A History of the Middle East (69 page)

At the same time, Hamas’s takeover of Gaza dramatically transformed the movement. From a non-state actor operating a social and charitable network and popular armed wing, Hamas morphed into a governing authority with an army and bureaucracy. As it turned from a guerilla movement into the ruling establishment, Hamas’s military wing, which had initially begun as a small unit of bodyguards protecting its leaders, dominated the movement. Once unsullied by the exigencies of government, Hamas now had to weigh its ideology against its business and political interests, had to compromise – even to the point of curbing attacks against Israel – to ensure entry of supplies, and in its government offices gave its enemies an address to attack.

For over a year, Hamas lobbed homemade rockets at Israel’s border towns in an attempt to pressure Israel to open its crossings.
In July 2008, it agreed a ceasefire on condition Israel ended the siege, and when that proved to no avail, again resorted to rocket fire. In December 2008, Olmert launched his Gaza offensive, sending Hamas scuttling underground. Most of its leaders emerged a month on, celebrating their survival. But Hamas’s subsequent ceasefire with Israel without a reciprocal commitment to lift the siege, and the failure of its much-hyped resistance to inflict significant damage on Israel sapped Hamas’s credibility. To the movement’s loyalists and believers, Hamas’s failure either to implement Sharia law or maintain the struggle with Israel smacked of betrayal.

In the West Bank, US military and financial help bolstered Salam Fayyad’s hold on the PA. For the first time since the
intifada
the PA resumed formal security coordination with Israel, and by the end of 2009 Fayyad had deployed five of a planned ten US-trained battalions in Palestinian cities. Awash with donor support, the economy briefly notched annual growth rates of 10 per cent. But, as in Gaza, the political price for stability was substantial repression and constitutional contortions. President Abbas’s term in office expired and was artificially extended; and Fayyad’s government was never elected. Seeking to channel growing resentment into political aspirations, Fayyad outlined a programme to declare a Palestinian state within two years. But he was in danger of doing his donors’ rather than his people’s bidding. Democratic institutions – particularly the Palestinian Legislative Council – remained moribund, and Hamas’s institutional presence in the West Bank was decimated. Fayyad ordered the closure of their charities running schools and hospitals, or appointed intelligence agents to their boards. His security forces detained hundreds of activists, some after their release from Israel’s jails. And during the 2008–2009 Gaza war they suppressed anti-Israel demonstrations, clubbing and shooting protestors who sought to rally against Israeli forces in the West Bank.

***

The trajectory of Palestinian governance matched the times. Across the region, regimes reacted to the internal chaos induced by America’s zealous promotion of democracy and the Islamist gains
that resulted by firmly bolting the hatches. Hopes of an era of political reform pregnant during the 1990s dwindled sharply, as did the distinction between Middle East kingdoms and republics.

Syria was the first Arab state to morph into a
gumlukiyya
(a play on the Arabic words for republic,
gumhuriya
, and monarchy,
mamlakiya
). Despite its more developed civil society, Egypt appeared to follow in Syria’s footsteps. When the elderly president, Hosni Mubarak, appointed his forty-something son Gamal, a former investment banker lacking in military experience, general-secretary of the ruling National Democratic Party in 2002, many feared he was grooming an heir apparent. The security establishment (who favoured one of their own and feared that his privatization programme would threaten the military’s copious economic and land holdings, particularly the tourist enterprises the generals built along the coasts), liberals and the Muslim Brotherhood all carped from the sidelines. Other North African rulers followed suit. Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika favoured his brother, Said; in Tunis, Ben Ali gave a green light to his son-in-law, Sakhr el-Materi, and his wife, Leila Trabulsi, a former hairdresser he married five years after taking power, to amass a business empire apparently as a stepping-stone to succession. And in Libya, Muammar Qaddafy, the leader of Libya’s Jamahiriya, or State of the Masses, named his second son, Saif al-Islam, co-ordinator of the Socialist Popular Leadership, the second most powerful post in the land, responsible for internal affairs. Another son, Muatasim, oversaw the oil sector.

Protest at the concentration of the region’s substantial energy and mineral wealth in the hands of the ruler’s family while over one in four people were unemployed was met with repression. After toying with a brief opening, the Mubarak regime rapidly abandoned the experiment fearful of the results. In the presidential elections of 2005 a rival contender stood against Mubarak for the first time, and the Muslim Brotherhood emerged as the largest opposition in assembly elections. Determined to limit the fallout, the regime jailed thousands, including many Brotherhood activists and the presidential candidate, Ayman Nour. Judges who questioned the polls’
integrity became the subject of criminal probes. Municipal elections scheduled for February 2006 were postponed. Elsewhere elections became exercises in
beya
, or traditional allegiance. In October 2009, Tunisian president Ben Ali won a fourth term as president with 90 per cent of the vote. And Algeria’s Bouteflika pushed a constitutional amendment through parliament that abolished a limit on the presidential term, granting him life-long rule. With Morocco already a monarchy, North Africa was succumbing to dynastic rule from the Atlantic to the Red Sea.

Perhaps the resentment might have been less had the existing dynasts delivered more. But the brief hope that the region’s new generation of leaders who succeeded their fathers might usher in an era of political liberalization flickered and went out. After initially experimenting with a cosmetic glasnost that did little to change the system, Morocco’s Mohammed VI, Jordan’s King Abdullah and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad all tightened their grip. While reining in Islamist opponents, each sought religious legitimacy to compensate for any deficit in a popular mandate. Mohammed VI continued his father’s practice of referring to himself as Commander of the Faithful. Abdullah promoted his Hashemite lineage, which had formerly ruled Jerusalem (and Mecca). Even Bashar al-Assad, who was not a Sunni Muslim, tried to fudge his Alawite origins. Distancing himself from his father’s narrow Alawite old guard, he sought to broaden his power base beyond minority sects. He promoted Sunnis to positions of power, restored ties to Aleppo – a Sunni stronghold with which relations had been tense since the violent repression of the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s, and adopted a more religious demeanour, leaking videos of one of his sons reciting the Koran. Embittered by Olmert’s recourse to war in Lebanon and Gaza (the latter in the midst of Turkish-mediated talks), Assad adopted a ‘resistance’ discourse that owed more to Syria’s potential Islamist challengers than to the pan-Arabism espoused by the Baathist state. The language yielded early dividends, temporarily reducing tensions with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The policy of adopting the
jihadi
discourse on Iraq and Palestine,
however, carried inherent risks. By giving vent to Islamist preachers, he enabled previously latent ethnic and sectarian tensions to surface, and Sunni activist groups aspiring to reshape Syria as well as other states to organize. He further unsettled the established non-Sunni elites who had prospered under his father, offering a foretaste of the sectarian strife that was soon to sweep Syria. In 2003, a football clash between Arab and Kurdish teams triggered rioting by their rival supporters; further skirmishes erupted between Christians and Muslims in Hasaka, Druze and Beduin in the south, and Alawites and Ismailis in Damascus. More damaging still were signs of a blowback from Iraq’s
jihad
. The attack on a military intelligence base outside Damascus in September 2008 was attributed to
jihadi
groups and prompted a wave of arrests extending well beyond militant circles to individuals reportedly wearing Islamic dress or beards. Fearing an assault on Syria’s secular society, security forces placed some neighbourhoods under virtual curfew, and Islamic education and charities under strict regulation.

Amid the crackdown, Assad took significant steps to pave the way for a rapprochement with his Western and Arab foes, particularly following President Obama’s election victory. In July 2009, he dismissed his brother-in-law and reputed Assad family strongman, Asef Shawkat, as head of military intelligence, thus ridding the regime of the key suspect in the international investigation into former Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri’s assassination. Risking a backlash from both the Islamists and the old guard, he called for a resumption of talks with Israel, exchanged diplomatic relations with Lebanon, attempted to build a new relationship with France and rebalanced his approach toward Iraq.

Jordan maintained the veneer of a constitutional monarchy. King Abdullah, a Western-educated soldier who spoke better English than Arabic, professed commitment to the system his father bequeathed of multi-party elections, trade unions and the co-option of Islamists, including the Islamic Action Front, the Muslim Brotherhood’s local parliamentary arm. But to guard against an overspill of tensions from neighbouring Iraq and Palestine, the new king steadily eroded much of the liberalization
of the previous decade. He repeatedly dismissed parliament and delayed elections, ruling by temporary decree, sometimes for years on end. When they were finally held, the elections were skewed in favour of indigenous East Bankers, who manned the security forces: constituencies in the mainly Beduin south sometimes comprised a few hundred voters, while those in the predominantly Palestinian cities and refugee camps comprised tens of thousands.

The General Intelligence Department, the
mukhabarat
, maintained a heavy hand over civil institutions from parliament to the press, and only permitted demonstrations if protestors carried the king’s portrait. Perhaps its most extensive tool was the department’s letter of good behaviour that applicants for jobs ranging from bank clerks to taxi-drivers were required to produce. Any sign of dissent, and the
mukhabarat
would threaten to withhold the letter not just from the applicant, but from his relatives. When such threats proved insufficient, the king resorted to the army, sending in forces to quell the 2003 uprising in Maan, a southern town. Beduin demands for royal intervention were met with insouciance. The day after the suppression of lethal riots in Amman triggered by the death of a Beduin civil servant in custody, the front-page headline on the official press read ‘King and Queen head to London’.

To safeguard such a security regime, foreign backing was crucial. The king maintained close ties with the United States and Israel despite public opposition, particularly from the Palestinian majority, many of whom supported Jordan’s Islamist opposition, and by extension, Hamas. As Iraq collapsed into chaos, many US companies charged with awarding multi-billion contracts to reconstruct Iraq relocated from Baghdad to Amman, and developed Jordan instead. King Abdullah also proved expert at auctioning his loyalties to the highest bidder. In 2002, he allowed Washington use of his kingdom for covert operations against Iraq only after Washington had outbid Saddam Hussein’s delivery of copious quantities of free oil and oil-for-food contracts. In the years following the war, the king received $650 million of US annual aid, making his small kingdom the third largest recipient of US aid.

The largesse was a temporary pacifier. It triggered an explosion of development in the capital. New suburbs sprouted by the season, and the tiny capital mushroomed into a sprawling metropolis. The security agencies joined in the real estate boom, converting their former headquarters into a vast office development and expanding the limousine ‘VIP’ business they ran, charging extortionate rates for the short taxi ride over the bridge to Israel. But the boom only deepened social and economic divides. While a few with the right connections grew rich, prices rose beyond levels accessible to the once robust middle class. With government salaries largely static, most Jordanians were penned in a poverty trap, with little disposable income. Absorbed by the struggle for daily bread and fed on a diet of consumerism pumped by advertising, few had the energy to pursue political goals.

Denting Lebanon’s democratic pretensions, but in keeping with regional trends, the country’s factional leaders also groomed their sons for dynastic succession. Saad Hariri replaced his felled father as prime minister and Walid Jumblatt, too, abandoned his progressive trappings and, having mended bridges with Syria, nominated his son, Taymur, as his heir.

The oil wealth of the Arab Gulf monarchies largely insulated them from democratic pressures. It spared them from needing to impose taxes, and provided them with the resources to maintain patronage networks. Shrinking capital markets following the 2008 economic crisis further strengthened central government vis-à-vis the private sector. Nevertheless, the belt-tightening provoked broader discussion of issues of management of the public purse, accountability and transparency, amongst subjects who feared insolvency, particularly in Dubai.

From the first, Dubai had relied on borrowing to develop its coast. In 1954, the ruler of Dubai and father of the current emir, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, raised £400,000 from Kuwait to clear the creek and create a port that would serve as Dubai’s economic base. In the decades that followed a second port, Jebel Ali, the largest man-made harbour in the world, become a trade hub for Asia and the Middle East, particularly Iran. As its
fortunes grew, Dubai built ski-slopes in the desert, aquaria with sharks, vast land reclamation schemes and the world’s tallest building. It attracted leading companies with tax-free incentives and a cultural life far from the region’s conservatism. On the eve of the economic slump, per capita income in an economy without oil was level with that of its neighbouring emirate, Abu Dhabi, which was awash with it.