The New Middle East (2 page)

God has returned to the Middle East.

Yet the uprisings were not Islamic revolutions. The call did not come from the mosques. Even so, religion is going to play a much greater role in the politics of the New Middle East. Its level of influence will depend on the make-up of each society. The rise of political Islam will create a discussion about the role of religion in the post-Arab Spring era. It may lose sway in countries where Sunni Islam forms almost the entire religious spectrum. Even in places where political choices will be tied to individual faiths, being pious will not be enough. Voters want answers to problems like unemployment, an inadequate education system and poor health care. The young revolutionaries did not fight to overthrow dictators just to have their freedoms curbed by religious edicts. Political Islam will have to adapt to reflect a more personal approach to religion. Islamic, or Sharia, law is not wanted in these new democracies even if faith is their reference point.

In Europe there will be concerns about the mix of religion and politics. Many in America will fear the rise of political Islam, because the legacy of 9/11 has left much of the nation believing that Islam often leads to extremism. The bomb attacks by two newly radicalised young men, one of whom had been granted American citizenship, on the Boston Marathon in April 2013 can only have strengthened that conviction. It is likely that the next few years will further reinforce some of these stereotypes, because extremism feeds on chaos, and chaos is likely to be a strong force as the New Middle East emerges from the ashes of the old.

The Arab dictators ruled their countries by dividing their people. They did that by stirring suspicion and mistrust among communities and religions. Now the Arab Spring revolts have also breathed new life into the schism within Islam itself. Sunni and Shia Muslims are facing off against each other in some of the region’s most volatile areas. Iran had a burst of influence after the US toppled regimes in two of the nations that had been boxing it in, Iraq and Afghanistan. The Sunni powers have used the Arab Spring to put that firmly in reverse. But even they are divided. The revolts reignited old rivalries between competing ideologies among the Sunni Islamists too.

The board on which all these new power games are being played stretches across the Middle East. The rules came from scripture and each player interprets them according to their faith. America not only does not understand the rules of the game, it can’t work out what winning might look like. So it is roaming around the table looking at everyone else’s hand, offering advice on which card to play, but because it has no stake in the game nobody is really listening.

Syria was where the last act of the old Middle East would be played out. The finale would drip with blood. It would hark back to the region’s darkest days, to the decades when its societies were opaque, when ‘the Arab street’ couldn’t raise its voice without getting its fingernails pulled out. Back then the world heard only the narrow view of a handful of dictators who ruled with an iron fist over hundreds of millions. Saddam Hussein, Assad, Ben Ali, Muammar Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak all lived lives of cartoonish excess. States were fashioned that mirrored their paranoia. Their people were surrounded by symbols of their masters’ omnipotence.

That narrative of the old Middle East lasted longer than the Cold War in Europe. It lasted as long as the Arab dictators did. The West propped up these men because, so the story went, the alternative was states falling first under the influence of the communist block and later into the arms of radical Islam. In Syria President Bashar al-Assad believed he could stem the tide of history by playing by the rules created by his father’s generation. He helped rekindle Cold War rivalries between Russia and America to stymie international intervention. His army tugged at the fragile mosaic of sects and religions that made up Syria’s complex society. It started a sectarian civil war that would bleed into the countries around it. I saw the regime’s warning to the world scrawled across the walls of the Damascus suburbs that dared to show dissent: ‘Assad or we’ll burn the country’.

The rise of the Arab people against their tormentors took even the protesters who manned the barricades by surprise. These revolutions took place in societies locked down by a security apparatus that had had decades to hone its skills. Generations of men from North Africa to the Levant had been trained in the craft of suppression. They had stalked their own people, snatched them from their beds, strapped them into seats and beaten them to pulp. These acts were not justified by religion or ideology. They were not necessary evils inflicted to further a cause or liberate a people. It was not done for God. It was done for a man and his regime. Now most of those men are gone. Locked up, exiled or buried in unmarked graves. They leave behind countries in transformation. The statues and posters of those dictators have been torn down and trampled underfoot. The people have been led blinking out of the dark days of oppression by their children, a generation of youngsters force-fed for their entire lives on the lie that nothing could or would ever change. Until it did.

‘The Arab world was considered a stagnant pond of retardation and tyranny, inhabited by what appeared to be a complacent populace toiling fatalistically under the yoke of their dictators,’ wrote the blogger Iyad el-Baghdadi, in the introduction to his satirical ‘Arab Tyrant’s Manual’.
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‘It really felt like this state of stagnation was permanent,’ he told me. ‘A lot of us thought that something has got to give at some point, but we didn’t really think it was going to happen for another twenty years. We thought it was not going to be our generation but the next generation that would be doing it.’

The ingredients that sparked the uprisings existed throughout the region. Nearly every country has a massive ‘youth bulge’, with half its population under the age of twenty-five.
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That made the competition even tougher for the meagre opportunities available to young people. The aspirations of the youth across the Middle East and North Africa were the same. Everywhere I went I would hear identical demands from the young protesters on the streets. They wanted their rulers to allow them some dignity. They wanted to work. They wanted some hope for a life at least as good as their parents’. The ‘youth bulge’ didn’t need to be a problem; it could have been an opportunity if the old Middle East had not been so dysfunctional. In East Asia I saw for myself that because the economies worked and made things people wanted, they were able to absorb and benefit from the suddenly larger workforce. In the Middle East the state knew how to turn out graduates, but not how to create an economy to usefully employ them. Even worse, the graduates it did produce didn’t have the right skills to fit the few opportunities there were in the market.
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The state had solved this problem with the parents of the revolutionaries by buying them off with ‘jobs for life’ in the government.

Professor Ragui Assaad studies labour markets in developing countries at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. He told me the old regimes eventually no longer had the resources to do the same thing for the next generation:

The only thing young people found themselves able to do was work in the informal economy, and that creates a lot of anger and frustration, so in a sense it’s the unravelling of that social contract, with much of that unravelling being imposed on the youth. The adults kept their government jobs, they kept their benefits, they kept their subsidised housing, but all the adjustment was imposed on the young people.

During the revolutions the West realised for the first time that Arabs were people just like us. They weren’t all brooding jihadis who needed to be kept in check by a reign of terror.

‘We have been here for seven thousand years, but people in Europe, you think that I have the camel in front of my house and I’m living beside the pyramid.’ I met Youssef, a 42-year-old engineer, at the height of the Egyptian revolution in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Before the uprising, Youssef kept his thoughts and feelings to himself. Now, in slightly broken English, and just yards from where pitched battles were still taking place, he was relishing the chance to talk freely for the first time in his life without having to look over his shoulder for a secret policeman. ‘We live like Third World people but we are First World people. We want to be able to show that we have all the capabilities to be First World people. Even the poor people here are civilised.’ If Youssef can now speak openly for the first time, then this is also our first chance to listen, to find out what people like him want from the post-Arab Spring era. We can ask what kind of societies they are going to build and learn how their decisions will change our lives.

The only people of the old Middle East that the Western world thought it understood were the Israelis. The West knew much of their lore because their histories were intertwined. The Israelis were still seen as the homogeneous group of Europeans, surrounded by a sea of troubles, that built the Jewish homeland. But as the West enjoyed the celebrations of democracy emerging from the revolutions in the Arab world, it discovered that Israel did not. Why does the country that likes to boast it is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ think the Arab Spring was a catastrophe? Why has the bit of the region we thought was the most like us stopped thinking like us? The Arab world may have been going through a very noisy transition, but a quiet revolution is taking place in Israel too. It has rarely been more politically isolated than it is today. Its neighbourhood has radically changed but it has belligerently refused to adapt to that reality. ‘Israel doesn’t know what its best interests are,’ said President Obama privately after he won his second term.
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The Arab uprisings have presented Israel with its greatest political challenge for a generation, just as its society seems at its most fragile. The rise of political Islam in the Middle East has ended for Israel the era of the cosy deal stitched up in smoky rooms with generals from Arab dictatorships. Mike Herzog has spent the last decade at the centre of Israeli decision-making on all key strategic, defence and political issues. To a greater extent than in other democracies in the world the Israeli military plays a central role in the country’s society and politics and its views have a huge impact on policy. Herzog is a former brigadier general and the son of an Israeli president. I asked him whether an Arab dictatorship was better for Israel than an Islamic democracy.

It’s a very good question, and people in Israel don’t usually think about it in that way. Over the long run an Islamic democracy is better than a dictatorship, over the short run not necessarily, because when it comes to Israeli interests I think [issues like] the security situation, the peace agreement, don’t promise good news. The problem is that Israel is highly unpopular on the Arab street, there’s a lot of hatred, resentment and so on. These people were educated that way for generations. So there’s a lot of hatred when the street speaks now. It’s clearly an anti-Israel voice and we don’t know how to communicate with these people.

In fact the street that worries many Israelis is much closer to home. It has posters telling women not to enter their area without covering their arms, legs and heads. It has banners describing Israel as a ‘Nazi state’ and blaming Zionism for the Holocaust. On these streets, just a few kilometres from where Mike and I were sitting, are people who want an end to the state of Israel. And these people are not Arabs, they are Jews.

As far as Yoel Weber is concerned Mike Herzog is not a Jew. We met in his small apartment, which is on the outskirts of the old city of Jerusalem. Yoel told me that the country’s ultra-Orthodox Jews believe that 70–80 per cent of Israeli Jews have no right to call themselves Jews at all. ‘They were lost to Judaism,’ he said. ‘We believe if any Jew behaves non-religiously, even if he was born a Jew then he has nothing to do with Judaism. He’s cut off his pipeline to Judaism.’ What’s more, Yoel said most of his community have no time for people like Mike who fought in the 1973 war to protect the state of Israel against its Arab neighbours. ‘The Haredi or ultra-Orthodox community don’t believe in the state of Israel. They don’t believe the state has done any good for Judaism or the Jews. [They think] that the state of Israel is not a blessing, rather it is a curse for the Jewish people.’

Ultra-Orthodox Jews were a tiny proportion of the Israeli state when it was created. Today they still make up only 10 per cent of the population, but the fractured nature of Israeli politics has often given them disproportionate influence.
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That is only going to grow, because one third of all the Jewish children in kindergarten today come from their community.
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The ongoing battle for Israel’s future is between the secular and the religious. Its outcome will have just as much influence on the Middle East of tomorrow as the consequences of the revolts that are still searing through the Arab world today. The old narrative forgot to tell us that Israel has changed too. Israelis no longer all think the same, talk the same or worship the same. Their society is split along ultra-Orthodox, religious Zionist (also known in Israel as religious nationalists) and secular lines.

Eight-year-old girls dressed in long skirts and coats have been spat at by Haredi men who called them ‘whores’ as they walked to school. Hard-line settlers are demanding Israel’s democracy be replaced by Jewish religious law. Secular Jews are fighting attempts to segregate their buses along gender lines and want protection from the spectre of ‘Jewish terrorism’.
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Jewish religious extremists who reject the existence of the state of Israel have sprayed pro-Hitler graffiti on the walls of Yad Vashem, the nation’s monument to the victims of the Holocaust. At the other end of this society are the Arab communities living within the recognised boundaries of Israel. The demographics show that the country will soon be dominated by the two extremes of its social spectrum.
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The state of Israel’s response to this, according to one of its leading newspapers,
Ha’aretz
, is to ‘thrust Israel down the slope of apartheid’.
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