A Palestinian state as absorber of anger

A Palestinian official on the radio today, when asked about the motives driving the latest wave of violence (including knife attacks on Israelis by a small number of Palestinians, followed by Israeli response), said the motives lay in 48 years of illegal occupation, coupled with feelings of hopelessness on the part of the younger generation.  The official compared this incipient 'third intifada' in that respect to the Arab Spring, and he compared Netanyahu to Mubarak.

Whatever one thinks of that suggested analogy or parallel, there is one obvious, glaring difference: the anger of the Egyptian protesters from 2011 on was directed at their own government, whereas that of Palestinians, as in the present moment, is directed outward, toward a government of occupation, a government not their own in any sense.  Hidden in this very obvious distinction is an implication one wonders whether Israel's leaders have ever fully grasped: namely, that once a sovereign Palestinian state is established, it would become the target at which its citizens would be most likely to direct whatever anger and frustration they might have about unfulfilled hopes or promises.  The longer that Israel continues the occupation, the longer the Palestinians exist in a basically stateless condition,  the longer it will be before there comes a time when Palestinians' anger is directed, in the first instance, where anger is typically first directed: i.e., at one's own government.

I wonder, in other words, whether Israeli leaders have ever taken an unabashedly pragmatic, self-interested view of a sovereign Palestinian state as an absorber of anger, which is what, among other things, it would be.  After an initial period of euphoria, once the state got down to the difficult business of governing and trying to improve its citizens' lives, it would become responsible or accountable in a way that the Palestinian Authority, despite its degree of autonomy in certain spheres, has never been.  This is presumably just one of several ways in which the establishment of a sovereign, universally recognized Palestinian state would benefit not only ordinary Palestinians (in psychic if not necessarily material terms), but also ordinary Israelis.

Added later: Lest the opening of this post give the wrong impression, I assure readers that I'm fully aware that (individual) Israelis have committed violent acts against (individual) Palestinians (including recently) and not just the other way around; on the level of individuals, the violence has flowed both ways, even while on the level of collectives it has been highly asymmetrical and unequal.  My basic position on the conflict should be fairly clear from previous posts; those readers in search of posts that consist solely of impassioned denunciations might be well advised to look elsewhere, since although I sometimes appreciate impassioned polemic, I don't do it all that often here.

Stray thoughts on revolution

A somewhat meandering discussion of revolution at Crooked Timber (CT) prompted me to open Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions (1979), which I hadn't looked at in a while. The distinction between political revolution and social revolution is central to that book's framework, and at the end of it Skocpol suggested that social revolutions -- i.e. those which transform not only political structures but social or class structures as well -- would be relatively unlikely to occur in postcolonial states whose "modern military establishments," while they might stage coups, would generally act to suppress upheavals from below (cf. p.290).

With the benefit of more than thirty years' hindsight, it appears that this forecast probably overestimated the strength and independence of postcolonial militaries. Skocpol herself, in an essay written several years later, i.e. in the early 1980s, about the 1979 Iranian Revolution, noted that "in most contemporary Third World countries, it is hard to distinguish political and social revolution in any firm way, because the state and its incumbent elites are so central to the ownership and control of the economy." But she judged the Iranian Revolution to be more like the great social revolutions of the past than "simply a political revolution, where only governmental institutions are transformed." [1]

Which brings one to the revolutionary upheavals of the last couple of years in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. (Not to mention the ongoing civil war in Syria, which is also a kind of revolution.)

The news summary on the NewsHour this evening contained this:

There were clashes in Egypt today as anti-government rallies marked the second anniversary of the revolution. At least four people were shot and killed in the city of Suez. The scene in Cairo's Tahrir Square was reminiscent of the massive crowds who helped topple President Hosni Mubarak. Street battles with police broke out in Cairo and elsewhere, and well more than 300 people were hurt. The protesters said the revolution was hijacked by Islamists, who now control the government.

Was the toppling of Mubarak a political revolution or a social revolution? I haven't been following events in Egypt very closely, but my impression is that it has been a political but not a social revolution. The upper classes, so far as I'm aware, have not fled the country en masse or been expropriated, whereas the Iranian Revolution by contrast did see "the dispossession of many (especially politically privileged) capitalists...." [2] The basic elements of the state apparatus in Egypt -- the judiciary, the army, the presidency, parliament -- are still in place, and the current struggles have to do, it seems, with the relative influence of Islamist versus liberal/secular forces in the framing of the new constitution, etc. Faced with popular protest, Morsi had to scale back his attempt of a month (or so) ago to seize extraordinary powers, but obviously the non-Islamist (or anti-Islamist) forces protesting in the street on this second anniversary feel that their hopes have not been realized.

In light of this, it is interesting that only one lone commenter on the CT thread, at least the last time I checked, had mentioned the Arab Spring and the associated upheavals. Whether this says something about the CT commentariat or about the difficulty of grasping a process that has yet to reach a conclusion (or both), I'll leave to others to judge.

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1. T. Skocpol, "Rentier state and Shi'a Islam in the Iranian Revolution" (1982), reprinted in her Social Revolutions in the Modern World (1994), p.241.

2. Ibid., pp.240-41.

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Added later: A commenter on CT points helpfully to this bibliography on the Arab Spring, compiled by the Project on Middle East Politics based at George Washington Univ.
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Note: This post was edited slightly on 6/19/15.

Outcasts and thugs in the Egyptian revolution

This post from last January by Ahmed Badawi, which opens with a vivid description of Egyptian street children (of whom there are approximately a million, he says), is still worth reading a year later, I think. (I learned of it because it is quoted in the opening of an article in the current issue of Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. -- an article which, as it happens, has nothing directly to do with Egypt.)

Don't write off 'people power' in ME just yet

Looking at events in Syria and Yemen, Jackson Diehl asserts that "people power [in the Middle East] isn't working." The judgment seems premature and much of the rest of the column rather weird. Of course, this is the same columnist who said that the PA's bid for statehood at the UN was tantamount to a declaration of war against Israel.

What happened to the Palestinian statehood thing, btw? The General Assembly's September session is long over (isn't it?) so something should have been voted on in the way of enhanced observer status. If it was reported on, however, I missed it. Haven't been following the right sites, evidently. (A blogger confessing ignorance -- my my, what is the world coming to?)

Documents of the Arab left

Kal at The Moor Next Door (which I visited recently for the first time in a long time) has started a series of translations of statements, communiques and so on from Arab left-wing parties, especially in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, and Mauritania. The first post in the series, consisting of three statements from the Tunisian Communist Workers Party (PCOT), is here. A main point of the series seems to be to counteract the impression in some quarters that Islamist parties monopolize the organized political space in Tunisia, Egypt, etc.

The post is careful to note it is not endorsing the views of PCOT, which is described as a Marxist-Leninist party with Hoxhaist (as in the former leader of Albania) and Stalinist tendencies, strongly opposed to normalization of relations with Israel. One hopes the full series will include statements from, e.g., social democratic (or democratic socialist) parties as well.

'Demonstrative compellence' is a bust (again)

Back in Jan. '09 I blogged about an article that discussed the notion of 'demonstrative compellence' (as the author termed it) in connection with the G.W. Bush policy toward Iraq. The argument in a nutshell was that the invasion of Iraq was meant to signal to Iran and N. Korea that if they didn't straighten up and fly right they might be next. The strategy was, in essence, a complete failure, at least with respect to its intended targets. Iran continued its less-than-transparent nuclear program and N. Korea showed, on occasion, some apparent willingness to negotiate but basically continued on its path toward acquiring nuclear weapons.

Why bring this up now? Because some might think, not unreasonably, that one motive for the NATO intervention in Libya was to send a signal to possible emulators of Gaddafi that they had better not contemplate atrocities. The trouble is that the signal, if one was intended, has had little effect: the Assad regime in Syria has killed lots of protesters (though recent events in Syria, with some soldiers perhaps having mutinied and killed other members of the security forces -- it's still not entirely clear what happened -- point to the possibility of a split in the armed forces); the Saleh regime in Yemen killed lots of civilians before Saleh's departure; and the Bahraini regime used violence against protesters before (and after) calling in Saudi troops to shore itself up.

The case for the NATO intervention in Libya thus has to be made mostly on humanitarian grounds and in terms of Libya alone, it would seem, since from the standpoint of demonstrative compellence it's been a washout.

Diehl's unwise prophecy

Jackson Diehl's column in today's Wash. Post ("Abbas's formula for war," p. A19, print edition) is nothing short of bizarre. It's hard to know where to begin with this farrago of weirdness. Diehl appears to think that Abbas's commitment to seek "a U.N. General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood in September" is almost tantamount to a declaration of war. Diehl fastens on Abbas's statement in a recent NYT op-ed that a UN statehood vote would mean "Palestine would be negotiating from the position of one United Nations member whose territory is militarily occupied by another." Let's slowly read the first four words: Palestine. would. be. negotiating. Does that sound like a declaration of war? I didn't think so.

It gets worse. Diehl indicts the U.S. and its European allies for indulging "the soft bigotry of wishful thinking about Arab strongmen" by believing in Abbas's words rather than looking at his deeds. He implicitly compares those deeds to the actions of Syria's Bashar al-Assad. The latter has been shooting his own people in demonstrations around the country. Has Abbas been doing anything comparable? I didn't think so.

Abbas, Diehl concludes, "is trying to transform the Arab Spring into a mass movement against Israel," which "could trigger not just another intifada but another Middle East war." This has the inflammatory ring of a potentially self-fulfilling prophecy. What about the stalemated status quo, with a 'peace process' going nowhere? Doesn't that present dangers? Isn't there a chance that a UN General Assembly vote to admit Palestine, although mostly symbolic, might shake things up in a constructive way? Is it sensible to let the current situation, in which no serious talks are taking place, continue indefinitely?

Abbas's prime minister, Salam Fayyad, has succeeded, as Diehl himself semi-acknowledges, in creating the conditions for statehood on the West Bank. Last September a World Bank report concluded that "if the PA maintains its current performance in institution-building and delivery of public services, it is well positioned for the establishment of a state at any point in the near future" (quoted in Robert M. Danin, "A Third Way to Palestine," Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2011, p.102). Diehl writes that the recent Fatah-Hamas reconciliation agreement "probably will obligate" Abbas to fire Fayyad. Probably will obligate? What does that mean? Diehl doesn't bother to explain. He's too busy excoriating Obama for his alleged pressure on Netanyahu.

This column is, arguably, worse than bizarre. It's irresponsible.

'Arab spring' update

Many critics of U.S. foreign policy have long decried the close ties between the U.S. and the House of Saud. It's no secret that the Saudis have been uneasy about the U.S. role in helping nudge its long-time ally Mubarak offstage, and as David Ignatius mentioned in his Wash. Post column of April 27, Pres. Obama's national security adviser met with Saudi King Abdullah this month and gave the king a reassuring letter from Obama. 

It has been plausibly suggested that the Saudis supported the initial proposal for a no-fly zone in Libya because they thought it would distract attention from what has been happening in Bahrain and elsewhere in the region. If that was their motivation, it doesn't seem to have worked. The Libyan intervention turned into a broader effort to protect civilians (and, in effect, indirectly aid the rebels), but it has not distracted attention from the ongoing violent crackdowns on protesters in Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. The simultaneous repressive actions by different governments, and the variation in international response, underscores something that should have been clear all along: humanitarian interventions are always a product of more than one motive and 'consistency' is not necessarily the main criterion by which they should be judged. That said, one hopes that real pressure is being brought to bear on the Yemeni and Bahraini regimes, with both of which the U.S. and Europeans have leverage, to modify what they are doing now.

Poem of the Arab spring

Via Scott Horton: here.