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Hypocrisy and the Holy Land

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In their reactions to Donald Trump’s hypocritical Jerusalem declaration, many Arab and Muslims leaders have exhibited their own grotesque double standards.

At the behest of the Turkish president, Islamic leaders gathered for an extraordinary summit to denounce Trump’s declaration.
Source: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Twitter account

Tuesday 19 December 2017

Exercising his peerless talent to make enemies and infuriate people, Donald Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the US embassy there changes nothing on the ground – except perhaps highlighting the extent of American hypocrisy and how Washington was never an impartial broker.

Nevertheless, Jerusalem is a city of enormous symbolic significance, not just to Jews and westerners but also to Arab Muslims and Christians, and the Palestinian struggle has been at the heart of Arab and Muslim consciousness for generations.

This partly explains why a merely symbolic announcement from Trump has triggered such angry reactions both in Arab corridors of power and on the streets. Another factor is the need to forge a semblance of unity in this bitterly divided region.

Arab League foreign ministers warned that Trump’s move “deepens tension, ignites anger and threatens to plunge the region into more violence and chaos,” as though it was not already mired in both.

In keeping with the League’s track record of futile, toothless endeavours, the ministers said they would seek a UN Security Council resolution rejecting Trump’s move, as though the US was not a veto-wielding permanent member.

Lebanon’s foreign minister, Gebran Bassil, urged the Arab world to adopt economic sanctions against the United States. While Bassil was outspoken in his defence of Palestine, his position towards Palestinians is a different matter.

The foreign minister has previously stirred controversy with his opposition to the naturalisation of not only the recently arrived Syrian refugees but also the Palestinian refugees who have lived in Lebanon for decades. Bassil is even against allowing Lebanese women to pass on their nationality to their children if they are married to a Palestinian or a Syrian.

While Bassil is an extreme and bigoted example, loving Palestine but disliking the Palestinians is a fairly common dissonance in Lebanon. This is reflected in how angry protesters clashed with riot police outside the American embassy in Beirut, with some denouncing the US as the “enemy of Palestine”.

Meanwhile, nearly half a million registered Palestinian refugees call Lebanon home, many of whom live in poverty and socio-economic marginalisation, excluded from numerous professions, in one of the country’s 12 Palestinian refugee camps, including the infamous Shatila in southern Beirut.

Of course, Lebanon has been a frontline state in the Arab-Israeli conflict. It has integrated some Palestinians and its failure to integrate the remainder partly rests on the fear of what this would do to the country’s delicate balance of power, which dangerously and precariously hinges on a sectarian fulcrum. Some Lebanese are opposed to the integration of Palestinians on the grounds that this keeps the Palestinian cause alive, even if it exacts a heavy human cost.

At a rally in Beirut last week, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah, speaking by video link, urged Palestinians to rise up against Israel and vowed that “Jerusalem and Palestine and the Palestinian people and the Palestinian resistance in all its factions” would become his group’s top priority.

One wonders why the Palestinians of Syria were not a priority for Nasrallah, whose militia has been actively supporting the Assad regime in its destruction of Syria, including Yarmouk, the Palestinian refugee camp in southern Damascus, upon which the regime and its allies have inflicted a cruel siege and fought a number of battles.

Not to be outdone, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan vowed to lead Islamic efforts to resist the US move, even hosting a summit of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation to prove his point. Calling Israel a “child-murderer state”, Erdoğan pledged to “continue our struggle within law and democracy… Our road map will show that it will not be easy for them to realize their plans.” What Erdoğan failed to mention is that he has almost destroyed Turkey’s democracy and undermined the rule of law through a systematic campaign to jail journalists and critics and to purge the state of opponents and enemies, both real and perceived.

After the summit, Erdoğan pledged to open a Turkish embassy in East Jerusalem. However, he built a cunning escape hatch into his plan by claiming that he could not, for now, open this embassy, because East Jerusalem is under occupation. This sounds like low-risk grandstanding to me, as Turkey already has a consulate in Sheikh Jarrah. He could declare that the embassy, if he really wanted, and hang a sign outside, even if it pissed off the Israelis or led to the Israeli taking action against the consulate-cum-embassy.

The reason Erdoğan talks the walk but does not walk the talk is because of all the Turkish interests at stake. What is also absent from Erdoğan’s inflammatory remarks is that, increasingly isolated like Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu, he ratified a lucrative reconciliation deal last year with Israel, the country he accused of infanticide.

While Turkey has longstanding official relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia, which severely reprimanded Egypt for its peace deal with Israel and ostensibly upholds the Arab boycott of Israel, is seeking closer ties, not to work towards peace and reconciliation in the Arab-Israeli conflict, but to build a mutual alliance against Iran, Riyadh’s belligerent regional rival.

Regardless of which side of the Gulf spat they stand on, much of the Gulf Co-operation Council has been hungrily eyeing Israeli technology, with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar all finding covert paths, via middle countries, through which to import Israeli products, including military ones.

This, along with Saudi Arabia’s hatred of Hamas and murderous starvation of Yemen, could explain the muted reaction from Riyadh compared with other Arab and Muslim capitals. Moreover, Saudi Arabia, under the de facto leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is keen to build an axis of autocrats with wannabe dictator Donald Trump in Washington.

Egypt’s reaction has also been fairly reserved. This is partly because of the mutual appreciation society President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi enjoys with Donald Trump, and partly because Egypt has an ambivalent relationship with the Palestinians.

On the one hand, the Egyptian regime has helped Israel maintain its blockade of Gaza by keeping its Rafah crossing mostly closed and has stoked hatred and fear towards Hamas. On the other hand, Egypt has been a central mediator, though hardly an unbiased broker, in intra-Palestinian efforts to mend bridges, helping clinch the recent reconciliation accord between Fatah and Hamas.

Beyond the regimes, on the street, where outrage is generally more genuine, much of the anger has been on behalf of stones and symbols rather than flesh and blood humans, and has featured a troubling element of religious bigotry.

Over and above the chanting of tired and outdated slogans, there has been little in the way of creative new approaches to break the deadlock and support the Palestinians.

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This is the updated version of an article which first appeared in German in Die Zeit on 14 December 2017.

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Make diplomacy, not war

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By Khaled Diab

The world is paying the price for Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s foiled attempts to reform the United Nations into an effective force to resolve conflicts.

Photo: UN

Tuesday 1 March 2016

As Egyptian diplomacy shifts from the art of the possible to the farce of the improbable, Egypt bids farewell to perhaps its most capable and accomplished international diplomat.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, 93, whose long life included an illustrious academic career, long service in the Egyptian government, as well as a stint as the Secretary-General of the United Nations, died in his hometown, Cairo, on Tuesday 16 February.

Born into a prominent aristocratic family in 1922, Boutros-Ghali was the grandson of his namesake, Egypt’s first Coptic prime minister, Boutros Ghali, who was assassinated for his perceived pro-British stance.

Raised in a cosmopolitan environment at a time when Egypt was a more diverse country, Boutros-Ghali possessed an easy multiculturalism. This was reflected in his mastery of French and English, as well as his decades-long marriage to Leia Nadler, who was born into a wealthy Alexandrian Jewish family.

After gaining qualifications from Cairo and Paris, Boutros-Ghali became an eminent professor of international law and international relations at Cairo University. He departed academia, though he was to return regularly, to enter politics in the 1970s.

Egypt’s embattled president at the time, Anwar al-Sadat, took Boutros-Ghali on board to aid him in his controversial bid to forge peace with Israel. In Arab eyes, this is the darkest point in his long career.

Despite his public support for Sadat, Boutros-Ghali had many private misgivings about the peace process: Israel’s refusal to deal with the Palestinian question, Arab rejectionism, as well as Sadat’s acquiescence to Menachem Begin’s demands, his cavalier attitude towards the Arab world and the president’s undermining of the Egyptian negotiating team.

“Sadat had concluded that Egypt could not undertake a major effort to gain the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people as long as Egyptian territory lay under Israeli control,” the frustrated diplomat wrote in his diary. “I was convinced that no treaty of peace could endure unless it included measures for Palestinian rights.”

One can only imagine how different the Israeli-Palestinian context would have been today had Israel sought a peace deal with the Palestinians alongside Egypt, had the Arabs dropped their rejectionist posturing and joined Egypt to form a united front, and had Sadat courted the Arab world instead of berating it.

But the idea that Boutros-Ghali had sold out the Arab and African cause is an unfair one. He just pursued it in his own way, whether you agree with it or not, as his subsequent track record shows.

For example, Boutros-Ghali humbly never took public credit for one of his most significant achievements, both symbolically and politically, the secret talks he held to help negotiate the release of Nelson Mandela.

As the first African and Arab to become UN Secretary General, in 1991, the mild-mannered, self-effacing, but tough Egyptian sought to transform the international body at a time when the world was taking new form after the end of the Cold War.

Against the backdrop of the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, Boutros-Ghali quickly set to work, formulating an innovative Agenda for Peace which expanded the then focus on peacekeeping to embrace preventive diplomacy, and to encompass post-conflict peacebuilding.

But for the law-professor-turned-diplomat, the new world order would not be made by peace alone. To complete a complementary trinity of sorts, Boutros-Ghali formulated an Agenda for Development and an Agenda for Democratisation, which was his parting gift as he was being pushed out of office.

Boutros-Ghali stands before a shed containing the remains of scores of dead killed during a massacre at Nyarubuye Church, in south-eastern Rwanda.
Photo: UN

Barely two years after formulating his blueprint for preventing, making and keeping peace, the Rwandan genocide, in which up to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were bludgeoned to death, occurred.

While an independent report found that Boutros-Ghali and his team had missed important signals that a genocide was imminent, the team document apportioned most of the blame on the permanent members of the UN’s Security Council: their failure to provide peacekeepers with a mandate to use military force and their unwillingness to send troops once the mass killings began.

“We cannot solve every such outburst of civil strife or militant nationalism simply by sending in our forces,” the then American president Bill Clinton said dismissively, despite desperate UN appeals.

Frustrated by Western stalling, Boutros-Ghali turned to African heads of state. “I begged them to send troops,” he disclosed at the time. “Unfortunately, let us say with great humility, I failed. It is a scandal.”

The Potočari genocide memorial near Srebrenica.

At around the same time, Bosnian Serbs massacred over 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks in Srebenicia despite the presence of UN peacekeepers. A later investigation partly blamed the UN’s “philosophy of neutrality and nonviolence” for enabling the mass killings. However, as with Rwanda, most of the blame was placed at the feet of the Security Council and its unwillingness to commit enough troops and give them the mandate to use force.

This inertia caused by individual member states, especially those seated on the Security Council, was what Boutros-Ghali had presciently attempted to shore up with his Agenda for Peace. Although the document did not call for the rethinking of the Security Council, it did recommend the establishment of forces to prevent conflict and enforce the peace, a special peace fund and the right for the UN to levy taxes to finance operations.

But now that the United States had become the world’s sole superpower, it was in no mood for such multilateral reforms. Although Boutros-Ghali’s constant drive for reform and his relative prioritisation of Africa and developing countries endeared him to most member states, Washington was livid.

This said more about Pax Americana than it did about Boutros Ghali. As Le Monde Diplomatique pointed out at the time, this scion of a wealthy Egyptian family was no “dangerous subversive” but an “enlightened conservative”.

And the experience of being booted out of the UN was enlightening for Boutros-Ghali. “It would be some time before I fully realised that the United States sees little need for diplomacy; power is enough,” he wrote. “Diplomacy is perceived by an imperial power as a waste of time and prestige and a sign of weakness.”

Boutros-Ghali spent the rest of his years promoting, in his cautious, “enlightened conservative” kind of way, pluralism, multilateralism, and multiculturalism, which he viewed as “the essence of democracy”.

Among other things, he became secretary-general of la Francophonie, the French equivalent of the British Commonwealth, and served as director of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights.

With the Middle East ablaze and the international community unable to cope with the spreading flames, one thing is clear: the world needs to appoint another reformer to lead the UN and to empower him or her to reinvent it.

____

Follow Khaled Diab on Twitter.

This is the extended version of an article which first appeared on Al Jazeera on 17 February 2016.

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Beyond the Arab winter

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By Khaled Diab

As the Middle East stumbles perilously close to its own “world war”, seeds of change are already sprouting hopes of a better century ahead.

Tuesday 10 November 2015

The fate of the Middle East was sealed in the blood-drenched trenches of World War I. Out of the smouldering ashes of the Ottoman empire arose dreams of national freedom which were dashed by European imperialism, post-colonial despotism and neo-colonialism.

A century on, nothing has changed and everything has changed. As these hundred years of dreams and nightmares, of illusion and disillusion, with a few measures of delusion, reach their dissolution point, what does the next century hold in store for the region?

Trying to forecast something as complex, unfathomable and random as the future is reckless at best, and a fool’s errand in these highly volatile and tumultuous times. But my intention here is not to gaze into a crystal ball. Rather, like gardeners or farmers, it is essential that we locate the blight and the weeds suffocating our societies, and identify the seeds and shoots of a better tomorrow so that we can nurture them.

In 2011, with great courage, determination and vision, millions of Arabs decided to shake their societies from their apathetic nightmarish slumber to walk the dream of equality, socioeconomic justice and dignity. Now for tens of millions that dream has become a nightmare, the gates to paradise had a hidden trapdoor down into hell.

Early talk of an “Arab Spring” has given way to gloomy reflections about the Arab winter. With all the heavy clouds hanging over our region, it looks like we’re in for seriously stormy times ahead. Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya have already plunged into the abyss, while numerous other countries, including my native Egypt, are wobbling on the edge of the precipice, at risk of falling off the cliff at any time.

Despite their role in destabilising the region by proxy, the Gulf states, with the exception of Bahrain, have not yet witnessed any major upheavals. However, they are far more vulnerable than they appear at first sight.

This is especially the case as the reserves of petro-dollars available to placate the population hurtle downwards with the huge drop in global oil prices, and the war in Yemen looks set to turn into a long-drawn out Vietnamesque catastrophe.

With three UN Security Council members involved militarily in Syria, even major global powers find themselves at risk of being sucked into the Middle Eastern black hole, at risk of coming to direct blows. But they feel the risk is worth it as they scramble to stake their claims in the new Middle East, as the century-old post-Ottoman regional order collapses.

Add to this the Saudi-Iran tussle, as well as the short-lived and ever-changing alliances and animosities of the other regional powers, and it is clear that the Middle East stands perilously close to being completely engulfed by its own “world war”.

Amid this gloom and doom, are there any signs of hope on the horizon?

In many parts of the Middle East, winter is actually a fertile period when water-starved, sun-drenched vegetation finally receive the sustenance they need to grow. And the region’s social and political soil is showing signs of this kind of winter growth.

Many misread the situation as a sign either of the invincible strength of authoritarian despotism or the tyrannical terror of religious fundamentalism.

But rather than revival, the extreme violence we are witnessing is a sign of the bloody, long-drawn death throes of three forms of despotism: that of the tyrannical Arab state, Islamist demagoguery and foreign hegemony.

Whether these deaths will result in the birth of a better Middle East will depend on whether the seeds of change currently showing early shoots will be nurtured into full blossom.

The one thing Arab regimes and Islamists alike fear the most is free thought and its expression because they can be deployed as weapons of mass disobedience. But even brutal oppression and murder have done little to arrest the proliferation of this particular WMD. Ultimately, no amount of thuggery from regimes or Islamists will force Arabs to abandon their thirst for knowledge and their hunger to speak their minds.

Despite appearances to the contrary, another area where the ground has shifted majorly is religion. The failed “Islamism is the solution” formula, as well as the bullying of fundamentalists, has convinced millions of Arabs that the relationship between religion and politics must be changed.

The rise of ISIS and the political abuse of religion by many regimes, particularly the absolutist monarchies, has driven home to many the urgent need for secularisation. If religion does not move to its rightful spheres – the private and spiritual – in the near future, then hell will have no fury like the region’s fanatics scorned.

Gender is another area where a largely unseen, sometimes underground, revolution is taking place. In numerous countries, women have had enough of being told to wait for their rights and are trying to seize them – and they have plenty of male allies too.

But for these shoots to truly blossom and bloom may require the oil era, which has been more of a curse than a blessing, to come to an end. Only then perhaps will the people of the Middle East have enough breathing space to overcome the combined yoke of domestic dictatorship and foreign hegemony and to build a borderless region of prosperity and justice.

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Follow Khaled Diab on Twitter.

This article first appeared on Al Jazeera on 2 November 2015.

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The UN’s Insecurity Council

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By Khaled Diab

The UN Security Council has a long track record of failing to resolve conflicts. Now it is also in danger of bringing the major powers to blows.

Wednesday 4 November 2015

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s recent surprise visit to Israel and Palestine followed fast on the heels of France’s efforts in the UN Security Council to issue a presidential statement in support of the deployment of international observers at the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount and other holy sites in Jerusalem.

Such a flurry of activity by and within the UN is clearly intended to calm the violence that has been escalating for the past month. But even with the best intentions, does the UN in its current form have any capability or credibility in this conflict?

The French draft on international observers, by focusing on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount, above all gives credibility to the myth that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about religion – but it also confuses a symptom with the disease.

The Temple Mount is only a microcosm of the wider conflict and it is not where the greatest abuses occur. It would be far better and more useful if international observers were deployed across the occupied territories and in East Jerusalem to monitor the daily transgressions there.

Better still would be an international peacekeeping force, which would be good for both sides. For Palestinians, it would offer protection from Israel’s arbitrary and repressive military rule. For Israelis, it would provide security without the corrupting domestic influence of draconian militarism. For both sides, it could offer the breathing space required to rebuild bridges burnt over the past couple of decades.

However, it is near impossible that such an ambitious proposal would fly, if even the idea of proposing international guardian angels at Jerusalem’s holy sites is meeting with such stiff resistance.

Israel is adamantly opposed to the French proposal. “Israel is not the problem on the Temple Mount; it’s the solution. We maintain the status quo,” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu claimed defiantly.

And Israel, through its patron and ally, the United States, holds an effective veto over the UN. Washington has exercised its veto right, as one of the five permanent member of the Security Council, to shield Israel dozens of times, not to mention the threat, or fear, of a veto on numerous other occasions to stifle resolutions at their inception.

But it is not just the US that has exploited its veto power irresponsibly to undermine global and local security. Other permanent members have been similarly reckless.

Take Syria as an example. Moscow, along with Beijing, has vetoed four resolutions on Syria. Displaying a multilateralism of sorts, all five of the Security Council’s permanent members, either directly or indirectly, have been involved in the Syrian civil war.

Rather than working for the common global interest of, first, preventing, and now, ending the Syrian conflict, they have selfishly been pursuing their own perceived narrow national interests. Moreover, the Security Council’s failures do not just stop at the here and now. The council’s inability to defang conflict is legendary, with one of the most alarming examples being the Rwandan genocide.

This is partly because the Security Council’s architecture is not fit for purpose. Intended primarily to prevent global conflicts involving the major powers, it is ineffective in regional or proxy warfare.

The Security Council has arguably succeeded in this mission and, even during the Cold War, it helped prevent direct confrontation between the major powers of the capitalist and communist camps. However, they did, and continue to, engage in proxy conflicts, with Syria being the most notable current example.

Additionally, most conflicts today are local or regional ones, and so are difficult to defuse with this architecture, especially the incredibly problematic veto right, which blocks the ability for collective action if just one permanent member objects.

Moreover, we have reached a dangerous fork in the road. Nowadays the Security Council is in danger of magnifying, rather than dissipating, conflict, as its paralysis over Syria and the involvement of its permanent members in Syria demonstrates.

There is an urgent need to reform the UN’s architecture to make it a more effective force for global peace and stability.

A growing chorus of voices argue that the number of permanent members of the Security Council should be enlarged to reflect the contemporary reality of the world and to better include unrepresented regions. Candidates put forward include India, Brazil and the European Union.

However, an enlarged Security Council in which its new permanent members also exercised a veto would likely paralyze this body even more than it already is. It is my view that, with or without enlargement, the veto has to go.

Given the gravity and importance of the issues it deals with, a supermajority voting system could be established in which a resolution would pass if, say, at least two-thirds of the 15 members of the Security Council (including the 10 temporary one).

However, this does little to address the fundamentally undemocratic and paternalistic nature of the Security Council, which effectively subordinates the will of the international community of nations to that of just five countries.

This can be addressed by making the Security Council subordinate to the General Assembly, and the executor of its will. Of course, for the current permanent members, who would have to agree unanimously to such a step, it would be tantamount to turkeys voting for Christmas.

In addition, if that kind of power is transferred to the General Assembly, larger countries would justifiably say that this unfairly discriminated against them. The UN’s current system of one country, one vote means that tiny Tuvalu, with a population of just under 11,000, carries as much weight as China’s 1.35 billion. This means that if the General Assembly were to start handling issues of international security directly, it would also need to be reformed, with a weighted voting system reflecting individual country’s populations – or the division of larger countries into voting regions, each of which would receive a seat at the UN.

Some small or pariah countries, such as Jewish Israel and Shia Iran, feel that the General Assembly has an intrinsic bias against them. Many Israelis are convinced Israel is held to a different standard.

Whether or not this view is accurate, such situations are possible. Just like a national democracy can turn into a dictatorship of the majority, the same can occur within an international democracy. Avoiding such eventualities would require a powerful constitution to govern the UN’s reformed security mandate and a “do no harm” philosophy.

But even if the Security Council were reformed to overcome its inertia, could it resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Many peace activists on both sides are convinced it could, while the Palestinian Authority and PLO have premised their global diplomatic strategy on the idea that the international community, represented by the UN, holds the keys to peace.

At a certain level, this is a valid point of view. Centralising the international response and rooting it in international law would, at the very least, remove the foreign meddling that created and fuels the conflict. At best, it would empower the international community to address the root causes fuelling the conflict. However, this would require a shift away from the long-deceased Oslo paradigm and towards a civil rights platform, identifying and empowering local partners who can build the popular support necessary to lead their peoples towards peaceful coexistence.

But even if the international community were able to act as a single voice and find creative ways to tackle and address the root issues, this would not necessarily resolve the conflict. After all, the UN played a major role in helping create the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the first place.

When it voted for the partition of Palestine in 1947, the newly conceived UN failed to ensure local buy-in, and this foreign hubris had dire consequences. Back then, failing to gain Palestinian and Arab acceptance led to war. Today, failure to gain Israeli support also risks leading to war or, at the very least, Israel openly embracing its pariah status, entering into self-imposed global isolation, and taking the gloves off completely.

The UN and the wider international community can only help lead Israelis and Palestinians to water. But they cannot force them to drink from the font of peace against their will.

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Follow Khaled Diab on Twitter.

This is the extended version of an article which first appeared in Haaretz on 20 October 2015.

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Hypocrisy and the Holy Land

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