Arab states as bulwark against Palestinian state forming
Bob Morris
Friday, 05:39 PM
From Steve Clemonts of The Washington Note. This is especially notable in that he is a moderate DC policy wonk, and not at all radical.
“I spent Monday in Los Angeles and met an insightful next generation Arab-American thinker, Sama Adnan, who told me he believed that there was something like a mathematical equation in the Middle East that few Americans — Democrat or Republican — understand. He said that democracies or more self-determining populations in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East were impossible as long as the Palestinian-Israeli standoff over Palestine’s state status remained unresolved.
He said that if true democracies governed in any of these states, then those democratic movements would focus on their outrage that Israel was continuing to illegally occupy Palestinian territory. The more totalitarian governments in the region are bulwarks against a popular will that is focused on grievances involving Israel. The only way to create a more liberal and stable order in the Middle East, according to this young observer, is to deliver on Palestine.
There can be no peace in the Middle East until Palestinians have a place to call home. The implication here is that Arab states do not really want a Palestinian state because it would upset the balance of power and quite possibly their grip on power too.”
So the existence of totalitarian governments in Arab lands is due to the fact that Israel exists. And no democratic government can come into being because…Israel exists. And all Arabs are willing to completely forgo their freedom…..until the only free nation in the Middle East ceases to occupy “Palestinian” land.
Is it me or does this sound insane?
Here in Van Nuys 
How is it that Israel is an illegitmate state that seems to cause unending problems for moslems the world over but Pakistan doesn’t? They were born exactly the same way. The difference is that Pakistan is moslem. No?
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You’re right. Democracy cannot be “spread”, and for the most part blaming Israel is an excuse to not do shit to help out people in most Middle Eastern countries.
But take the case of Lebanon as an example of the reality of a Middle East with Israel. From 1941-1970 Lebanon was a multicultural democracy that, save for the exceptional flare up, had managed to achieve a semblance of stability and prosperity rare in the Middle East. Of course, there were problems- wealth was unevenly spread while sectarian divisions were very much alive, but these were issues that many countries face, and they certainly did not seem to put a damper on Lebanon’s future in the eyes of the Arabs or Western investors. Fast forward to the 1967 War- a coalition of Arab countries (but not Lebanon) invade Israel, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees pour into Lebanon. Now the Palestinians upset a delicate balance in Lebanon’s religious divisions. If they were assimilated as citizens of Lebanon, they would create a Muslim majority (& Sunni plurality), an outcome the Maronite Christian minority, with hundreds of years of persecution only recently ended still fresh in their mind, would refuse to accept the political consequences of. As a result, the Palestinians realize they would never be able to become Lebanese, and they set up bases to fight Israel in the south of Lebanon, among Lebanon’s historically impoverished and marginalized Shia community.
Eventually, tensions between the Palestinians, the Christians, and the Sunnis boil over, and warfare breaks out… When Israel invades, the Christians & Shias, eager to get the Palestinians out of their land in the South, support the Israeli invasion. The Israelis, however, massacre Shia villagers and the US bombards their villages from offshore, destroying their homes for the supposed crime of harboring Palestinian militants (who happen to be the Shias’ enemies). So now, when the Shias finally achieve political and military power in Lebanon, who do you think they target? Not the Palestinians, of course, but the Israelis and Americans who were stupid enough not to distinguish between a Lebanese Shia and a Palestinian.
Any idea what organization rose out of all this? None other than Seyyed Hassan Nasr’Allah’s Hizb’Allah.
So, the point of this whole thing, is that if you’re gonna get involved in the Middle East, whether you’re American, Israeli, French, etc, you better be prepared for every action you take to result in an extremely complicated reaction. Maybe the Arabs had many problems before and continue to have many problems in their countries- but after given the case of Lebanon, do you understand a little why maybe it’s very easy to see Israel as the cause of a lot of it?
All Arab anger towards Israel is not just hating the country or hating their repressive techniques- it goes much deeper for most people…
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Democracy cannot be “spread” anyway. It has to be nutured by a consitutution, separation of church and state, a free press, balance of power, representative government, etc. Israel has all of these.
No Arab country has all of the above. Israel is the excuse and always will be the excuse whether it withdraws to some imagined border or not. It’s very existance is what “provokes” and angers, not its oppression of Palestinian rights.
If the Arabs cared about the Palestinians, wouldn’t they have integreated them into their own lands by now? Palestinians living in Lebanon and Egypt aren’t even allowed to become naturalized!
Why is there even a need for a Palestine? To speak Palestinian? To worship Palestinian?
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I have to agree with anonymous, to an extent. Right now, most of the governments in the Middle East stay in power by focusing on Palestine instead of their countries’ own problems, to distract their people..
In Iran, for example, most people don’t really care about Palestine, and have no reason to. It has nothing to do with Iran, but because the government has inundated the country with propaganda regarding Palestine’s importance to the Iranian people, large swaths of the population, who would normally concern themselves with more pressing problems (like the economy), are now instead focusing on Palestine…
This is not to say that Israel is propping up dictatorship among the Middle Easterners, or that Israel’s destruction will miraculously free the Middle East. It just means that the existence of a militant Israeli state in Palestine doesn’t help the cause of democracy in the Middle East. What should be done about this fact, though, is debatable.
However, there are cases where the Israeli question has directly created insecurity and a situation where democracy can’t exist (Lebanon 1973-, Jordan 1970-, for example), and these cases shouldn’t be ignored or lumped together with intentionally misleading governments…
The fact is, Israel doesn’t help the spread of democracy in the Middle East. As said before, everyone will make their own conclusions about what should be done about that.
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I love your blog. I worked in L.A. for a year (well, Torrance) so it’s great to get news from the Valley up here in San Francisco. I think you might enjoy my blog too.
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Not insane at all, unless you have been brainwashed to believe that Israel is “right” no matter what. The true injustices and outrages committed by Israel in their occupation provide the perfect cover for non-democratic Arab regimes. They can put all the focus on the outsider state (one formed and founded by outsiders only 60 years ago) and keep the heat off themselves.
While there is no guarantee that the situations in Egypt, Saudi, etc. would be improved by a peaceful, just settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, it’s demonstrably true that removing the cancer that is the occupation of the West Bank would create huge waves of positive change across the middle east, including fixing refugee problems in Lebanon and Jordan, allowing Israel to focus on its regional allies rather then its enemies, and removing the basic stumbling block that comes up any time any other problem in the middle east is addressed.
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Insane’s a good word.
If democracy were ubiquitious in the Middle East, would there not be overwhelming support for Israel, almost by default? There would almost certainly be (or already have been) peaceful negotiations resulting in two states living side by side, in peace.
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