Arabs (103 page)

In May and June 2005, the Lebanese public voted to elect a new parliament. The anti-Syrian coalition, headed by Saad Hariri, son of the assassinated premier, won 72 of the 128 seats in the parliament. However, the political wing of the Shiite militia Hizbullah won a solid bloc of fourteen parliamentary seats and, combined with a group of pro-Syrian parties, retained sufficient power within the Lebanese political system to resist any attempt by the central government to force the Hizbullah militia to disarm, in lines with the 1990 Taif Agreement. Even in Lebanon, parties explicitly hostile to the United States fared well at the polls.

 

For Islamist parties, resistance against Israel paid political dividends. Indeed, so long as they persisted in making bold strikes against the Jewish state, Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon could count on broad-based political support. They also believed in what they were doing: that fighting against Israel to liberate Muslim lands was a religious duty. In the summer of 2006, both parties escalated their attacks on Israel—with disastrous consequences for both the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.

On June 25, 2006, a group of Hamas activists crossed from Gaza to Israel through a tunnel near the Egyptian frontier and attacked an Israeli army post. They killed two soldiers and wounded four others before escaping back to Gaza with a young conscript named Gilad Shalit as their prisoner. On June 28 the Israeli army entered Gaza, and the next day they arrested sixty-four Hamas officials, including eight members of the Palestinian cabinet and twenty members of the Legislative Council. Hamas responded by firing homemade rockets into Israel, and the Israelis in turn deployed their air force to bomb Palestinian targets. Eleven Israelis and more than 400 Palestinians died before a cease-fire was struck in November 2006.

Hizbullah’s war with Israel provoked a massively disproportionate response against Lebanon. On July 12, 2006, a group of Hizbullah fighters crossed into Israel and attacked two jeeps patrolling the border with Lebanon. They killed three soldiers, wounded two, and took two others prisoner. This unprovoked attack set off a thirty-four-day conflict in which Israeli ground forces invaded South Lebanon. The Israeli air force bombed key infrastructure and leveled whole neighborhoods in
the Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut, displacing an estimated one million civilians. Hizbullah fighters fought fierce battles with Israeli troops in the hills of South Lebanon and kept up a constant barrage of missiles firing into Israel, forcing thousands of Israelis to evacuate the conflict zone.

The Lebanese government turned to the United States for assistance. After all, the Bush administration had touted democratic Lebanon as an example to the Middle East and had given its full support to Lebanese demands for Syria to withdraw in 2005. Yet America was unwilling to intervene with the Israelis even to call for a cease-fire in 2006. Because Israel was fighting against Hizbullah, which the United States had branded a terrorist organization, the Bush administration refused to restrain its Israeli ally. In fact, the U.S. government resupplied the Israelis with laser-guided weapons and cluster bombs as the Israeli arsenal was depleted by its intensive bombing campaign against Lebanon. By the end of the conflict, over 1,100 Lebanese and 43 Israeli civilians had died under the aerial bombardment. Among combatants, the UN estimated 500 Hizbullah militiamen killed and the Israeli army reported 117 of their soldiers dead.

Israel’s two-front war against Gaza and Lebanon in the summer of 2006 proved to the Arab world—if further proof were needed—that America would back Israel no matter what it did. The Arabs were more convinced than ever that the war on terror was an American-Israeli partnership to impose their full control over the Middle East. Television viewers alternated between images of violence in Iraq, Gaza, and Lebanon and concluded that there would be no peace for the Arab world so long as America pursued its war on terror.

 

The Middle East remained in turmoil at the end of the Bush presidency. There was some good news in Iraq. The Iraqi people had elected a national government in free elections with high voter turnout. A reinforcement of American troops in Iraq in 2007, known as the “surge,” led to a significant reduction in violence and a return to normal life for many Iraqis. By the end of 2008, the Americans began to reduce troop numbers in Iraq. There were still acts of terrible violence that threatened to overturn that country’s fragile gains. But the end of the American occupation was in sight.

The situation for the Palestinians only deteriorated during Bush’s last weeks in office. In March 2007, the Fatah movement and Hamas formed a national unity cabinet with the aim of ending Palestinian isolation and the resumption of much-needed external aid. The unity government proved short lived and broke down in June 2007 when fighting erupted in Gaza between Fatah and Hamas. The dispute between the two parties ended with Hamas in full occupation of the Gaza Strip, and a Fatah-led emergency cabinet ruling the West Bank. The Quartet played upon Palestinian divisions and resumed support of the “moderate” Fatah government in
the West Bank, while embargoing assistance to the Gaza Strip, now under Hamas rule. The standard of living in Gaza, cut off from all outside assistance, deteriorated into a humanitarian crisis.

The final conflict of the Bush years took place in the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009. After Hamas had observed a six-month cease-fire with no relaxation of Israeli controls over Gaza’s frontiers, Palestinian militiamen began to fire missiles into Israel. On December 27, Israel’s government responded with dozens of air raids that left nearly 200 Palestinians dead; Israel claimed it was targeting “terrorist infrastructure” in Gaza. The Bush administration urged the Israelis to avoid civilians—this in one of the most densely populated spots on earth—but endorsed the Israeli attack in time-honored war-on-terror fashion. “Hamas must end its terrorist activities if it wishes to play a role in the future of the Palestinian people,” a White House spokesman claimed.
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After eight days of heavy aerial bombardment, the Israeli army sent tanks into the Gaza Strip. Over the next two weeks, the Israelis targeted UN agencies, hospitals, schools, and residential neighborhoods, inflicting physical damage estimated at $1.4 billion on the impoverished Gaza Strip. The bombardment continued until the eve of the inauguration of the new U.S. president, Barack Obama. By the time a cease-fire between the Israelis and Hamas was agreed to, on January 18, over 1,300 Palestinians had been killed and 5,100 wounded. By comparison, only thirteen Israelis died; eight more were wounded.

With George W. Bush’s departure from the White House on January 20, 2009, the Arab world hoped for an end to his war on terror. With the inauguration of President Obama, the United States entered a new period of constructive engagement with the Arab and Islamic world.

In his first hundred days, the new president initiated a number of policies intended to reduce the regional tensions generated by seven years of the war on terror. President Obama set in motion the closure of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp and the reduction of the U.S. troop presence in Iraq. He signaled that the Arab-Israeli peace process was a first-term priority, both through the appointment of Senator George Mitchell as his Middle East envoy and by meeting with both Israel’s prime minister and the president of the Palestinian Authority. Obama pursued a policy of rekindling dialogue with states shunned by the Bush administration, like Syria and Iran. Each of these policies was fraught with uncertainty, given the complexity of the history and issues involved. Yet these initiatives provided welcome relief to a region that had suffered years of strain at the center of the war on terror.
The clearest expression of this new policy of constructive engagement with the Arab and Islamic world came in Obama’s address to Cairo University in June 2009: “I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect,” Obama told his attentive audience. “There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground.”

Though Obama made important points in his forty-minute speech, it was perhaps his tone of mutual respect that gave Arab audiences most hope for the future. If the dominant power of the day could truly move beyond imposing rules on the Arab world and begin seeking common solutions to the issues that we face, the Arabs would indeed be entering a new and better age.

Yet constructive engagement by the United States, as the dominant power in a unipolar age, is only part of the solution to the ills that face the Arab world in the twenty-first century. The Arabs too must assume responsibility for a better future. If the Arab peoples are to enjoy human rights and accountable government, security and economic growth, they will have to seize the initiative themselves. History has shown the limits of reform through foreign intervention—in both the colonial age and in the post–Cold War era. Democracy cannot be imposed without the messenger killing the message.

There are grounds for hope for positive change in the Arab world today. Between 2002 and 2006, a prominent group of Arab intellectuals and policymakers collaborated on a radical reform agenda. Headed by Jordanian stateswoman Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, the drafters of the Arab Human Development Report focused on three crucial deficits: a freedom deficit of good government in the Arab world; a knowledge deficit, in which the education system ill prepared young Arabs to take advantage of the opportunities in the global market place; and a deficit in the empowerment of women, restraining half the population of the Arab world from making its full contribution to human development in the region. Written by Arabs, for Arabs, the authors of the Human Development Report aspire to nothing less than a new Arab renaissance.

Many of the deficits named in the Arab Human Development Report are being addressed in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf today. The wealth provided by oil revenues has given those countries opportunities to connect to the global economy. Their citizens are broadening participation in government through both appointed and elected office—in Kuwait, Bahrain, even Saudi Arabia, with its consultative Shura Council. The Gulf has seen an unprecedented spread of free media, particularly in satellite television, where stations like Qatar’s al-Jazeera or the UAE’s al-Arabiyya broadcast open debates across Arab borders beyond the reach of government censors. And new universities, both national institutions and branch campuses of premier foreign
institutions, provide a wider range of educational opportunities and professional training than Arab citizens have ever enjoyed before.

For the Arab world to break the cycle of subordination to other people’s rules will require a balanced engagement from the dominant powers of the age, and a commitment to reform from within the Arab world itself. As the region moves from under the shadow of the war on terror, the very beginnings of such a virtuous cycle may be discerned. Yet much more needs to be done by way of conflict resolution and political reform before the Arabs move beyond a history of conflict and disillusion to achieve their potential and fulfill their aspirations in the modern age.

In writing this modern history of the Arab world I have been privileged to be part of a remarkable intellectual community in the Middle East Centre of St. Antony’s College in the University of Oxford.

The late Albert Hourani, one of the greatest historians of the Arab world, assembled an innovative group of scholars who made the Middle East Centre Europe’s leading university institute for the study of the modern Middle East. From that original fellowship, my emeritus colleagues Mustafa Badawi, Derek Hopwood, Robert Mabro, and Roger Owen have been my mentors since 1991. I have taken full advantage of their deep knowledge of the Middle East, discussing the arguments of this book with them and imposing draft chapters on them for comment. They have been unstinting in their encouragement and constructive criticisms.

The current Fellowship of the Middle East Centre has in every way preserved the magic of Albert Hourani’s original community. In Ahmed Al-Shahi, Walter Armbrust, Raffaella Del Sarto, Homa Katouzian, Celia Kerslake, Philip Robins, and Michael Willis, I have generous friends and colleagues who have made daily contributions to this project—in casual conversation over coffee each morning at the Centre, in suggested readings, and in comments on draft chapters. I owe a particular debt of friendship and gratitude to Avi Shlaim, a brilliant and innovative historian of Israel’s troubled history with the Arabs. Avi read every chapter and met with me over lunches in College to give me the most detailed and constructive feedback. His insightful comments have made their impact on every part of the book.

I wish to thank the Middle East Centre’s archivist, Debbie Usher, for her generous support for my research in the archive’s rich collections of private papers and historic photographs. I am most grateful to the Middle East Centre’s Librarian, Mastan Ebtehaj, and to the Centre’s administrator, Julia Cook.