Palestine, Iraq, and American Strategy (part 1 of 2)
Michael Scott Doran
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2003 issue
nytimes.com
Michael Scott Doran is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of "Pan-Arabism Before Nasser: Egyptian Power Politics and the Palestine Question."
REMOVE THE WEDGE?
When toppling Saddam Hussein rose to the top of the Bush administration's foreign policy agenda, a chorus of voices protested that Washington had misdiagnosed the root cause of its Middle Eastern dilemmas. "It's Palestine, stupid!" was the refrain heard not only from European and Arab capitals, but from some quarters in the United States as well. These voices argued that attacking Iraq while the Israelis were reoccupying Palestinian lands would substantiate the claim, already widespread in the Middle East, that the United States had declared war against all Arabs and Muslims. The ensuing backlash would undermine the American position in the region and wreak havoc on American interests. What Washington really needed to do was postpone or abandon a showdown with Saddam and focus instead on achieving a breakthrough in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.
Unqualified U.S. support for Israel, the critics reason, drives a wedge between Washington and the Arabs, most of whom support Palestinian aspirations; for the United States to improve its regional position, it must remove the wedge by tilting somewhat toward the Palestinians. The problem with this argument is that it rests on two hidden and faulty assumptions: about how much Washington would have to change its stance, and about how much goodwill that change would produce.
Unfortunately, Americans and Arabs nurture such different conceptions of what constitutes a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that it is hard to imagine Washington ever adopting a policy toward it that would be truly popular in the Arab world. The most "pro-Palestinian" policy realistically conceivable would look something like the Clinton plan presented in late 2000, but even this would entail major Palestinian compromises (such as the renunciation of the right of pre-1967 refugees to return to their homes inside Israel proper). Under the right conditions, a handful of Arab leaders might be induced to endorse such a settlement, but they would be denounced by others as puppets of Washington and the Jews. Suicide bombings would very likely continue, and the United States would still find itself entangled in a passionate communal conflict. The Palestine wedge would thus remain in place -- smaller and less troubling, perhaps, but a wedge nonetheless.
Even if the United States were somehow able to broker a stable Palestinian-Israeli settlement that met many Arab aspirations, however, this would not necessarily generate a great deal of goodwill. Those who argue the opposite see Palestine as the primary obstacle blocking an American-Arab rapprochement. They claim, correctly, that Arab political discourse revolves around Palestine and that a great many Arabs hold the United States responsible for Palestinian suffering. But what they overlook is that although Palestine is central to the symbolism of Arab politics, it is actually marginal to its substance.
Palestine-as-symbol has a protean nature, a capacity for expressing grievances wholly unrelated to the aspirations of the Palestinians themselves. In Northern Ireland last summer, for example, the Irish Republican Army raised the Palestinian flag over Republican strongholds. Why? Because for many around the world, this pennant now expresses simple anticolonial defiance, the protest of those who believe their native rights have been trampled under the boots of foreign rulers. (Not to be outdone, Unionists countered by flying the Israeli banner over their neighborhoods.)
The migration of Middle Eastern symbolism to a remote corner of Christian Europe would hardly be noteworthy were it not for the fact that the Palestinian flag plays a similar role throughout the Arab world itself, where it often expresses grievances unrelated to the specifics of Palestine-as-place. In addition to serving as a front for venting anger at local repression, unemployment, and inequity, Palestine-as-symbol expresses the resistance of Arabs and Muslims to Western political and cultural hegemony.
Palestine has acquired this broad meaning because in Arab political discourse the maltreatment of the Palestinians signifies the prejudice of the West toward all Middle Easterners. Palestine is the only Arab land successfully colonized in modern times, a fact that rankles deeply. According to a commonly held version of history, the Western powers (especially the United Kingdom and the United States) planted Israel in the Arab world and then nurtured it with the intention of using the Jewish state as an "imperialist base," a bridgehead for dominating the entire region. For most Arabs, the history of Palestine is thus not simply the story of two peoples struggling for the same land, but rather evidence that unmasks the true and nefarious intentions of the West toward Arabs and Muslims in general.
As a sign of anti-Western defiance, Palestine-as-symbol resonates beyond the Arab lands -- in Iran and, to a lesser extent, throughout the entire Muslim world. Precisely because it invokes a version of the history of relations between the Middle East as a whole and the West, Palestine is one of the few communal symbols that crosses religious, ethnic, and national lines. An Iranian Shi`ite, a Moroccan Sunni fundamentalist, and a Syrian Alawite who would never brush elbows at home can all stand united under the banner of Palestine. Although particularly well suited to Muslim immigrants living in the West (who frequently encounter shabby and discriminatory treatment from the majority populations in countries that also maintain good relations with Israel), the symbol's universalism works wherever Middle Easterners engage in mass politics. But, of course, it speaks most directly to Arab aspirations. To call for justice in Palestine is to decry the debasement of the entire Arab world in the modern period, to long for a more just and authentic political order in the Middle East, and to demand a change in the balance of power between Arabs and the West, represented today chiefly by the United States.
There are many reasons why Washington should distance itself from misguided Israeli policies such as the building of settlements in the occupied territories, but among them should not be the hope that such a move would greatly affect the broader sources of resentment and despair that Palestine-as-symbol encompasses. If coupled with a stand-down on Iraq, moreover, dramatic pressure on Israel now might even inflame matters further, by calling into question American willingness to support its friends and oppose its enemies in the region.
What the Bush administration seems to understand better than its critics is that the influence of the United States in the Arab-Israeli arena derives, to no small extent, from its status as the dominant power in the region as a whole -- and that this status, in turn, hinges on maintaining an unassailable American predominance in the Persian Gulf. It is worth remembering that Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 came on the heels of the first Palestinian intifada, which also provoked much Arab hostility toward the United States. It was Saddam's defeat that cleared a space for the Madrid Conference and eventually the Oslo peace process. Then as now, defeating Saddam would offer the United States a golden opportunity to show the Arab and Muslim worlds that Arab aspirations are best achieved by working in cooperation with Washington. If an American road to a calmer situation in Palestine does in fact exist, it runs through Baghdad.
FUNDAMENTALISM HITCHES A RIDE
After the September 11 attacks, many in the West wondered how important a concern Palestine was for Osama bin Laden and his followers. Some argued that undermining the United States and the dynastic regime in Saudi Arabia were bin Laden's top priorities, with Palestinian nationalism coming almost as an afterthought. Others saw Palestine as crucial. Citing bin Laden's frequent references to the issue, they argued that even if he personally had only limited interest in the matter, the prominence he accorded it demonstrated how greatly he felt his audience cared. To blunt the edge of radical Islamism, in this view, the United States must successfully address Palestinian concerns.
For this second camp, al Qaeda's political intentions possess all the subtlety of a laundry list: (1) expel Crusaders from the Holy Land, (2) remove Jews from Jerusalem, and so on. Viewing these concerns in the context of Islamic fundamentalism and inter-Arab politics, however, leads to some skepticism about the role Palestine plays in the al Qaeda phenomenon.
Bin Laden is a product of a radical Islamic reform movement that originated in the early twentieth century. In the eyes of its adherents this movement represents true religion itself and dates back to the Prophet Muhammad and, before him, to the dawn of human existence. Looking at the state of the Islamic world today, radical Islamists bemoan the degradation of their lands and ask, What went wrong? In formulating their answer, they hark back to a utopian view of early Islamic history -- a time when, as they see it, the companions of the Prophet marched successfully against the greatest empires of their day. In that golden age, the rulers were united in values with the virtuous among the ruled, and both obeyed God's laws.
The comparison between the idealized past and the ugly present leads them to conclude that Muslims fell into their current state of degradation because they abandoned their true religion. This abandonment, in turn, is held to have two causes: the political, economic, and cultural rise of Western civilization; and the slavish subservience to the West by local, nominally Muslim rulers who use the power of the state to propagate Western values inimical to true Islam. The first is considered the "far enemy" and the second the "near enemy." Both present mortal threats to the umma, or universal Islamic community, that cannot be ignored.
From the 1970s through the advent of al Qaeda in the 1990s, radical Islamists focused mainly on the near enemy, trying to launch revolutions against local rulers. They calculated that defeating the West required the creation of a base, a bastion of true Islam that could serve as the staging point for spreading their message throughout the Muslim world and beyond. Israel was placed firmly in the category of the far enemy; the struggle against Zionism was seen as a distraction from the essential goal of revolution at home. Israel, moreover, was considered an offshoot of the West -- a particularly ugly and irritating offshoot, to be sure, but not an independent element in the struggle.
Bin Laden's own statements, including his 1998 fatwa against Crusaders and Jews, clearly portrayed Israel as a derivative factor. To al Qaeda, Palestine's travails were irrefutable evidence of hostile Western intentions toward Muslims. But they were hardly the only example of these intentions and were often mentioned alongside, say, the vast numbers of Iraqi babies the United States had allegedly starved by imposing sanctions on Saddam Hussein.
After al Qaeda merged with Egyptian Islamic Jihad in the late 1990s, however, Palestine moved to the center of its propaganda. Gone now from al Qaeda's statements were the long, rambling discussions of internal developments in Saudi Arabia, the ills of the Saudi dynasty, and the justification in Islamic law for attacking infidels. In one of the organization's first video statements released after September 11, for example, bin Laden's close associates Ayman al-Zawahiri and Sulayman Abu Ghayth held forth at length on Palestine. Bin Laden himself also had something to say on the matter, and his words were typical of the tone and content of his associates' message:
That which America is suffering today is an insignificant thing compared to what we have been suffering for scores of years. ... In these very days, Israeli tanks and armored troop carriers have entered Jenin, Ramallah, Rafah, Beit Jala, and elsewhere ... in order to wreak havoc in Palestine, and we do not hear anyone who will raise his voice or lift a finger. ... Neither America nor anyone who lives in America will ever dream of peace until we experience it as a reality in Palestine.
To interpret this statement properly, one needs to understand that the cause of Palestine is so deeply wrapped up with fundamental questions of identity in the Arab and Muslim worlds that a simple reference to it reveals almost nothing about the speaker's political agenda. A call to action over it, on the other hand, especially when accompanied by implied or overt criticism of government inaction, does reveal something: the speaker's opposition to the status quo. What the statement above shows, therefore, is bin Laden advancing his candidacy as an avenger, an opponent of the West and the corrupt Arab regimes that do its bidding. But it says nothing about his specific goals, nor does it even indicate that he has any practical concern for the fate of actual Palestinians. If anything, quite the opposite: Palestine-as-symbol works best when Palestine-as-place is burning.
Bin Laden may have moved Palestine to the center of his propaganda on the advice of al-Zawahiri, who brought to the organization years of political experience and considerable acumen. Or he may have recognized that the outbreak of the second intifada created a regional atmosphere conducive to a message couched in Palestinian terms. Whatever the trigger, what matters is that in Palestine-as-symbol he found the perfect vehicle for his propaganda.
Al Qaeda had been seeking to topple near enemies (such as the Saudi dynasty and the Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt) by sparking a conflict with the far enemy (the United States). To achieve this, bin Laden needed a war that would polarize Arab countries between ruling elites allied with the United States and societies sympathetic to him and his cause. If he and his associates had gone before the world proclaiming that they had carried out the attacks in order to, say, raise up the shari`a, they would have alienated potentially valuable constituencies for whom questions of religion are not the main grievance. By spinning the attacks as retribution for crimes committed against Palestine, however, al Qaeda benefited from the symbol's universalism, the fact that it represents all grievances in the Middle East against the West and its local agents.
In order to foster the broadest possible popular identification with the September 11 attacks, furthermore, the leaders of al Qaeda avoided taking direct responsibility for them, implying that the attacks expressed the collective will of the Islamic world itself. In their imagery, September 11 did not reflect the agenda of a specific political organization with its own parochial interests, but rather a belated counterattack in response to a prolonged war that the United States had been waging against Muslims everywhere -- a natural, even inevitable backlash against the oppressive status quo.
Given such an ideological framework, it is hard to conceive of any plausible change in American policy with respect to Palestine that would appease bin Laden and his ilk. Radical Islamists are by nature revolutionaries, enemies of the prevailing order and enemies of the West. A practical solution to the Palestine question would solidify the status quo and further legitimate the presence of the United States in the region. Far from welcoming such developments, radical Islamists would consider them a catastrophe.
[contd. in next post] |
