by Gwynne Dyer
The whole situation seems as arcane as the street battles of the blues and greens in Byzantium fifteen centuries ago. It certainly doesn’t sound like modern politics, and indeed, it is not like politics in mature democratic countries like France or India. But it is (apart from the coloured T-shirts) a great deal like nineteenth-century European politics.
Thailand’s democracy is less than twenty years old, and it was the growing Thai middle class that made it happen—just as it was the middle class in European countries that made the revolutions happen there in the 1800s. In both cases, they were doing it for themselves, not for the poor.
As the history of a hundred ancient empires demonstrates, the poor and the downtrodden never launched a democratic revolution. It didn’t occur to them to demand their democratic rights, because they lacked the education and the perspective even to think in those terms. Democracy only got onto the political agenda when a large and literate middle class appeared.
The European middle class mainly wanted political equality, as they were already doing quite nicely economically. But, no sooner had they won it than they discovered to their horror that the poor were also infected by this idea of equality. At that point, the newly empowered middle class faced a stark choice: either make a political deal that brought the poor into the system economically, or live forever in fear of the day when angry mobs broke into their homes. In Europe, it took most of the nineteenth century and a good deal of the twentieth to come up with a deal that worked, but in the end, various versions of the welfare state did the trick.
Most of the former colonial countries inherited the democratic system. They didn’t all make it work but at least they knew the rules, including how to get the poor to accept the system. Whereas Thailand, almost uniquely in southern Asia, was never colonized.
In 1992, middle-class Thais, overwhelmingly Bangkok-based, drove the army from power in a non-violent revolution that brought genuine democracy to the country for the first time. It was an exhilarating and long overdue event, but the Thai middle class really didn’t anticipate what was going to come next.
Give a country a democratic system, and pretty soon the poor will figure out how to use it for their own purposes. Their leader and voice in Thailand was Thaksin Shinawatra, an ex-cop from humble origins who became a telecommunications billionaire. He was a demagogue who cut as many corners in politics as he did in business, but he genuinely represented the poor, both urban and rural, and they voted for him in the millions.
Thaksin won power in 2001, and began pushing through measures to give the poor access to cheap loans, medical care and other things that the middle class took for granted. The poor loved him for it, but the urban middle class was appalled: they had lost control of politics, and their money was being spent on ignorant peasants.
Thaksin was overthrown by the army in 2006 and his party was banned. Then, as soon as democracy was restored, the poor voted for his allies and the new party they had formed. So the new government also had to be overthrown, a task that was accomplished last year by the yellow-shirted supporters of the People’s Alliance for Democracy.
In many ways, the PAD is typical of conservative parties seeking to rein in the demands of the poor. It is backed by the army, the senior bureaucracy and the upper middle class, but its street fighters are drawn mostly from the aspiring lower middle class. However, this being Thailand, there is one big difference: the PAD actually wants to take the vote away from the poor.
In the parts of the world that know democracy better, the notion that the demands of the poor can be dealt with simply by disenfranchising them seems crazy—and we have the history to prove it. At the moment, however, it clearly doesn’t sound like a crazy idea to many middle-class Thais.
Really bad outcomes to this impasse are possible, including a return to permanent military rule, although that would now require repression on an almost Burmese-like scale. But the likelier outcome is that the Thais will find some way out of their current blind alley and back to democratic normality.
The whole history of the past two centuries proves that you have to compromise with the poor. You don’t have to give them all your wealth, but if you want to live in a stable and prosperous country, then you do have to share it.
28.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE II
“Turning point” is generally the wrong phrase to apply to events in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, because it implies a change of direction. When things go from bad to worse, along an entirely predictable trajectory, it is not a turning point. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe what happened in June 2007 as a milestone.
A milestone on the road to where? Don’t ask. You know.
June 14, 2007
THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF GAZA
“I like this violence … It means other Palestinians are resisting Hamas,” said a U.S. official some months ago to Alvaro de Soto, the United Nations envoy to the Middle East, according to de Soto’s confidential “End of Mission Report,” leaked to the Guardian last week. This certainly fits with what we know about U.S. policy at the time.
The policy was to block international cooperation with the shaky Palestinian coalition government, including both Hamas and Fatah elements, that had been cobbled together after a year’s delay, and to build up Fatah’s militia for a showdown with Hamas. That showdown came last week in the Gaza Strip, and Hamas won it.
In less than a week, at the cost of about a hundred lives, Hamas eliminated almost all of Fatah’s strongholds in the Strip, and now the question is: were the United States and Israel being naïve boycotting Hamas and backing Fatah, or was their real goal all along to split the Palestinians?
In a sense this confrontation has been coming for years. The Gaza Strip is an overcrowded open-air prison where living conditions are vastly worse than in the West Bank, so it has always been a breeding ground for extremism. Nevertheless, the change is dramatic: where yesterday there was one “Palestinian Authority” seeking to build an independent state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—the bits of former Palestine that were not incorporated into Israel after the war of 1948—there are now two rival authorities with very different aims.
The West Bank is still run by the familiar institutions built up over forty years by the late Yasser Arafat: Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Palestinian Authority, the proto-government of what the Oslo Accords of 1993 envisaged as an independent Palestinian state. The PA, currently led by President Mahmoud Abbas, remains committed to a “two-state” solution in which Israel and a Palestinian state share former Palestine.
The Gaza Strip, however, is now controlled by Hamas, an Islamist organization that rejects peace with Israel. Its vision is a single Palestine reunited under Islamic law, a country in which Palestinian Arabs would be the clear majority. (There are currently 5.5 million Jews and 4.5 million Arabs in the lands under Israeli control, but millions more Palestinian refugees live in the surrounding countries.) Hamas says that native-born Jews would be welcome to stay, but the state of Israel would have to vanish.
The state of Israel is not going to vanish, of course—it has by far the strongest army in the region, the unquestioning support of the United States and lots of nuclear weapons—but this marks the definitive end of the peace process that began fourteen years ago. The Israelis blame the Palestinians, and the Palestinians blame the Israelis (and they are both right), but there will be many more years of violence before there is any return to serious peace talks.
The last exit before this disaster was probably passed seventeen months ago, when the Palestinians elected a Hamas government in a fair and free election, and Israel and the West refused to have anything to do with it: the Palestinians had made the wrong choice and they would just have to be bludgeoned into changing their minds. What followed was a political boycott, a financial blockade and, in the case of the Gaza Strip, an almost complete physical blockade as well.
The aim was to push Fatah and the Palesti
nian Authority into defying the election results and taking Hamas on in an open civil war. What the boycott and blockades actually did, of course, was to further impoverish and radicalize the population, especially in the Gaza Strip. The civil war duly arrived, in the end, but in the Gaza Strip, Hamas won it. It never had any chance of winning in the West Bank, where there was little fighting and Fatah remains in control, and now there are two Palestinian proto-states where there used to be one.
Back to the original question: were the U.S. and Israel being naïve and clumsy in trying to push the Palestinians into a civil war that was bound to end with Fatah controlling the West Bank and Hamas ruling the Gaza Strip—or were they being devious and very clever? If the goal was to take the spotlight off the continuing expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, to free Israel from pressure to negotiate with the Palestinians, and to destroy the prospect of a viable Palestinian state for at least a generation, this much has certainly been achieved.
The only losers are the ten million people, Jewish, Muslim and Christian, who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean sea. They have been condemned to another generation of war.
What always puzzled me was the inability of most people in the English-language media to call a spade a spade. It was like the Monty Python pet-shop sketch, with the customer pointing out that the parrot was dead and the pet-shop owner insisting that it was just “pining for the fjords” or “shagged out after a long squawk.”
The peace process was utterly, unarguably, irreversibly dead, and yet the Western media went along with the pretense that it was still alive. The U.S. media were the worst, slavishly printing every State Department press release as if it were actual news or independent analysis. (The Canadian media weren’t much better.)
October 16, 2007
THE CORPSE TWITCHES: THE MIDDLE EAST “PEACE PROCESS”
“We are at the beginning of a process,” said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice after her four-day tour of the countries closely involved in the Arab-Israeli confrontation. But the peace process really began with the Oslo Accords in 1993, and it died when Ariel Sharon became prime minister of Israel in 2001. The last nail was hammered into its coffin with the takeover of the Gaza Strip this year by Hamas, which flatly rejects the idea of Palestinian and Israeli states living side by side. Dr. Rice can make the corpse twitch, but she cannot make it walk.
Faced with almost universal cynicism about her proposed Middle East peace conference in the state of Maryland next month, she protested: “I have better things to do than invite people to Annapolis for a photo-op.” Nevertheless, the suspicion lingers that this conference is just part of a last-minute legacy project to salvage President George W. Bush’s reputation.
Secretary Rice insisted that this is “the most serious effort to end the conflict in many, many years”—but the wasted years are those of Bush’s presidency. The last serious American attempt of this sort was at Camp David seven years ago, in the last year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. That was another rushed legacy project, but it came a lot closer to success than this one will.
The “two-state solution,” the basis of the Oslo deal, assumed that Israelis would settle for the four-fifths of former Palestine that was already within their legal borders, and that Palestinians would settle for the remaining fifth. It was not unrealistic at the time, for Palestinians were very tired after a quarter-century of military occupation and most Israelis had concluded that they could not afford to hold down the occupied territories forever. But it never quite happened.
The Israelis could not agree among themselves on how much of the territories to give back. The Palestinians felt that they had made their final concession by recognizing Israel within its pre-1967 borders, and wanted all the conquered land back. On both sides there were also rejectionists: Israelis who insisted on Israel’s inalienable right to all of the occupied territories, and Palestinians who refused to accept the legitimacy of Israel. Time passed, patience eroded and hope died.
There is another reason, beyond sheer fatigue and disillusionment, for the collapse of the peace process. The Islamist parties and groups that are the main opposition to the existing regimes in most Arab countries have always condemned the idea of making peace with Israel. Their organizations are illegal in many countries, but their views on Israel are very popular.
In some thirty years of trying, the Islamists have not managed to win power in any Arab country, either through elections (where that is theoretically possible) or by revolution, but now they have the wind in their sails. The exploits of the Islamists who have come to dominate the anti-American insurgency in Iraq, and more recently Hezbollah’s success in withstanding the Israeli assault in southern Lebanon last year, have made them the heroes of the Arab street, and given Islamist parties everywhere a better chance of gaining power.
And now, even those Israelis who genuinely want a deal are increasingly reluctant to hand over territory in return for peace since they cannot be sure that the regimes they are dealing with will stay in power. What if Israel finally gave the Golan Heights back to Syria in return for a peace treaty, and then, a few years later, President Assad was overthrown by Islamists who repudiated the treaty and re-militarized the Golan?
Even existing peace treaties are at risk. What if the Islamists were to come to power in Egypt one day? In the 2005 election, the semi-legal Muslim Brotherhood (it can run candidates in elections, but only as “independents”) increased its seats in parliament fivefold, from 17 to 88, despite the usual vote-rigging, media manipulation and intimidation.
It really is over. There will be no comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace deal this decade. In the next decade there could even be a war.
It is remarkable how some people grow into their responsibilities. Ehud Olmert was almost a caricature of the right-wing Israeli politician for most of his career, trotting out the easy clichés whenever his ultra-nationalist policies were challenged. As mayor of Jerusalem, he was ruthless in moving Arabs out and moving Jews in. But then he became prime minister, with ultimate responsibility for the fate of the whole Zionist enterprise, and he started to think strategically.
It happens like that a lot, actually.
November 29, 2007
ISRAEL SIXTY YEARS ON: PARTITION OR APARTHEID
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was just back from the Annapolis summit where President George W. Bush tried to reboot the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. More importantly, last week was also the sixtieth anniversary of the United Nations vote that divided British-ruled Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. That promised Arab state still doesn’t exist, of course, but if the peace talks fail to produce it in the end, Olmert told the newspaper Haaretz, then Israel is “finished.”
“If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses,” Olmert said, “and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights for the Palestinians in the [occupied] territories, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished. The Jewish organizations which were our power base in America will be the first to come out against us, because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.”
It was an extraordinary thing for a right-wing Israeli politician to say: Israelis usually erupt in fury if anybody suggests a comparison between their country and apartheid-era South Africa. However, Olmert wasn’t talking about the country as it is now—seven million people, of whom about five and a half million are Jews—but about the country that would exist if the peace talks fail definitively and the four million Palestinians in the occupied territories remain under Israeli control indefinitely.
They have already been under Israeli military rule for forty years, and fifteen years of on-and-off peace negotiations have made little progress towards a Palestinian state. The Arab population both within Israel and in the occupied territories is growing much faster than the Jewish population, even allowing for Jewish
immigration. Sometime soon, there will be more Palestinians than Jews within the borders of the former British mandate of Palestine for the first time since the war of 1948–49.
Most of the Palestinians who lived within what is now Israel fled or were driven out during the 1948–49 war. Subsequent Jewish immigration, combined with the fact that many of the Palestinians fled beyond the borders of the old British mandate, meant that Jews were still a large majority overall even when Israel conquered all the remaining lands of former Palestine in the 1967 war. And so, for a long time, the “demographic question” did not trouble Israelis much.
There were still far fewer Palestinians in the late 1980s, when Yasser Arafat persuaded the Palestine Liberation Organization to adopt the goal of a Palestinian state within the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem (which is considerably less territory than it was given under the United Nations partition plan of 1947). That led to the era of the peace process, but for various reasons, and with much blame on both sides, the negotiations never succeeded.
Now the Palestinians are within sight of becoming a majority in the whole of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean sea, and some of them are starting to abandon that compromise goal. Let us have a single democratic state in all of these lands, they say, and we don’t mind if Israel never returns to its 1967 borders. We will just demand our equal democratic rights within this larger country that includes all the land now controlled by Israel, and our votes will change Israel from a “Jewish democracy” to a multi-ethnic, post-Zionist democratic state. (Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, has already adopted this strategy.)
