James A. Russell
The predictions of doom in the Middle East that are dominating thinking in the foreign policy commentariat of Washington and other capitals over the spread of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could use a little perspective.
An unlikely source of insight transpired the other day when [...]]]>
James A. Russell
The predictions of doom in the Middle East that are dominating thinking in the foreign policy commentariat of Washington and other capitals over the spread of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could use a little perspective.
An unlikely source of insight transpired the other day when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not known for clear-headed strategic thinking, equated Hamas with ISIS. The suggestion was part of a long-running Israeli narrative that seeks to link its periodic muggings of the Palestinians with the American-led war on Islamic extremists launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Netanyahu’s suggestion, however, is not far off the mark when it comes to framing regional events—though not for the reasons that he would think. The fact is that the Middle East is mired in several overlapping and competing national wars of liberation and state formation by various factions and states that seek a common variable in these wars: political power and authority over a demarcated geographic area. ISIS and Hamas are certainly participants in these wars, as are the Israelis.
None of these wars are in any way remarkable by historical standards—a point worth remembering as the Obama administration faces massive pressure to “do something” about the advances of ISIS. Americans generally suffer from short historic memories and easily forget their role in post-World War II era wars including in China (1949), Vietnam (1950s-60s), and Greece (1948).
Like the United States, Britain and France involved themselves in these wars directly and indirectly—most of which turned out badly for the Western powers. If anything, the involvement of outside powers in these wars prolonged them—much to the detriment of the groups involved in the struggle for political power.
The Middle East’s wars of national liberation and state formation were never really settled—hence the prevalence of the phenomenon today. The longest running is the unfinished war of Israeli independence launched in 1948. It’s unsettled because Israel’s borders are still in question due to its ongoing annexation of territory that presumably one day will become part of the state. It seems clear that the annexation fits within the governing Likud Party’s vision of “greater Israel,” which includes the Palestinian territories (Judea and Samaria) that stretch all the way to Jordan River.
This war is ongoing because Hamas and Likud share the same objective—achieving a state that stretches from Gaza to the Jordan River. Hamas is a classic radical religious nationalist movement that seeks to create its own state and, like Israel, is prepared to use force to achieve its goals. Thrown into this mix is the Palestinian Authority, the group that initially took up arms to achieve Palestinian independence but which as of late has tried in vain to achieve its objectives of state formation at the negotiating table.
We can expect this war to continue for the foreseeable future. The involvement of the United States and the blank check it has given to Israel has prolonged the battle; the Israelis have to take no responsibility for their actions and hence have no real incentive to reach a negotiated settlement until the Likud achieves its objective.
The other main war for national independence and state formation in the Middle East involves the fight for political power and authority in the Mukhabarat States of Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq—where (except in Saudi Arabia) the security sector created during colonization seized political power after the external powers departed. Libya is also engaged in a war of state formation that, like in Syria and Iraq, will likely be bloody and take a number of years.
Egypt’s internal battles between the security sector and the Islamists, which raged for 20+ years before briefly subsiding in the 1990s, look as if they may start up again due to these two group’s opposing and perhaps irreconcilable goals for the shape and identity of the state. For its part, Algeria won its civil war against the Islamists in the 1990s. In Tunisia, there may be a process of peaceful transition away from the Mukhabarat regime of Ben Ali to some form of representational government that involves all political parties.
In Syria, Iraq, and Libya, the national wars of liberation and state formation are currently underway. ISIS must be seen as an unfortunate but perhaps inevitable consequence of the battle for power in Syria, which has seen the Saudi-Gulf State support network funnel arms, people, and money into the fight against the Assad-Mukhabarat regime.
The historic genealogy of ISIS reaches back into US-occupied Iraq and the Saudi-Pakistani-US supported war by the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Its intellectual and religious roots lie within the toxic mix of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi clerics and the Sayyid Qutb-inspired militant Islamic resistance to Nasser in Egypt.
To a limited extent, Hamas can be considered a distant cousin of ISIS; both spring from radical Sunni Islamic political and religious ideology. Importantly, however, they are engaged in fundamentally different wars of liberation that involve different actors with various objectives in the contest for political power and authority.
In Iraq, the 2003 US invasion turned the existing political order on its head and unleashed long-repressed political aspirations that have blossomed, like in Syria, into another national war of liberation and state formation. ISIS now straddles the Iraqi-Syrian border, and one of the casualties of this war may be the Sykes-Picot boundaries that divided up the Ottoman Empire.
Saudi Arabia is noticeably absent, at least for now, in this intra- and transnational discord in part because, like other Gulf States, it has bought off its population with subsidized good living and sent its radicals to blow themselves up elsewhere. The regime’s periodic muggings of the Shia population in its Eastern Province are supported by the majority of the population. One day, however, the radicals that survived will come home just like those who did from the Afghan jihad in the 1990s.
The only good news on this front is that there is no widespread political support for the Sunni extremist ideology espoused by groups like ISIS. These groups tend to have short shelf lives precisely because they alienate the very people they seek to govern. The bad news is that these groups’ struggle for political power will likely be long and bloody—in part because they are not interested in a negotiated settlement and/or in sharing power with other actors. The blood-soaked Algerian Civil War provides a historic example of what can happen when entrenched, committed Islamic extremists take on an established security establishment.
More bad news: developed states have had almost universally poor results with their interventions in these national wars of liberation and state formation. In almost every case, the developed states were forcibly kicked out of their former domains. The British headlong retreat from Aden in 1967, the French defeat in Vietnam and Algeria, and the American defeat in Vietnam all represented important signposts as the wars of national liberation became prominent in the post-World War II era.
Moreover, the attempts to intervene in these disputes were often marked by ill-informed choices in backing local participants. The American backing of Chiang Kai-shek turned out particularly badly as did the backing of Nguyen Van Thieu. Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki and Hamid Karzai must also now be added to the list of bad choices by the United States.
The hysteria sweeping the West today over who’s up and who’s down in the battle for power in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere in the region needs to be placed in this historic context. There is nothing remarkable about these wars. The lessons of past attempts to involve us in these localized struggles suggest that caution should be exercised in committing our militaries to affect the outcomes. A regrettable but perhaps enduring lesson of international politics is that sometimes keeping your powder dry and being patient is just the best option.
Protesters gathered in Ahrar Square, in the Iraqi city of Mosul, on April 3, 2013 against US-backed Nouri al-Maliki’s government. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS
]]>by Thomas W. Lippman
To understand why Israel and Hamas keep fighting, and why Secretary of State John Kerry was unable to forge a permanent peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, it helps to do some homework. Read Volume 8 of the State Department’s “Foreign Relations of the United States” series [...]]]>
by Thomas W. Lippman
To understand why Israel and Hamas keep fighting, and why Secretary of State John Kerry was unable to forge a permanent peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, it helps to do some homework. Read Volume 8 of the State Department’s “Foreign Relations of the United States” series for 1977-80, the years of Jimmy Carter.
It is a 1,303-page compilation of declassified documents—presidential letters, intelligence assessments, memoranda of conversation—covering the 20 months of intense Middle East diplomacy between Carter’s inauguration in January 1977 to his decision to convene the famous trilateral summit at Camp David. The principal characters are Carter, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, but much of the heavy lifting is done by their foreign affairs ministers, Moshe Dayan of Israel, Ismail Fahmy of Egypt, and Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, along with their professional staffs.
What the documents show is that despite herculean efforts, especially by Carter himself, and huge investments of time, diplomacy failed. Sadat undertook his daring trip to Jerusalem in November 1977 and Carter summoned the other two to Camp David because only extraordinary, game-changing gambles produced any real movement on the intractable issues the negotiators faced. Suspicion ran deep, antagonisms were entrenched, and history was implacable, especially for the Israelis. Not even the combined weight of the United States and Soviet Union could bring the Israelis and Egyptians—to say nothing of the Syrians—to the comprehensive, once-and-for-all regional solution that all professed to want.
The fate of the West Bank, which Israel referred to as Judea and Samaria, defied every formula offered for resolving it, just as it does today. As for Gaza, it was a stepchild of the negotiations throughout—nobody really wanted it. And while everyone agreed that peace must be based on US Security Council Resolution 242—the “land for peace” formula adopted after the 1967 war—the negotiators spent endless hours arguing about what that resolution required.
Resolution 242, which even today provides the theoretical framework upon which negotiations between Israel and the Arabs would be based, stipulated the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and recognized “the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” It also called for the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” but it did not say “all territories” or even “the territories.” Israel said any withdrawal from the lands it captured in 1967 was negotiable and would not necessarily apply to all of them—the Sinai Peninsula, which belonged to Egypt, the Gaza Strip, which had been under Egyptian administration, Syria’s Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which from 1948 to 1967 had been part of Jordan. The Arabs naturally argued that since 242 declared the acquisition of territory by war inadmissible, the resolution obviously applied to all the occupied lands.
Another major stumbling block at the time was the refusal of Israel, supported by the United States, to have any dealings with anyone associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which it regarded as a group of terrorists decided to Israel’s destruction. Israel’s view was that before 1967 the West Bank belonged to Jordan, and its inhabitants were citizens of Jordan, and therefore its future would be negotiated with Jordan alone. The problem with that was that an Arab summit conference had stripped Jordan of its claim to the West Bank and declared the PLO to be the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people.
And then there was the composition of the delegations that would negotiate at Geneva. Syria’s Hafez Assad, father of the current president, fearful that Sadat would strike a separate peace with Israel and abandon the other Arabs, wanted a single, unified Arab delegation. That was unacceptable to Sadat, who understood that nothing would be accomplished if every Arab participant had a de facto veto over decisions by the others.
Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who understood that Sadat was impatient but the Israelis were not, told Carter that “the priority of Israel’s policy now seems to be to make a fairly attractive offer to Egypt in order to tempt Sadat into a separate deal. This would allow Israel to put off movement on the Syrian front and to avoid the Palestinian-West Bank issues altogether.”
He was right about Israel’s negotiating strategy. Begin’s Likud Party was elected in the spring of 1977 on a platform that called for keeping the West Bank and encouraging Jewish settlements there. The Labor Party, which had run Israel since statehood in 1948, had been somewhat more forthcoming about the possibility of territorial compromise, but Begin was a hard-line Zionist who believed in Israel’s right to all the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.
In the quest for the Holy Grail of Geneva, everyone traveled extensively in an endless summer of fruitless haggling over how to proceed. These were negotiations about negotiating, arguments of stupefying legalistic tedium about who would participate, under what circumstances, and what the agenda would be. Would there be a single Arab delegation, or several? If single, would there then be “working groups” for specific country-by-country issues? What would Israel accept on the subject of Palestinian refugees? Who would speak for the Palestinians? Would Jordan participate? Would Syria? What would be the role of the Soviet Union, co-chairman of the proposed conference? Should there be agreement beforehand on a “declaration of principles?” Would the specific language of 242 be the basic reference point, or would it be somehow modified? Would Geneva be a ceremonial event, at which agreements already reached would be signed, or the forum for the hard work of negotiating? If Israel were somehow to agree to pull out of the West Bank, who should take over now that Jordan had been stripped of its claim?
Carter, who had stunned everyone in March by volunteering the view that peace would require the establishment of a “homeland” for the Palestinians, soon concluded that Israel’s positions were the biggest obstacle to peace and let his feelings show in public—stirring anger in the American Jewish community and anxiety among his political advisers. Camp David was a last-ditch, high-stakes shot at a breakthrough.
Some of the roadblocks on the path to peace were removed at Camp David and in the subsequent negotiations over the peace between Israel and Egypt, a treaty that left the Palestinian issue unresolved and was achieved only when the United States and Egypt gave up on Geneva. Other issues, such as Israel’s refusal to negotiate with the PLO, were resolved years later, at Oslo.
The Arabs argue today that one of Israel’s greatest issues, the refusal of Arab nations other than Egypt or Jordan to recognize it or accept its existence, was resolved when all members of Arab League endorsed a plan offered by Saudi Arabia to offer peace and recognition in exchange for Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines. But Israel is no more inclined to accept that formula today than it would have been in 1977; after all, Hamas and Hezbollah are not members of the Arab League and not parties to that offer, and are supported in their intransigence by Iran. Even if Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party abandoned the “Greater Israel” policy of Begin’s time, anxieties about security would still prompt Israel to demand substantial revisions in the 1967 lines, as well as demilitarization of Palestine, including Gaza. If the proposed “two-state solution” is still viable—if it ever was viable—it is hard to see how Gaza could be part of it if Israel believes Hamas workers resume digging tunnels under the border from which they could attack Israelis.
At the end of 2011, according to the Foundation for Middle East Peace, there were 328,423 Israeli settlers in the West Bank. If future negotiations about the future of Palestine are to include Gaza as well as the West Bank, it is hard to see how Gaza’s status can be resolved until the question of those West Bank settlers has been resolved as part of some overall agreement. A far-reaching deal that would end the Gaza conflict by including it as part of a Palestinian state and linking it to the West Bank by some kind of corridor—as envisioned at the time of Oslo—seems far in the future. The Gazans would live better lives if Israel were to allow them greater access to the outside world, but they will still be living in a stateless limbo.
Photo: Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat with US President Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1978.
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