Among the many confusing factors swirling around the whole ISIS phenomenon is the role, or roles, of Turkey in the situation. It might be helpful to tick off some of the major salient factors that compete to form Turkish policies towards ISIS under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at this point.
DEALING WITH ASSAD: First, Turkey fell into the same analytic error that most countries and most analysts, including myself did: the assumption that after Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, the Assad regime in Syria, now facing its own Arab Spring uprising, would be the next to fall. It did not happen. Erdoğan had been deeply and personally invested in mentoring Assad as a “younger brother” for nearly a decade, bringing him closer to western and especially EU ties, helping moderate a number of internal Syrian issues. After the uprising began in Syria, Assad then refused to follow Erdoğan’s strong advice about yielding some democratic concessions to the early anti-regime demonstrators in Syria; Erdoğan grew angry, felt he had lost face internationally with his claims to exert influence over Assad, and finally grew determined to overthrow Assad by force. The more difficult the task turned out to be, the more Erdoğan doubled down, determined to get him out using almost any means—now driven by deep personal grudge as well.
PREFERENCE TO SUPPORT DEMOCRATIC CHANGE. In fairness to Erdoğan and Prime Minister Davutoğlu, Turkey had been gravitating towards a regional policy of general support to democratic movements against shaky dictators. It would indeed have been desirable to see Assad go—in principle—and Ankara had supported the previous four uprisings against entrenched dictatorship in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. There is consistency in his expectations—demands now—that Syria follow suit.
THE ROLE OF JIHADI FORCES. The Assad regime turned out to be more deeply entrenched institutionally than many guessed; large portions of its population dislike Assad, but fear even more the uncertainty, chaos and likely Islamist character of a successor regime. No Syrian could want an Iraq meltdown scenario taking place in Syria either. But the longer the anti-Assad struggle went on, the more it attracted ever more radical Jihadi forces—the most radical ones sadly being the most effective anti-Assad forces, as opposed to the feckless and divided ( if more congenial) moderate opposition. Erdoğan, feeling more desperate, became willing to cooperate with ever more radical forces—to the point of no longer rejecting out of hand the activities of pro-al-Qaeda or pro-ISIS forces in the nearby region. Ankara’s policy doesn’t represent outright support for ISIS, but it does demonstrate a willingness to overlook many ISIS activities in order to facilitate Assad’s overturn.
ERDOĞAN’S OWN ISLAMIC AGENDA. Erdoğan comes out of a tradition of Turkish Islamism. His party, the AKP, represents its most moderate face—perhaps indeed the most pragmatic and most successful Islamic political party in the world. The Turkish form of the AKP Islamic tradition can be compared, very roughly, to the Muslim Brotherhood—although the Turkish AKP is vastly more advanced, politically experienced, practical, and sophisticated. Nonetheless, Erdoğan and some others in the AKP, do seem to look with some sympathy on the struggle of Muslim Brotherhood movements in the Arab world as the most promising, moderately grounded Islamist/Islamic political movement out there. The MB is generally open to concepts of democracy, globalization, tolerance and dialog—although in line with their own understanding of these terms, and depending where and when. Thus Erdoğan is predisposed to some sympathy with the Brotherhood. This accounts for his massive falling out with Egypt’s Sisi who is now crushing the Brotherhood as his chief rival, and Saudi Arabia that similarly deems the Brotherhood to be a “terrorist organization.” Erdoğan has been more willing to cut many Islamist opposition movements some degree of slack, such as in Syria. Compared to almost any form of Turkish Islam, ISIS is essentially an extremist movement, well beyond the pale of mainstream Islam and Islamism; the lines have grown blurred, however, due to Erdoğan’s continuing obsession with overthrowing Assad by almost any means at hand.
THE KURDISH FACTOR. Erdoğan and the AKP government over the past decade has done more to accept “the Kurdish reality” and advance dialog with the Turkey’s Kurdish guerrilla movement (PKK) than any party before. There is still great promise here. Turkey has also reached an astonishingly swift accommodation and close working relations with Iraqi Kurdistan and its leaders in forging political, economic and strategic ties with the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government. But the chaos and unrest generated in every major war in the Middle East over the past two decades have generally benefited the regional Kurds first and foremost (except in Iran), creating the space for them to assume more de facto regional sovereignty. But Turkey’s negotiations with the PKK are complex and still underway—encouraging, but far from a done deal.
The newfound, vocal, de facto autonomy of the Syrian Kurds as well, now taking advantage of the Syrian civil war, has worried Ankara that perhaps all the Kurds may be now moving too far too fast in what could become a dangerous new Kurdish dynamic harder for Ankara to deal with. In any case, any kind of a pan-Kurdish state is still far down the road, if ever feasible. But Erdoğan is worried about anything that enhances the identity, role, profile and military proficiency of the Syrian Kurdish movement, especially since it will not officially sign on to the anti-Assad struggle. (That movement hates Assad, but also fears an even harsher anti-Kurdish regime under Islamists than it has had under secular Assad.) Ankara’s bottom line through all of this is fear of spreading armed Kurdish activism (such as against ISIS) that only enhances Kurdish armed strength and capabilities that can easily affect Turkey’s own negotiations with its own Kurds. It’s a tough call, and whatever happens, regional Kurds are gaining greater prominence and sense of identity with every passing month…
THE US FACTOR. Many US analysts still worry about Ankara not getting on board with Obama on fighting ISIS–as if relations are newly strained. The fact is, Ankara declared its foreign policy independence from the US a decade ago, in multiple areas. Turkey will never again play the role of “loyal US ally.” It has its own regional and global interests and will pursue them; Washington’s preferences will play only a modest role among the many factors influencing Turkish decision-making. Obama may help/persuade Erdoğan to back off from his reckless willingness to tolerate even the ISIS card to bring down Assad. But Erdoğan may well remain intractable on the Assad issue. That policy, among other things, has served to seriously damage Ankara’s relations with Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. So we should not look forward to much cordial cooperation between Ankara and Washington except to the extent that Washington changes its policies on Palestine, Israel, Iran, and overall military intervention in the region. The two countries essentially do not share a common regional strategic outlook.
These issues roughly summarize the complexity of the Turkish calculus on ISIS. Most important to note though, is that Ankara does not share at all the ISIS view of Islam or regional politics. But Ankara does not regard US military policies in the region as desirable either. Turkey’s best prospects lie in backing off from further support to the armed overthrow of Assad, cutting its losses, thereby improving its strained ties with Iran and Iraq, and in returning to the relatively successful “zero problems with neighbors” that marked the AKP’s first decade in office.
Photo Credit: Ra’ed Qutena/Flickr
This article was first published by Graham E. Fuller on his blog and was reprinted here with permission. Copyright Graham E. Fuller.
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
Take a particularly provocative and grandstanding Israeli government and shift its focus from Hamas and Gaza to Jerusalem and you have a most explosive recipe. That potion is being stirred now, and the results could shake up the status quo in a way that we have only seen a few times in Israel’s history.
Much of the recent news narrative starts with the wounding of Yehuda Glick, a US expat who emigrated to Israel as child and became one of the leaders of the self-proclaimed “Temple Mount Movement.” In reality, this chapter of the endless and bloody saga of the Old City of Jerusalem began with the last Israeli election. That poll brought into power the most radically right-wing of Israeli governments, representing an odd mixture of zealous Zionism, modern Orthodoxy in Judaism and a curious impulse to completely disregard centuries of Jewish law regarding the Temple Mount. We’ll get back to that later, but first it’s important to recognize the potential fallout from further escalation.
The recall of Jordan’s ambassador to Israel is no small matter, and it reflects just how important this issue is to the Hashemite kingdom. Despite having lost the West Bank to Israel in 1967 and having relinquished its claim to it in 1988, Jordan is still the guardian of the Jerusalem holy sites for the Muslim world. This status is precious to the Hashemites, and the prestige it brings is a crucial element for their continued hold on power.
The Israeli threats have escalated steadily since the election and then ticked up sharply in the spring, when the Netanyahu government began its anti-Hamas crackdown throughout the West Bank, under the false cover of searching for kidnap victims the Israelis already knew had been brutally murdered. Tensions and demonstrations in Jerusalem were escalating throughout the summer, while everyone’s attention was, quite understandably, focused on Gaza.
This was the inevitable result of an intensely nationalistic government believing it had finally done away with the façade of negotiations in which Jerusalem was a central issue. Brazen statements, provocative visits, and then crackdowns and harsher limits on Palestinian worshippers at al-Aqsa Mosque were all to be expected.
One question that these events raise is whether this is the intention of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the result of his unwillingness to challenge his coalition partners and members of his own party on a passionately populist issue. I tend to lean toward the latter belief, as Netanyahu has usually shown himself to be the sort of leader who does nothing unless he’s pressured by politics. In either case, the Israeli actions have raised concerns from Washington to Brussels to Cairo and, most resoundingly, to Amman.
Despite the peace treaty with Israel being massively unpopular in Jordan, where the majority of the citizens are Palestinian, it has not been a cause for major internal upheaval. For Jordan, peace has not only brought financial and diplomatic support from the United States, it has also opened up a new market with Israel, which exports goods to Jordan and thereby to the rest of the Arab world, despite the ongoing regional boycott against Israel.
Tinderbox
But now there is unrest and unease in Jordan. King Abdullah’s support of the United States’ efforts against the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) has helped rile some of the more radical elements in Jordan, adding to the tensions that already existed between the government and more mainstream Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. The country is undergoing a severe economic crisis, with massive unemployment, even while it is also burdened with refugees from Syria and Iraq, many of whom have sharp complaints about their treatment.
These conditions make Jordan a tinderbox. And Jerusalem is just as sure a fuse for a Jordanian tinderbox as it is for an Israeli-Palestinian one. These are the factors that led King Abdullah to recall his ambassador from Israel. Only once before, when Israel attempted to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Jordan, has peace between Jordan and Israel been so threatened.
The Israelis have surely given this consideration, but they likely estimate that Jordan would not dare abrogate its treaty with Israel. Such a move would surely endanger Jordan’s support from the US, and that could be fatal if, indeed, internal conflict does break out in the Hashemite kingdom. Ultimately, Israel probably believes that unless it tries to threaten the authority of the Islamic Waqf, which is the body that administrates the Temple Mount, or otherwise officially changes the status quo of the area, Jordan will not withdraw from the treaty.
That’s a reasonable assessment, but it should not be banked on too strongly. Given the precarious situation in Jordan, its leadership’s main concern now is avoiding an outbreak of civil conflict altogether. Even though the Jordanian military is far superior to that of, say, Iraq, a popular uprising triggered by conflict over the Jerusalem holy sites could quickly spread to encompass the mass dissatisfaction with both the economic conditions and Hashemite rule in the country in general. Abdullah does not want to gamble on his ability to contain all of that anger. Though unlikely, that concern does give him a reason to potentially take the bold step of ending peace with Israel, and deal with the consequences of that step later.
For Israel, such an outcome would mean near-total isolation again. Even the Sisi government in Egypt would have a difficult time continuing to work with Israel all by itself. Egyptians remember well the isolation they experienced from the rest of the Arab world after their treaty with Israel was first struck. It took a very long time, even after they were re-admitted into the Arab League, for Egypt to regain a position of some stature in the Arab world.
New Path
The entire approach the international community has taken toward Jerusalem needs to re-evaluated, and quickly. For years, Israel has treated Jerusalem as a flashpoint it could manipulate for nationalistic reasons, and for a long time, young Palestinian Muslims (sometimes all of them under the age of 50, other times the cutoff age has been as low as 35) have been unable to go to pray at the al-Aqsa Mosque. To be sure, there have also been many incidents of Palestinians using Friday prayers as a launching pad for protests and stone-throwing, sometimes down the hill at Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall.
Israeli soldiers and police blocking Palestinians from one of the entrances to the old city in Jerusalem on March 14, 2010. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS
Now, Jerusalem is being used by different parts of Israel’s governing coalition. The further right elements are crystallizing nationalist fervor around it. Netanyahu, for his part, is using the violence that Israeli actions are stirring up to blame Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas as part of his campaign to convince people that all of Israel’s opponents—IS, Iran, Hamas, and the PA as led by Abbas—are essentially the same enemy of not only Israel, but the entire world. And, of course, Hamas, and Fatah as well, are using the Israeli actions as a rallying cry, spurring people to both organized and individual acts of resistance and/or terrorism.
But it’s high time reality set in and we understood this to be an issue of nationalism manipulating religion to its ends. Many of the Jewish Temple Mount activists claim that they are pursuing a civil rights issue. After all, they argue, if the Muslim right to pray at their third holiest site is sacrosanct, shouldn’t the Jewish right to pray at their holiest site be at least as high a priority?
Sorry, but that’s not what this is about. Religious Zionism has twisted many Jewish precepts over the years. But even Israel’s chief rabbis have reiterated continuously that Jews must not pray on the Temple Mount or even walk upon it for fear of treading upon the area of the Holiest of Holies, which was inside the Temple and where only the High Priest may enter.
Religious Zionists are split on this issue, as some religious leaders have, in a rather arbitrary fashion, decided that going up to the Temple Mount is acceptable. And, it must be noted, that this notion is an entirely modern phenomenon. It is only in recent years that even religious Zionists have tried to completely negate this particular tenet of Jewish tradition, which has been undisputed for most of our history.
As with so many issues regarding Israel, this is not about Judaism. In fact, it’s not about the terms of much of mainstream Zionism, either. It is a brazen effort by far-right nationalists, some because of a radicalized messianism, some with more secular motivations, to lay claim to Jewish rule over Jerusalem as a whole. It is of a piece with the escalating efforts by Jewish Israelis to spread the colonization of East Jerusalem in the hope of making a unified, Jewish Jerusalem a fait accompli.
Israel is playing with fire on a number of levels here, with the Palestinians and with the broader Arab and Muslim worlds. Thus far, the government has been justified in its belief that the United States and Europe would do nothing more than issue the usual condemnations, not recognizing that Israel’s actions could make compromise on Jerusalem a practical impossibility.
But at some point the US and EU must recognize that if Israel continues to increase its antagonism on the issue of Jerusalem, it’s going to radicalize a lot more than just the Palestinians in East Jerusalem, as well as complicate their efforts against IS and other concerns in the Arab World. If they don’t take some action to reign Israel in soon, they will also be paying the consequences.
Photo: View of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount in the ancient city of Jerusalem. Credit: Sarah Ferguson
]]>Last week I commented on the unhelpful habit of throwing everything Islamist, no matter how extreme or moderate, into a single conceptual bucket and writing off the whole lot as incorrigible adversaries. That habit entails a gross misunderstanding of events and conflicts in the Middle East, and has the more specific harm of aiding extreme groups at the expense of moderate ones. Shortly afterward Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy presented a piece titled “Islamists Are Not Our Friends,” which illustrates almost in caricatured form some of the misleading attributes of the single-bucket attitude that I was discussing.
Ross’s article probably is not grounded in Islamophobia, although it partly appeals to such sentiment. The piece ostensibly is about how “a fundamental division between Islamists and non-Islamists” is a “new fault line in the Middle East” that provides “a real opportunity for America” and ought to guide U.S. policy toward the region. In fact it is a contrived effort to draw that line—however squiggly it needs to be—to place what Ross wants us to consider bad guys on one side of the line and good guys on the other side. The reasons for that division do not necessarily have much, if anything, to do with Islamist orientation. Thus anyone who has been unfriendly to Hamas or to its more peaceful ideological confreres in the Muslim Brotherhood are placed on the good side of the line, Iran and those doing business with it are put on the bad side, and so forth.
Ross tries to portray something more orderly by asserting that “what the Islamists all have in common is that they subordinate national identities to an Islamic identity” and that the problem with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was that “it was Islamist before it was Egyptian.” What, exactly, does that mean, with particular reference to the short, unhappy presidency of Mohamed Morsi? There were several reasons that presidency was both unhappy and short, but trying to push an Islamist-more-than-Egyptian agenda was not one of them. (And never mind that Ross is risking going places he surely would not want to go by making accusations of religious identification trumping national loyalty on matters relevant to U.S. policy toward the Middle East.) It would make at least as much sense to say that the current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, was more authoritarian and more in tune with fellow military strongmen than he was Egyptian.
Where Ross’s schema completely breaks down is with some of the biggest and most contorted squiggles in the line he has drawn. He places Saudi Arabia in the “non-Islamist” camp because it has supported el-Sisi in his bashing of the Brotherhood and wasn’t especially supportive of Hamas when Israel was bashing the Gaza Strip. Saudi Arabia—where the head of state has the title Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, the country’s constitution is the Koran, and thieves have their hands amputated—is “non-Islamist”? Remarkable. Conversely, the Assad regime in Syria, which is one of the most secular regimes in the region notwithstanding the sectarian lines of its base of support, is pointedly excluded from Ross’s “non-Islamist” side of the line because of, he says, Syrian dependence on Iran and Hezbollah. Of course, any such alliances refute the whole idea of a “fundamental division” in the region between Islamists and non-Islamists, but Ross does not seem to notice.
Getting past such tendentious classification schemes, we ought to ask whether there is a more valid basis on which we ought to be concerned about states or influential political movements defining themselves in religious terms. If we are to be not merely Islamophobes but true children of the Enlightenment, our concern ought to be with any attempt, regardless of the particular creed involved, to impose the dogma of revealed religion on public affairs, especially in ways that affect the lives and liberties of those with different beliefs.
Such attempts by Christians, as far as the Middle East is concerned, are to be found these days mainly among dispensationalists in America rather in the dwindling and largely marginalized Christian communities in the Middle East itself. In a far more strongly situated community, that of Jewish Israelis, the imposition of religious belief on public affairs in ways that affect the lives and liberties of others is quite apparent. Indeed, the demographic, political, and societal trends during Israel’s 66-year history can be described in large part in terms of an increasingly militant right-wing nationalism in which religious dogma and zealotry have come to play major roles. Self-definition as a Jewish state has been erected as a seemingly all-important basis for relating to Arab neighbors, religion is in effect the basis for different classes of citizenship, and religious zeal is a major driver of the Israeli colonization of conquered territory, which sustains perpetual conflict with, and subjugation of, the Palestinian Arabs.
When religious zealotry involves bloodshed, especially large-scale bloodshed, is when we when ought to be most concerned with its infusion into public affairs. The capacity for zealotry and large-scale application of violence to combine has increased in Israel with the steady increase of religiosity in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and its officer corps. A prominent exemplar of this trend is Colonel Ofer Winter, commander of the IDF’s Gilati Brigade, who has received attention for the heavily religious content of his instructions to his troops. With his brigade poised near the Gaza Strip before the most recent round of destruction there, Winter said in a letter to his troops that he looked forward to a ground invasion so that he could be in the vanguard of a fight against “the terrorist enemy that dares to curse, blaspheme and scorn the God of Israel.” After Winter’s brigade did get to join the fight, he said that a mysterious “cloud” appeared and provided cover for his forces, an event he attributed to divine intervention. Quoting from Deuteronomy, he said, “It really was a fulfillment of the verse ‘For the Lord your God is the one who goes with you to give you victory.’”
Winter’s brigade was involved in what could be described as a culmination of the synthesis of zealotry and bloodshed. When an Israeli soldier was missing and suspected (incorrectly, as it later turned out) to have been captured alive by Hamas in a battle at Rafah, Winter executed the “Hannibal” directive, an Israeli protocol according to which as much violence as necessary is used to avoid having any Israeli become a prisoner, no matter how many civilians or others are killed and no matter that the captured Israeli soldier himself is killed. Over the next several hours a relentless barrage of artillery and airstrikes reduced this area of Rafah to rubble, while Israeli forces surrounded the area so that no one could escape it alive. This one Israeli operation killed 190 Palestinians, including 55 children. There may have been other implementations of the Hannibal directive in the recent Israeli offensive in Gaza; this one is confirmed because Winter himself later spoke openly and proudly about it. Although some secular-minded private citizens in Israel have objected to the heavily religious content of Winter’s leadership, officially there does not appear to be anything but approval for anything he has said or done. He is an exemplar, not a rogue.
In short, an operation officially sanctioned and led in the name of a national god was conducted to slaughter scores of innocents as well as one of the operators’ own countrymen. We ought to think carefully about this incident and about what Colonel Winter represents when we decide how to conceive of fault lines in the Middle East, what it means to insert religion into politics or to be a religious zealot, exactly what it is we fear or ought to fear about religiosity in public affairs, and which players in the Middle East have most in common with, or in conflict with, our own—Enlightment-infused, one hopes—values.
This article was first published by the National Interest and was reprinted here with permission.
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
The two ceasefire proposals aimed at ending the accelerated violence in Gaza and Israel also offer one of the best illustrations of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The circumstances and the content of each proposal demonstrates very well why outside pressure is necessary to end this vexing, seemingly endless struggle and [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
The two ceasefire proposals aimed at ending the accelerated violence in Gaza and Israel also offer one of the best illustrations of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The circumstances and the content of each proposal demonstrates very well why outside pressure is necessary to end this vexing, seemingly endless struggle and just how differently Israelis and Palestinians view both current events and the conflict as a whole.
Let’s look at the two proposals. Egypt, acting as the United States normally does, worked out the details of its ceasefire idea primarily with Israel. The deal reflects the Israeli and Egyptian agenda: it mostly follows the formula of “quiet for quiet,” essentially bringing back the status quo ante of early June. It offers Hamas a vague promise of future negotiations to address the siege of the Gaza Strip. But this is hardly something Hamas will put stock in. The 2012 ceasefire agreement, which was negotiated by then-Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, a man much friendlier to Hamas than the current Egyptian leadership, also made such a promise and it never came to anything. Finally, Egypt says it is willing to open the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt more widely but only if Hamas allows Palestinian Authority security to police it instead of their own people.
It’s not hard to see why Hamas viewed that offer, and its exclusion from the talks, more like a call to surrender than a ceasefire. Indeed, that’s what it was. The offer was likely made with the expectation that Hamas would refuse it. That is one reason, along with the fact that I don’t see them getting a better deal from continued fighting, that I thought Hamas should have taken it. But it is perfectly understandable that they did not.
Hamas recently confirmed its terms for a ceasefire: Israel should lift the siege it has imposed on the strip for the last seven years, and release all the prisoners it arrested last month during its sweep of the West Bank while the Netanyahu government was keeping the Israeli public and the world from immediately finding out that the three youths who were ostensibly being searching for were already dead. In exchange, Hamas would agree to a ceasefire.
Those terms are undoubtedly unacceptable for Israel, and Egypt for that matter. They won’t because they don’t have to. Each of them, by themselves, is far more powerful militarily than Hamas. Together, they are even more so, and they have the backing of the United States, quite openly. More discreetly, they also have the backing of much of the Arab leadership in Saudi Arabia and most of the Gulf states, which, with the exception of Qatar, generally despise Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’ ideological forebears.
Therefore, Israel and Egypt will follow the most basic rule of international politics: might makes right. They will ignore minor details like peace, security for both Gazans and Israelis, and most of all, international law. They will do this because they can.
But really, what is Hamas demanding? That they be set free from a crippling siege that has remained in full force with only minor and occasional amelioration through ceasefires and flare-ups alike. That seems like a perfectly reasonable demand, an expectation, even, especially since Israel claims that it is no longer an occupying power in Gaza. Inside, that may be true, but Israel controls the airspace, the offshore areas and the overwhelming majority of Gaza’s borders, except for the southern one, which Egypt controls. It permits only limited amounts of supplies into the strip, bars many things like chemicals and building materials entirely and allows almost no exports. According to most international law experts, Israel has the responsibilities of an occupying power proportionate to the control it exerts. Thus, Israel is not responsible for internal policing of Gaza, but it is responsible for the effects of its control — meaning the siege is illegal.
Hamas, and most Palestinians, surely see the demand to lift the siege as a minimal one. Hamas is not, after all, demanding that the entire occupation regime be lifted for a ceasefire to take place, nor that Israel, for example, repair the damage it has done to Gaza’s only power plant or compensate Gaza for the destruction of its airport.
But the majority of Israelis see the siege as a defensive measure. They believe lifting it will enable Hamas to reload with much more and better weapons and then they will strike much harder and might, at that point be able to deliver a real blow to Israel, something far beyond their ability right now. Most Israelis do not see the Egyptian proposal as a Hamas surrender, but rather as a very reasonable return to the status quo ante.
Israelis believe their leaders when they say they are not targeting Gazan civilians, despite the rather conclusive evidence to the contrary (such as bombing an open beach with children playing on it, destroying a hospital with patients in it, bombing the homes of Hamas leaders with their families inside, etc.). Palestinians see the destruction of civilians, homes, and Gaza’s infrastructure as justifying firing rockets at Israel. Israelis see Hamas as willing to sacrifice its own civilians in order to kill Jews. Palestinians see Israel as offering them a choice of being bombed to death relatively quickly or starved to death more slowly.
The point is not whether one view or the other is right or wrong (we all obviously have an opinion on that, myself included). The point is that these are two completely irreconcilable views. When we combine that with the massive imbalance of both political and, especially, military power involved and the sense both sides have that they cannot afford to be seen as letting the “violence of the other” dictate the terms of the ceasefire, we see the impasse. So where does that leave us?
Ultimately, it is more than likely that Israel’s overwhelmingly greater ability to cause death and destruction, along with the fact that Hamas (and Gaza in general) has very few countries willing to stand up for it in the international arena, will force Hamas to accept a deal that closely resembles the one they just rejected. But all that will do is reset the clock to ticking down to the next round.
If there were a genuine desire to find a way to stop this endlessly repeating loop, there would need to be forceful international mediation. Such mediation cannot come from those countries that stand with Israel against Hamas (Egypt, the US) nor those who have the reverse position (Turkey, Qatar). It can only come from an international delegation, either under the auspices of the UN or in the form of a committee from a variety of countries. There would need to be international guarantees and sanctions applied to both sides (and, crucially, actually enforced) for violations of any agreement.
That, of course, is not something Israel would ever accept. It has no reason to sacrifice its impunity, because it has might — militarily, economically and politically — on its side. And as long as that is true, it simply has no good reason to moderate its position. In this regard, it acts like any other country. And the ineffectual Hamas rockets, terrifying though they may be to so many in Israel, are not coming anywhere near giving Israel any incentive to change.
The bottom line: it is the United States, which unconditionally runs interference for Israel in the Security Council and which arms Israel and completely ignores the fact that Israel uses US-made weapons in blatant contravention of US law, that is fueling this fire. It will support Israel in its refusal to allow any other outside party to mediate, and will certainly ensure that Israel retains its impunity. And the US will do this against the better judgment of its president and secretary of state, both of whom are well aware that the security of Israelis and the very lives of Palestinians both depend on ending the 47-year old occupation, lifting the siege of Gaza and allowing the Palestinians to achieve their freedom. Such is the effect of domestic politics in the United States, and it is playing out in blood in the Gaza Strip right now.
Photo: Relatives and friends of the al-Kaware family carry 7 bodies to the mosque during their funeral in Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip, on July 9, 2014. The father, a member of the Fatah movement, and his 6 sons were all killed the day before in an Israeli air strike that targeted their home. Credit: AFP/Thomas Coexthomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images/Used under a Creative Commons license
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
The fighting in Gaza will continue for some time, as a ceasefire agreement brokered by Egypt fell apart. Despite the bellicose language Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has employed over the past week, it was Hamas and not Israel that rejected the proposal. This was, to be [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
The fighting in Gaza will continue for some time, as a ceasefire agreement brokered by Egypt fell apart. Despite the bellicose language Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has employed over the past week, it was Hamas and not Israel that rejected the proposal. This was, to be sure, the direct result of that proposal not meeting any of Hamas’ demands for a ceasefire and, because as one Israeli official put it, “…we discovered we’d made a cease-fire agreement with ourselves.” The dynamics of this turn of events are important and tell us much about how the ground has changed in the region. We first must ask why Hamas rejected the Egyptian proposal. They have been rather clear about their reasons:
- Hamas felt, quite correctly, that Egypt had essentially negotiated this deal with Israel, then presented it as a fait accompli to Hamas. In fact, they said they first heard about it through social media.
- Hamas has declared that they intend to come out of this round of fighting with some gains. In particular, they want to end the siege that Israel has imposed on the Gaza Strip since 2007, the release of all the prisoners who had been re-arrested recently after being freed in exchange for Hamas freeing Gilad Shalit in 2011, and the negotiation of a long term truce, as was agreed in 2012, but never acted upon. The terms of the proposal offered no such relief, or any real change to the status quo.
- Many among Hamas and other groups believe this proposal was deliberately put forth by Egypt as one Israel would accept and Hamas would reject, in order to legitimize further attacks on Gaza. The way things have unfolded, they may be correct.
Those reasons may show a certain rationality in Hamas’ refusal to accept a ceasefire. Wisdom and real concern for the innocents suffering under Israel’s bombings are far less apparent, however. In fact, Hamas’ refusal to accept the ceasefire completes the process of wiping from the memory of much of the world the fact that Israel initiated this round of fighting.
Rarely has Netanyahu been more accurate than earlier yesterday, when he said “[If Hamas] doesn’t accept the ceasefire proposal…Israel will have all the international legitimacy to broaden its military activity in order to achieve the necessary quiet.” Indeed, Hamas’ decision does exactly that. There will still be expressions of concern from various quarters, but for the most part, pressure on Israel to stop its onslaught from the US, EU, UN and even many Arab states will diminish essentially to zero. It is hard to imagine that the refusal is going to lead to a better deal. The only thing that might, and only might, do that is a massive uptick in civilian deaths from where the number is at now. Hardly something anyone would wish for. So, while Hamas may have had very good reason to reject this deal, it does not seem that rejection is a better option.
Indeed, one may argue that accepting the ceasefire deal with certain reservations may have put Hamas in a better position. At least the massive uptick in death and destruction in Gaza would have been stemmed, even if temporarily.
Egypt’s New Position
Hamas has issued a statement rejecting further Egyptian efforts to mediate a ceasefire. They will now accept only Turkey or Qatar in that role. Those are, not coincidentally, the only two significant states who support the political goals of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the new Egyptian regime joins Saudi Arabia and many of the Gulf States in despising.
Egypt has now demonstrated that not only has its position on Hamas hardened since the ouster of the Brotherhood and President Mohamed Morsi, it is even more antagonistic to Hamas than former President Hosni Mubarak. Given this, it is likely that the role Mubarak frequently played as a broker between Israel and Hamas is not one that the current General/President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi can assume, and this was a failed attempt to show that he could.
This will please Netanyahu, who is surely seeing the new Egyptian regime as much more to his liking than anything that ever came before it. But it is going to complicate matters for the United States, all the more so as Israel is not likely to accept Turkey or Qatar as an intermediary. Without Egypt as a broker, the US is going to have a much harder time stabilizing these periodic escalations between Israel and Hamas. This, again, may suit Netanyahu, who believes US President Barack Obama is much too quick to try to end conflicts. But it also makes Israeli decisions as to when to back off more complicated, as the US will not be able to give Israel a way out that shields its leadership at least a little from the political fallout of ending these operations while Hamas is still in control of the Strip.
Hamas’ weakened position
Hamas is facing serious isolation. Egypt was surely never very sympathetic to Hamas, even when Morsi was in office. It is now even more firmly in the US-Israeli camp. Hamas’ support for Syrian rebels and the slow thaw of relations between the United States and Iran has (to Netanyahu’s chagrin) cooled the Hamas-Iran relationship, and Qatar has had to back away to some degree from its support of the Brotherhood and its affiliates like Hamas due to pressure from other Gulf states. This is why, despite the forecasts by many that this latest round will end with the status quo more or less maintained, Netanyahu, and probably also Mahmoud Abbas, believes a severe blow can now be struck against Hamas.
Netanyahu believes, not without reason, that this can be done without resorting to the kind of all-out assault, and even re-occupation, which is being pushed by his right flank in Israel. Consider the Islamist group’s current position. It was already struggling to pay workers in Gaza and had been arguing with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah about who bears the responsibility. Egypt’s harder line has been stifling the “tunnel economy,” which was the only method for bringing many goods and supplies into Gaza that Israel would not permit to pass through its blockade. Hamas seemed to have nothing but rhetoric to offer to deal with the situation, and it was losing standing among the Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank.
Islamic Jihad and other, more radical Palestinian factions, which Hamas was generally preventing from taking violent actions against Israel from Gaza, were accusing Hamas of abandoning its revolutionary ideals. Add to this the loss of much of its support from the rest of the Arab and Muslim world, in the wake of the decline of the Brotherhood throughout the region, and it’s not hard to see why Netanyahu believes that, even if the outcome of the current fighting is merely an agreement to go back to the way things were, he will still come out a big winner.
He may be right. But it is more likely that Israel’s continued attacks will cause the various factions to rally together, as they have in the past, strengthening Hamas’ position. It is also more likely to exacerbate the already dire predicament Abbas is in, as he has cracked down in the West Bank to prevent anti-Israel protests during the fighting, sacrificing what little respect and confidence the Palestinians had left in the PA President.
To Cease or not to Cease
Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other factions fighting in Gaza can certainly make the case that they have successfully stood firm under Israel’s attacks while demonstrating that they can shoot their missiles throughout Israel. The rockets being used in many cases were actually made in Gaza, along with what they have been able to smuggle in from outside. The fact that the locally made rockets include some of the medium range ones that have been penetrating farther into Israel than ever before is one reason Hamas is perhaps in less of a rush than one might think to stop the fighting.
The calculus, though, is cold and fails on a number of levels. The most obvious failure is the suffering of the people of Gaza. Over 190 Gazans have been killed, the vast majority civilians. These deaths do raise a great deal of anger among Palestinians against Israel, but to what end? There does not seem to be any victory, or even small gains, on the horizon for which these people are dying. When the fighting dies down, Israel will be the same villain in Gaza it always was, but people are surely going to wonder why the fighting went on for as long as it did with no gains in sight. And that is really the nub of it — there seems to be no hope for Hamas to achieve any of its goals, such as lifting the maritime blockade on Gaza or easing the border crossings. If they are hoping that other forces — such as those in Lebanon, which have lobbed a few projectiles across the border and to which Israel has responded quite forcefully — will be opening another flank against Israel, they are not paying attention to events in Syria and Iraq, which are occupying the efforts of Hezbollah and other parties that might be willing to engage Israel.
There simply isn’t an endgame that represents progress for Hamas. In 2012, when then-Egyptian President Morsi brokered an agreement, Hamas could claim a few minor concessions from Israel (which never really materialized once there was no pressure on Israel to follow through with them). There will be nothing of that sort here, but Hamas seems to be desperately clinging to the hope that it can extract something to base a claim of victory on.
That’s a terrible gamble. It is much more likely that the refusal to agree to a ceasefire is giving Netanyahu exactly what he wants: the chance to deliver a blow to a weakened Hamas regime in Gaza. Hamas has given Netanyahu the means to do this without having to overcome the global opposition that was apparent at the beginning of the current fighting. Their refusal is understandable. Israel has repeatedly failed to live up to prior agreements, and this entire thing does look very much like a setup cooked up by Egypt and Israel.
Still, it seems like the rejection of the ceasefire plays into Netanyahu’s hands even more than going along with it would have. Hamas was faced with two bad options. Some may say they chose the lesser of two evils, but they seem to have opted for the path of salvaging some pride while losing more innocent lives and gaining nothing.
Photo: A school in Gaza after an Israeli bomb attack.
]]>by Emile Nakhleh
Does repression force Islamic parties to moderate? This is the key question Shadi Hamid raises in his seminal book on political Islam, governance, and Islamist “illiberal” democratic ideology.
Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy In a New Middle East is a first-rate, thorough, yet controversial study of what drives [...]]]>
by Emile Nakhleh
Does repression force Islamic parties to moderate? This is the key question Shadi Hamid raises in his seminal book on political Islam, governance, and Islamist “illiberal” democratic ideology.
Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy In a New Middle East is a first-rate, thorough, yet controversial study of what drives political Islam as well as the complex relationship between political Islam and repressive regimes. The focus is on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Tunisia’s Ennahda, and Jordan’s Islamic Action Front.
The book is a welcome primer on contemporary political Islam and should be a required reading for students, academics, policymakers, policy and intelligence analysts, and anyone interested in the contemporary Middle East and the rise of Islamic political parties and movements. The author focuses on mainstream Sunni Islamist movements, the largest and most established of which is the Muslim Brotherhood, traces Islamists’ brush with political power, and examines at length their performance once in power, as in Egypt and Tunisia.
Shadi Hamid, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution, has spent several years interviewing Islamic activists and political party leaders in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia. He started writing the book before the eruption of the Arab revolutions in 2011 and interviewed numerous senior leaders and thinkers of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, including the deposed Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi. The author’s deep expertise in political Islam’s ideologies, politics, governing style, and tactics is clearly visible in this highly welcome book.
Key Arguments
The author advances several hypotheses, which should keep scholars of political Islam occupied for years to come. Perhaps his most controversial thesis is that regime repression has pushed Islamists “along a more moderate path.” He examines “two distinct phases in the Islamist narrative—one defined by the experience of repression and the other by the democratic openings made possible by the Arab revolutions.”
Islamists’ electoral strategies were carefully developed in order not to arouse the suspicions of the regime, the ruling party, or other non-Islamist parties. By running a limited number of candidates in any particular election, Islamists emphasized their motto of “participation not domination.”
While Islamists opted for elections and political participation in Egypt and Jordan, according to Hamid, they were far from being liberal democrats. The Muslim Brotherhood, for example, views itself not as a traditional political party but as a religious, social, and educational movement or organization.
Despite their active participation in electoral politics, “the goal of Islamist groups is the ‘Islamization’ of society, [which] goes well beyond the political realm.” The author expertly discusses the stages of Islamization, which the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups have pursued to Islamize the individual, the family, and the society at large. Once in power, Islamists have pursued a form of “illiberal democracy” by infringing on the liberties of others. In essence, moderation in the past four decades has not made Islamists liberal democrats.
Islamists have been more comfortable in opposition than in power. Rachid Ghannouchi, head of the Tunisian Enmahda, according to the author, warned Islamists that they would be “loved by the people before they get to power and then hated afterward.”
The book’s central argument, which is perhaps the most controversial as well, is that regime tolerance of the opposition, including allowing more political freedoms, did not necessarily lead to moderating policies promoted by Islamists. On the contrary, the author asserts, “increasing levels of repression, rather than resulting in radicalization, can have amoderating effect on Islamist groups, pushing them to reconsider and redefine their policy priorities.”
Islam, Politics, and Ideology
As governing parties, Islamists have sought popular support for their policies by moving to the center. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) preached that “freedom and Islamization were not opposed but rather went hand in hand.” In the hundreds of hours of interviews, which the author conducted with MB activists and leaders, he sought to understand how and why Islamists adopted more moderate ideologies when they actually gained state power.
He challenges the prevailing view in academic literature, which states that Islamists moderate in response to “political participation and inclusion.” He tosses out the accepted “inclusion-moderation” hypothesis and the so-called “pothole theory of democracy” which maintain that when in power Islamists tend to focus on bread-and-butter issues and less on ideology. Hamid strongly argues that engaging Islamists, either on the part of the ruling regime or by outside actors, does not automatically push them to moderate.
This is a radical challenge not only to academic theorizing about Islamists’ political strategies but also to Western governments’ policies of Muslim world engagement, especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Policy makers in Western countries have urged authoritarian regimes in the Arab Muslim world to open up their political systems and allow mainstream Islamists to contest the political space. Regimes are told that as Islamists experience more freedom and less repression, they would move away from radicalization and extremism and move toward the moderate center.
By contrast, the author argues that, when faced with extreme repression and the threat of eradication by the regime, Islamists tend to moderate. Despite continued regime repression and the massive arrests and convictions of MB leaders, the Muslim Brotherhood’s commitment to democratic politics has remained unshakeable. The MB followed a similar policy during Mubarak’s repressive regime. In the 1980s and 1990s, the MB formed political alliances with other parties in order to elect some of their members to the national legislature—first, with the Wafd Party and then with the Labor Socialist Party. Later on, MB parliamentary candidates ran for elections as independents.
Despite Egypt’s “turn to repression” in the 1990s, the MB continued to participate in parliamentary elections and to reach out to the West with their message of moderation, pragmatism, pluralism, and inclusion. In response to regime accusations in the 1990s depicting the Islamists as “regressive and close-minded,” the MB submitted more detailed statements to the public and to the outside world emphasizing their commitment to pragmatism and inclusion. The MB’s 1994 statement included sophisticated analysis of their commitment to pluralism, inclusion, women’s rights, and minority (read Christian) rights.
The last chapter “The Past and Future of Political Islam,” offers a brilliant analysis of the political ideology of political Islam, the recent experiences of political Islamists, and the lessons the region and the international community should take from these experiences. Although the MB committed huge political and ideological errors in its first year in office under Mohamed Morsi, it would be naïve and shortsighted to see the experience as a failure of political Islam itself. Although Morsi’s failure resulted from policies of a specific Islamist party in a particular country under unique circumstances, it could offer instructive lessons to other Islamist political parties that aspire to govern.
Concluding Comment
Sophisticated as this book is, the author did not establish a convincing causal relationship between repression and moderation and whether Islamists’ moderation was a response to regime repression or a strategy for survival.
For example, why was the MB “forced” to moderate, as Hamid puts it? If MB Islamists were “forced to moderate by their circumstance,” did those circumstances include regime repression, popular calls for democracy, the fear of liquidation by the regime, or a desire to win elections? Did the Islamists’ moderation reflect liberal tendencies or an innate desire to survive under repression? Were the frequent compromises the MB in Egypt and the Islamic Action Front in Jordan made in response to regime repression a sign of moderation or a strategy for survival? Was the shift the Muslim Brotherhood made toward political participation in the mid-1990s tactical or strategic? These critical questions are too often left begging.
Hamid does an excellent job, on the other hand, in discussing the role of foreign actors, especially the United States, in the MB’s evolving stance on democratic politics.
]]>by Dilip Hiro
Since September 11, 2001, Washington’s policies in the Middle East have proven a grim imperial comedy of errors and increasingly a spectacle of how a superpower is sidelined. In this drama, barely noticed by the American media, Uncle Sam’s keystone ally in the Arab world, Egypt, like [...]]]>
by Dilip Hiro
Since September 11, 2001, Washington’s policies in the Middle East have proven a grim imperial comedy of errors and increasingly a spectacle of how a superpower is sidelined. In this drama, barely noticed by the American media, Uncle Sam’s keystone ally in the Arab world, Egypt, like Saudi Arabia, has largely turned its back on the Obama administration. As with so many of America’s former client states across the aptly named “arc of instability,” Egypt has undergone a tumultuous journey — from autocracy to democracy to a regurgitated form of military rule and repression, making its ally of four decades appear clueless.
Egypt remains one of the top recipients of U.S. foreign aid, with the Pentagon continuing to pamper the Egyptian military with advanced jet fighters, helicopters, missiles, and tanks. Between January 2011 and May 2014, Egypt underwent a democratic revolution, powered by a popular movement, which toppled President Hosni Mubarak’s regime. It enjoyed a brief tryst with democracy before suffering an anti-democratic counter-revolution by its generals. In all of this, what has been the input of the planet’s last superpower in shaping the history of the most populous country in the strategic Middle East? Zilch. Its “generosity” toward Cairo notwithstanding, Washington has been reduced to the role of a helpless bystander.
Given how long the United States has been Egypt’s critical supporter, the State Department and Pentagon bureaucracies should have built up a storehouse of understanding as to what makes the Land of the Pharaohs tick. Their failure to do so, coupled with a striking lack of familiarity by two administrations with the country’s recent history, has led to America’s humiliating sidelining in Egypt. It’s a story that has yet to be pieced together, although it’s indicative of how from Kabul to Bonn, Baghdad to Rio de Janeiro so many ruling elites no longer feel that listening to Washington is a must.
An Army as Immovable as the Pyramids
Ever since 1952, when a group of nationalist military officers ended the pro-British monarchy, Egypt’s army has been in the driver’s seat. From Gamal Abdul Nasser to Hosni Mubarak, its rulers were military commanders. And if, in February 2011, a majority of the members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) abandoned Mubarak, it was only to stop him from passing the presidency on to his son Gamal on his 83rd birthday. The neoliberal policies pursued by the Mubarak government at the behest of that businessman son from 2004 onward made SCAF fear that the military’s stake in the public sector of the economy and its extensive public-private partnerships would be doomed.
Fattened on the patronage of successive military presidents, Egypt’s military-industrial complex had grown enormously. Its contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP), though a state secret, could be as high as 40%, unparalleled in the region. The chief executives of 55 of Egypt’s largest companies, contributing a third of that GDP, are former generals.
Working with the interior ministry, which controls the national police force, paramilitary units, and the civilian intelligence agencies, SCAF (headed by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, doubling as the defense minister) would later orchestrate the protest movement against popularly elected President Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. That campaign reached its crescendo on June 30, 2013. Three days later, SCAF toppled Morsi and has held him in prison ever since.
The generals carried out their coup at a moment when, according to the Washington-based Pew Research Center, 63% of Egyptians had a favorable view of the Muslim Brotherhood, 52% approved of the Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party, and 53% backed Morsi, who had won the presidency a year earlier with 52% of the vote.
Washington Misses the Plot
Remarkably, Obama administration officials failed to grasp that the generals, in conjunction with Interior Minister Muhammad Ibrahim, were the prime movers behind the Tamarod (Arabic for “rebellion”) campaign launched on April 22, 2013. Egyptians were urged to sign a petition addressed to Morsi that was both simplistic and populist. “Because security has not returned, because the poor have no place, because I have no dignity in my own country…,” read the text in part, “we don’t want you anymore,” and it called for an early presidential election. In little over two months, the organizers claimed that they had amassed 22.1 million signatures, amounting to 85% of those who had participated in the presidential election of 2012. Where those millions of individually signed petitions were being stored was never made public, nor did any independent organization verify their existence or numbers.
As the Tamarod campaign gained momentum, the interior ministry’s secret police infiltrated it, as did former Mubarak supporters, while elements of the police state of the Mubarak era were revived. Reports that cronies of the toppled president were providing the funding for the campaign began to circulate. The nationwide offices of the Free Egyptians — a party founded by Naguib Sawiria, a businessman close to Mubarak and worth $2.5 billion – were openedto Tamarod organizers. Sawiria also paid for a promotional music video that was played repeatedly on OnTV, a television channel he had founded. In addition, he let his newspaper,Al Masry al Youm, be used as a vehicle for the campaign.
In the run-up to the mass demonstration in Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square on June 30th, the first anniversary of Morsi’s rule, power cuts became more frequent and fuel shortages acute. As policemen mysteriously disappeared from the streets, the crime rate soared. All of this stoked anti-Morsi feelings and was apparently orchestrated with military precision by those who plotted the coup.
Ben Hubbard and David D. Kirkpatrick of the New York Times provided evidence of meticulous planning, especially by the Interior Ministry, in a report headlined “Sudden Improvements in Egypt Suggest a Campaign to Undermine Morsi.” They quoted Ahmad Nabawi, a Cairo gas station manager, saying that he had heard several explanations for the gas crisis: technical glitches at the storage facilities, the arrival of low quality gas from abroad, and excessive stockpiling by the public. But he put what happened in context this way: “We went to sleep one night, woke up the next day, and the crisis was gone” — and so was Morsi. Unsurprisingly, of all the ministers in the Morsi government, Interior Minister Ibrahim was the only one retained in the interim cabinet appointed by the generals.
“See No Evil”
Initially, President Obama refused to call what had occurred in Egypt a military “coup.” Instead, he spoke vaguely of “military actions” in order to stay on the right side of the Foreign Assistance Act in which Congress forbade foreign aid to “any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.”
Within a week of the coup, with Morsi and the first of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood followers thrown behind bars, SCAF sidelined the Tamarod campaigners. They were left complaining that the generals, violating their promise, had not consulted them on the road map to normalization. Having ridden the Tamarod horse to total power, SCAF had no more use for it.
When Morsi supporters staged peaceful sit-ins at two squares in Cairo, the military junta could not bear the sight of tens of thousands of Egyptians quietly defying its arbitrary will. Waiting until the holy fasting month of Ramadan and the three-day festival of Eid ul Fitr had passed, they made their move. On August 14th, Interior Ministry troops massacred nearly 1,000 protesters as they cleared the two sites.
“Our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back,” said Obama. However, in the end all he did was cancel annual joint military exercises with Egypt scheduled for September and suspend the shipment of four F-16 fighter jets to the Egyptian air force. This mattered little, if at all, to the generals.
The helplessness of Washington before a client state with an economy in freefall was little short of stunning. Pentagon officials, for instance, revealed that since the “ouster of Mr. Morsi,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had had15 telephone conversations with coup leader General Sisi, pleading with him to “change course” — all in vain.
Five weeks later, the disjuncture between Washington and Cairo became embarrassingly overt. On September 23rd, the Cairo Court for Urgent Mattersordered the 85-year-old Muslim Brotherhood disbanded. In a speech at the U.N. General Assembly the next day, President Obama stated that, in deposing Morsi, the Egyptian military had “responded to the desires of millions of Egyptians who believed the revolution had taken a wrong turn.” He then offered only token criticism, claiming that the new military government had “made decisions inconsistent with inclusive democracy” and that future American support would “depend upon Egypt’s progress in pursuing a more democratic path.”
General Sisi was having none of this. In a newspaper interview on October 9th, he warned that he would not tolerate pressure from Washington “whether through actions or hints.” Already, there had been a sign that Uncle Sam’s mild criticism was being diluted. A day earlier, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden stated that reports that all military assistance to Egypt would be halted were “false.”
In early November, unmistakably pliant words came from Secretary of State John Kerry. “The roadmap [to democracy] is being carried out to the best of our perception,” he said at a press conference, while standing alongside his Egyptian counterpart Nabil Fahmy during a surprise stopover in Cairo. “There are questions we have here and there about one thing or another, but Foreign Minister Fahmy has reemphasized to me again and again that they have every intent and they are determined to fulfill that particular decision and that [democratic] track.”
The Generals Axe the Secular, Pro-Democracy Movement
Fahmy and Kerry were looking at that democratic “track” from opposite perspectives. Three weeks later, the military-appointed president, Adly Mansour, approved a new law that virtually outlawed the right to protest. This law gave the interior minister or senior police officials a power that only the judiciary had previously possessed. The minister or his minions could now cancel, postpone, or change the location of protests for which organizers had earlier received the permission of local police. Human Rights groups and secular organizations argued that the 2013 Protest Law was reminiscent of Mubarak’s repressive policies. Washington kept quiet.
Two days later, critics of the law held a demonstration in Cairo that was violently dispersed by the police. Dozens of activists, including the co-founders of the April 6 Youth Movement, Ahmed Maher and Muhammad Adel, seminal actors in the Tahrir Square protests against Mubarak, were arrested. Maher and Adel were each sentenced to three years imprisonment.
Following the coup, the number of prisoners rose exponentially, reaching at least 16,000 within eight months, including nearly 3,000 top or mid-level members of the Brotherhood. (Unofficial estimates put the total figure at 22,000.) When 40 inmates herded into a typical cell in custom-built jails proved insufficient, many Brotherhood members were detained without charges for months in police station lockups or impromptu prisons set up in police training camps where beatings were routine.
The 846 Egyptians who lost their lives in the pro-democracy revolution that ended Mubarak’s authoritarian regime were dwarfed by the nearly 3,000 people killed in a brutal series of crackdowns that followed the coup, according to human rights groups.
The sentencing of the founders of the April 6 Youth Movement — which through its social media campaign had played such a crucial role in sparking anti-Mubarak demonstrations — foreshadowed something far worse. On April 28, 2014, the Cairo Court for Urgent Matters outlawed that secular, pro-democracy movement based on a complaint by a lawyer that it had “tarnished the image” of Egypt and colluded with foreign parties.
With this set of acts, the post-coup regime turned the clock back to Mubarakism — without Mubarak.
Setting the World’s Mass Death-Penalty Record
On that same April day in the southern Egyptian town of Minya, Judge Saeed Elgazar broke his own month-old world death-penalty record of 529 (in a trial that lasting less than an hour) by recommending the death penalty for 683 Egyptians, including Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie. The defendants were charged in an August 2013 attack on a police station in Minya, which led to the death of a policeman. Of the accused, 60% had not been in Minya on the day of the assault. Defense lawyers were prevented from presenting their case during the two-day trial.
Elgazar was a grotesquely exaggerated example of a judiciary from the Mubarak era that remained unreconciled to the onset of democracy. It proved only too willing to back the military junta in terrorizing those even thinking of protesting the generals’ rule. A U.S. State Department spokesperson called the judge’s first trial “unconscionable.” But as before, the military-backed government in Cairo remained unmoved. The Egyptian Justice Department warned that “comments on judicial verdicts are unacceptable, be they from external or internal parties as they represent a serious transgression against the independence of the judiciary.”
When the second mass sentence came down, Kerry murmured that “there have been disturbing decisions within the judicial process, the court system, that have raised serious challenges for all of us. It’s actions, not words that will make the difference.” A defiant Nabil Fahmy responded by defending the verdicts as having been rendered by an independent judiciary “completely independent from the government.”
One predictable response to the military junta’s brutal squashing of the Brotherhood, which over the previous few decades had committed itself to participating in a multi-party democracy, was the swelling of the ranks of militant jihadist groups. Of these Ansar Bait al Muqdus (“Helpers of Jerusalem”), based in the Sinai Peninsula and linked to al-Qaeda, was the largest. After the coup, it gained new members and its terror attacks spread to the bulk of Egypt west of the Suez Canal.
In late December, a car bomb detonated by its operatives outside police headquarters in the Nile Delta town of Mansoura killed 16 police officers. Blaming the bombing on the Muslim Brotherhood instead, the interim government classified it as a “terrorist organization,” even though Ansar had claimed responsibility for the attack. By pinning the terrorist label on the Brotherhood, the generals gave themselves carte blanche to further intensify their ruthless suppression of it.
While SCAF pursued its relentless anti-Brotherhood crusade and reestablished itself as the ruling power in Egypt, it threw a sop to the Obama administration. It introduced a new constitution, having suspended the previous one drafted by a popularly elected constituent assembly. The generals appointed a handpicked committee of 50 to amend the suspended document. They included only two members of the Islamist groups that had jointly gained two-thirds of the popular vote in Egypt’s first free elections.
Predictably, the resulting document was military-friendly. It stipulated that the defense minister must be a serving military officer and that civilians would be subject to trial in military courts for certain offenses. Banned was the formation of political parties based on religion, race, gender, or geography, and none was allowed to have a paramilitary wing. The document was signed by the interim president in early December. A national referendum on it was held in mid-January under tight security, with 160,000 soldiers and more than 200,000 policemen deployed nationwide. The result: a vote of 98.1% in favor. (A referendum on the 2012 constitution during Morsi’s presidency had gained the backing of 64% of voters.)
The charade of this exercise seemed to escape policymakers in Washington. Kerry blithely spoke of the SCAF-appointed government committing itself to “a transition process that expands democratic rights and leads to a civilian-led, inclusive government through free and fair elections.”
By this time, the diplomatic and financial support of the oil rich Gulf States ruled by autocratic monarchs was proving crucial to the military regime in Cairo. Immediately after the coup, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) poured $12 billion into Cairo’s nearly empty coffers. In late January 2014, Saudi Arabia and the UAE came up with an additional $5.8 billion. This helped Sisi brush off any pressure from Washington and monopolize power his way.
The Strongman as Savior
By then, huge photographs and portraits of General Sisi had become a common fixture on the streets in Cairo and other major cities. On January 27th, interim president Mansour promoted Sisi to field marshal. Later that day, SCAF nominated him for the presidency. A slew of stories started appearing in the state-run media as well as most of its privately owned counterparts backing Sisi and touting the benefits of strong military leadership.
Sisi’s original plan to announce his candidacy on February 11th, the third anniversary of Mubarak’s forced resignation, hit an unexpected speed bump. On February 7th, Al Watan, a newspaper supportive of the military regime with longstanding ties to the security establishment, printed an embarrassing front-page story placing Sisi’s worth at 30 million Egyptian pounds ($4.2 million). Within minutes of its being printed, state officials contacted the paper’s owner, Magdy El Galad, demanding its immediate removal. He instantly complied.
Sisi continued to place his henchmen in key positions in the armed forces, including military intelligence. On March 26th, he resigned from the army, declaring himself an independent candidate. Nonetheless, as Alaa Al Aswany, a prominent writer and commentator, revealed, senior military commanders continued to perform important tasks for him. There was nothing faintly fair about such an election, Aswany pointed out. Most other potential candidates for the presidency had reached a similar conclusion — that entering the race was futile. Hamdeen Sabahi, a secular left-of-center politician, was the only exception.
Despite relentless propaganda by state and private media portraying Sisi as the future savior of Egypt, things went badly for him. That he would be crowned as a latter-day Pharaoh was a given. The only unknown was: How many Egyptians would bother to participate in the stage-managed exercise?
The turnout proved so poor on May 26th, the first day of the two-day election, that panic struck the government, which declared the following day a holiday. In addition, the Justice ministry warned that those who failed to vote would be fined. The authorities suspended train fares to encourage voters to head for polling stations. TV anchors and media celebrities scolded and lambasted their fellow citizens for their apathy, while urging them to rush to their local polling booths. Huge speakers mounted on vans patrolling city neighborhoods alternated raucous exhortations to vote with songs of praise for the military. Al Azhar, the highest Islamic authority in the land, declared that to fail to vote was “to disobey the nation.” Pope Tawadros, head of Egypt’s Coptic Christian Church whose members form 10% of the population, appeared on state television to urge voters to cast their ballots.
The former field marshal had demanded an 80% turnout from the country’s 56 million voters. Yet even with voting extended to a third day and a multifaceted campaign to shore up the numbers, polling stations were reportedly empty across the country. The announced official turnout of 47.5% was widely disbelieved. Sabahi described the figure as “an insult to the intelligence of Egyptians.” Sisi was again officially given 96.1% of the vote, Sabahi 3%. The spokesman for the National Alliance for the Defense of Legitimacy put voter participation at 10%-12%. The turnout for the first free and fair two-day presidential election, held in June 2012 without endless exhortations by TV anchors and religious leaders, had been 52%.
Among the regional and world leaders who telephoned Sisi to congratulate him on his landslide electoral triumph was Russian President Vladimir Putin. No such call has yet come in from President Obama.
For Washington, still so generous in its handouts to the Arab Republic of Egypt and its military, trailing behind the Russian Bear in embracing the latest strongman on the Nile should be considered an unqualified humiliation. With its former sphere of influence in tatters, the last superpower has been decisively sidelined by its key Arab ally in the region.
Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, has written 34 books, including After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World. His latest book is A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Middle East.
*This article was first published by Tom Dispatch and was reprinted here with permission.
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Photo Credit: Mohammad Omer/IPS
Copyright 2014 Dilip Hiro
]]>by Thomas W. Lippman
An Arabic-speaking friend who has been doing business in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf for decades and seems to know everyone there invited me to lunch the other day. He wanted to know if I could make sense of developments in Saudi Arabia over the past six months.
[...]]]>by Thomas W. Lippman
An Arabic-speaking friend who has been doing business in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf for decades and seems to know everyone there invited me to lunch the other day. He wanted to know if I could make sense of developments in Saudi Arabia over the past six months.
I almost laughed — he knows more before he gets out of bed in the morning than I ever will. But it was a measure of the collective bafflement of people whose business it is to know what is going on in the kingdom that my friend turned to me. His was the sixth such request I had fielded recently. The others were from diplomats at two foreign embassies, representatives of an international industrial conglomerate and a giant oil company, and an Obama administration official who has access to classified material.
It was flattering to be sought out by such people, who normally would be sources for me rather than the other way around. I would have liked to help them if I knew the answers, but the conversation was not reassuring. All this highlights how much Saudi Arabia, traditionally cautious and understated, has thrown knowledgeable people into confusion by its actions and decisions over the past several months. It is no secret that the leaders of Saudi Arabia have been upset with the United States over several policy differences in the past year; it’s less clear if the Saudi leaders understand how difficult it has become for their friends outside the kingdom to discern where they want to go and how they plan to get there.
The fundamental objectives of Saudi strategic policy are well known: contain Iran, put an end to the Assad regime in Syria, stamp out the Muslim Brotherhood, fight Islamic extremism, forge coherence out of the squabbles within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and encourage the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. What’s harder to discern is how the kingdom’s actions and decisions over the past six months have advanced this agenda.
This period of turbulence seems to have begun with the decision last November to reject the seat on the United Nations Security Council that the kingdom had sought for years. The Saudis said the U.N. had failed in its duty to stop the carnage of Syria’s civil war and to bring about a negotiated settlement between the Palestinians and Israel. It is true that those conflicts remain unresolved, but it was and is hard to see how Saudi Arabia’s decision made any difference. The Syrian war had been going on for some time, and the plight of the Palestinians dates to 1948; were the Saudis unaware of that while they were avidly pursuing the seat they rejected?
In the months since then, Saudi-watchers have been confronted with one surprising development after another. These include, in no particular order:
- The dismissal of Prince Bandar bin Sultan as director of intelligence. He had previously been removed as director of Saudi efforts to help the Syrian rebels, who are not winning the war, and he had failed in an apparent attempt to persuade Russia to abandon Bashar al-Assad. He had also been ill. Which, if either, was the real reason?
- The withdrawal by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain of their ambassadors to Qatar, a split within the six-member GCC that seems to have arisen over differences in policy toward Egypt. The Saudis and Emiratis in particular have been supporting the military government headed by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a relentless foe of the Muslim Brotherhood, while the Qataris have been critical of the Egyptian military’s ouster of an elected Brotherhood government headed by Mohammed Morsi. Qatar’s public position is that it does not support the Brotherhood as an organization but stood by the outcome of a valid election. After the ambassadors were pulled, the four countries announced an agreement to end their dispute, but the ambassadors have not returned to Doha.
- An invitation to Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif to visit Saudi Arabia. Given the Saudis’ penchant for blaming Iran for all the region’s troubles, and their vigorous opposition to the U.S.-led negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, this initiative came as a surprise. Not long before, Saudi Arabia’s new ambassador to Iran, Abdul Rahman al-Shehri, went to visit former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, an advocate of improved bilateral relations, and was photographed kissing his hand. What does that portend, if anything?
- The elevation of Prince Muqrin bin Abdul Aziz, who had been dismissed as director of national intelligence when Prince Bandar got that job, to the previously non-existent position of “deputy crown prince.” Was this a preemptive strike by King Abdullah to ward off possible dissension within the royal family over the line of succession, or did it indicate that consensus has already been achieved and the family had lined up behind Muqrin? The official announcement of this royal decree contained a tantalizing bit of information: it said Muqrin had been elevated with the approval of “an overwhelming majority of more than three-fourths” of the Allegiance Council, the group of 35 princes created by King Abdullah to deal with the succession question. That means the decision was not unanimous. Who voted no, and why?
- A shakeup of senior military leadership and of positions in the Defense Ministry. The most interesting piece of this was probably the replacement of Prince Salman bin Sultan, half-brother of the ousted Bandar, as deputy minister of defense. Analysts in the Gulf described the changes as the replacement of hard-liners on Syria and Iran by more moderate personalities, but because the Saudi decision-making process is entirely opaque and the people involved never talk about it to outsiders, it may be quite a while before we can discern the significance of this, if any.
- Staging an enormous, elaborate display of the kingdom’s military forces, complete with ballistic missiles, combat jets, and an estimated 130,000 troops, at Hafr al-Batin, in the northeastern corner of the country near the borders with Iraq and Kuwait. It was impressive, but what was the message, and who was the target audience? Senior Saudi defense officials were quoted in the local press as saying the kingdom has no intention of attacking anyone and was simply showcasing its preparedness. Perhaps so, but why now?
This list is not complete, but it is instructive. People outside Saudi Arabia who try to follow the kingdom’s affairs, and I include myself among them, should remind ourselves at all times how little we really know. This is not a country where the king and senior princes have to explain themselves, and they usually don’t. Even when they do, their explanations may or may not be the whole truth. It’s not as if a committee of the legislature could subpoena them. What all these pieces add up to may become clear over time — or maybe not. Meanwhile we should be wary of drawing conclusions.
]]>by Daniel Wagner, Giorgio Cafiero, and Sufyan bin Uzayr*
Since the revolutions that swept across the Middle East in 2011, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government has arrested dozens of Emirati and Egyptian nationals allegedly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). Declaring the MB a threat to the UAE’s [...]]]>
by Daniel Wagner, Giorgio Cafiero, and Sufyan bin Uzayr*
Since the revolutions that swept across the Middle East in 2011, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government has arrested dozens of Emirati and Egyptian nationals allegedly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). Declaring the MB a threat to the UAE’s ruling order, social fabric, and economic prosperity, Emirati authorities have since 2011 waged a crackdown on Al-Islah (AI), a MB-influenced group. Throughout the Arab Awakening movement, Abu Dhabi has deepened partnerships with other states determined to eradicate the MB. Given that the UAE and Kuwait support Saudi Arabia’s efforts to establish the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as an MB-free zone, shared hostility toward this Sunni movement appears to unite the GCC members more effectively than fears of Shi’ite Iran.
The MB’s activity in the UAE dates back to the 1960s when scores of Egyptian MB members fled Nasser’s Egypt to take haven in the Gulf. These Egyptians were sophisticated, educated, upwardly mobile, and they gained high-ranking posts in the UAE’s public and private sectors, playing an important role in the nation’s judicial and education systems. The Egyptian MB followers influenced scores of conservative UAE nationals who founded AI, which became an official NGO in 1974.
Initially, AI was heavily involved in the UAE’s educational, religious, and social affairs. In time, however, its orientation grew increasingly political, and relations with the government grew tense. The government’s belief that AI was loyal to a transnational Islamist movement, rather than the UAE, has been a primary source of tension. Since the 1990s the state has prohibited AI members from holding public office or making calls for political reform.
The UAE maintains that AI is an armed group with 20,000 followers determined to overthrow the federation of seven emirates and establish a caliphate in the Gulf. AI claims that it rejects violence while supporting peaceful reforms in the country. Regardless of what constitutes reality, the potential for instability and the threat of ending a relatively harmonious status quo between the Gulf state’s diverse ethnic and sectarian communities have contributed to the support the government is receiving from many Emiratis who credit their rulers with maintaining stability as chaos destabilizes many Arab nations.
When Mohamed Morsi and the Egyptian MB’s newly-established political party — the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) — won the 2011/2012 elections, authorities in the UAE became deeply unsettled. Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was a close UAE ally and the prospect of democratic revolutions spreading from Egypt into the GCC was a central concern for all Gulf monarchies.
Egypt-UAE relations were marked by tense diplomatic spats throughout Morsi’s presidency. In July 2012, Dubai’s Police Chief accused the MB of plotting to topple the government in order to seize its sovereign wealth. In October 2012, the UAE Foreign Minister alleged that the MB was “encroach[ing] upon the sovereignty and integrity of other nations.” After UAE authorities arrested 11 Egyptians in January 2013, accusing them of training local Islamists to overthrow the government, an FJP spokesperson dismissed such allegations, stating that UAE officials were conducting an “unfair campaign” against Egyptians that had “no basis whatsoever”.
The UAE viewed Morsi’s downfall as a strategic opportunity to reset the course of events since 2011. Since the coup, Abu Dhabi has not been shy in showing support for Egypt’s military-backed interim government. In October 2013, Emirati officials announced a $4.9 billion aid package to Egypt that included cash, petroleum products, and funds for clinics, education, housing, and infrastructure. This, along with aid from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, has made a significant difference in Field Marshal Abdul Fatah el-Sisi’s ability to govern effectively by delivering on some of his promises to the Egyptian people.
Sisi’s visit to the GCC in March 2014 was rich in geopolitical context. While in the UAE, the two countries’ militaries conducted joint training exercises and the UAE-based contractor Arabtec signed a memorandum of understanding to construct approximately one million housing units across Egypt, costing $40 billion. It was understood at the time that this deal, supported by the UAE government, was another part of the Egyptian military’s effort to garner greater support for Sisi among low-income Egyptians, with presidential elections scheduled for May 2014.
Egypt’s military has for decades asserted greater power by playing an increasingly important economic role. Since the coup, Egypt’s generals have made power grabs by designating their allies to major economic posts while securing contracts for major infrastructure deals, and a lucrative Suez Canal project. As Egypt’s military is determined to seize even greater control of the national economy, the billions of dollars in aid from the UAE will aid Sisi’s efforts toward this outcome.
In March 2014, immediately after Saudi Arabia’s government declared the MB a “terrorist organization”, the UAE’s government expressed support for Riyadh’s decision, calling it a “significant step”. This declaration came in the aftermath of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE withdrawing their ambassadors from Qatar on the grounds that Doha did not implement a security pact regarding non-intervention in fellow GCC states’ affairs. Among other motivations, the move was largely intended to signal a message to Qatar about supporting the MB in Egypt and elsewhere. Doha’s relationship with MB branches has contributed to the tense state of relations between the UAE and Qatar.
Ongoing sectarian violence in Bahrain and eastern Saudi Arabia showcases how the GCC is not immune to the Arab Awakening. Although calls for political or social change in the UAE have been minimal since 2011, the potential for income disparities to fuel unrest in the UAE is a concern for the ruling order. Given that AI has functioned as a charity and social welfare organization for decades, the government believes there is potential for the group to gain influence in the UAE’s poorer emirates.
While sectarian fault lines largely define the Middle East’s geopolitical order, a “Sunni Cold War” is simultaneously influencing the regional network of alliances. On one side, the distinctly undemocratic polity in Saudi Arabia vehemently opposes Islamist political parties that promote democratic institutions. On the other, Turkey and Qatar support the spread of ‘democratic Islamism’ throughout the region.
In this struggle, the UAE has made its position abundantly clear. While Abu Dhabi will continue to use its massive natural resource wealth to attempt to neutralize its citizens’ aspirations for democratic reforms, the UAE appears determined to conduct an increasingly activist foreign policy that counters the MB throughout the region while seeking to prevent the organization from gaining any foothold in the GCC. In doing so, the UAE underscores its intention to preserve the status quo power structure in the Gulf and Egypt.
*Daniel Wagner is CEO of Country Risk Solutions and Senior Advisor with Gnarus Advisors. Giorgio Cafiero is co-founder of Gulf State Analytics (GSA). Sufyan bin Uzayr is an analyst with GSA.
]]>by Emile Nakhleh
The Bahraini Arabic language newspaper al-Wasat reported on April 9 that a Cairo court began to consider a case brought by an Egyptian lawyer against Qatar accusing it of being soft on terrorism. The “terrorism” charge is of course a euphemism for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt, Saudi [...]]]>
by Emile Nakhleh
The Bahraini Arabic language newspaper al-Wasat reported on April 9 that a Cairo court began to consider a case brought by an Egyptian lawyer against Qatar accusing it of being soft on terrorism. The “terrorism” charge is of course a euphemism for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have designated a “terrorist” organization and have vowed to dismantle.
The two partners and the UAE also loathe Qatar for hosting and funding al-Jazeera satellite TV. The continued incarceration of the Al-Jazeera journalists and dozens of other journalists on trumped up charges is no coincidence.
The court case is symptomatic of the current Saudi-Egyptian relationship in their counter-revolution against the 2011 pro-democracy upheavals that toppled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his fellow autocrats in Tunisia, Yemen, and Libya.
The pro-autocracy partnership between the Egyptian military junta and the Saudi ruling family goes beyond their opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood and the perceived threat of terrorism. It emanates from the autocrats’ visceral opposition to democracy and human rights, including minority and women’s rights.
What should be most critical to them as they contemplate the future of their coalition of counter-revolutionaries, however, is the growing Western conviction that dictators can no longer provide stability.
The Egyptian Field Marshall and the Saudi potentate also abhor the key demands of the Arab uprisings and reject their peoples’ calls for freedom, dignity, justice, and genuine economic and political reform.
They are equally terrified of the coming end of the authoritarian paradigm, which could bring about their demise or at least force them to share power with their people. The Saudis and their Gulf Arab allies, especially Bahrain and the UAE, are willing to trample on their people’s rights in order to safeguard family tribal rule.
The Saudi-Egyptian partnership is also directed at the Obama administration primarily because of Washington’s diplomatic engagement with Iran.
According to media and Human Rights Watch reports, at least 16,000 secular and Islamist activists are currently being held in Egyptian prisons, without having been charged or convicted. This number includes hundreds of MB leaders and activists and thousands of its supporters.
Many of them, including teenagers, have also been tortured and abused physically and psychologically. These mass arrests and summary trials and convictions of Islamists and liberals alike belie the Saudi-Egyptian claim that theirs is a campaign against terrorism.
A brief history of Egyptian-Saudi relations
Egyptian-Saudi relations in the past 60 years have been erratic, depending on leadership, ideology, and regional and world events. During the Nasser era in the 1950s and ‘60s, relations were very tense due to Saudi fears of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab nationalist ideology.
The Saudis saw Nasser as a nationalist firebrand arousing Arab masses against colonialism and Arab monarchies. He supported national liberation movements and wars of independence against the French in North Africa and the British in the Arab littoral of the Persian Gulf.
The Saudi monarchy viewed Nasser’s call for Arab unity “from the roaring ocean to the rebellious Gulf” as a threat to their survival and declared a war on “secular” Arab nationalism and “atheist” Communism. They perceived Nasser’s war in Yemen against the tribal monarchy as an existential threat at their door and began to fund and arm the royalists there against the Egyptian military campaign.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia were the two opposite poles of the “Arab cold war” during the 1950s and ‘60s. Nasser represented emerging Arab republicanism while Saudi Arabia epitomized traditional monarchies. Nasser turned to the Soviet Union; Saudi Arabia turned to the United States.
In the late 1960s, Saudi Arabia declared the proselytization of its brand of Islam as a cardinal principle of its foreign policy for the purpose of fighting Arab nationalism and Communism.
It’s ironic that Saudi Arabia is currently supporting and funding the military junta in Egypt at a time when the military-turned-civilian presidential shoe-in Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is resurrecting the Nasserist brand of politics. In the next three to five years, the most intriguing analytic question will be whether this partnership would endure and how long the post-2011 generation of Arabs would tolerate a coalition of secular autocracy and a religious theocracy.
Saudi Arabia supported Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat’s war against Israel in 1973 but broke with him later in that decade after he visited Jerusalem and signed a peace treaty with Israel.
By the early 1980s, however, the two countries re-established close relations because of their common interest in supporting Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war and in pushing for the Saudi-articulated Arab Peace Initiative.
The Saudi King viewed President Hosni Mubarak warmly and was dismayed by his fall. He was particularly incensed by Washington’s seeming precipitous abandonment of Mubarak in January 2011.
The Saudi monarchy applauded General al-Sisi’s removal of President Muhammad Morsi and pumped billions of dollars into the Egyptian treasury. They also indicated they would make up any deficit in case American aid to Egypt is halted.
The Saudis have endorsed Sisi’s decision to run for president of Egypt and adopted similar harsh policies against the Muslim Brotherhood and all political dissent. Several factors seem to push Saudi Arabia closer to Egypt.
The Saudis are concerned about their growing loss of influence and prestige in the region, especially their failure in thwarting the interim nuclear agreement between the Iran and world powers known as the P5+1. Their policy in Syria is in shambles.
Initially, they encouraged jihadists to go to Syria to fight the Assad regime, but now they cannot control the pro-al-Qaeda radical Salafi jihadists fighting the Damascus tyrant.
The Saudis also failed in transforming the Gulf Cooperation Council into a more unified structure. Other than Bahrain, almost every other state has balked at the Saudi suggestion, viewing it as a power grab.
In an absurd form of retaliation against Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors from that country. The Saudis are engaged in tribal vendettas against their fellow tribal ruling families, which is out of place in a 21st century globalized and well-connected world.
The oil wealth and the regime’s inspired religious fatwas by establishment clerics have a diminishing impact on the younger generation connected to the global social media.
Despite the heavy-handed crackdown, protests, demonstrations, and confrontations with the security forces are a daily occurrence in Egypt. It’s becoming very clear that dictatorial policies are producing more instability, less security, and greater appeal to terrorism.
It won’t be long before Western governments conclude that autocracy is bad for their moral sensibilities, destructive for business, and threatening for their presence in the region. The Saudi-Egyptian coalition of autocrats will soon be in the crosshairs.
In order to endure, such a coalition must be based on respect for their peoples, a genuine commitment to human rights, and a serious effort to address the “deficits” of liberty, education, and women’s rights that have afflicted Arab society for decades.
Photo: Photo released by the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) shows Egypt’s Interim President Adly Mansour (L) listening to Saudi Crown Prince Salman after his arrival in the Saudi Red Sea port city of Jeddah on Oct. 7, 2013. Credit: Xinhua/SPA
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