and heavy-going.

The third of these imposing new books about Saudi Arabia is Toby Craig Jones’s Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia. Jones has much in common with Hertog and Hegghammer; each has a top academic pedigree, having graduated from top universities: Hertog’s doctorate is from Oxford, Hegghammer’s from Sciences Po and Jones’s from Stanford, and all three have based their books not only on rigorous scholarship but also on extensive fieldwork. Jones spent a year living in the country, attached to a university and conducting his research on the ground.

Of the three, Jones’s book will probably appeal most to the educated lay reader. It is analytical but engagingly written and not overly theoretical, perhaps because Jones is a historian rather than a political scientist. And yet despite its readability and engaging narrative, Jones’s book is just as insightful and academically original as the others – and may even be the most original of the three.

While almost all scholars of the Middle East would say that oil has been integral to defining modern Saudi Arabia, it is remarkable that none – at least since Sheikh Yamani’s comment in the 1970s – has looked in any detail at another natural resource, water, and its impact on modern Saudi history. Has it really eluded scholars that Saudi Arabia has not a single lake or river of any substance, and that its people would begin to die of thirst if the kingdom’s desalination plants were to fail? Apparently so. Desert Kingdom is the only study of any size or depth that places water side-by-side with oil in a study of twentieth-century Saudi Arabia.

Jones brings a unique line of argument to the debate about the modern political history of Saudi Arabia. He argues that the Saudi royal family governs and holds together a fragile state not merely because of oil revenue, important though that is, but also through careful management of both oil and water. At its core, his book argues that the regime controls natural resources, whether hydrocarbons or water, and that, in doing so, it gains control of the population.

THE Saudi state as we know it today is, of course, a fragmented and artificial creation. It was built by the al Saud family, yes, but only through complex arrangements. A diverse set of tribal groups were brought into the fold through marriage, coercion or the al Sauds’ use of the Ikhwan militia. These dynamics require a symbiotic arrangement with clerics, who otherwise could build a popular base and claim religious legitimacy, and the business community on the Red Sea coast, which otherwise could draw on its wealth to demand autonomy from the state. On top of that, of course, is the famous, or infamous, trade with the United States: energy security for Washington in return for protection against external threats for Riyadh.

Until now, the conventional wisdom has been that what held together the al Sauds’ bonds with other elites was symbiosis, or political quid pro quo, and that a number of factors underwrote the societal bonds necessary for the formation of a modern state and cohesive nation. These included tribal intermarriage by the royals and others, oil wealth and the selective but widespread allocation of riches across society, and the use of modern communications technologies and the apparatus of the state to build an artificial but genuinely imagined and shared Saudi community.

Jones takes us beyond these points. After all, the elite relationships that underpin the Saudi royals’ position explain some higher-level political bargains but say little about how the broader society was brought into the nation-building exercise. The argument that oil was crucial is not seriously contested by most observers – Jones agrees too – but the theories contending that al Saud rule is solely due to rent disbursements have not convincingly established a link with better state–society relations. Other theoretical approaches have demonstrated limitations as well.

Jones explains his argument about the joint importance of oil and water through a historical and analytical narrative alongside a selection of fascinating stories and examples. He opens the book with the wonderful story of Saudi plans in the 1970s to solve water supply problems by towing an iceberg from Antarctica to a Saudi port where it could be melted down into drinking water (yes, seriously). He shows how crucial water has been to Saudi economic development projects – both the successful ones and the white elephants – and in the process argues that such grand schemes helped bind the Saudis together in their national experiment, building a sense of national accomplishment and bringing people into the state’s economic and social influence.

His argument here is that such policies gave – and still give – the regime its political power. They not only tame nature, but also tame the population: by confirming the state’s importance in economic life; by building its legitimacy and binding people to its institutions through grand projects and new development opportunities; and by helping to develop and sustain the state as the bringer and giver of wealth, modernity, technology and opportunity. In this light, grand projects such as the development of a large, subsidised and expensive agricultural sector is not the madness it may seem; although it makes little sense through a purely financial lens, it makes perfect political sense.

Jones goes even further than this. He argues that the state grew smarter as oil wealth and the harnessing of water transformed the state–society relationship. The oil wealth paid for the projects that brought technology, skills and Western-style rationality, which in turn expanded the al Sauds’ experience with the complexities of modern governance and sharpened their political smarts. This is a novel argument, at least in the Saudi case, and adds originality and insight – if possibly some controversy – to the book’s strong factual base.

When all these dynamics are put together – the royals’ skills (and size – there are some 7000 princes embedded in the system, remember), the oil money, the big projects – it’s not surprising that Saudi Arabia’s regime is likely to be safe from the protests that removed the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt (and soon, possibly, Libya and Yemen). The Saudis don’t just have the repressive capability of these other leaders, they also have cooptive means and a wider elite web that would make most authoritarians jealous.

Non-specialist readers will find interesting historical discussion in Desert Kingdom. There is much here on the history of foreign firms in the Saudi oil industry, for example, and on the 1979 siege at Mecca and the Shiite uprisings in the eastern province the same year. Some of this covers well-trodden ground, but it is usually done with a fresh lens and a new angle to enliven the narrative for those more familiar with these events.

This is not to say that the book is without weaknesses, or at least some elements to be wary of, especially for readers who may be uninitiated in Middle East studies. Because the book focuses on Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, readers will need an interest in that area (or a willingness to learn something of it) and may find themselves having to extrapolate some points to the national level. Alternatively, they might want to read this book in conjunction with a broader work such as Madawi Al-Rasheed’s A History of Saudi Arabia or Robert Vitalis’s America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier.

People may quibble with other things. The book lacks an introduction, even if much of what would be found in one is still there in the text. Annoyingly for scholars (and reviewers) it does not have a bibliography: while its citations are sufficient, it would be good to see more easily which texts were consulted, and to have at hand a list of interviewees (or at least some details of them).

But Desert Kingdom advances new ways of viewing Saudi Arabia, underpinned by new information. It may well stir some debates that could reshape how many observers see modern Saudi Arabia. It will certainly end up next to Hertog’s Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats and Hegghammer’s Jihad in Saudi Arabia in a list of classic works on Saudi Arabia, but ought also to find a wider readership among those willing to invest a little time and energy in a book that is quite specialised in scope, but much broader in its insights and its lessons. •

The post Oil and water appeared first on Inside Story.

A MONTH after the onset of the Egyptian revolt, Egypt’s economy is beginning to return to normal. Banks have opened; the curfew is almost over; Cairo’s main commercial streets are increasingly busy. But the country’s political life is anything but normal. As an Egyptian IT technician jokingly told me, “We’ve pushed the restart button; now the country is rebooting.” The hope, of course, is that the new political interface will be bug-free.

Two processes are at the centre of the rebooting exercise. The first revolves around amendments to six very significant clauses in the constitution, which regulate the scope of presidential powers, the presidential candidacy and terms, and the links between the country’s legal system and executive power. The second is the process and timing of the presidential and parliamentary elections, which the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (currently governing Egypt) has promised to hold within six months. The first is mired in legalese and technical details, and the second is a fluid process involving various political forces. Both processes are attracting immense interest.

The interest in these issues is a testament to Egypt’s huge middle class, which led and formed the spinal cord of the revolt and is now determined to reap the fruits of that dramatic move. But although the political momentum is still strong, four issues are causing concern among a significant percentage of the country’s middle class.

First, how can secularism be ensured? Unlike many commentators in the West, the Egyptian middle class does not inflate the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian society. Although it’s well-organised, wealthy and politically savvy, the Brotherhood doesn’t make up the entirety of Egyptian political Islam. A number of wide-reaching Salafist movements are increasingly asserting their presence in a fluid landscape. This is not surprising; political Islam has been demonised and persecuted in Egypt for the past seven decades. Many of these groups have built up a vast social infrastructure over the past three decades, providing services such as affordable healthcare and creative transportation solutions. Some of their leading players now see a historic opportunity in the post-Mubarak Egypt. The rising prominence of some of these groups, however, is a trend that many in the middle class follow with vigilant eyes.

Second, how can Egypt create a level political playing field? A number of leading voices in civic society believe that holding the parliamentary elections in less than six months plays into the hands of sections of the community that already have entrenched power centres, chief among them being leading business interests and individuals and remnants of the ruling National Democratic Party. The worry is that such groups would use their financial sway to re-assert their influence without necessarily appearing on electoral platforms. These voices from civic society suggest postponing the parliamentary elections until the first quarter of 2012, thereby allowing different and new political players to develop their thinking, formulate their manifestos and promote their ideas.

Third, how can the needs of different groups be met without destabilising the economy? In recent weeks Egypt has witnessed a large number of demonstrations across most large cities by groups with specific economic demands or grievances. These are a consequence of decades of economic pain and coercive policies to contain dissatisfaction. In most cases, there is widespread sympathy for the demonstrators, a substantial percentage of whom are among the thirty million Egyptians living in poverty. The concern, however, is that such disruptions would weaken an already vulnerable economy managed by an interim government with a very limited mandate.

Fourth, how can clear priorities be developed? Local media seem to be increasingly focusing on corruption, excesses and sleaze within the top echelons of President Hosni Mubarak’s administration. The details are often sensational, and there’s a burgeoning interest in the size and deployment of Mubarak family’s wealth. Such details attract eyeballs and sell papers, but they are a distraction from the thinking and planning that the country needs.

In the eyes of wide sections of the middle class, this planning should focus on filling political life in Egypt with new, promising participants. There is much talk of “reform” and “change”; there’s jubilation and a sharp use of the Egyptian sense of humour, mostly at the expense of the stalwarts of President Mubarak’s administration. But so far the political energy that the revolt has unleashed has not translated into concrete forces. “The 25th January Youths” and “the Facebook movement” have become household terms in Egypt, but they remain without recognisable leadership, clear objectives or a structured vision of the future.

Last month’s revolt remains nascent, of course, and it is too soon to try to frame it in specific ways. But the very fluid situation in Egypt fuels a worry among the middle class: that the fluidity is not creative enough to produce viable new movements or parties, and will destabilise the country to the extent that the military establishment will assert its control for a longer period than expected.

These apprehensions reflect the middle class’s determination to see through the ultimate prize of its successful move: a true, functioning, liberal democracy in Egypt. But as an ageing Arabic teacher succinctly put it to me, “‘The Egyptian revolt’ is either a noun or an incomplete phrase; in either case, it needs a verb to become a meaningful sentence.” •

The post “Rebooting” Egypt appeared first on Inside Story.

IF Niccolò Machiavelli were alive today, not only would he be in demand among the princes – and kings, presidents, and dictators – of the Middle East, but he would observe great differences in how they conduct politics, why so many of them are resented, and the ways in which they have handled popular protests or the threat of them.

The past weeks have seen some leaders depart, often more easily than anyone assumed possible. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak was removed by the army after only eighteen days of crisis; by then it was clear that he had no real ability to defy his top brass. Somewhat similarly in Tunisia, Zine ben Ali was ultimately powerless in the face of protesters and little support from the security apparatus. To those who despised him – a good mass of his compatriots, it turned out – his police and army were not as fearsome as they had for so long assumed.

The Bahraini royal family may yet prove that brains trump brawn when it comes to political survival. After flirting briefly with repression of protesters, the ruling al-Khalifa family is now trying negotiation: coupled with Bahrain’s complex social dynamics, it seems likely that they will survive.

In contrast, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has proven himself politically deranged. After ordering that his people be bombed from the air, he appeared on television to patronise and deride them for not appreciating all that he and his rule have given them. He has deep problems whether or not he stays in power: if he somehow clings to office, his people will detest him (even more), he will fear them (even more), and he will almost certainly face isolation and sanctions (again) for his conduct in authorising brute force against the population.

Almost every leader in the Middle East has broken one of Machiavelli’s golden rules: “Government consists mainly in so keeping your subjects that they shall be neither able nor disposed to injure you.” What he meant here was that in an autocratic or similar system, an equilibrium is needed between coopting and repressing a population. A little of each, in balance, is an ideal method for ensuring the survival of a political order. If the balance is disturbed, however – if a regime is too brutal, or lets itself appear weak, or is not generous enough with welfare or oil money – then a leader’s days, and even those of the regime or system more widely, are probably numbered.

It had long been assumed that Middle Eastern leaders had this balance about right. For the past thirty or forty years they had been durable, though not very popular or legitimate in more recent times. The vast sums of oil wealth and aid that have flowed into and around the region meant that many of these regimes had enough money to buy off the people, either en masse or through key institutions such as the army, the bureaucracy and representatives of social groups such as tribes and powerful families. Most were also able to be brutal when the need arose, and intrusive intelligence services and the fear created by those agencies and by the police were assumed to keep most people in line.

These assumptions seem to have been misplaced. Several lessons have come out of the protests in the Middle East over the past weeks: lessons about the political systems of the Middle East, the leaders, their people, and the extent to which a leader facing popular anger and revolt can still survive.

THE first lesson – an old one, but easily forgotten – is that leaders and regimes are not the same thing. In Tunisia and Egypt, the leaders were replaced, but the system – while likely to change a little – has not been overthrown or changed wholesale. Alternative leaders and new identities are emerging in Tunisia, but while they are likely to negotiate some real political changes, these will modify and remodel the system rather than repace one system with another.

In Egypt the situation is similar – if not more so. Mubarak was removed by senior figures in the military, not by popular protests. The protesters might have been important in creating the momentum for the president’s removal, but he only departed when the military conducted what was, in effect, a coup. The top brass acted not out of opportunism, nor to seize power permanently, and nor, for that matter, out of solidarity with the protesters. They acted to protect the system, a system that gives the army special privileges and prestige and guarantees its budget and financial autonomy. The army will want to placate the protesters and address the deep grievances that run across society, so some political reform is almost certain to come – but the army will not undermine the system or its prominence in it.

Leaders are not regimes, nor even necessarily of them. In fact, a “regime” – a political system and its sets of elites – can easily become opposed to a leader and remove him. Perhaps terms like “the Mubarak regime” will, in hindsight, be seen as a contradiction in terms.

The second lesson is that there are many types of regimes. Most Middle Eastern regimes are authoritarian to some extent or another, but the degree of repression varies greatly. In some countries, a misspoken word about a leader can mean arrest and torture; in most, however, one has to be a political activist to gain any attention, and even then would be marginalised or threatened rather than physically tortured. There is, therefore, “hard” authoritarianism and a milder or “soft” authoritarianism among Middle Eastern regimes. Libya’s is “hard,” Tunisia’s and Egypt’s are “soft” – or “softer,” to be more accurate, since Ben Ali and Mubarak did not have human rights records to be proud of. The ultimate point, though, is that where the style of authoritarianism is inappropriate to political conditions, the regime is harming its legitimacy or even endangering itself.

The complexity of regimes is also important. While protests have arisen across the region, they have succeeded only after elites have begun disagreeing with each other and when the military and/or security services have backed the protesters, or at least undertaken not to attack the people. The more complex the elite structure, or where a leader is from a minority while most of the elite are not, the more likely it is that members of the elite and the military will decide to break with the existing order.

Finally, regimes based on oil are different from those that must raise taxes. Oil regimes receive energy royalties and allocate some of that money to ordinary people (by not having taxation, through free services and government employment, and so on) and to elites such as tribal leaders, clerics and top bureaucrats. (A government that needs to tax people, in contrast, must offer something in return – think of the American cry of “No taxation without representation!”) But once it has bought off its population, an oil state – what political scientists call a “rentier” state – tends to become autonomous, unaccountable and undemocratic. If the state is adequately generous and benevolent, it will be tolerated by most people. Gaddafi’s failing was in not living up to this rentier bargain: he wasted much of the oil money on white elephants, tomfoolery and a large, inefficient bureaucracy, and sent too little of it the people’s way.

The third lesson is that leaders are often very different too. Above all, numbers are important. There is no greater risk than to be a one-man band – the Shah of Iran was, and fell in the 1978–79 revolution, and although leaders like Ben Ali and Mubarak were not literally one-man shows they only had very small inner circles. Few members of their elites were close enough and loyal enough to their leader to die for him.

This is why the Saudi monarchy, despite being very unpopular, is not going to fall to protesters. Both reformists and conservatives resent the royals, but for opposite reasons (seeing it as too conservative and too liberal, respectively). Then there is a Shi’ite minority in the northeast, disenfranchised because of their religious beliefs and because the regime suspects their loyalty. They make up about 15 per cent of the population and, not coincidentally, are mostly located where the bulk of the oil is found.

The Saudi regime is durable. It is a classic rentier system, but – just as crucially – the royal family consists of some 7000 princes who are spread throughout the system. They are the senior bureaucrats, the flag officers, many of the business elite, the civil society figures and others. They permeate most of the political institutions and key social groups, with a stake in the system and as part of the royal bloodline.

Few other leaders can match that, although the smart ones try to copy it. One reason why Saddam Hussein lasted so long as president of Iraq – from 1979 to 2003 – was because he filled his cabinet and many top jobs with people he could trust: extended family, people from his home town or district, and those he’d known before taking power. He’d watched Iran’s Shah fall, and learned his lesson.

Other leaders are the opposite – out of touch and reliant on a handful of people for advice. One of the jokes about Mubarak in his final days went like this: A minister approaches Mubarak in his palace and says, “I’m sorry, sir, but I think you need to consider drafting a farewell letter to the Egyptian people.” Mubarak looks at him, confused, and asks, “Why? Where are they going?”

This might look like a cutting joke about a leader many saw as a fool, but it captures exactly how out of touch he was. As details start to emerge of his final days in power, it is becoming clear that he relied only on his son Gamal and a couple of others for advice. This seems to be why he didn’t resign on the Thursday night, as originally planned, but tried to cling on, only to be forced out the next day.

Likewise, Gaddafi’s televised rant last Tuesday night showed how removed he has become. Promising to execute the protesters, incredulous and furious that an ungrateful public wasn’t stepping up to defend a regime that supposedly had done so much for them, he might have defeated himself. Mubarak at least started a rift among the protesters by promising to resign in September; Gaddafi idiotically cornered the protesters and rallied them against him with that speech.

The point is that the talents, astuteness and brutality of leaders vary, and so too does their ability to predict, pre-empt and handle popular unrest. Beyond mere talent, though, leaders also need to know whether they can, or should, stay in power, and when to leave. Alas, ambition is common, but political self-cognisance rare.

The Bahraini king and royal family may come to be numbered among the clever ones if they survive the unrest, because they have moved more carefully and tactfully. They briefly flirted with the use of force on 17–18 February – the royals are a minority Sunni dynasty in a country that is over 60 per cent Shi’ite, and so are fearful of that majority – but then they changed tack. Starting last Saturday, the military and police were pulled back on government orders, food was provided to the protesters, prisoners released, and the king reiterated an offer of dialogue. In effect, he had shown a certain toughness at first, but ultimately let brutality cede to compromise. In the long run, of course, it may not work; talks could collapse or new grievances emerge among the protesters. Yet so far it is looking like a smart strategy. Above all, the royals have taken away the protesters’ momentum, agreeing to talk – seemingly genuinely – but without making any concessions or promises up front.

WHAT does all this ultimately mean for Middle Eastern politics? Can leaders – and regimes, even – survive a large concerted effort by the population to remove them?

Perhaps not, once the numbers of protesters and the momentum behind them reach a critical mass. Until that point, however, a leader’s loss of power is by no means certain. A savvy leader will genuinely try to address the protesters’ grievances without looking desperate or fearful, and without undermining the support of the most crucial elites. In Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain, leaders have done this: in Jordan the cabinet was replaced, in Kuwait concerns about the cost of living were bought off, and in Bahrain talks could bring (albeit modest) reforms. Such moves seem to pre-empt or avoid protester numbers reaching a critical mass.

Or the protests may begin to atrophy anyway. The grievances that drive them are deep and widespread, certainly, but the successful protests will probably be limited to only one or two more countries. Beyond Libya and perhaps Yemen, and at a stretch Algeria, political systems become very different from Tunisia’s and Egypt’s: elites are too cohesive, or the military too loyal, or the leadership too popular or too tolerated.

If the leaders currently facing down protests can survive for a time, perhaps by eschewing violence and communicating genuinely with people about their grievances, this may lead to some real reform – anti-corruption moves, new educational or social opportunities, more efficient welfare and greater political openness, among others. A leader who followed this path might not just survive, but could even bring the region some of the true change it has been longing for. •

The post Different leaders, different regimes appeared first on Inside Story.

MOST observers speak of the “surprise” of the protests that have swept Cairo and other Egyptian cities in recent weeks, but the surprise was actually an eruption that took decades to develop. To make sense of what happened in Egypt, and more importantly to envisage what the future holds, we need to understand the energy that built up (and was pressurised) under Egypt’s societal surface over the past few decades, and to identify the fault lines from which such socio-political energy is being (and will continue to be) released.

Five currents – a changing class structure, a decline in the regime’s legitimacy, eroding institutions, the absence of a meaningful national narrative and a dramatic demographic shift – flowed through the interstices of Egyptian society to set the stage for that eruption.

The first factor is the transformation in the composition of the country’s middle class. This group of public-sector employees, professionals, army officers and owners of small- and medium-sized enterprises coalesced in the 1950s and 1960s. But in the mid 1970s, under the infitah (open-door) policy of President Anwar Sadat, the middle class reconfigured as new sectors emerged – traders, brokers, employees of multinational companies, and a significant number of the three million–plus Egyptians who emigrated to the Gulf in search of jobs during the 1970s oil bonanza. Moreover, the state’s gradual but consistent withdrawal from providing adequate education, healthcare, transportation and other key services weakened the traditional middle class and pushed parts of it into the lower socio-economic strata.

The financial reforms of the 1980s and 1990s further pressed the older middle class and widened the fractures between its various subdivisions; then, the economic policy shifts of the 2000s imposed severe pains on this beleaguered group. The state incrementally retreated from central economic command (initially by floating the Egyptian pound, resulting in inflation, then through an accelerated privatisation program, extending to the state’s strategic assets, and finally by granting economic decision-making power to the private sector’s leading capitalists). This hollowing-out of, and within, Egypt’s middle class created social tensions, alienated many of its segments, and instilled anger that percolated through the society.

The second factor is the gradual erosion of the legitimacy of the regime. Nasser (1952–70), Sadat (1970–81), and Mubarak (1981–) all ruled Egypt on the basis of the people’s consent to the ruling framework that the 1952 coup d’etat/revolution had put in place. But no truly fair and transparent elections took place in Egypt during those sixty years. The people’s consent was schematic, with constant reference to the key tenets of the 1952 revolution – chief among them being “siding with the working classes.” The economic policies of the mid 1970s onwards rendered that tenet in particular null and void, and as power and wealth merged in the 2000s legitimacy drained from Egypt’s ruling elite.

The Egyptian people’s tolerance of the semblance of democracy (lacking any real participation in power or any functioning checks and balances) and their tolerance of absolutism (from Nasser to Sadat to Mubarak) had come to converge around their tacit acceptance of ultimate rule by the military establishment that had led, secured and sustained the 1952 regime. This began to change in the 2000s with the ascendancy of the new capitalists: their assumption of complete control over the state’s economic strategy and practices created an intra-regime balance between the military establishment and the emerging economic players. That distorted formation, whose newer elements had their financial clout alone to sanction their position, represented to a degraded middle class a final breach of an already terribly frayed social contract.

The third factor is a noticeable weakening of the regime’s established institutions. This was especially true of the presidency itself. Under Nasser and Sadat, it had remained a vibrant nerve centre of governance, even a laboratory of ideas (albeit some bad ones), and certainly the place where active power was contained and expressed. By the 2000s the institution had long withered into a mere administrative structure around the president.

Such dilution could in principle have been welcome, had democratically elected institutions (mainly the parliament) also been strengthened and a healthy balance struck between presidency and government. Instead, what happened in Egypt was that the (undemocratic) parliament, the government and the presidency became varied representations of the president’s will – executive bodies, rather than pillars of a functioning political system. The same decay took hold of most other state institutions, from government ministries to the public sector. The regime’s institutional structure had reached its weakest point since 1952.

The fourth factor, one that both reflected and compounded the others, is the chronic lack over more than three decades of a national project. The failure of Egypt’s liberal experiment in the first half of the twentieth century, and the fall of Arab nationalism and the Nasserite dream as the 1960s developed, left Nasser’s successors focusing their efforts on “development”: a vague notion which, from the start of the strategic shift in the mid-1970s, was understood solely in economic terms, and which over the years was diluted into successive five-year plans (economic milestones, financial targets, statistical measures) devoid of any grand ideas. The ambitious and inspiring objectives of “catching up with Europe” (during the liberal period) and “leading the Arabic nation in its historical march” (at the height of Nasser’s reign) became a distant memory. No big picture or grand scheme filled the void in the Egyptian psyche. Egyptians’ economic pain could not even find consolation as sacrifice for a higher cause; it was increasingly context-less, even meaningless.

The fifth factor, which made every other thornier, is demographics. Egypt’s population almost doubled from 1980 to 2010, from around forty-five million to more than eighty million. More than forty-five million of them are under thirty-five years old. These young Egyptians are deprived in multiple ways: economically, psychologically (in that they were obliged to witness, and endure, the rising influence of an ultra-wealthy elite in a shockingly corrupt political–economic milieu), and emotionally (in that they were living through a socio-political void marked by a sense of wasted energy, a disconnect between regime and people, and an overarching heritage of lethargy and failure).

In a chapter entitled “Young Egyptians” in my book Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak, I argued that this major demographic bloc has generated many positive social dynamics. But none of them can yet counterbalance the sheer weight the disabling factors have exerted on Egyptian society and (especially) its young people. An eruption, with this generation in the vanguard, was inevitable.

EGYPT is now in transitional limbo. The eruption of January–February has been too powerful to be contained within the existing political structure, yet not powerful enough to force the regime’s removal. At this delicate stage, four emerging realities of the political earthquake of the past two weeks are clear.

First, it has been a political rather than an economic eruption: the demands of the several million young Egyptians who protested in Tahrir Square and elsewhere in Egypt were not about subsidies or higher salaries but cut to the heart of the country’s political framework.

Second, the fixation on the apparent political deadlock over whether or not President Mubarak will step down immediately or at the end of his term in September misses the fact that the Egyptian regime is not solely the president. Now that the new capitalists who shared power in the past decade are out (some indeed are already being prosecuted), the regime’s foundational core – the military establishment – has regained its former control. The key figures emerging as political captains in this transitional period are respected as individuals; some even command wide appeal, in part because they draw on the bruised middle classes’ fear of a descent into chaos and their realisation that the army is the only force in Egypt able to ensure stability and maintain order. In this sense it is arguable that the regime, embodied by the military more than any other institution, is now stronger than it was pre-25 January 2011.

Third, political Islam has achieved a strategic gain. It is true that the young people who catalysed the uprising have declaimed their rhetoric in nationalist and secular language. The Muslim Brotherhood neither inspired the demonstrations nor led the opposition forces at any stage. But the Brotherhood is now negotiating with the Egyptian vice-president as a recognised entity (politically, if not – yet – legally). The Muslim Brotherhood is also in open dialogue with Mohamed ElBaradei, the most notable of the regime’s liberal opponents. It increasingly has a conspicuous presence in the demonstrations. And crucially, after more than sixty years of intense (and almost continuous) confrontation with its arch enemy, the secular regime, the Brotherhood has changed the terms of engagement.

True, the Brotherhood has pledged not to field a presidential candidate in the presidential elections due in September 2011; it has also hinted that it would not stand for more than a third of seats in the next parliament. But these conciliatory (and non-binding) measures serve to confirm that the eighty-two-year-old Brotherhood has acquired a new confidence, and that many among its younger generation see a historic opportunity to move closer to the prize of power.

Fourth, Egypt’s liberal movement is also a winner. It may remain fragmented, fractured, and leaderless, as it was before 25 January 2011. The country’s liberal parties linger in a catch-up game with the rapidly changing situation. The momentum created by the emergence of Dr ElBaradei remains personified in him, lacking a structure that can be presented to the middle classes. But it is undeniable that the liberal movement more than any other political grouping was the force whose ideas and presence guided the youth revolt. This has created immense political capital, which it can only use, however, by finding the savvy strategists it has lacked for decades.

How will these emerging realities play out in coming weeks and months? In political terms, Egypt will enter a phase of competition for influence and support among the new leaders of the military establishment; political Islam, represented by the Muslim Brotherhood; and Egypt’s liberals. This will be a medium-term political contest that extends beyond the September elections.

It will be an absorbing contest. The military establishment has the restraint, discipline, grasp of power and historical perspective to present itself as the protector of the people, the bedrock of stability and the founding principle of the regime that ruled Egypt from 1952.

The Brotherhood, supported by political Islam’s wide and deep socioeconomic infrastructure, sustained by its superb organisational powers and connected to the conservative religiosity of Egyptian society since the 1980s, will present itself in new colours – specifically drawing on the successful and appealing example of the AK Party’s experiment in Turkey.

The liberals, if a credible, modern leadership arises from within their ranks, could also benefit from the political contest. This in turn will depend on their ability to build on the momentum of the current revolt, in part by invoking Egypt’s liberal experiment in the first half of the twentieth century (a period to which many in Egypt’s middle class feel deeply attached).

But there is, too, a larger Egypt, in which millions around the country beyond the inspiring events of Tahrir Square will have a decisive voice in the unfolding political drama. The waters of Egyptian politics have been stagnant for a long time. The “eternal brown land” is preparing for a further deluge of political energy. Where it will take us, no one yet knows. But something has already changed. This is a good time to be an Egyptian. •

Tarek Osman is an Egyptian writer. He is the author of Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak (Yale University Press, 2010).

A version of this article also appears on openDemocracy.

The post Egypt’s next phase: a competition for influence and support appeared first on Inside Story.

EGYPTIANS are renowned for having a strong and cutting sense of humour – perhaps a comic approach to life is an essential tool for surviving in a country with so much promise but so many constraints – but one joke stands out. Varieties of it exist across the Arab world – it’s a good joke, after all – but one of the versions in Egypt is especially fitting for that country right now, and encapsulates why Egyptians are marching in the streets demanding their president’s political scalp:

The president feels under pressure, and decides to hire a new Minister for Transparency. He calls for interested people to come and see him. The first applicant, a career bureaucrat, comes along.

“OK,” says Mubarak, “I’ll test you with a question. What does two plus two equal?”

Being a bureaucrat, the applicant takes the cowardly course: “Well,” he says, “rather than me answer you now, let me set up an interdepartmental committee to look at all the possibilities, so as to make an informed choice and to report in five months as to―”

The president cuts him off: “Get out of my sight! There’s no way I am appointing you to the job, you fool!”

The second applicant comes in; a businessman, perhaps slightly tarnished by corruption, but a smart guy with an American MBA and a successful chain of business ventures to his credit. The president asks him the same question.

The second applicant looks at him, stunned, and answers: “Why, the answer is four, Mr President.”

The president harrumphs: “Get out of my sight! There’s no way I am appointing you to the job either!”

Finally a third applicant comes in. He is highly corrupt but well-connected, with a public service job but earning most of his vast income from shady private dealings that he finds through his work. Perhaps he is one of the “munfatihun,” the profiteers from economic reform in recent decades. The president offers him the same question.

“Just tell me,” says Mubarak, “What does two plus two equal? Answer that and you will be my new Minister for Transparency.”

“Ahh,” says the third applicant, smiling – he knows he has the job now – “two plus two equals three for you and one for me.”

The joke is more fitting than its inventor perhaps ever intended. It captures the cynicism towards a president who is doing something just because he needs to be seen to be doing something. It highlights the informality of politics. It puts the private sector into politics, where it has increasingly been since a series of market reforms began in the mid 1970s. And, above all, it states how central corruption has become: the Minister for Transparency will be anything but transparent.

A long period of frustration and a growing list of grievances led to the protests that have shut down Egypt and will remove the president, Hosni Mubarak, now or by September. Mubarak has been in power since the assassination of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, in 1981, but some of the grievances even go back to Sadat’s predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who led the Free Officers Movement coup against the monarchy in 1952 and was president from 1954 to 1970. Recalled fondly by many – he was charismatic, strong-willed and relatively honest – Nasser nonetheless created the large, ineffective bureaucracy and created many other problems that today bedevil Egyptian development and politics.

At first Mubarak was to have been different. He was unlike Sadat, though both were military men. He was relatively unknown, he appeared shy, and he promised a period of stabilisation and a presidency of only two terms. He would not act like Sadat, who built palaces for himself and faced down violent protests in 1977 – the last before the current ones to threaten the survival of an incumbent president.

Almost twenty-nine years later, however, Mubarak is seen as no better than Sadat, and is held in even lower esteem. The economic and social strains on Egyptians are massive. Despite an impressive array of economic reforms, for example, which have gained Mubarak commendation from the United States and the IMF, ordinary Egyptians struggle financially. Wages are low: while an experienced engineer might command E£50,000 a year or more (around A$8500), most government employees or semi-skilled workers live (and often raise a family) on a third of that, and a great mass of unskilled Egyptians live on £20, or a little over $3, a day. At the same time, luxury apartments in gated communities can sell for what something similar would fetch on Sydney’s shoreline. Unemployment is officially about 9 per cent but real unemployment and underemployment probably exceed 25 per cent. Union powers were eroded by legal reforms in the 2000s. The government still talks of reform, yet persists with expensive subsidies, such as those on energy, that most benefit the wealthy.

Financial problems breed social ones, too. A great mass of graduates – often trained in fields the economy doesn’t need – either take a lower-status job or wait more than a decade for the government position that is still technically promised to them. After the time spent on military service and education, many Egyptian men have to wait until they are in their thirties before they can afford to marry. And a large number of Egyptians feel that their country is getting poorer and less fair, and that the homeless, the workers lurking in the black economy, and the touts harassing tourists at major sites are a blight on the proud history of one of the world’s great civilisations.

The protests are in large part about economics and the social issues that attend them, but ultimately people need to be sufficiently angry at political leaders to take to the streets. And Egyptians are furious, not without cause. They have long resented Mubarak, known as “the laughing cow” after the round packets of triangular-shaped soft cheese that in Egypt carry the label “Mubarak” (they’re available here in Australia as “Laughing Cow” cheese). Jokes on the street have, almost since he took power, centred on Mubarak’s supposed stupidity or his hesitation to commit to a policy or position. Other people simply speak of him angrily – if nearly always, until late January, in private. This behaviour both reflects and is encouraged by politics, which at senior levels is very cooptive and sometimes negotiated, but at the mass level is conducted through a variety of repressive processes: Mubarak has “taken the politics out of the politics,” as Samuel Himmel once said of dictatorship.

Perhaps most repressed is political Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood, formed in Egypt in 1928 and thus the Arab world’s oldest Islamic party, has been banned or repressed for much of its existence. Mubarak has retained the ban on the party’s involvement in politics, and allows it only the smallest of space in the social and cultural realms. By running independents, it in effect won eighty-eight seats in the last parliament – 20 per cent of the total – but that path to political influence as a party has been removed. It remains a matter of conjecture among observers as to how the Brotherhood would fare in a truly free poll: whether they would win a majority is debatable, but they would be a force to be reckoned with, and probably the single largest opposition force. The fact is that many Egyptians, Islamist or not, see the Brotherhood as clean and honest – and thus a far cry from Mubarak or his cronies.

For a secularist to challenge Mubarak has been risky too. Egypt may be a softer autocracy than some, but the regime can be nasty when necessary. An important opposition figure, Ayman Nour, discovered this when he ran for the presidency in 2005. He was never likely to win, even in a free contest, but the regime made sure of it. It took Nour three attempts to get his Al-Ghad party registered. Then, after campaigning for reform of the presidency, he was arrested on probably falsified charges. He was later released and allowed to contest the election, in which he came second to Mubarak, officially gaining 7 per cent of the vote but probably – independent monitoring of the poll was not permitted – closer to double that. In late 2005 he was found guilty of the charges and was given a six-year sentence, of which he served just over three. He is still around; he was injured protesting on 28 January.

Sometimes just a scent of threat has prompted Mubarak into acting. The secretary-general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, was Egypt’s foreign minister from 1991 to 2001 but lost that position because of his popularity with Egyptians. The last straw for Mubarak was rumoured to have been the highly popular song by singer Shaaban Abdel Rahim which, reflecting the widespread sentiment of ordinary Egyptians, included the now-famous line, “I hate Israel and I love Amr Moussa.” At least he got the Arab League position; Ayman Nour got nothing, and reportedly was physically abused during his arrest. Amr Moussa could well be the next president: he has hinted that he will run for the position when polls are held, and is as popular as when Shaaban sang about him a decade ago.

Quite popular too, and astute, is Mohamed ElBaradei. Originally a lawyer and then a diplomat, he became famous as the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1997 to 2009, a period that included 9/11, the 2003 Iraq war and years of investigations into Iran’s nuclear program. He has garnered support from several key groups involved in the current protests, probably including the Muslim Brotherhood (although their exact position on and links with ElBaradei remain uncertain), to lead an interim coalition if and when Mubarak leaves office. ElBaradei has been the most visible senior and figure in the protests, and would probably be favoured by much of the community. But he has lived outside Egypt for a long time, and even as an interim leader might struggle to build the base necessary to win an election convincingly under a new, permanent political system.

A final possibility is that power will again be transferred to a military officer or senior official. The new vice-president, Omar Suleiman, is technically the most likely candidate. Only appointed on 29 January – before that Mubarak had no nominated successor, most assuming that he was setting up his son Gamal to replace him – Suleiman previously was head of national intelligence, after a military career. He is loyal to Mubarak and not widely accepted on the streets – undermining his chances – but he reportedly is acceptable to many other countries, and has spent parts of his career fighting Islamic radicals, negotiating ly, and engaging in other duties that would train him well for the presidency. His fate will probably come down to whether the military would support him; they may prefer someone else still in uniform such as the Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Sami Annan, who would also find favour in Washington, and probably on the street – more so than Suleiman, certainly.

Mubarak is on borrowed time. The most he can do is cling to power until September, as he is trying to do. That might just work, if he can wear down the protesters and keep them as divided as possible. Regardless of when he goes, his main interest is in leaving the country with as much of his dignity and family money intact as possible. He probably does, also, truly want to leave the country stable, and have elections follow his departure, if mostly for the sake of his legacy. The outcome of any such elections is hard to predict; victory would rely on support bases yet to be built, and negotiations yet to take place. There are plenty of contenders, however, and despite what Mubarak would have had the world believe for the last twenty-nine years, many of those contenders are capable and, indeed, preferable to the “laughing cow.” •

The post Egypt’s leaders in waiting appeared first on Inside Story.

THE LEAKING of 250,000 US State Department cables to WIkiLeaks has generated an enormous amount of excitement about the fact of the leaks (how is this possible?), the content of the cables (did he/she/they really say that?), and the motives of people like Julian Assange. Added to the mix is some overheated commentary from the left (Assange is a champion of free speech) and from US conservatives (Assange is determined to destroy the United States and should be treated as an unlawful enemy combatant).

The excitement will eventually die down, but with only a tiny fragment of the leaked material having seen the light of day so far this might take quite a while.

While the content of many of the individual cables is interesting, the behaviour that the release has provoked among political leaders, and the behavior revealed in the 200 or so cables we have seen so far, are more important to any assessment of the overall impact of the leaks.

Three behaviour patterns are of principal concern. First, incidents such as this bring out the authoritarian instincts of our political leaders and lead them to indulge in such gross hyperbole that they misrepresent situations and dilemmas to the Australian public.

The prime minister rushed to judgement, declaring Assange’s behaviour to be both “grossly irresponsible” and “illegal,” sentiments echoed by Attorney-General Robert McClelland. They then established a taskforce to identify what if any laws Assange might have broken. Embarrassingly for the government, it took the Australian Federal Police only days to conclude that Assange had broken no Australian laws.

Attorney-General McClelland also claimed that the publication of the cables would put lives at risk, an echo of US commentary. If lives are indeed put at risk by the release, the primary responsibility would lie with the originator of the cable, because it would be an act of lunacy to name someone who was giving information at risk of life and limb in a cable that was destined to be posted on a diplomatic network to which about three million people have access. I have seen nothing in the cables I have read that would cause the people named anything more than embarrassment.

More disturbingly, the cables reveal that behind closed doors our political leaders deal incautiously with representatives of the United States and Israel. They seem to forget that they are dealing with the representatives of a foreign country, in a game that is definitely reserved for grown-ups, the world of navigating our country through the shoals of major international events. They make such forthright and absolute declarations of support that they leave hostages to fortune, giving themselves little room to negotiate on issues arising in the future on the basis of a hard-nosed assessment of where Australia’s national interest lies. Indeed, at times they give the impression they would struggle to see the difference between Australia’s national interests and those of the United States or Israel.

Kim Beazley and Kevin Rudd are at pains to impress on the US ambassador how rock-solid on the ANZUS Alliance they are, Beazley so much so that he assures the ambassador that Labor would support Australia’s military contributions in Afghanistan until hell freezes over, and that, in the event of a war between the United States and China, Australia would have absolutely no alternative but to line up militarily beside the United States.

We know from the cables that in 2008 Kevin Rudd went out of his way to express his strong support for Israel and his appreciation of its security concerns. Israeli Ambassador Yuval Rotem told the Americans that Rudd was “deeply worried” that Iran’s intransigence means that the window for a diplomatic solution is closing and that Israel may feel forced to use “non-diplomatic” means. This reads to me like a signal from Rudd that Australia would be very understanding if Israel felt “forced” to do something as undiplomatic as carry out a pre-emptive military strike against Iran. There has been a price to pay for Rudd’s strongly pro-Israeli stance – retaliatory steps by the Iranians have made it more difficult for the Australian embassy in Tehran to do its job effectively, which doesn’t seem to me to serve anyone’s interests.

Julia Gillard too went out of her way to establish a relationship with the Israeli ambassador and asked him to arrange an early opportunity for her to visit. When the Israelis invaded Gaza, they were pleasantly surprised to find that Acting Prime Minister Gillard was much more supportive than they had expected, and just plain surprised to find that Foreign Minister Stephen Smith was on holiday and did not want to get involved.

The “Israel right or wrong” attitude of both Rudd and Gillard is quite over the top, at variance with our traditional stance of at least claiming even-handedness, and at variance with our national interests. I would define these to include the establishment of a lasting peace in the Middle East, which necessarily includes a decent outcome for the Palestinian people, and the establishment and maintenance of constructive relations with all countries of the region including Iran. I do not see how we can contribute to those outcomes if we are seen by all, including Israel, as a country Israel can afford to take for granted. Why would we want to tell any country that it can count on our support no matter how it behaves – so much so in Israel’s case that we are seen as a valuable part of its global PR battle?

The effect of these conversations behind closed doors is that the United States and Israel can go about their affairs confident that Australia will never press them on any issue, and on most occasions will refrain from critical comment. Why would any country put itself in this situation, even with its friends?

Most serious of all, it is now clear that our national leaders use the shelter of national security classification to conceal from the public their real assessments and motives, and the advice they are receiving from their intelligence agencies. Such behaviour is unconscionable. There are many valid national security grounds for governments’ withholding information from us, but they are not entitled to deceive us. Nor is it in their interests to do so.

Several examples have come to light. It is reassuring to know that our top-level intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments, which reports directly to the prime minister, has a sober and balanced view of the threat from al Qaeda and Iran, two subjects on which our government has much to say. In November 2008 the ONA’s director-general, Peter Varghese, told the Americans that al Qaeda “ultimately has failed to achieve the strategic leadership role it sought within the Islamic world.” On Iran, he said that ONA viewed Tehran’s nuclear program within the paradigm of “the laws of deterrence,” and that “It’s a mistake to think of Iran as a ‘Rogue State’.”

These sober assessments are at variance with the explanations the government gives us for our presence in Afghanistan (we have to prevent it from becoming a haven for terrorists), with its alarmist comments about Iran (which simply echo commentary coming out of Israel), and with Kevin Rudd’s comments to the Israeli ambassador. Governments are of course entitled to reject the advice they get from their advisers, but there is nothing sensitive about Mr Varghese’s comments, and on a matter of this importance it would be desirable to disclose to us what the overall assessment of our national assessments agency is and why the government sees things differently.

Perhaps the most serious case of deception relates to the prospects for the war in Afghanistan. The stock line from western governments is that they are optimistic, that things are going well, though perhaps not quite as well as we would like, that we are making progress. What we find from WikiLeaks is that the real assessment – no doubt shared by all our NATO allies – is quite different. In October 2008 Kevin Rudd told visiting US members of congress that the national security establishment in Australia was very pessimistic about the long-term prognosis for Afghanistan, a pessimism which was evident in a December 2009 cable reporting the views of Australia’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, former Defence Secretary Ric Smith, who referred to the “train wreck” the Australian Federal Police have to deal with in working with the Afghan National Police.

This gap between the public statements and the government’s real views is outrageous. The situation it suggests is that all western governments involved know the outlook in Afghanistan is very bleak, but none is prepared to confess this to its public.

Contrast this with the way Winston Churchill took the British people into his confidence during the days when his country was in dire peril. When he addressed the House of Commons on becoming prime minister in May 1940, Churchill did not gild the lily – he promised the British people nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat. When Britain faced the prospect of invasion, he held out the thoroughly unattractive prospect of the British people fighting the invading Germans on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets, and in the hills.

In his speech at the Mansion House in November 1942, after the mighty victory over the Afrika Korps in the Second Battle of Alamein, Churchill said that the occasion was not the end, it was not even the beginning of the end, but it was perhaps the end of the beginning. In all these dire circumstances Churchill was straight with the British people. He rightly withheld from them a vast array of military and other secrets, but in asking them to shoulder the burden of facing Hitler all but alone, he didn’t leave them in any doubt about how difficult it would be or what price they would be called on to pay.

On Afghanistan our political leaders should be dealing with the Australian people in a similarly forthright way, telling us why we are there, why it is important, and what we need to do to succeed. We are a mature and sensible people. If the government can convince us of what the task is (something that remains a mystery) and why it is important, we will rise to what is needed to succeed, and the government can proceed confident that it has the backing of the majority of Australians. If it cannot convince us of the importance of the task, or even define it coherently, then maybe we shouldn’t be there.

What the WikiLeaks cables are progressively revealing are patterns of behaviour on the part of our political leaders that involve very substantial breaches of trust. This is a matter of the highest importance. Democracy both depends on trust, and thrives on it, as many great examples of democratic societies in difficult circumstances demonstrate. It is to be hoped that, whatever other consequences the leaks might have, they result in a closer alignment between what our political leaders say to other governments in private and what they say and disclose to us. •

The post What the WikiLeaks cables reveal about Australia’s leaders appeared first on Inside Story.

IN JUNE this year a group of identically dressed women, all wearing “Free Gaza” headbands, set fire to an Israeli flag in Kota Bharu, capital of Malaysia’s Kelantan state. They were members of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, or PAS – a key component of Malaysia’s opposition alliance, the People’s Pact, which is led by prominent former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim. Their demonstration against the “illegitimate Israeli regime” kicked off the fifty-first annual PAS Congress.

On the same day, members of the PAS Youth Wing assembled to hear a speech by Munir Said from the political bureau of Hamas. As they arrived in the meeting hall, they trampled on images of Israeli and American flags painted on the foyer floor. Inside, Said told his audience that Muslims all over the world must unite to liberate Palestine from Zionist control. The message was clear: Muslims around the world must take up Gaza as their cause.

These pro-Gaza and anti-Israel displays brought a distant event – the violent boarding of the Mavi Marmara by Israeli troops – much closer to millions of Malaysians. This vessel was the flagship of the Freedom Flotilla, a convoy of six ships that attempted to defy Israel’s three-year blockade of Gaza by delivering aid supplies to the occupied territory. Troops killed nine activists on board – all Turkish nationals and members of the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, a Turkish, Islam-oriented non-government organisation.

The killings triggered a flurry of claims and counter-claims, globally coordinated on both sides. The flotilla vessels themselves, which carried 682 activists from forty-two countries, were proof that Gaza solidarity campaigns attract Islam-oriented activists from far and wide. These activists include members of NGOs and charities in Turkey, Jordan, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania and Malaysia.

In its analysis of the flotilla the western media focused most closely on Turkey. The Turkish government itself made a public stand, lauding returned flotilla activists and expressing its outrage over the killing of “martyrs” on board. Since the Mavi Marmara deaths, commentators have observed that Turkey’s foreign policy is increasingly oriented towards gestures of global Islamic solidarity. Could the Turkish government, under the Islamist Justice and Development Party, be leading its nation’s departure from the west?

But these gestures were not only being made by Turkish politicians. In Malaysia too, politicians invested heavily in the protest, most of them in language inflected by Islam rather than the old idioms of national liberation and Third World unity. Indeed, in Malaysia, questions of rights, justice and sympathy with Palestinians are usually framed in terms of what might be called “ummatic globalism” – an effort to activate the ummah, or worldwide community of believers, as a purposeful and united political agent. Malaysian politicians of every stripe now use Gaza to demonstrate this globalism and their support for the political formation it both imagines and produces, “the Muslim World.”

In Malaysia public debate before and since the flotilla has both fed into and reflected the domestic electoral contest. Not only were PAS and the People’s Pact condemning Israel in June, so too was the government. Just a few days before the PAS Congress, the prime minister, Najib Razak, welcomed home activists who had been aboard the Freedom Flotilla – twelve on the Mavi Marmara and six on another ship, the Rachel Corrie. These activists were feted in the media, which discussed their love for Gaza, the bloodstained clothes they brought home, and the fear they felt while briefly in Israeli detention.

Gaza has become embedded in actions, practices and statements that suggest to Malaysians that the ummah is watching, assessing their gestures of religious and political credibility. Indeed, Gaza is now such a potent symbol on Malaysia’s global map of Islam that one parliamentarian recently referred to it as “an exalted place after Mecca and Medina.” The Muslim World isn’t just a creation of Orientalist westerners; in Malaysia, it is produced and perpetuated in countless statements and gestures by politicians, both nationally and ly.

Performing to both audiences, Malaysia made a large contribution to the Freedom Flotilla by backing the Rachel Corrie, a converted merchant ship. Named after a young American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting at house demolitions in Gaza, the vessel lagged several days behind the main flotilla because of engine trouble. It was intercepted off the Gaza coast, without violence, and directed to dock at Ashdod in Israel, where its crew of activists was offloaded, detained and processed for deportation.

The voyage was funded by a Malaysian NGO whose patronage profile links it directly to the Malaysian establishment. Called the Perdana Global Peace Organisation, the NGO’s main patron is former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad. The architect of Malaysia’s political Islamisation, Mahathir used religion domestically to appropriate the legitimacy of non-government Islamist groups. He also gave the Palestine Liberation Organisation full diplomatic status in 1981, and Gaza solidarity has been central to the political contest in Malaysia ever since. Perdana lists among its advisers one Mukhriz Mahathir – Mahathir’s son and the current deputy minister for trade and industry in the national government.

With patrons like this, the organisation’s fundraising capacity is enormous. It raised €300,000 for the Rachel Corrie’s voyage and also funded two other ships that didn’t end up travelling. It also has access to government support – for example, through official lobbying of Egypt to allow the unimpeded passage of aid convoys through its Rafah crossing into Gaza.

The volunteers aboard the Rachel Corrie reflected these close government ties. They included Shamsul Akmar Musa Kamal, a former assistant political editor for the New Straits Times, Malaysia’s leading English-language broadsheet, and now a special officer to Mahathir; Matthias Chang, a barrister and one-time Mahathir political secretary; Ahmad Faizal Azumu, once a youth wing leader of the main party in the government coalition; and Muhammad Nizar Zakaria, a federal MP in the current government. Some opposition PAS volunteers were also on board, however, including Abdul Rani Osman, a member of the Selangor state legislative assembly.

Naturally, not all of the Malaysian volunteers were politicians or current and former political staffers. A number of Islam-oriented professional organisations, NGOs and charities were also represented. Nor has the Freedom Flotilla been the only instance in which Malaysian activists have attempted to break the Gaza blockade. In August this year, further attempts were made by two more delegations – the Ramadan March for Freedom and a group of thirty medical practitioners coordinated by the Malaysian Red Crescent Society. Only last month, fourteen Malaysians also joined the fifth Viva Palestina convoy, which successfully entered Gaza through Rafah.

WHY did the Malaysian government pour so much political capital into the Freedom Flotilla? And why did opposition parties ensure they were also represented on board?

One reason is that gestures like these are felt to create important leverage with the Muslim community. Like Turkey, but on a smaller scale, Malaysia’s actions demonstrate that the Gaza cause is valued by non-Arab states seeking a greater speaking part on Islam’s global stage. During a speech before the United Nations General Assembly in September, for example, Prime Minister Najib Razak referred explicitly and at length to the military boarding of the Freedom Flotilla. Earlier, in June, his government called for action against Israel through the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, in which Malaysia is an active and committed participant.

The second reason is that Gaza solidarity gestures provide each side in Malaysian politics with countless political opportunities. Politicians use Gaza to argue to the Malaysian public that they are better Muslims and greater globalists than their opponents. For this reason, the Freedom Flotilla was also drawn in to a government narrative against the opposition People’s Pact leader, Anwar Ibrahim.

This narrative began to unfold in February this year, when Anwar launched an media campaign to highlight his second and ongoing trial on charges of sodomy – charges designed to ruin his moral credibility with Malay Muslims, Malaysia’s majority electoral constituency. International media sources took up his story, and he was lauded in a Washington Post editorial and also interviewed by the Guardian and CNN.

But the government also seeks positive coverage, in part through public affairs consultant APCO International, which promotes Malaysia’s democratic institutions, capacity for service delivery and economic success. Hired in 2009, APCO quickly established a new office in Kuala Lumpur, announcing that it would “provide support” to the Malaysian ambassador in his work in the United States.

On his return from overseas in March, Anwar attacked the government’s connection with APCO. He compared the government’s “One Malaysia” campaign – intended to promote racial harmony in multi-ethnic Malaysia – with an Israeli government campaign called “One Israel.” He accused APCO of creating that campaign for the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak. The government responded by attacking Anwar’s friendship with Paul Wolfowitz, a leading American neoconservative and supporter of Israel. It targeted Anwar’s connection with the Brookings Institution and the National Endowment for Democracy, both seen as Israel-friendly organisations. It also referred Anwar to the Parliamentary Rights and Privileges Committee, accusing him of misleading the house over APCO. (If censured, he could have been suspended from parliament for a year.)

Opposition spokespeople then lined up behind Anwar to accuse APCO of possessing links with Mossad; its access to Malaysian government documents, they argued, should therefore be blocked. Meanwhile, APCO’s assistance reportedly gained Prime Minister Najib a meeting with Barack Obama at a summit on nuclear security, leading Anwar to accuse the government of softening its criticism of the United States and Israel under APCO’s influence.

The accusations continued until the situation suddenly shifted, and Anwar’s side lost control of the argument. In an important by-election, Anwar’s public posturing around the APCO issue failed to shift Malay Muslim votes away from the government over to his side. Then the New Ledger, a right-leaning American website, suddenly published an article attacking Anwar. It accused him of having used the APCO controversy to spin a conspiracy theory about Jews, stoking anti-Semitism at home while posing as a democrat overseas. B’nai Brith, an Jewish organisation, wrote to the US Congress Committee on Foreign Relations accusing Anwar of anti-Semitism. Anwar denied this charge and instead blamed APCO for organising the criticism.

In the middle of all this, the Mavi Marmara was boarded. Malaysian politicians quickly condemned the United States, leading competing protest rallies outside the US embassy in Kuala Lumpur. (There is no Israeli embassy; Malaysia has no diplomatic ties with Israel.) A government-linked NGO, Perkasa, rallied first; opposition representatives and supporters rallied soon after. Anwar’s side won the numbers game – the People’s Pact and a coalition of NGOs managed to stage a rally of 10,000, which marched from a downtown Kuala Lumpur mosque to the US embassy. Here, too, an Israeli flag was burnt – or, more accurately, melted – and demonstrators carried portraits of Hamas leaders Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh. After submitting a memorandum to the ambassador, Anwar addressed the crowd, which chanted “Down with Zionists!” and “Accursed Jews!”

In parliament, the government’s efforts to reclaim the Gaza issue were met with chants of “APCO!” from the opposition benches. Yet the taunts were futile: only the government could organise a homecoming for the Freedom Flotilla volunteers. They were greeted in Istanbul by the foreign minister himself, before being escorted back to Malaysia. The deputy prime minister greeted them at the airport, and Najib wore a Palestinian scarf. Pictures were broadcast globally by Al Jazeera’s Malaysia bureau.

This round in the Malaysian Gaza contest then drew to a close. Anwar’s parliamentary committee hearing was postponed indefinitely, and Anwar apologised to his overseas associates for using terms like “Zionist aggression.” This drew taunts from government politicians for apologising to Americans. In turn, the government, apparently satisfied with its success, has renewed APCO’s contract for another year. Meanwhile, in Malaysia as in Turkey, Gaza allows the political contest to continue referencing two audiences: the domestic Muslim public and also the Muslim World. •

The post Global Gaza, Global Ummah appeared first on Inside Story.

IN EACH of its three years so far, the small Palestinian Film Festival has been marked by a spirited, glamorous opening evening: lots of black silk and satin, champagne, high heels and glitter. It’s appropriate; these films come out from under, and without the energies of a very small number of organisers and supporters we’d never know they were there. Celebration is in order. The four evenings of cinema which follow are variously pleasurable and challenging; some films will extend consciousness on what it can mean to live under military occupation, and work to break the stereotypes.

Julian Schnabel’s Miral is, like his earlier, remarkable The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a full-on melodrama, all stops out; he gets away with it brilliantly. The beautiful, motherless Miral grows up under the tutelage of a true Palestinian heroine, Hind al-Husseini, who keeps her orphanage and school going against all odds. Emerging, on her way to becoming an international journalist, Miral discovers the realities of the refugee camps, and brutalities of the Occupation. This is a film of conventional strategies, deployed for a story that is still outside conventional boundaries; it has great flow and energy, and should be sought for commercial release.

Miral was shown with 138 Pounds in My Pocket, a twenty-minute documentary on Hind al-Husseini and the beginnings of her orphanage, when she took on the child survivors of the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948. The pairing worked well, high-end fiction offered beside its ground in history.

A few films divided the audience. Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention moves off from the more literal, autobiographical mode of his The Time that Remains, the major feature in last year’s program, and rebuts empathy to deliver the Occupation as farce. Staring calmly through everything, Suleiman plays a man who lives in Nazareth, with a beautiful young girlfriend in Ramallah. The film opens with the girl, in high heels and a pink sheath, walking imperturbably through a checkpoint, insulting the guards by simply refusing to see them. The tale moves in comic, quasi-surrealist jumps, with more than a touch of the Godards in holding action at a distance and finding absurdity in authoritarian rituals. There’s a wonderful sequence in which a drunken Israeli guard, clumsily trying to control a fast stream of cars at his checkpoint, has to flounder and give up. A red balloon is set flying over the landscape; it carries Yasser Arafat’s face, the expression humorously benign. Some would have liked more realism, but as it is, Divine Intervention helps lift Palestinian cinema up and away from the political ground; the horizon widens, and much more is possible.

Zindeeq is sparse, stern, resolute; as the opening night film, it was found by some to be rather too grave and cheerless. A lone man’s travels through the night, when one hotel after another refuses to find him a bed, are clearly allegorical; where is home? Mohammad Bakri’s intense, contained performance as the searcher instils the sense of dispossession; this is about 1948, and the requirement to remember. Other ways to make that call are spoken, seen and felt in the hour-long essay called As the Poet Said, an elegy in many voices for the late Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), modern Palestine’s national poet. It’s been argued that poetry and film can’t work together – remember the discussions round Jane Campion’s Bright Star?; they do here, resoundingly.

One of the strongest items here is Budrus, Julia Bacha’s great documentary already seen, and discussed, after this year’s Sydney Film Festival. Among much else, this film reminds the audience that not all Israelis support the Occupation, and many – particularly among the young – hate and oppose the security wall and all it stands for. Some of those stood with the villagers of Budrus, unarmed, facing the bulldozers that threatened their olive groves and livelihoods; and they won. It’s the strongest pro-peace film I know; beyond argument, they show us how. •

The post Breaking the stereotypes appeared first on Inside Story.

IN MAY the ABC made Ronin Films, the independent Canberra-based distributor, a firm offer to buy and screen a one-hour documentary called Hope in a Slingshot. This film, which was independently financed, explores daily life in a part of the Palestinian territories under the Israeli occupation. Interviews and observation are punctuated with maps, segments of history back to 1948, and statistics – for example, on the forced evictions of Palestinian families, on deaths by violence on both sides, on periods of imprisonment, on the numbers of young Palestinian men confined to their villages. One map shows how far the settlements have penetrated the West Bank, and thus the near-impossibility of the so-called two-state solution. The huge concrete security fence – or segregation wall, depending on which side you’re on – is inescapable; diagrams show how far it moves east of the notional border, separating workers from workplaces and families from each other. The checkpoints appear in clusters, sometimes no more than seven kilometres apart. The Israeli soldiers are cavalier and inconsistent; here they scrutinise papers minutely, there they don’t bother.

The filmmaker, Inka Stafrace, interviews both Israeli and Palestinian residents of the West Bank; she tried and failed to get into Gaza as well. She follows a peaceful demonstration, involving international visitors, Jews and Palestinians together; they are assaulted by armed Israeli soldiers who use rubber bullets, but those do considerable bodily damage. She finds a senior Israeli lawyer, a woman who defends Palestinians in court and who finds her own country’s practices abhorrent. She finds young people gripped by anger and frustration; one is cast down to the point of hopelessness by the sight of another line of trailers, marking a new building site, on a Palestinian hillside; others plead for attention from the international community. Stafrace reflects on the psychological damage to young men from long-term restriction and surveillance, a system that breeds exactly the sort of enmity it seeks to guard against. Around the checkpoints, as she watches people subjected to pointless, malicious obstruction, she has to keep her temper; she sees that for the sake of the victims around her, she can’t afford to lose it. Holding her camera close, she shares her own fear as she walks alone toward a checkpoint. Through the whole essay, feeling and factual analysis work dynamically together; having seen this, we won’t forget.

For Ronin, a small family firm with a long track record in supporting film work outside the mainstream, the ABC sale was very important, both for its own sustaining income as well as for the circulation of this particular documentary. It fell through; the head of television, Kim Dalton, cancelled the deal on the grounds that since (as he saw it) the film is an expression of opinion on “contentious” matters, it couldn’t be run unless a program made from the Israeli side was run as well; he referred to a general policy of “impartiality.” Dalton said that the ABC had been unable to find such a program. A friend remarked that at that rate you couldn’t run an anti-slavery film without turning on a pro-slavery one as well; and what price Four Corners?

The call for “balance,” however, misses the point that this film is arguing for peace rather than, more simply, pressing the Palestinian cause. While there has been an international shift toward better recognition of the Palestinians’ case – a shift that was under way even before the assault on Gaza and the attack on the aid ship – there are also Jewish people everywhere who want to see peace with justice. In Hope in a Slingshot the concluding interview is with two young women, who wish passionately that nationalities and national identities could simply disappear, taking the bitter inheritance with them. The film is a rational assemblage of evidence on that inheritance, its reasons and its force in the present; it isn’t an anti-Israel polemic. Behind the Palestinians’ story of occupation and oppression, there is always Israel’s own story, the grand postwar multicultural project, a social-democratic dream buried under fear-driven militarism. Because these stories are, perennially, the whole world’s business, this film is one we should all be able to see. It seeks to contribute to the process of changing perceptions: a twenty-first-century shift. The ABC’s action amounts to self-censorship; the thinking here is seriously out of date.

Hope in a Slingshot will undoubtedly find outlets, both in and outside Australia. You can get it on DVD from Ronin Films. •

The post Arguing for peace appeared first on Inside Story.

WHEN ISRAEL withdrew the 9000-strong settler population from the Gaza Strip five years ago, hopes were renewed that normalisation was beginning after the five years of deadly violence that followed the breakdown of the 1993–2000 “Oslo” peace process. In New York, the United Nations commented that “the Palestinians have experienced the joy of the departure of the occupier” and “the Israelis are no longer saddled with the unrewarding, Sisyphus-like grind of securing the Gaza Strip.”

Voices in the neighbourhood were more pessimistic, even cynical. Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Zvi Bar’el, a liberal political commentator, noted that “all the components of the potential [Gaza] explosion are yet to be neutralised – the highest population density in the world, terrible poverty, a huge collection of arms, and a radical leadership [Hamas].” The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram published a cartoon that depicted Ariel Sharon contemptuously tossing a lean bone labelled “Gaza” onto an outstretched plate held by the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who gazed longingly at a fat leg of lamb, labelled “West Bank,” grasped firmly in the Israeli prime minister’s other hand.

Five years on from 2005, the faint hopes aroused by Israel’s Gaza withdrawal have been cruelly shattered. Instead, Gaza has emerged as symbol and flashpoint of the morass that is post-Oslo and post–second intifada Israel–Palestine, of which internecine Palestinian warfare, Israel’s punitive “Operation Cast Lead” in December 2008–January 2009, and now the peace flotilla fiasco in the eastern Mediterranean are all symptoms.

Israel has long regarded the Gaza Strip as an unmanageable and dispensable liability. A few months before the first Palestinian intifada began in the Jebalya refugee camp, located at the Strip’s northern end, in December 1987, the Israel Defence Forces completed a classified study titled “The Gaza District Up to the Year 2000.” It was, in the words of the Israeli analysts Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, “one of the grimmest documents ever submitted to the Israeli establishment.” The report warned that an exponentially rising population combined with acute land and water shortages amounted to “a human time-bomb ticking away at Israel’s ear.” In their study of the first intifada, published in 1989, Schiff and Ya’ari wrote that “the Gaza Strip is a cancer that will steadily drain the State of Israel” and predicted that “Israel will soon be on its knees begging all and sundry to do it the mercy of taking Gaza off its hands.”

That prognosis proved prescient. Over the first eight months of 1993, during the famous “back-channel” talks between Israeli and Palestine Liberation Organisation representatives in Norway, the first point of in-principle agreement concerned Israel’s disengagement from Gaza. Dennis Ross, the US special envoy to the Middle East from 1989 to 2001, has written in his memoirs that “in Israeli eyes, this was a promising beginning. The Israelis wanted out of Gaza.”

In 1994 the Strip’s maze of congested townships and claustrophobic refugee camps was duly turned over by Israel to the administration of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, along with Jericho, a West Bank town in the Judean desert near the border with Jordan. Israel retained a significant portion of the Strip containing Jewish settlements, as well as control over roads linking those settlements to Israel. In 2005 Sharon took the seemingly revolutionary step of dismantling the settlements and relocating their inmates to Israel, in the face of strong protests by the settlers. Especially resistant were those in the large settlement bloc of Gush Katif, located in the south-western part of the Strip next to the teeming Palestinian areas of Rafah and Khan Yunis. Sharon defended his decision in pragmatic terms: “I am not prepared to accept the claim that leaving Gaza is the trampling of Zionism. It is in fact strengthening Zionism in areas that are much more important.” He specifically cited Jerusalem and its environs, the Galilee region of northern Israel (which has a large “Israeli Arab” population) and the Negev desert of southern Israel as the areas of high strategic priority, unlike Gaza, to the Jewish state.

It is thus more than a little ironic that Israel continues not just to bear, but also to aggravate through its own actions, the Sisyphus-like burden represented by Gaza. Fifty-four years ago, the Israel Defence Forces seized Gaza during the Suez conflict of 1956. Dr Haidar Abd al-Shafi, an eminent resident of the Strip, recalled that brief occupation many years later: “I remember Israel’s occupation of Gaza during the Suez invasion in 1956. It was clear that they were engaged in long-term planning, that they intended to stay. When the UN passed resolutions calling for withdrawal, France and Britain withdrew immediately from the canal area and Israel began to slowly withdraw from the parts of Sinai it had occupied. But they made no move to withdraw from Gaza, and when President Eisenhower sent a letter to [David] Ben-Gurion” – the Israeli prime minister at the time – “asking why Israel did not withdraw Ben-Gurion had the gall to not reply. But then Eisenhower wrote a second letter threatening sanctions, and Israel withdrew in one night. That night we went to bed to the noise of armoured cars roaming the streets, and woke up the next morning to find no trace of Israelis in the Strip. It took a president with a moral fibre to get them out.”

Alas, 2010 is not 1956, Obama – his virtues notwithstanding – is not Eisenhower, Netanyahu is definitely no Ben-Gurion, and Israel finds it seemingly impossible to extricate itself from the messy legacy of the long occupation of Gaza that commenced in June 1967. And Gaza’s inhabitants find Israeli occupation replaced by Israeli blockade.

The consistent harshness of Israeli operations aimed at Gaza, most notably in Operation Cast Lead but also apparent in the decision to interdict the activist flotilla sailing toward the Strip, may seem somewhat puzzling at first glance. Why react with such ferocity to the relative pinpricks inflicted by Qassam rocketry, and mostly on small towns like Sderot? Why risk a fresh round of global controversy and criticism by pouncing in waters on a flotilla of vessels with hundreds of people of different nationalities on board? But while the Israeli use of disproportionate force may not be justified, it can be explained.

To most Israelis, the elites and the citizenry alike, a Gaza Strip under Hamas control embodies in a concentrated microcosm the mixture of menaces that cumulatively constitute the “existential threat” to their state and society. The declaratory hostility of Hamas, a movement that enjoys the committed adherence of a very large minority of Palestinians, to the existence of Israel is one component of this existential syndrome; the unsettling physical proximity to Israel of the Hamas enclave in Gaza is another. But by themselves these two components would not add up to more than a major irritant to Israel’s sense of security.

What makes Hamas-controlled Gaza more than a neighbourhood nuisance is the movement’s links with Syria and (particularly) Iran. The hardline Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal lives in and operates from Damascus. The Islamic Jihad group, which has long been active in Gaza and currently enjoys a relatively fraternal relationship with Hamas, has a longstanding and close nexus with Iran’s military and intelligence apparatus. Israel has a simmering “northern front” where it faces a formidable adversary, Hezbollah, backed by Iran and also Syria. The Hamas-dominated enclave in Gaza represents a live “southern front” where the same constellation of anti-Israel forces coalesces. Nor can Hamas be chased away from Gaza – or Hezbollah from Lebanon – in the manner the PLO was evicted from Jordan in 1970 and Lebanon in 1982.

It is this calculus of interlinked threats that fortifies the Israeli siege mentality. That mentality is manifested in the hammer-and-tongs operations seen in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2008–09 and 2010 (and indeed in the assassinations of Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus in early 2008 and Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in early 2010). The Gaza imbroglio and its periodic eruptions are especially uncomfortable for the authoritarian regime of Egypt, whose suspicion of Hamas – an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood movement – is matched if not surpassed by the Egyptian public’s dislike of Israel’s aggressive behaviour.

In January 1995, a suicide bombing conducted inside Israel by the Islamic Jihad group killed twenty Israeli soldiers and one civilian. In a nationally televised address after the incident, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin grimly promised to “take Gaza out of Tel Aviv” and declared that this would be achieved through “a separation between us and them,” to be negotiated with Yasser Arafat. The promise to liberate the faux Mediterranean Europe of Tel Aviv from the fanaticism and violence of Gaza underlined the mixture of contempt and fear with which the typical Israeli views the festering cauldron of the Strip. And this was fifteen years ago, well before the rise of Hamas to political and strategic prominence.

THE PALESTINIANS, meanwhile, are a nation divided. The strongman-centric Palestinian Authority regime of Yasser Arafat was past its sell-by date significantly before Arafat’s death. In the post-Arafat phase Palestinian politics has, instead of experiencing a transition to a two-party system based on mutual tolerance and power-sharing between Fatah and Hamas, experienced its opposite: a bitter rift between the two major Palestinian political formations, a Hamas power-grab in Gaza and Fatah repression of Hamas supporters in the West Bank. Arafat’s legacy of corrupt, clique-based governance has of course contributed much to the unseemly fracas into which Palestinian politics has degenerated after his demise. But so has Arafat’s absence from the scene. The Palestinian polity has had trouble evolving beyond the situation in which Arafat, for all his flaws and misdemeanours, provided a focal point.

The decline of Fatah and the ascendancy of Hamas are due, above all, to one factor – the catastrophic failure of the 1993–2000 peace process. Hamas rose almost literally from the ruins of Oslo and the embers of the second intifada. As the most significant Palestinian faction opposed to and excluded from the Oslo process, Hamas stood to gain the most once most Palestinians, in the words of the Israeli observer Ron Pundak, “came to the conclusion that Israel did not in fact want to end the occupation” and became convinced that their established leadership had been tricked into a “barren process” and “historical trap.”

And gain Hamas did. Through 2005 it won a string of victories in Palestinian local elections. And not just in the Gaza Strip, the cradle and stronghold of the movement; it also won resoundingly in West Bank cities like Nablus and towns like Qalqiliya. These local triumphs were the precursor to its landslide victory in the Palestinian parliamentary election of early 2006, when Hamas took an absolute majority – seventy-four out of 132 – of the legislature’s seats. It was striking that Hamas won handsomely not only in places where it is known to have a strong base, such as religious-minded Hebron, but also in Ramallah, regarded as a bastion of secular Palestinian nationalists and leftists.

The lesson of this history is that the “problem” represented by Gaza – and Hamas – cannot be tackled in isolation, but only through a serious, sustained renewal of an Israeli–Palestinian peace process. That is a tall order. The constellation of mutually reinforcing obstacles is quite daunting.

The Palestinian polity is hopelessly disunited. Yet it is difficult to deny the argument made by Hamas specialists Beverley Milton-Edwards and Alastair Crooke that “a meaningful and inclusive Palestinian national unity is necessary for a negotiated peace” between Israel and the Palestinians. As a political actor Hamas is too significant to be ignored, marginalised or suppressed, and at the same time the “inclusion” of Hamas is fraught with complications. The possibility of indirect inclusion via the good offices of a third-party intermediary such as Turkey has receded for the time being after the flotilla fiasco and the sharp downturn in Turkish–Israeli relations. It is certain, however, that the formulaic distinction made by many influential Israelis and Americans between (acceptable) Fatah “moderates” and (unacceptable) Hamas “extremists” is a recipe for continuing deadlock.

The problem of Palestinian disunity is reinforced by the very pronounced rightward shift of the centre of gravity of Israel’s polity since the early years of the Oslo process. This shift is exemplified among many other developments by the progression from Shimon Peres to Tzipi Livni and then to Avigdor Lieberman in Israel’s foreign ministry. As for Binyamin Netanyahu, it remains to be established whether he has evolved since his previous term as Israel’s prime minister (1996–99), when he was privately described by a British ambassador to Tel Aviv as “a drunk who lurches from one lamp-post to the next.” Sixteen summers ago, it seemed feasible that Rabin and Arafat – both towering figures amongst their own peoples – would be able to deliver a lasting Israeli–Palestinian rapprochement. Harbouring such hopes with Netanyahu and Abu Mazen – lightweights presiding over deeply factionalised polities – would stretch the imagination of a fantasist. The demoralisation and disarray on the Israeli left looks unlikely to abate in the near future, and the appearance of Marwan Barghouti as a Palestinian Gerry Adams remains just a gleam on the horizon.

The geopolitics of the wider region is also challenging. The Israel–Syria antagonism cannot be mended without a resolution of the Golan Heights issue. Lebanon’s internal equilibrium is fragile, and the summer 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel a recent, ominous memory. The paranoia – partly feigned but partly real – among Israel’s political and security establishments about Iran’s capabilities and intentions is an additional source of tension and intransigence. The seriousness of the “Iran factor” has been aggravated by Iran’s internal, and unresolved, turmoil since the disputed presidential election of June 2009. The image of Iranian aid ships attempting to run Israel’s Gaza blockade is exactly the kind of picture the world’s television screens can do without.

“Only a dispassionate, fair and impartial arbiter,” according to the scholar Rashid Khalidi, “can help bring the two sides to mutually acceptable terms.” He believes that “if there is to be peace between Palestinians and Israelis the United States must begin to act in this fashion, or it must allow another [third] party to do so.”

There is clearly no plausible third party other than the United States that could possibly play a substantive role to disentangle this stalemate. At the same time, the limits to American influence with Israel became apparent in March 2010, when the United States fired a calculated – if only verbal – warning shot across Israel’s bows after an Israeli announcement of further housing for Israelis in East Jerusalem coincided with Vice-President Biden’s visit to the Jewish state and the West Bank, and the Israeli government reacted in the manner of a cornered bulldog. Will George Mitchell, the US special envoy for the Middle East – a far bigger brief than the one he creditably handled in the second half of the 1990s as the US special envoy for Northern Ireland – be able to make a difference? Can the Obama administration, disengaging from Iraq but bogged down in Afghanistan, rise to the challenge? Time will surely tell, but the portents are not promising. •

The post Gaza: symbol and flashpoint appeared first on Inside Story.

WHILE Afghanistan has been centre stage, with its deeply flawed presidential election and the vexed debate about sending in more US troops, Iraq has lost its status as an almost daily source of major news stories, despite elections due in January and the recent bomb attacks on government buildings. But this complex and riven country remains a crucial part of the Middle East’s seemingly unsolvable jigsaw puzzle.

Journalism is fundamentally challenging in Iraq. Personal safety is an obvious issue, and verifying the accuracy of information and providing authentic, informed analysis of events and personalities stretches even the most experienced and assiduous journalists. Martin Chulov is an Australian who has spent the last four years in some of the Middle East’s hottest trouble spots. Now, from his station in Baghdad as a correspondent for the Guardian, he updates on the latest developments in Iraq and reflects on how different his current life is from being a reporter in Sydney, London or New York.

Listen here

Because the sound quality from Baghdad was variable, we have added an edited transcript of this interview, below. After the interview was recorded the Iraqi legislature agreed on a formula to include the city of Kirkuk in the January 2010 national election, which is now likely to take place on 21 January.

Transcript

: Another horrific bombing in Baghdad, killing and injuring many and destroying more government buildings, has propelled Iraq back into the news headlines briefly. But compared to the daily diet of Iraqi news in years past, this still deeply troubled country has largely fallen off the news radar. National elections are scheduled for January, if the Iraqi parliament can finally reach agreement on the legislation that would underpin electoral legitimacy. And, of course, the withdrawal of US troops to their bases has made a significant difference to the political, social and security climate there. But what are the current trends for an improved future in Iraq, despite the complex web of tribal, ethnic and sectarian loyalties and conflicts? Martin Chulov is an Australian journalist who has become something of a veteran in covering and analysing Middle East events and politics over the last four years or so. He is now on duty in Baghdad as a correspondent for the Guardian newspaper. Martin, welcome to Inside Story.

Martin Chulov: Hello Peter.

PC: Since Barack Obama took over as president of the United States, there’s been a really big shift in terms of the news coverage of Iraq specifically – clearly, Afghanistan is centre stage at the moment. Can we just step back and put on the wide lens for a moment to give us some context for this conversation. Looking back over those twelve months, what has been the shift in dynamics in Iraq itself?

MC: Well, I think since June 30, in particular, the Americans have withdrawn to their bases… and that means that we’re not seeing them on Iraq’s streets at all, unless they’re being escorted around by Iraqis themselves. So we don’t have the pervasive presence of the Americans on the city streets here. But looking beyond that, their role and their relevance has gradually diminished in the last six months in particular. They are now looking at an exit strategy: they’re winding back the 120,000 troops that they do have here; their diplomatic efforts have also scaled back. They are consolidating, and not as robust or proactive as they were during the previous administration… We are seeing a lot of micro works still being done in the provinces – reconstructions, a lot of water projects and small sewerage or public service projects – but we don’t see the Americans playing a heavy hand in this society as we did, throughout the last six years. So we do have the Iraqis taking control of the levers of power here, to the best of their means at the moment, [and] they still do play a pretty strong consultative role with the Americans. But Iraq seems to be theirs for all intents and purposes at the moment…

PC: Martin, that’s an enormous move really, when we think about it – the withdrawal of the United States troops from the cities themselves back to the bases? As that happened around about three or four months ago, what was the immediate change in atmosphere? A lot of people discussed whether the Iraqis would be able to maintain the security – and we’ll talk about the bombings in just a moment – but what was that immediate shift in the general security atmosphere and the atmosphere generally in Baghdad and beyond?

MC: There was a sense that the Iraqis had reclaimed what was theirs and that they were now masters of their own destiny. So there was a general euphoria at the time, both on the street level and also within the administrative level. The cabinet or the ministers, most of the bureaucrats, were quite happy to talk about how Iraq had regained sovereignty after so many years of not just an American occupation but also thirty years of brutal dictatorship under Saddam, in which there was no respect for the rule of law whatsoever… It was all top down and people didn’t have the right to assert themselves as Iraqi citizens. So we got to the end of that point, ostensibly, in the middle of 2009 and there was a pretty significant euphoria spreading around this town, spreading around this country. And, also, a will for the Americans to leave and not just to move back to their bases and sit there, but to leave for good. I mean it had been a very, very difficult period and this was seen to be the starting point of something new.

PC: I was intrigued to hear you use that term, just being “an Iraqi citizen.” The impression we get here, of course, in our little grabs on the nightly news is that sectarian tensions are still very deep and very problematic and, of course, there are lots of other tensions within Islam itself… So can you sit there today and tell us that there is, as you experience it, a clearcut sense of being an Iraqi citizen? Or, do all those other loyalties play a much bigger role?

MC: It’s a very good question, a question that all of us wrestle with, from the top down, from the American diplomatic efforts here, from the Iraqis themselves. But I must say that looking from society from the grassroots level up it is difficult to see a sense of Iraqi nationalism riding above the tribal, sectarian and clan loyalties that we do see around the country. It is fair to say that the sectarian tensions that exploded into outright civil war in 2006 are not as strong now. But they are still there; there are still some very powerful undercurrents here… The loyalty to the tribes is paramount. It is very much a tribal society. It is still split in the government along sectarian lines, although Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki is contesting the next election looking for a cross-sectarian base. But we have seen throughout the ages in Iraq the time-worn adage of “safety in numbers,” and people do look for safety within the tribes, within their sects and within their areas of Iraq. It’s still pretty geographic-centric: the Shiites are in the south and the Sunnis are pretty much in the centre and the Kurds have the north. There isn’t a lot of mixing. In Baghdad there was a sectarian cleansing going on throughout 2006, 2007, and lots of mixed areas were vacated, or certainly whoever had the power base in that area, whether it be the Sunnis or the Shiites, their opposite would have left. Now we are starting to see them come back to these mixed suburbs and there are some reconciliation processes going on right throughout the community.

Is that going to translate into a rising sense of Iraqi nationalism? At the moment it’s very difficult to see that and if you look at this electoral process at the moment – the run-up to the election which is due to be held on January 16 – there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that we can see of people looking to embrace this election as Iraqis. The sectarian lines are pretty strong and pretty entrenched and it does look as though we will head to the election with people looking to boost their power base and their sect, rather than their country.

PC: Early on, of course, or much earlier on, Martin, there was quite a bit of discussion about the potential for a federal system within the nation of Iraq, with the Kurds to the north and you’ve already mentioned those broad geographical divisions between the Shiites and the Sunnis. Is that still on the agenda, the possibility of something like that?

MC: No, it’s not being talked about at the moment and there really isn’t any will for a federal system that we can see from the central government in Baghdad. There is a fear that that may lead to a further push for partitioning the country. If that was to happen there would be enormous instability in Iraq and it just would not be something that the Iraqi administration would support, and nor would its neighbours. If Iraq was to partition along sectarian lines, there would be absolute chaos in the heart of the Middle East…

PC: I notice the latest news indicated that the parliament still hasn’t nailed down the legislation for these looming elections in January. What are the key sticking points here? I notice mention of the way the ballot paper may be laid out and, of course, Kirkuk is in a very difficult area and that seems to be playing into the difficulties around the election as well…

MC: The key sticking point, as you say, is Kirkuk, what to do with Kirkuk. Now Kirkuk has long been contested; the Kurds, the Turkmen, and the Arabs have all laid claim to this strategically important city in northern Iraq, which is just above a massive subterranean lake and is very important in providing future revenues for the Iraqi economy, which is doing very, very poorly and oil is its meal ticket. So Kirkuk – for the reasons of oil and also for other reasons that go back throughout the ages – is strategically important to all sides. Kirkuk was not part of the provincial elections, but there is a significant push from the central government to include it in the national elections for the new prime minister and the new government, in January.

People are pushing on one hand for the right to elect individual citizens. On the other hand, there is a push to elect a party block. There doesn’t seem to be any agreement, from any side at the moment, on how that is going to move forward, because over the last fifty years, since the last time there was a census, the demographics have changed significantly. There’s been claim and counter claim, by all sides, of Kurds, Turkmens and Arabs being shipped in by various politicians or militias to make up the numbers. The fact is we don’t have a reliable census in Kirkuk or reliable demographics to actually let us know, who is there and what the demographics are now. So the push at the moment is to try and work out a formula to satisfy all sides and include Kirkuk in the poll and accept the results of the election as legitimate, if it is in fact held. It is very, very hard to see how we are going to see a resolution on that.

The electoral law, which was due to be introduced into parliament, and enacted, has been delayed three weeks now, and there is growing talk in Baghdad that the election may be delayed. If that happened that would be a setback. But Kirkuk is a very, very thorny issue that is going to need a lot of work over a number of years to make any side happy.

PC: You mentioned earlier Prime Minister Maliki’s move to broaden his base to reach for a much broader coalition. But will the Sunnis be involved in the election this time after boycotting the last one?

MC: They are showing no signs of boycotting this one. Indeed, they are campaigning actively and looking to see where the lists end up and whether they can, in fact, make a push to regain ground that was lost in 2003 when Baathists were ousted, and was further lost when the Sunnies actually boycotted in 2005. I think there is a view in retrospect that that wasn’t terribly wise: it was an act of protest because they were thinking that if they did contest that election then that would just legitimise what they thought were unjust losses in 2003. However, this time they do appear to be contesting. They do know that their way to return to the power base here is through cross-sectarian support, rather than standing alone as a bloc…

PC: Is an Iraqi general election campaign anything like we experience here in Australia, or the United States? Or even in Iran when they had their elections – they were rather western style elections with debates, live television debates, etc. Does it go anything like that in Iraq?

MC: We do see the town hall meetings that we’d be used to. We do see the grassroots rallies, and prime ministers and senior figures wandering on through like conquering heroes amongst a sea of flags and banners and chants. And we do see some public discourse, and cabinet ministers putting themselves up on television for, I guess, a grilling – although by our standards it wouldn’t be considered so. Society here is still very differential, and it’s not all that easy to take on a senior player, somebody who is considered to have power and patronage. It’s not that easy to criticise or to take them on in an interview setting if you are an Iraqi. But, that said, there is a broad exchange of ideas. There is a semi-democratic model, or at least the semblance of it, that we could recognise and people do campaign on the things that citizens want – and that is delivering services, such us sewerage, roads… and cleaning up the smaller areas. I guess the local MPs do play a role and they do campaign for the support of citizens in certain areas. So, yes, it is a process that we would be familiar with. It’s perhaps not as rigorous and not as transparent as we would be familiar with.

PC: Martin, I have very little idea really of just what state the local Iraqi media has reached at this stage… Of course, here in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, there is this great discussion around journalism at the moment and the involvement of social media. I’m not sure how much social media plays a role there in the local Iraqi media. But just what standing does the local Iraqi media have at the moment, and to what extent are they playing a significant role in the campaign?

MC: There are plenty of media outlets here and there are plenty of journalists. What we do see unambiguously is that media outlets are aligned with certain political blocs… and there doesn’t appear to be too many commentators, or too many television stations or newspapers or radio stations, that are neutral or can be seen to be giving an independent or even semi-independent look at all sides. The official government station here, Iraqiya, does not criticise the government at all. There are opposition television stations and newspapers here which don’t give the government a voice. So there is a robust media industry, although they don’t examine as forensically as many of us would like the shortcomings, the failings, or even the successes of their adversaries. Journalism here has a way to go, but there is an enthusiasm for it. News coverage is eagerly sought. On a public radio level, I mean there are talkback callers, and people are free to criticise their local mayor or their local governor if things aren’t happening in that area and things actually do start to work. In terms of citizen journalism or social media, we don’t see any twitter or blogs or various things hitting the agenda. But the old style talkback, or citizen participation on television or radio, still does play a role and in many cases, an important role.

PC: You mention an absence of a forensic sense of inquiry. Just so we get a better idea of that, Martin, what sort of coverage across those various outlets, media outlets and from various journalistic outlets, did you see there after the most recent bombing?

MC: That clearly raised significant questions about (a) the competence and (b) the loyalty of the security forces. It’s not easy, you would have thought, to get four huge bombs, four truck bombs, into the heart of Baghdad within three months and to destroy three government ministries and the [offices of the] Baghdad governorate. Not surprisingly there were some very significant questions asked about how this could happen and government ministers [and] government officials were called to account by media outlets to explain themselves, and so they should have. I mean this is just something that in our society we would have noticed some dramatic ramifications. However, on the government television station, Iraqiya, we didn’t see any criticism of the government itself. What we did see is yet another attempt at blaming the neighbours, blaming Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

It’s quite common in Iraq after a bombing like this, which does cause some acute embarrassment for the government, some acute shame as well, to put somebody out on the television confessing to committing these crimes and naming people who he claims to have backed them. [After] the August bombs, which destroyed the foreign and finance ministries, we saw that happen within a day, and the government then held that up as proof that Baathists in exile in Syria were backing things and that then becomes the narrative that is pushed for the next six weeks or so. And after the bombs in late October we saw something similar. Putting people up like that isn’t necessarily convincing and the government doesn’t do a great job of presenting its case. However, huge events like that, flash points that do have the potential to change the political landscape here, are heavily scrutinised by most sides, not all sides, and the citizenship here does feel free to criticise the government and to put their names to their criticism. So there are some positive signs there, and there is a degree of scrutiny. It’s just not as extensive as it is in more developed societies.

PC: We read today in our news here that there’ve been some pretty widespread arrests in connection with the most recent bombing. How do you read those arrests? What’s the significance of those particular arrests amongst so many from the security forces?

MC: I think my initial reading from that would be that many of them are face savers, they are not being accused of direct participation, or facilitating the bombings. I think as it happened in August, they are accused of being lax at their checkpoints and not being professional enough to actually stop these devices coming into the city… They’d driven from the northern city, from fifty kilometres north, and they’d passed a number of checkpoints with forged documents to get to the green zone. So it must be said that it was a reasonably clever sort of a set-up to pass these checkpoints, and it wasn’t as if it was a concrete mixer driving on through, which had been used to blow things up in the past. So the militants that use these sorts of bombings they do learn and they do evolve and they do make things difficult for people who are looking to find them. But after the August bombs there was a decree across Baghdad that no trucks carrying anything more than one ton could move around the city at all between 6 am and 4 pm in the afternoon. Now these bombings happened at 10.30 in the morning. One of the bombs outside the governorate, contained in a minivan, did a lot of damage but nothing as extensive as the justice ministry just further up the road, which was blown up by a water tanker. Rather than carrying it in a big container, this was a tanker, carrying portable water ostensibly, that was filled with ammonium nitrate. So it is not easy to detect these things if they go to such lengths to disguise them. But there are and there have been some pretty strict security protocols, and people do have to pay a price, I guess, in some sense, for these things happening. But so far we haven’t seen any of the sixty-odd people that were rounded up as part of a sweep being accused of being part of any conspiracy. It is more so that they are lackadaisical in their duties.

PC: Can we put a slightly harsher spotlight on Prime Minister Maliki himself? He is not a figure that we know much about here in Australia, as you’d understand, he’s a bit of a shadowy figure to us in many ways I think. But he has survived in that role for quite a number of years. Introduce us more to his political abilities and his capacities perhaps, Martin, to win this next election. How clever is he as a politician?

MC: This election will answer that instructively. Over the last three and a half years that he’s been in power, he’s also been a shadowy figure here. We don’t have a lot of access to him, we try, but as a western media corps here we don’t see him a great deal. He does stick to the set pieces. He does do a lot of work outside Iraq, and he does do a lot of work in trying to build coalitions and build alliances to keep himself in power. I mean it’s not easy to claim power here and to hang on to it. And, he did have some very heavy patronage from 2006 onwards, during an incredibly difficult period in Iraq, from the last American administration and the embassy here. So there is a perception that he was propped up during that time. I mean, he had a wavering, I guess you could say, relationship with the Bush administration who initially backed him, then started to drift away from him. By the end of their time, they were backing him again, largely because at that point the security situation in Baghdad and across Iraq had started to stabilise.

So he is somebody that the Americans have invested their trust and invested their faith in. He is somebody that the Iraqis have started to do so as well. We saw during the provincial elections in January his political bloc did very well. But we don’t see any great evidence at this point, of him leading this nation out of the mire that it’s been over the past six years. He has claimed, and rightly, that Iraq can only start to advance once security is brought into the society at all levels. That’s why he had pushed so hard on saying that Baghdad was now a safer place than it ever was. That is why he has felt it so harshly when four enormous bombs that had levelled government institutions had proven that his security gains were perhaps illusory.

But in terms of whether this prime minister is somebody who can go on to make his mark in this society, it really is difficult to say. He doesn’t have a great deal of charisma. When he moves around town here, he moves around in massive convoys and roads are shut for four or five hours before he’s moved. So it is not as though he is doing many street walks or allowing an audience to regular citizens, and the security situation, I guess, dictates that – that he does have to stay inside the green zone and run the business of state from a sanctuary. There are the criticisms that he doesn’t know the society as well as he should as a leader. But there are also some factors that make that almost inevitable for now. I wish I could give you a more comprehensive psychological assessment of the man. But the fact is that we don’t know him, and many Iraqis don’t know him either.

PC: Of course, talking about the election, talking about Maliki and the very shaky security situation as it continues, it’s not hard to imagine, Martin, is it, that as the election gets closer if they do manage to nail down that legislation, that there could be more bombings and the election could be a very fraught period indeed. Do you anticipate that there could be more of that sort of violence leading up to the election?

MC: I think we all anticipate that there will be some more bombings. I guess ironically there aren’t too many government ministries left to blow up, that certainly people can access. Most of the rest appear to be within the green zone or within very safe areas that it’s very hard to reach. There is a will amongst the Sunni insurgents and perhaps the Baathists who back them – perhaps, I say, because we haven’t seen anything to prove it; there is evidence to suggest it, but not prove it – but there is a campaign, by Sunnis in general, to destabilise the government by delegitimising some of its claimed security gains. That is going to be an important strategy in the lead up to the elections. So there is an anticipation, a wide anticipation, that we will see more violence here.

What we are not seeing is the sectarian stuff that we saw throughout 2006 and 2007. The dreadful slayings, the rounding up of people at the checkpoints… So the sectarian stuff has not flared up again, and indeed the Shiite militia… have remained stood down since early 2008. We don’t see them on the streets they don’t run checkpoints. The checkpoints all seem to be run by the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police these days, which does give a degree of confidence. While we anticipate more bombings, more uncertainty and more fear in the streets, not to the extent that the brutal civil war of 2006–2007 that led so many Iraqis to leave the country, will flare up again. We do think that there is a lid on that for now and it is unlikely to be removed before the poll.

PC: Martin, they are all very intriguing aspects and you’ve already given me a lot more information than I had before we started this conversation, but do you mind just giving us a sense of what it’s like there, just to be there as a human being. You alluded a moment ago, to the Iraqi society and I’m assuming that’s a multilayered and complex society. But how would you, in just a few words, summarise your experience of the Iraqi society as of today? What’s it like for the average Iraqi with their family, perhaps working, perhaps going to university, etc etc? What changes have you seen and how would you describe it today?

MC: Over the last two years, despite the extreme violence we see from time to time, we have seen on the streets of Baghdad a better atmosphere, I guess you could say. I mean, you look around and you see new shops with new European goods, or copies of European goods that are imported from China, opening up everywhere. There is a bit of money to spend. We do see families taking their children to public areas now and having picnics. We didn’t see that two years ago. It’s certainly something that has brought a renewed sense of normality to Baghdad now. So despite the bombings, despite the almost daily bombings in the capital, the small magnet bombs put under cars, the government checkpoints attacked, people are trying to live what they would say would be a normal life. That is, that they will go to the shops, they will go to shopping malls and they will go to parks.

That said, we’re still seeing an enormous number of kidnappings now, mostly for ransoms. Anyone who is wealthy and has children will be targeted and there are still kidnappings going on every day here and ransoms are paid very, very regularly, so there is still no great confidence or no newfound respect for the rule of law here. It’s still pretty much a jungle in some aspects. Iraqi families do have to put up with this and do have to accept this as the norm for now – that even though they can do the things that you and I would take for granted, go to the shops, go to the parks, there is still a real risk and people are looking over their shoulders here. So it is a society that isn’t normal. It’s a society that’s gone through a lot over thirty-five years – or more than that: we had three decades of Saddam, we had two wars, we had twelve years of sanctions and six years of occupation. So it’s not as though it’s had a great deal of opportunity to develop a robust sort of society… It does have a long way to go, but people are starting to assert their rights and actually do pleasant things, or do things that they enjoy. I guess, in part, despite looking around and seeing such a bleak landscape on many levels, it is refreshing to see that people are resilient here.

PC: You as a journalist, as a western journalist there, trying to live your own life day by day, but also doing your job as a professional, what’s it like for you? For example, Martin, where are you right now? Are you in a secure area or are you just out there in the jungle, as you describe it?

MC: We are in an area just south of the green zone, in what’s called the red zone, and we’re in an area which is protected by Peshmerga soldiers. Peshmerga is the Kurdish military. They control our precinct in Baghdad in which the President lives, he has a palace here, President Talabani, who is a Kurd, so they are responsible for security here. We live in house inside their zone. So, we are in pretty good shape. We can get around. In this area we don’t run any sort of a risk of being kidnapped or blown up, although rockets do go over our head on a daily basis on the way to the green zone. But when we do get out and about – today we are going to Fallujah, which is 60 kilometres out of town – we do have to be very, very careful. It is still not normal to see western reporters or anyone western who isn’t military or embassy driving around Iraq. So we limit our time on the ground.

I want to make sure that I can reflect what’s going on in Iraqi society as well as I possibly can and not just bunker down and expect some people to come to me. So we do look, we do go, we do travel and we do observe as much as we can. But we always do have to maintain some security protocols. Despite the fact that Iraq has improved on many levels, it is lethal there in the shadows and if we’re not careful we could end up in some trouble. So the balance is not putting ourselves too much in harm’s way but, by the same token, always being in a position to reflect how this very, very important part of Middle Eastern history is tracking. As you said when we started the conversation, the interest in the story, or in Iraq, has started to wane over the last year or so, but I guess we see our role as journalists as almost duty bound just to keep it in the public domain and not just to let it slip away into obscurity but to report this story as a legacy. How is it tracking, I mean there were so many expectations, so much money spent. But, it is an important period to actually reflect, or to report or to chronicle on how it is actually doing now.

PC: As you describe that I’m just trying to use my imagination as a journalist to try and think through how you do that job? I understand some of the things you are saying. It sounds like, Martin, you have to really bring together those very bedrock skills as a journalist, but you also have to be very analytical. You have to bring together what you see as an eye witness with your background knowledge, etc. So do you agree with me that, it does differ fundamentally in many ways from being a journalist here in Australia, or in Canberra, or in London, or in the United States? It is fundamentally a different sort of job there, isn’t it?

MC: Very much so. I guess any foreign beat you need to know the context of your patch in order to reflect what’s going on now. But the Middle East in particular is so multi-layered and so much perspective and context is needed here before you can even start to add value as a journalist. That does involve some analytical skills, some interpretative skills, but also in essence of being able to pick your mark. It’s being able to pick that anecdote or pick that story or issue which is going to reflect a broader trend and to be able to cast that in the right way and to attract the interest of your foreign desk, who have a lot of competing stories for limited spaces. So it’s just a matter of really getting across it at such a forensic, multi-layered level and then being in a position to use that knowledge that you build up to infuse into anything that you do write. But Iraq is a society that is rich with anecdotes, rich with human suffering, human tragedy and, in some cases, great human success stories. So, it is a colourful place still. It is somewhere that once you do get out of that and you pick your mark carefully, you can quite often get a reward in terms of the work that you are able to produce. So it’s a very, very difficult society in which to operate in as a reporter. There are so many variables here and it’s very, very tiring. But by the same token, when you do put in the effort you usually do get a result and sometimes you can make contribution which does make it worthwhile.

PC: In a rather phlegmatic Australian way a few moments ago, you mentioned the rockets going over into the green zone, etc, and that you are in a reasonably secure situation there with the Kurdish troops, but I have to ask you, Martin, how you deal day by day as a human being, as well as a journalist, with that level of threat and that level of risk and seeing violence and experiencing violence either directly or vicariously? Is there a psychological first aid dimension to all this?

MC: I think that some of it may account for why this place is so tiring. We do six weeks rotations in here and four weeks out, and by the end of the six weeks you’re utterly exhausted and it’s not just because of the heat or because of the harsh climate. A lot of it is because psychologically you are confronted all the time by some pretty harsh things and some evil things as well… As I said earlier, we can’t bunker down. Sometimes you do have to take a risk and you do get out in the streets. What we all have feared for many, many years and is less of a threat now is being kidnapped and that would be a terrible ordeal that none of us actually want to go through. We have had some experiences, some kidnapping experience here, and its something that we don’t want to repeat. So we don’t have the risk from being lifted at illegal checkpoints or even by Iraqi police or soldiers – although soldiers always are less of a risk than the police. So there is that dimension, that you are looking over your shoulder the whole time. But, you do also become semi immune to it. When rockets go over your head here, you know that they are not aimed at your house, they are being aimed at the Americans and they are in a very fortified embassy compound there, so they can look after themselves. The journalists in Iraq haven’t been targeted, not the western journalists, for the last eighteen months or so. So that would tend to be a pretty reasonable trend, you would hope.

But, as I said, it’s not an easy place and you do feel drained by it and on a daily basis you are seeing things that I guess as a reporter back in Australia would sicken you. I think sometimes when you do sit down to draw breath you wonder how you’re getting through it all and what have you become. Maybe the sights of human legs and human hands and dead babies don’t affect you as they once would. I guess theses are questions we all wrestle with during our quieter periods. But they don’t sort of dissuade you from just getting on with the job.

PC: Martin, as a final question, further down the track you won’t be in Iraq you may be somewhere else. You may be in London, or the United States, or some other locale as a foreign correspondent where things aren’t as violent, the whole dynamic is totally different. How have you changed as a human and as a journalist? Do you feel there’s been a shift inside you in some ways because of what you’ve just described as the day-by-day strictures and the challenges of being a journalist in Iraq and in Baghdad. Do you think when you come to the fluffy trivial stories in the future, that you’ll be a little less patient with all that?

MC: I think it will be very difficult for me to head back to Australia now and be a roundsman on a newspaper. I think I’ve been in the Middle East for four years now and right around from Gaza to Jerusalem to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, so I’ve done a reasonable period I guess at ground zero of a lot of what’s good and bad about the world. It’s a very confronting place. It’s a very tough school, the Middle East. You get scrutinised intensely here and you learn a lot, too. This has been a flashpoint throughout the past eight years or so… and the experience that you get from a society like this is something that it would be difficult to translate or difficult to parlay into returning to what was your old job in Australia. So I think you use this experience, for all its dangers, for all its risks, for all its difficulties, as something which gives you very rich and very valuable context on how the world actually works, or how this part of the world works and its knock-on effects elsewhere. So would it be difficult for me to write softer stories in downtown Manhattan or the city of London? No it wouldn’t. But I think I would always like to use the experience that I do have to add value in other ways. So if I moved on to another job, or another post, I think that everything that I’ve been able to do here throughout the last four years, will be pretty valuable and will set me up to perform a decent role elsewhere.

PC: Martin, I think when we watch the news at night, or hear the news, or chase it up online, we take for granted a lot of what goes into creating these stories, and the constant pressure on you as a foreign correspondent and your colleagues. We appreciate the time you spent with us today on Inside Story. Thank you very much.

MC: You’re welcome, Peter. Thank you.

“,

The post In the red zone appeared first on Inside Story.

THE NOW-ANNUAL Palestinian Film Festival ran last weekend in Sydney, and moves on to Melbourne and Adelaide. For most sessions in Sydney, the cinema in Leichhardt was packed; attendances were greatly increased since last year – evidence, perhaps, of significantly shifting consciousness.

The last item in the program was, you’d have to say, cinematically sparse; but the queue went down the stairs and out into the street. Edward Said: The Last Interview is just two hours of one man talking; with punctuating fades and cutaways to the interviewer, movements in and out on face and figure, but virtually no changes of camera position on the subject. The critic and activist was interviewed only months before his death from leukemia in September 2003; he was pale and gaunt, but absolutely lucid, plain-spoken and passionate. The audience was held fast while he canvassed some of the issues in his own story, a Palestinian Arab born in Egypt in 1935, to well-placed Christian parents; exiled in America, from age fifteen, for the sake of his education; eventually a critic and teacher of classical European literature, a member of the American and international academic establishment; musician, music critic, fighter and spokesman for the Palestinian cause.

What emerged, dynamically, was the way the tensions among those identities have to do with the constant to and fro of his thinking, both as it is elaborated in prose and as it came over in the film. As he responds to his interviewer, Charles Glass, Said’s opposition to the Occupation and his support for the right of the Palestinians to living space in their lands are fundamental; they are given; but at the same time he won’t condemn Zionism outright, knowing too much about the complexities of its history. Nor will he defend nationalism of any kind, nor support the much-canvassed two-state solution: in the face of the Occupation and all its cruelty, he still wants to see Palestinians and Israelis sharing their country, learning to live together. (He’s not the only Middle Eastern intellectual to argue this way; vide Ilan Pappe’s History of Israel–Palestine.) At the same time, in fighting the Occupation and the expansion of settlements on the West Bank, Said gives no houseroom to the compromised Oslo accords, and leaves the late Chairman Arafat without a feather to fly with.

Along the way, he revisits the strange position of literature and literary criticism in anti-imperial and postcolonial struggles, and looks back at his own essays on Joseph Conrad – who, like him, had to negotiate several identities – and especially on Heart of Darkness. He also finds words for an area where, for many of us, language fails: his experience of music. In all this something very curious is happening; intellectual processes become a set of cinematic events for a cinema audience. (As they do, but differently, in the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who has said that “anything whatever can be filmed” – including philosophic and political abstractions.)

And this wasn’t a captive audience; according to the festival’s organisers, only a minority of those who answer their surveys identify as Palestinian; many are of local Lebanese families, Muslim, Christian and secular; and a good many more are ourselves, ordinary Anglo-Australian moviegoers. For all of them and us, the festival presents a map of Palestine – and Israel–Palestine – which you won’t be getting from the mainstream media. In one film after another, documentary and fiction, the checkpoints are there, the banked up traffic, the irrational bureaucratic obstructions. In Pomegranates and Myrrh, a pretty romantic drama, the bridegroom is badly held up on the way to the wedding; in a stark half-hour animation, Fatenah – based, they said, on a true story – a young woman in urgent need of breast cancer treatment is fatally delayed.

On audience demand, the festival screened again a marvellous documentary from last year, Slingshot Hip Hop, in which teenage music groups bop and rap their way from innocence into politics as they find out how long it can take, for example, to get a group from one end of Gaza to the other (eight checkpoints). Invited to share a major concert with other groups in the West Bank, the Gaza group can’t make it; with great difficulty, negotiating the Wall, the boys who live inside Israel manage to get there. Parents are seen supporting the kids; however alien they find the pounding music, they still understand that this cultural pursuit (“another kind of resistance”) is better than throwing rocks. A girl singer is shown in double resistance – against her family’s notions of her feminine role, and then, with the boys, against the Israeli authorities. Their project carries them beyond their first intentions; they and it are transformed. This little movie should get around; it’s an ultimate anti-depressant.

One feature film, Elia Suleiman’s The Time that Remains, is a fine autobiographical meditation on the eminent director Suleiman’s own life, his parents’ and Palestinian history since 1948. Seen at the beginning of the program, it connects in retrospect with Said’s thinking at the end, when he says that while the Occupation continues there can be no conciliation, no meaningful peace process. It’s not only the violence (in both directions), the irrational degrees of surveillance, but also the indignities constantly inflicted. The film that most completely unfolds the situation (and one that had a good few people reaching for the Kleenex) is the great documentary essay, The Heart of Jenin. When that town comes under fire Ahmed, a six-year-old boy, is killed. After only a little hesitation his parents agree that his organs, the symbolic heart included, should be given to Israeli children whose lives may thereby be saved. A year and a half later Ahmed’s father, Ismail, goes travelling through Israel to visit the young beneficiaries. This involves struggling at checkpoints to explain his errand to completely unsympathetic functionaries, and in one case facing hardline Zionist parents who are most reluctant to credit his humanity. See it if you can – and send the DVD to politicians who need straightening out on Israel–Palestine; I think those may include the prime minister. •

The post Beyond the checkpoints appeared first on Inside Story.

AT 10.30 on the morning of 27 September 1981 all hell broke loose in central Tehran. In simultaneous attacks within a kilometre of the Australian embassy, where I was acting head of mission, the leftist Islamic Mujaheddin set buses on fire, filling our office with smoke, and attacked the Revolutionary Guards who arrived on the scene. Light and heavy weapon fire and ambulance sirens screamed from all directions.

Nearly three years of constant violence had followed the Islamic revolution of February 1979, but the summer of 1981 was particularly turbulent. In late June the headquarters of the régime’s political arm, the Islamic Republican Party, was bombed, killing many of its leaders. Tehran had become so used to violence that life hardly paused after the simultaneous assassinations of the president and prime minister in September. Among the Iranians I knew, three had close relatives killed or arrested during the street demonstrations that were broken up by motorcycle squads of Hezbollahis, the forerunners of today’s Basij paramilitary.

The Mujaheddin’s effort to provoke a popular uprising failed. I watched as Revolutionary Guards blindfolded about fifteen young girls in an empty lot across the street from the embassy and hustled them into a minibus with blacked-out windows. Soon after, three blindfolded young men were led into a shed by the side of the empty lot to await the return of the minibus. Even in the middle of an urban civil war, the proper segregation of the sexes had to be observed. A wave of executions followed, so it is unlikely that any of them survived the night.

It seemed to me at the time that the Islamic régime would survive in the absence of any strong, identifiable alternative leadership group or a single rival to Ayatollah Khomeini. The Iranian Islamic régime only survived the violent challenges of its early years because Ayatollah Khomeini was a widely revered leader with a fervent support base among the poor and the devout middle class. I thought that Australia had no choice but to engage with the Iranian régime, however distasteful it was.

But Khomeini died twenty years ago. The fervour has gone. And today’s contending Iranian leaders have not forgotten that the Islamic revolution barely survived. This partly explains their harsh response to any political challenge. The transparent rigging of the recent presidential election result, reportedly because the leadership feared president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be forced to a second round ballot, and lose it, can only be explained by the fear of losing absolute control.

The régime now fears a “soft revolution,” by which the United States could penetrate Iranian culture society and politics, according to Roxana Saberi, the Iranian-American journalist who was released on 11 May from imprisonment in Tehran for “acting against national security.”

Yet, even as it prepared to rig the presidential elections, the régime seems to have sent signals to the Obama administration that it is willing to open negotiations with the United States on their differences, including Iran’s nuclear program. According to an anonymous Iranian student writing in the New York Times on 19 June, there is a widespread perception in Iran that Ahmadinejad can do a “Nixon to China” by bringing his hard line supporters along with an opening to the United States.

But the Nixon parallel breaks down because Nixon made his opening to China before the Watergate scandal broke his legitimacy as a leader, not after. The post-election protests in Tehran show that, like Marcos in the Philippines in 1986 and Suharto in Indonesia in 1998, the Islamic régime has governed too ineptly and tried to win one election too many. Its fear of opposition has betrayed its weakness. Mir Houssain Moussavi has emerged as a competent and determined political leader.

A successful outcome to the apparent internal struggle between supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and more moderate clerics depends partly on the United States and its allies continuing to exercise restraint in commenting on the unfolding events in Tehran. As the president of the National Iranian American Council, Trita Parsi, said on 23 June: “If our intention is to help, we have to first listen to the people in Iran rather than pretend to speak for them without ever having consulted with them.”

The Obama administration has dealt itself a fairly strong hand in this situation. The president’s respectful Now Ruz (New Year) address to the Iranian people on 20 March and his silence before the elections were wise strategic choices. Compare that with President Bush’s message to the Iranian electorate before the 2005 presidential elections – “And to the Iranian people, I say: As you stand for your own liberty, the people of America stand with you” – which fed into Ahmadinejad’s successful political line that “the United States does not show Iran respect.” The New York Times reported from Tehran on 28 June 2005, after Ahmadinejad’s election, that this was an argument that “resonates with the public.”

President Obama’s comments at a White House press conference on 23 June were pitched in exactly the right terms to give moral encouragement to the demonstrators and discourage violence by the régime, without arming the régime with credible charges of western meddling. “The Iranian people,” he said, “can speak for themselves.” He went on to speak in the language of rights, which he has used since the post election crisis developed: “The Iranian people have a universal right to assembly and free speech. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the community, it must respect those rights and heed the will of its own people.”

The Iranian régime has, of course, accused the United States, Britain and Western countries generally of meddling, but the president’s restraint serves the essential purpose of depriving these tired accusations of oxygen.

What then should western countries like Australia do in response to events in Iran? First, they should continue to emphasise the rights of Iranians to free speech and peaceful assembly – rights that Iran, as a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, is bound to uphold. This is not “meddling”: all states have an interest in the upholding of universal human rights.

Second, as traditional diplomats would recommend, western countries should observe a period of “masterly inactivity,” even if this does not play well in the twenty-four hour news cycle. The next moves depend on the judgement of the Iranian opposition. President Obama has struck the right note of respect and restraint. We must wait for it to work. Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and their allies will fall, perhaps not now, perhaps not violently, but inevitably. •

The post The waiting game appeared first on Inside Story.