The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)

by Mehran Kamrava

  The “road map for peace” would have three phases. In phase 1, the Palestinians would be required to “undertake an unconditional cessation of violence,” while the Israelis would “immediately dismantle settlement outposts erected since March 2001.”115 This phase would entail a series of other confidence-building measures, such as a progressive withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Occupied Territories. This would lead to phase 2, which would come about sometime in December 2003, during which a Palestinian state would be established and an international conference would be convened to hammer out some of the most contentious issues dividing the two sides. In phase 3, during the year 2005, a comprehensive peace treaty would be signed that would finally resolve some of the most intractable points of contention, most notably the status of Jerusalem, the location of a Palestinian capital, and the issue of “right of return” for Palestinian refugees.

  President Bush’s “road map” for ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict ended up sharing the fates of the Oslo Accords, Camp David II, and the many other stalled peace initiatives. Within weeks of toppling Saddam Hussein, Washington found itself in an Iraqi quagmire, bewildered and scrambling to contain an urban guerrilla war for which neither the Pentagon nor the military commanders had prepared themselves. By all accounts, the “road map” died before it had a chance to get started, and both the Palestinians and the Israelis did their best to ensure its demise.116 Hamas and the Islamic Jihad refused to relent on their bloody campaign of suicide bombings directed against Israeli civilians—some one hundred bombings occurred between 2001 and 2003 alone. Each suicide bombing was followed by massive Israeli retaliatory strikes, in the course of which many Palestinian civilians also perished. And the circle of violence continued.

  Sharon’s government, meanwhile, embarked on the construction of an enormous concrete wall intended to physically separate the West Bank from the rest of Israel. The thirty-foot-high wall, or “security fence,” is complemented by electrified wires designed to prevent anyone from crossing it. When completed, the $2 billion project will be at least 625 miles long, although the so-called green line separating Israel and the West Bank is only 224 miles long. This is because the wall frequently veers off into Palestinian territory to keep Israeli settlements on the Israeli side, often cutting off Palestinians from their farmland, uprooting countless orchards and fruit trees belonging to Palestinians, and separating Palestinian families.117 By the time the wall is completed, sizable portions of the West Bank will be separated from it.

  Figure 32. A Jewish settler praying at sunrise from a former outpost near Nablus. Corbis.

  The wall’s stated purpose is to help keep suicide bombers out of Israel. Its real impact will be to create new facts on the ground. How it will influence the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its outcome remains to be seen. Whether the wall, which most members of the Israeli Left denounce, will remain a permanent feature of the physical and psychological landscape of the region is also a question that only time will answer.

  After a mysterious illness in late 2004, Arafat slipped into a coma and died on November 11. Long the symbol of Palestinian resistance, in the waning months of his life the old warrior had become a virtual prisoner in his presidential headquarters in Ramallah. For nearly two years he had been unable to leave his compound, which was surrounded, and repeatedly battered, by Israeli tanks and bulldozers. Death frequently vindicates fallen heroes, and Arafat was no exception. But the collective mourning of his passing by Palestinians was followed by the excitement of Mahmoud Abbas’s election to the presidency of the PNA in January 2005. An old Fatah insider with impeccable nationalist credentials, Abbas was admired even by many Israelis in the know for his commitment to the cause of peace and his reasoned, steady approach to the conflict’s complexities and its solutions.

  Earlier, in December 2003, Prime Minister Sharon had announced a unilateral “Disengagement Plan” from Gaza, one that would, he promised, “reduce terrorism as much as possible and grant Israeli citizens the maximum level of security.” As subsequent events demonstrated, Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was driven less by the imperative to “minimize friction between Israelis and Palestinians,” as Sharon had claimed, than by a need to “relieve the pressure on the IDF and the security forces in fulfilling the difficult tasks they are faced with.”118 Approved by the cabinet, amid chaotic scenes of clashes between Israeli soldiers and settlers refusing to leave, the withdrawal occurred on August 2005.

  The Palestinians’ euphoria at reclaiming the entirety of the Gaza Strip proved short-lived as the Israeli withdrawal did little to reverse Gaza’s descent into political turmoil, lawlessness, and economic despondency. The PNA failed to capitalize on the opportunity to deepen its base of support and legitimacy across Gaza. That opportunity instead went to Hamas, whose slogan “Islam is the answer” propelled it to victory in the Palestinian legislative elections that were held for the first time in a decade in 2006. The elections signified an almost complete divorce of the Fatah-dominated West Bank, led by the PNA, and the Gaza Strip, now controlled by Hamas. Singularly lacking in charisma and content with being a manager rather than a leader, President Abbas was left with no option but to invite Hamas to form a cabinet in March 2006, thus forging a coalition administration destined to fail from the very beginning. In the meantime, the refusal of the United States and the European Union to recognize Hamas’s victory, coupled with their punishing withholding of much-needed financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority, further eroded the PNA’s administrative capacities, which were already hampered by widespread corruption and ineptitude. The Hamas-PNA rupture was not long in coming, resulting in a brief civil war between the two in June 2007, with the United States and Israel allegedly instigating the clash and arming a pro-Fatah militia group.119 The fighting ended, but the rift did not heal. Frequent and deadly clashes continued, meanwhile, between Hamas and the IDF. Following repeated attacks by ineffective and inaccurate rockets fired from Gaza into Israel, the IDF launched Operation Iron Cast, a massive and deadly assault on Gaza in December 2008–January 2009, which, according to a United Nations report issued shortly afterwards, left over 1,300 Palestinians dead, over 5,000 injured, and thousands more displaced and without food or shelter.120 But even widespread allegations of Israeli war crimes in Gaza failed to bring the bickering Palestinians together.121

  Once again, in November 2012, amid allegations of rockets fired at Israeli civilians from inside the Gaza Strip, Israel attacked Gaza under the rubric of Operation Pillars of Defense. Earlier, as a prelude to its attack, Israel had started with the targeted assassination of Hamas military chief Ahmed Jabari. During the eight-day conflict, Israeli warplanes hit 1,500 targets in Gaza, and a reported 1,500 rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel. Once again, Gaza became the scene of massive destruction and damage to infrastructure. By the time the conflict was over, an estimated 161 Palestinians were dead, 103 of whom were civilians, and 1,269 were injured. On the Israeli side, 6 individuals were killed, 4 civilians and 2 soldiers, and 244 were injured, a majority of them civilians.122

  Figure 33. A Palestinian woman inspecting the rubble of her house after Israeli missile strikes. Corbis.

  Figure 34. A Palestinian woman flashing the “V for victory” sign at Israeli soldiers. Corbis.

  Figure 35. Funeral of a two-year-old Palestinian boy killed in Israeli air strikes in the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Yunis on November 15, 2012. Getty Images.

  Within a week of the conclusion of the 2012 Gaza war, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to upgrade the status of Palestine to that of nonmember observer state, with 138 countries in favor, 9 opposed, and 41 abstaining. Jubilant crowds in Ramallah and other Palestinian cities celebrated what Mahmoud Abbas called “a birth certificate of the reality of the state of Palestine.”123 But the fleeting street celebrations masked the desperate straits of the Palestinian cause. The Oslo Accords were long dead, and successive efforts to revive them had come to naught.
A rehabilitated Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, had made a comeback following his implication in a corruption scandal in the late 1990s and had become prime minister once again in February 2009. Neither the Likud nor any of its coalition partners showed any appetite for meaningful progress of the peace process. After the Clinton administration, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had also found themselves preoccupied with America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, neither man showing the sustained political interest or the courage needed to force the Israelis and the Palestinians to the negotiating table. With the peace process adrift, and Palestinian frustrations mounting over the ever-expanding size of Israeli settlements, upgraded diplomatic recognition at the United Nations was more than anything else an act of desperation on the part of the Palestinian Authority. At any rate, the importance of the UN vote was far more symbolic than substantive. Israel, for its part, duly retaliated by withholding more than $100 million in tax revenues from the cash-strapped PNA. More ominously, it announced plans for the construction of as many as 6,600 new housing units in settlements in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem.124 Once the settlement expansions are completed, they will effectively cut the West Bank in two. In the words of Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations, this move “gravely threatens efforts to establish a viable Pal-estinian state.” Ban’s “call on Israel to refrain from continuing on this dangerous path,” joined by similar refrains from some of Israel’s erstwhile allies, were all ignored.125

  Figure 36. A Palestinian boy walking through the rubble inside the house of Hamas commander Raed al-Attar, which was targeted by an overnight Israeli air strike in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah on November 20, 2012. Getty Images.

  Figure 37. Hamas leader in exile Khaled Meshaal (left) and Hamas prime minister in the Gaza Strip Ismail Haniya (right) at a rally to mark the twentyfifth anniversary of the founding of the Islamist movement, in Gaza City on December 8, 2012. Getty Images.

  As of this writing, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians shows no signs of a resolution. Different solutions for a peaceful end to the conflict continue to be offered by old actors and even new ones, including Saudi king Abdullah and the Quartet on the Middle East (composed of the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia). For a region racked by more than a century of war and bloodshed, the need for a lasting peace has never been greater. For now, however, the prospects of such a peace seem painfully remote. Hamas and the Fatah, meanwhile, have fragmented the Palestinian body politic in ways that Israel could not have dreamt of. With friction and animosity characterizing intra-Palestinian relations, it is not surprising that meaningfully ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict seems today like a distant dream.

  Despite repeated setbacks and the seeming futility of the never-ending “peace process,” monumental progress has indeed been made over the years on several fronts in relation to certain specific aspects of the conflict. As we have seen so far, this is a conflict whose very essence has been shaped and reified by the blood, sweat, and tears of the antagonists on either side. The fault lines run too deep, the responses are too visceral, and the stakes are too high for there to be any easy solutions, or perhaps any lasting solutions at all. But to dismiss all efforts toward peace as hopeless and futile would be at best ignorant of what has been accomplished so far and at worst fatalistic and resigned to an absence of peace. Despite its flaws and go-it-alone character, the Camp David Accord did return the Sinai to Egypt and led to an Israeli-Egyptian peace that has lasted since 1978. The Oslo Accords, for their part, though maligned and ignored soon after their signing, brought about the institutional ingredients and an actual, albeit truncated, territorial frame of reference that are key elements in the eventual construction of a state. And, the second Camp David summit, held in July 2000, crossed some of Israel’s most firmly drawn red lines by having the Jewish state’s prime minister offer to put up for negotiations the status of Jerusalem and the right of Palestinian refugees to return home and be reunited with their families. As the scholar Avi Shlaim has put it, “The mere fact that . . . the core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were discussed at all is significant. Jerusalem is no longer a sacred symbol but the subject of hard bargaining. The right of return of the Palestinian refugees is no longer just a slogan but a problem in need of a practical solution. A final status agreement eluded the negotiators, yet everything has changed.”126

  Figure 38. Israeli schoolgirls taking cover next to a bus in Ashdod, Israel, during a rocket attack from the Gaza Strip, on March 12, 2012. Getty Images.

  By the accidents of history and geography, the two peoples of Palestine and Israel found themselves on the same piece of land. Each side has tried to stake a claim for its right to control the land. The ensuing conflict has been not just a dialogue of the deaf but a brutal, violent struggle to destroy or at least dehumanize and demonize the enemy, to take away its spirit and its life. In some ways, the passage of time has forced the antagonists to face the sobering realities of the conflict. But the wounds of the past are too fresh and the memories of historic wrongs remain too deep to allow either side to trust the other. The oscillating preferences of the Israeli electorate in the past few elections reflect their unease and uncertainty over the wisdom of finally embracing the enemy. The same dilemma exists for the Palestinians, who are equally torn between the rejectionism of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad and the relative moderation of an increasingly beleaguered and ineffectual PNA. This popular anguish manifested itself in the form of the intifadas.

  For all their mutual hatred and distrust, the Arabs and Israelis in general and the Palestinians and Israelis in particular have managed to travel far on the road to peace. The Camp David Accords of 1978 resulted in a peace between Israel and Egypt that has so far lasted for more than three decades. Despite frequent frictions and disagreements, the Egyptian-Israeli peace shows no signs of collapse, even after the 2012 election of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi to the presidency of Egypt. In the same way, the 1993 Oslo Accords brought the historic adversaries together and, at the very least, made each party realize that “the enemy” does indeed have a face, a family, human emotions, and, most important, a right to exist. Many on both sides still deny this basic right, but their denials can no longer be backed by empirical data. Reality, the “facts on the ground,” may be subject to different interpretations, but it cannot be denied. Israelis and Palestinians exist, and despite their best efforts at destroying each other, neither side shows signs of simply vanishing.

  In one important respect, the tangible progress made so far on the issue of Palestinian-Israeli peace has made it harder for would-be Nassers or Khomeinis, and other self-declared liberators of Palestine, to claim Palestinian leadership. Alas, there has been no shortage of liberationists in the Middle East, and future Qaddafis and Saddams may still appear. Soon after it started, the struggle between Palestinians and Israelis became known as the “Arab-Israeli conflict,” and now, after many decades and many wars, it has once again become more of a Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Ultimately, the two peoples need to resolve their conflict themselves, although, as with any other passionate arguments, third-party mediations often help.

  History is both written and directed by victors, and how the Israeli-Palestinian question finally gets settled depends on who holds which trump cards. Edward Said warned of the permanent ghettoization of the Palestinians and the establishment of a two-tiered, apartheid-like state, whereby Israeli dominance would be ensured by the complicity of a self-serving PNA.127 Aharon Klieman, a respected, liberal Israeli academic, envisions two peoples that are “separate but dependent” as a realistic (and desirable) outcome. Perhaps, he argues, there could even be some type of a confederation between the three otherwise small entities of Palestine, Israel, and Jordan.128 These are, at best, all conjectures. For now, the future is far from certain; but it is clear that the peoples of Israel and Palestine must learn to share the same piece of
land.

  10The Challenge of Economic Development

  In one form or another, and to one extent or another, all developing countries have faced formidable obstacles in their efforts to foster economic development. For a variety of reasons, the twists and turns of history have left developing countries in an inferior global position in relation to increasingly more powerful and advanced economies. Domestic political institutions and procedures have remained equally underdeveloped and have been subject to violent oscillations and even revolutions, so that making rational economic policy has been even more difficult. Economic and industrial infrastructure could not or have not been allowed to develop, and when they have developed they often have fallen victim to foreign economic domination, the greed or incompetence of domestic tyrants, or, as is often the case, a combination of both. It did not take long for the developing world to lag significantly behind in basic indices of development such as the availability of transportation and storage facilities (roads, ports, and warehouses), hydroelectric dams and power-generating plants, steel mills, and various other industrial complexes that manufacture consumer goods and provide employment opportunities.

  By the 1950s and 1960s, the glaring underdevelopment of what by now had emerged as the “Third World” made the large-scale importation of Western industry an attractive and indeed necessary option. Import-substitution industrialization (ISI) policies were adopted in one developing country after another from East Asia to South America, including the countries of the Middle East. The hope was to eventually indigenize the imported industry and, once the industry had become “developed,” to engage in the profitable export of manufactured goods such as appliances, automobiles, spare parts, and other technologically advanced products. For some time, the countries of East Asia—most notably South Korea and Taiwan—were the only developing countries that made the successful transition from the import phase of ISI to its more mature export phase. But the self-perpetuating dependence on imports did not dissuade most other developing countries, including those in the Middle East, from zealously following ISI as a viable path to industrial development.