A History of the Middle East (76 page)

Israel feared that the fall of its autocratic allies would give way to revolutionary enemies who would rupture former treaties and trigger its first state-on-state wars since 1973. Prime Minister Netanyahu turned sullenly inwards, telling his public the region was drunk on anti-semitism while fearing that any intervention might only make matters worse. Israel lost its embassy in Cairo after protestors stormed it in September 2011, and Turkey almost severed relations, after Israel refused to apologize for killing nine Turkish nationals when intercepting a Turkish-led flotilla ferrying humanitarian aid to Gaza in the summer of 2010. In the West Bank and the Golan Heights, Netanyahu used Arab preoccupations with their domestic affairs to consolidate his hold with intensified Jewish settlement expansion, effectively annexing swathes of the 60 per cent of the West Bank that the Oslo Accords had designated under full Israeli civil and military control. Further afield, Netanyahu battened down the hatches. He erected a 240-kilometre barrier along Israel’s border with Egypt, shutting the region out with walls. Unlike his predecessor, he shied from launching a ground invasion after an escalation of missiles from Gaza in November 2012, and restricted his raids to areas far from the Arab heartland such as a strike on a weapons plant in Sudan. And despite the bluster against Iran’s nuclear programme, he refrained from a military strike and left the US and its allies to negotiate.

That said, Israel also saw benefits. The fighting in Syria weakend yet another army fleet that had periodically threatened its border. And over the months, Israel gradually recovered some confidence that its relationship with Egypt would survive the Islamists ascendancy, at least in the medium-term, given their mutual interest in stability. The survival of ties had an impact which rippled beyond their bilateral ties. If the parent organization, the Brotherhood, could maintain relations with Israel, so perhaps one day could other newly ascendant Islamist movements, including its off-spring, Hamas. In the wake of the Arab Awakening, Netanyahu eased Israel’s siege on Gaza, agreed a prisoner exchange with Hamas and in the wake of his eight-day bombardment war in November 2012, which killed 160 Palestinians, began negotiations with Hamas without pre-conditions on a longer-term truce (in marked contrast to his position on Abbas, whom he
called on to first recognize Israel as a Jewish state). Both parties gathered in Cairo, and negotiated via Egyptian brokers improved access and movement arrangements including the entry of building materials for the first time in five years for the Hamas government to reconstruct Gaza.

Indeed, given the religious composition of Netanyahu’s coalition rather than the secular make-up of Israel’s Zionist left, some argued that his government belonged to the wave of national-religious sentiment sweeping the Middle East. While the waning Palestinian nationalist movement, Fatah, was the natural partner of Israel’s Zionist left, and shared its vision of a two-state settlement, Netanyahu’s Likud party mirrored the positions of Hamas. Both flinched from an absolute partition of the holy land, preferring medium-term arrangements which spared either side from ceding their messianic endgame and theological belief in ultimate sovereignty over all of it.

If Israel saw the Arab Awakening as an initial threat to its regional standing which might one day prove advantageous, for Iran the reverse was the case. After almost a decade of growth in regional influence thanks to US policy which had toppled anti-Shia regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Awakening stopped the Shia resurgence in its tracks. At first Iran crowed at the downfall of Mubarak, both Saudi Arabia and the West’s closest regional ally, as well as Ben Ali, likening the revolutionary Islamic wave that swept through North Africa to its own Islamic Revolution of 1979. But the Iranian strategic posture changed as soon as the revolution spilled into Syria, their ally and conduit to Hizbollah, their satellite on the Mediterranean coast.

The more Iran invested political, diplomatic and military support to prop up the Assad regime, the faster it haemorrhaged political capital on the Arab street. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was lumped with the region’s autocrats who repressed the will of the people at home and abroad. He was remembered for rigging the elections in his own country that returned Ahmadinejad to power in 2009 and for crushing the Green movement protests that followed;
four years on, two presidential candidates remained under house arrest. In Bahrain, the initial burst of exuberance was smothered, and the Sunni grip was entrenched. Its other east Mediterranean satellite, Hamas, abandoned its Damascus base and shifted from Syria’s orbit to Egypt’s and Qatar’s. In Gaza, its erstwhile protégés even launched a witch-hunt for Shias. From the sidelines, Israel gleefully watched as western powers imposed sanctions and Arab Gulf states rolled back Iran’s influence, not least by promising to meet the shortfall in oil supply when Europe embargoed the purchase of Iran’s oil.

Of all the region’s powerhouses, Turkey had the most success extending its influence. Unlike Iran and Saudi Arabia, Erdogan viewed the Arab Awakening not only through a sectarian prism, but through his own struggles to replace a security–military establishment with Islamist-leaning civilian rule. In place of his government’s ‘no problems’ foreign policy, he aligned himself against the old order, abandoning former allies in favour of popular Islamist movements. He cut ties with Bashar al-Assad and Qaddafy despite the huge contracts both had awarded to Turkish companies, and recalled his ambassador from Israel following Israel’s raid on the Turkish-led aid flotilla. But in return, he garnered fresh support with a new set of allies across the former Ottoman Empire, hosting a summit for its leaders at his party conference in Ankara in September 2012.

Further afield, the US under President Obama gave guaranteed support to the Arab Awakenings, seeking to tweak rather than obstruct the transitions. Rather than risk confrontation with the forces that toppled America’s long standing allies, he tried to woo them with praise while moderating their revolutionary zeal. Behind the scenes, he helped engineer the army’s takeover in place of Mubarak with Egypt’s army chief of staff, Sami Annan, who happened to be in Washington when protests against Mubarak erupted. While critics accused him of turning a revolution into a military coup, he further steered Egypt’s US-dependent army – kicking and shoving – to hand over power to elected civilian rule,
apparently after helping to broker a deal with the electoral winners, the Brotherhood.

Obama’s tactic of leading from behind yielded considerable success. Military intervention continued, but in contrast to its prosecution of high-visibility wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which one decade on had cost the lives of 6,500 American soldiers, the US ceded successfully much of the action in Libya to other powers, engineering the overthrow of the world’s longest-ruling tyrant without the loss of a single US or NATO soldier. Elsewhere, Obama resorted to covert and, where possible, non-human action. On Iran, he and his allies intensified their covert war against Iran’s nuclear power programme, using tools ranging from car-bombings to internet viruses. He resorted to drones to pursue al-Qaeda, particularly in Yemen, which in 2012 overtook Pakistan as the CIA’s main theatre for drone attacks. US air strikes on Yemen tripled in a year, killing up to 700 people in a little-reported bombardment which forced al-Qaeda to cede ground in Yemen. Despite bloody reprisals and suicide bombings in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, the war continued to enjoy the fulsome support of Yemen’s new president, perhaps as the price for US political approval and financial aid underwriting Yemen’s transition.

Despite continued US military operations, regional movements found it easier to work with a foreign government which acted less visibly like a superpower. America lost the sureties of its previous satraps, but gained from Iran’s retreat – both in Syria and with Hamas’s shift into the Sunni camp, and the new-found appeal of Islamic pragmatism over al-Qaeda’s unfettered violence. The replacement of autocrats with allies enjoying a more solid popular base put US relations with the Arab world on a more solid footing and, at the level of public opinion, enhanced acceptability of the US. As America appeared to recede, so did the mood of anti-Americanism. Libyans waved rather than burned American flags, and manifested outrage at the killing of the US ambassador, chasing the
jihadi
perpetrators from Benghazi. Conversely, the region’s Islamist movements benefited from the welcome they received on
the world’s stage. In place of the Bush administration which had viewed Islamist groups primarily through a monofocal terrorist lens, Obama dealt with the region as it was, not as America wanted it to be.

That said, America’s courting of Islamist movements came at the expense of its traditional relations with the region’s surviving old guard. Israel contemplated forging new alliances with the Far East to protect it from the possibility that western criticism of Netanyahu’s settlement expansion and European support for UN recognition of Palestine as a state, albeit one with non-member observer status, might grow into broader condemnation of the Jewish state. In Jordan, King Abdullah’s men interpreted US criticism of his recalcitrance to reform as proof that Barack Obama was a closet Muslim Brother. And Bahrain’s princes angrily rebuffed US pressure to negotiate with their Shia opposition. Four decades earlier, US relations with the region had rested on ties with the region’s four powers – Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey. Now each showed signs of strength as the US balanced its old relationships with newer ones.

***

In compiling a balance sheet, two years into the Arab Awakening there is good cause for hand wringing. Two years after its eruption, the death toll it unleashed topped 100,000. Millions had been displaced, and economies ravaged. But the storm was far from spent, and threatened more carnage to come.

Many caught in its advance feared that as in Afghanistan in the 1980s they had awoken an Islamist Frankenstein that would turn against them. In the West, opponents of regime-change seized on the killing of the US ambassador and four US diplomats in Benghazi on the anniversary of the felling of New York’s Twin Towers as a foretaste of attacks to come. After direct intervention in Libya on the grounds of protecting Libyans against a massacre, America shied away from action in Syria where the humanitarian costs were far worse. While there were pressing diplomatic reasons for its hands-off posture – most importantly Russia’s resistance to a no-fly zone that could provide cover for military action – the US was unwilling to
nurture another
jihadi
theatre, particularly one bordering Israel. It even blacklisted one of Syria’s opposition groups, the Nusra Front, an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq, first led by Jordanian Islamist Abu Musab Zarkawi.

As of 2013, an end to the turbulence is not in the offing. Not only does the fighting in Syria continue to rage, but the Brotherhood’s autocratic bent in Egypt coupled with continued economic deterioration portends further unrest to come. Continual turmoil has badly tarnished the Islamists image and cost them significant support after the initial election triumphs. Revolutionaries have returned to the street and, based on Gaza’s precedent, the hope that the Brotherhood might bow to fresh elections which allow for a smooth handover at the end of their term is far from guaranteed. Even in Palestine, where Hamas’s defence against Israel’s November 2012 bombardment propelled the movement to its best polling figures since its 2006 victory over Fatah, political rivals staged huge rallies exceeding those of Hamas. Moreover, after their flirtation with electoral politics, the failure of civil means to unseat the autocrats of Libya and Syria helped catapult
jihadi
methods back to centre stage, after their marginalization in the early months of the Arab Awakening. Al-Qaeda increased its chapters from 7 in 2008 to 11 in 2012 retaining its fields of operation in southern Yemen, Algeria and Iraq, and opening new fronts in Libya, Egypt’s Sinai and Syria. There was evidence of coordination and some transmission of personnel and arms across the multiple theatres. Abdelkarim Belhaj, a leader of Libya’s rebel forces who had trained in Afghanistan, headed via Turkey to Syria after Qaddafy’s fall. By March 2013,
jihadi
groups had notched up some 1,400 bomings in Syria. Despite numerous attempts to unseat it, the Taliban evolved from a Luddite organization to a movement with multiple twitter feeds, media outlets and diplomatic relations. And the number of al-Qaeda fighters in Yemen as well as its popular support continued to grow, stoked by anger at US aerial attacks on villages which killed civilians.

If America backed a change of guard only to spawn a new and more antagonistic crop of autocrats, as the Arab revolutions of the
1950s did, history will not likely look kindly on Obama’s policymaking. But it is not clear that he had much choice. In the end, abandoning Mubarak and cheerleading Egypt’s Revolution proved a more fruitful and subtle path than pinning its colours on a fallen Shah, and stoking a confrontation with Iran’s Revolution which still raged forty years on. Moreover, while the Islamist embrace of the principle of a rotation of power remains in doubt, so is Egypt’s descent into Islamic dictatorship. Turkey’s transition from military to democratic civilian rule – a process greatly enhanced by Erdogan’s Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) which held power since 2002 and was allied to the Brotherhood – offers a plausible trajectory. Were a number of stable democracies to appear in the Arab world, the blowback effects on and transformative power over the internal dynamics of such oppressive governments as Israel, Iran and Saudi Arabia could be considerable. After decades of suppression, the Arab world might finally experience the independence and self-determination that autocratic regimes denied them when they toppled colonial rule.

The focus of this history is on the past two centuries since Bonaparte began the second invasion of the world of Islam by the West – the secular crusades. The background of the previous eleven centuries since the coming of Islam which led to the arabization and islamicization of most of the Middle East is covered by the
Cambridge History of Islam
(2 vols, Cambridge, 1971), but a new synthesis of much of this material which can be highly recommended is I. M. Lapidus’s
A History of Islamic Societies
(Cambridge, 1988). The collection of essays edited by J. Schacht and C. E. Bosworth,
The Legacy of Islam
(Oxford, 1974), covers all aspects of Islamic society and civilization. For an understanding of Shiite Islam, which plays such an important role in the modern Middle East, M. Moojan’s
An Introduction to Shi’i Islam
provides a comprehensive account. A. H. Hourani’s
Minorities in the Arab World
(London, 1979) is still the only survey of the religious and national minorities remaining in the Arab countries. The Christians are specifically dealt with in R. B. Betts’s
Christians in the Arab East: A Political Study
(London, 1979).