Placing people’s needs above avidity
The Middle East will not be at peace even if Israel were to suddenly withdraw to the pre-1967 borders, dismantle its settlements, return the Golan Heights and do everything else its enemies desire.
All of those things might buy safety from rockets, but peace requires much more than that. Israeli generosity in peace will be a very powerful contribution but not sufficient. The other requirements are beyond Israel’s power to give.
In Gaza, peace requires an end to low level civil war for power among Hamas, PLO, Fatah and various movements of martyrs and Jihadis. That is also true of the West Bank.
If these factions cannot come together in friendship to one another in their own towns in a time of war, what hope is there that they will overcome their mutual distrust and hatreds at any other time? Instead, their internal power struggles would be more violent. There are many examples of this kind of degeneration around the world.
It is futile to think that peace will automatically bless the Middle East if Israel turned into an angel of conciliation. The biggest self-deception among Arabs is that Israeli occupation is the sole cause of all troubles in the Middle East. In fact, it is a cause among several other seemingly more intractable ones.
The real causes derive from the mutual hatreds of the people living in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and the region’s other countries, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Further causes reside in the corrupt and venal nature of the regimes in those countries.
It is as if factions within those countries hated one another more than Israel. In the Palestinian territories, the slightest lulls in battles with Israel bring rival militias onto the streets in bloody clashes for power. Whichever faction dominates temporarily, it governs poorly and lines its pockets with both hands.
In Lebanon, Christian and Sunni inhabitants are already complaining at the influx of Shiite refugees in their neighborhoods. Some fear that Israeli bombs might follow but there is also loathing of their co-citizens. It has been customary since the peace of the 1990s to brush these sectarian tensions, even hatreds, under the carpet and to pretend that Lebanon would flourish if only Israel trod more carefully. But the hornets are out of the nest now.
In Syria, a tiny Alawite clan minority (of Shiite faith) controls the majority with an iron fist. The lid is on the pressure cooker and it could burst regardless of Israel.
In Saudi Arabia, the princes live in fear of a religious establishment that is as obscurantist in Sunni terms as their shortsighted Shiite counterparts in Iran. In Egypt, the mostly secular elites seem more out of touch with their own people than with the White House.
All of these societies have significant forces of internal instability, which they must themselves resolve to create foundations for peace in the region. This is not just a matter of installing American style democracy or creating a disciplined “New Middle East� where nobody lobs rockets at Israel.
The solutions lie in the hearts and minds of the ruling elites of those nations. If they place their people’s economic and social needs above their own avidity for power, it will be much easier to find peace within their nations, achieve armistice with Israel and enjoy their rightful place in the world.
7 Responses to “Placing people’s needs above avidity”
Good analysis, as usual. But how does one judge “their people’s needs?” The Arab populace is distinctly more radical than the regimes – with the exception, of course, of the radical regimes themselves. Therein lies the conundrum. If the regime is anti-US (Iran, Syria, Saddam-era Iraq) the populace is slightly less so. If the regime is pro-Western (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt), the population is viciously anti-American. In Palestine, the people and the regime hate Israel, and generally resent the US. Anyway, if the regimes of the region place their people’s desires above their own, opposition to Israel would much stronger. Anti-Israel sentiment is NOT just a creation of Arab authoritarian regimes.
Elrod, short term you might be right in that the governments would be more anti US/Israel but long term the radicals would have to deal with the bread and butter issues, like roads, sanitation, and healthcare. Hamas won the election more on what they could do for the community rather than a desire to take out Israel. The trouble is that the process for mellowing would take decades, if it were to take place at all. Can we wait decades? I don’t know, maybe that is why Sharon gave up and decided to build the wall.
It’s not only that there would be conflict among Arabs even if the Israelis did everything most of their opponents want. Even that wouldn’t satisfy Hamas, Islamic Jihad and who knows how many others of the radical Islamists. Their only goal is the elimination of Israel.
Grognard,
I’m not sure I’m convinced by the whole “radicals would eventually lose because they can’t do bread and butter stuff.” Plenty of extremist governments have survived just fine and figured out how to do bread-and-butter governance. Is Cuba well-governed? Plenty have survived without doing the nitty gritty of providing for the people too – North Korea has survived a very long time and its people are not the most nourished in the world.
The other problem is that revolutions sometimes go into second phases, where they re-radicalize. That, in a sense, is what’s happening in Iran right now. It happened in China under the Cultural Revolution, which was Mao’s way of striking back at the post-Great Leap Forward reformers. (Mao starved millions of Chinese in the GLF in 1958-1960, was pushed aside for six years while more market-oriented reformed undid much of the GLF. Then Mao violently undid the reformers by reaching to “the masses” outside the party.) Same thing happened under Stalin too. The late Lenin New Economic Policy bureaucrats were the first to be purged by Stalin.
That could happen to Islamists too. Again, Iran is the model. If these oil-rich nations decide they can do business with China, Russia and India, they won’t be subject to pro-Western cajoling.
Brij…the “Hearts and Minds”.
I must laugh. Have you seen any indication that any of these arseholes have hearts or minds?
Good Grief.
Anti-Israel sentiment is NOT just a creation of Arab authoritarian regimes.
No, but it’s certainly a useful tool to stir up the base, as it were. There, as here, fear of the other is a useful device for the self-interested ruling class.
Their only goal is the elimination of Israel.
For many of these groups, that may very well be the case, but for others it may be a primary goal but not the only one. Hezb’Allah and Hamas have become full-fledged political entities because they offered something else to their electorates: infrastructure services and responsible governance, respectively. While this is overshadowed by their militant wings’ abhorrent activities, it is a small sign of maturing.
Sadly, so long as the fearmongers remain dominant, there and here, we may never see what could be.
Elrod, very good and well thought out points. Yes the radicals did stay in power, and indeed they became more radical in some instances. China did have the Mao period, but even though they are far from being a democracy today they are far away from that era. And what is driving the difference? Providing the “masses“ with material goods. Stalin was replaced by the reformers, then repression, and finally the whole system collapsed. Castro has held on, Cuba does provide some services like universal heath care but, yes,
the repression is what keeps people in line. Again I am thinking in the terms of many decades, before things sort themselves out, but your point is well taken that it might never be possible.