In the old days, when the Israeli military
bombed and shelled Palestinians and sought to destroy their society, Hosni
Mubarak used a well-worn formula, fully abetting Israeli actions while uttering
pro-Palestine platitudes. Occasionally, when huge protests rocked the streets,
he green-lighted theatrical gestures such as his wife
heading a relief convoy to Gaza in 2002, and his son fronting a delegation
to Beirut when Israel bombed Lebanon in 2006.
Today, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has not only steered
clear of a single expression of token solidarity with Palestinians. He and his
media creatures have actually ventriloquized Israeli talking points: Hamas is responsible for the staggering
civilian death toll; Hamas is a terrorist
organization; Hamas ought to be tried for war crimes.
One of Sisi’s shills even instigated
a diplomatic crisis with Morocco when she attacked King Mohammed VI for
allowing Islamists to form the government, prompting an official apology by the
Egyptian ambassador to Morocco.
What accounts for this baffling state of
affairs? Mubarak’s and Sisi’s are both dictatorial regimes, and Sisi is seen as
the logical heir to Mubarak (albeit rudely interrupted by the evanescent
Egyptian revolution). But why is Sisi going out of his way to advertise his
identity of interest with Israel? Surely it’s better for him to be circumspect
and keep up appearances?
But Sisi is not Mubarak. For the old dictator,
parliamentary Islamism in both its Egyptian and Palestinian versions was a
troublesome popular movement to be contained. For the new dictator, it’s an
existential threat to be crushed. Mubarak and his intelligence chief mediated
unfairly but serviceably between Israel and Hamas. Sisi and his intelligence
chief have given up any pretense of mediation, ferrying Israeli ultimatums
to Hamas and openly expressing intense dislike not just for the Islamists but
for any pro-resistance
Palestinian.
Sisi’s foreign policy is of a piece with his belligerent
domestic modus operandi, built on the same three pillars: an exterminationist
stance toward any bottom-up political mobilization, Islamist or otherwise; an
alliance with anti-change social forces; and a crude, over-the-top propaganda
machine specifically designed to overturn Egyptians’ sound beliefs, be it
their aversion to state violence to eliminate political opponents or their
enduring affinity with Palestinians. Sisi’s Palestine-Israel policy is but a grotesque
manifestation of the ascendant counter-revolutionary regional order.
Gaza in the Time of
Counter-Revolution
On one level, Israel’s war on Gaza this year is
only the latest
round in Israel’s ongoing punishment of Palestinians for electing Hamas in
2006. But this time, Israeli aggression enables and is enabled by a regionwide
anti-democratic surge, an effort born to counter the uprisings in 2011 that has
now grown from an implicit constellation into an open alliance.
The millions who led and championed the Arab
uprisings wanted to create representative governments answerable to their
citizens, not least on foreign affairs, especially the just treatment of
Palestinians. But what they ultimately got was a brazen, super-motivated,
anti-change regional coalition that now counts Israel as its proud newest
member.
The fact that a rightwing Israeli ruling
establishment and a gaggle of new and old Arab dictators have jettisoned the
old decorum and are openly making common cause is an unintended outcome of the
2011 uprisings, brought about by the intense struggle between pro-change forces
in the Arab world and the powerful guardians of the status quo.
Sisi’s military coup last year was the crowning
achievement of the regional counter-revolutionary entente. Finally the spark of
Egyptian democratization was extinguished once and for all. After maintaining a
studied reticence about the Arab uprisings in 2011-2012, Israeli officials began
to openly laud Arab monarchs and military dictators as a strong “Sunni
axis.” Hawkish Israeli powerbroker Amos Gilad even triumphantly
proclaimed that Arab democracy is “four or five” decades away.
By openly declaring which side it’s on in the
epic battle for Arab democratization, Israel unwittingly accelerates yet
another unintended outcome: the merger of the two great popular strivings of the
modern Middle East, the struggle for popular sovereignty within each state and
the struggle for Palestinian sovereignty within an independent state.
Arab democratization and Palestinian
self-determination have always been linked in practice, both in the sentiments
and political activism of populations and in the stratagems of rulers. But in
journalistic writings, academic tomes, and rulers’ speeches, they’re carefully compartmentalized
as two separate stories, one a domestic affair between rulers and populations,
the other an international great game involving superpowers, non-state actors, aspiring
regional hegemons, and transnational civil society.
Among its many other long-term consequences,
Israel’s latest bombing and shelling of Gaza makes it much harder to pretend
that Arab democratization is one track and the Arab-Israeli conflict another.
They’ve always been nested within and feed
off each other. Israel’s brutal control over Palestinians deepens anti-government
popular mobilization in Arab countries. And Arab rulers’ methods of repression
drive them closer and closer to Israeli interests, Israeli rhetoric, and the
abiding Israeli fear of unsubjugated Arab citizens.
Egypt’s Regime Changes
It’s no news that Arab presidents and monarchs
are rabid anti-democrats. Neither is it news that Israeli generals and prime
ministers (and a hefty portion of the Israeli public) are allergic to Arab
democratization. What is new is how openly and enthusiastically they’re seizing
the moment to together crush the experience of Arab self-rule in both its
Palestinian and wider regional variants.
Egypt’s trajectory since 2011 is crucial to
understanding the development of the new Israel-inclusive anti-democratic
regional caucus. Days into Egypt’s 2011 uprising, Netanyahu instructed his
officials to keep
mum about it until events play out. Naturally, the Israeli establishment
was terrified at the prospect of “losing Egypt.”
When that prospect was on the cusp of becoming
reality, then-defense minister Ehud Barak articulated the longstanding Israeli
equation of political change in Egypt with a “takeover” by the Muslim Brothers.
“The real winners of any short-term election, let’s say within 90 days, will be
the Muslim Brotherhood, because they are already ready to jump,” Barak
told Christiane Amanpour, elaborating, “Usually in revolutions, if they’re
violent, there is an eruption of idealist sentiment at the first moment and
then later on, sooner than later, the only group which is coherent, focused,
ready to kill and be killed if necessary, takes power.”
A year and a half later, when the Muslim
Brothers won the presidency, not by “jumping” on anything or killing anybody
but in fair-and-square elections, Israeli expectations were that Mohamed Morsi
would greet Hamas with open arms and establish an Egypt-Turkey-Hamas-Qatar-Tunisia
axis that would stand up to Israel. Amos Gilad claimed
that Hamas’s “self-confidence was huge when Morsi was in power.”
In fact, as Nicolas Pelham details,
Morsi was severely constrained by the military in his dealings with Hamas,
especially after the August 2012 killing of Egyptian border guards that the
military blamed on Hamas. The military asserted its primacy in scripting
foreign policy, and in short order “Egyptian bulldozers began digging up
tunnels with a tenacity Morsi’s predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, had rarely
shown.”
When Israel bombed Gaza in November 2012, Morsi
engaged in a pragmatic balancing act. He addressed outraged public opinion by
dispatching his prime minister to Gaza, recalling Egypt’s ambassador from Tel
Aviv, and opening the Rafah crossing to the Gaza injured, while working all
channels with Israel to negotiate a ceasefire. Morsi earned plaudits from Obama
for his effective mediation (“he
sensed an engineer’s precision with surprisingly little ideology”), but to
many Egyptians and Palestinians his approach was disappointingly
tepid.
It was Morsi and the Muslim Brothers’ repeatedly
demonstrated pragmatism that was troubling to the region’s anti-change
coalition. Israeli and Saudi officials love
to tar the Egyptian Muslim Brothers, Hamas and other parliamentary
Islamists as “extremists” and “terrorists,” but they would say the same thing if
the Islamists were communists. Israel did say the same thing about the
Palestinian national movement when it was dominated by the secular nationalists
of the PLO.
What the region’s anti-democrats really fear are
representative leaders with broad popular constituencies to whom they’re answerable
in periodic elections. When these alternative elites are in power, and not the
likes of Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Ali Abdullah Saleh, life is unbearably hard for
Israel and Saudi Arabia, because they have to actually deal with the
preferences of populations and modify their policies, and that’s unacceptable.
The Regional Anti-democratic Caucus
For Israel, no less than for Saudi Arabia and
the junior members of the anti-democratic caucus (Jordan and the UAE), Sis’s
coup was a blessing, promising to reverse the dangerous consequences of Egyptian
democratization. Those consequences had literally landed on their doorsteps, as
Egyptian crowds encircled the Israeli
and Saudi
embassies in 2011 and 2012 to protest the two countries’ arrogant,
unaccountable policies.
No one can accuse Israeli and Saudi rulers of
not understanding the implications of a democratic Egypt. A representative
government, even if led by the tame
Muslim Brothers and hamstrung by the Egyptian military, would be
susceptible to popular clamor for democratic control over foreign policy.
Translation: the end of Israeli and Saudi impunity. Israel would have to stop
killing Palestinians every few months and start accepting Hamas as an integral
part of the Palestinian national movement. And Saudi Arabia would have to end
its perennial abuse of non-Saudi nationals and face unprecedented scrutiny of
its treatment of citizens.
No surprise then that the Sisi
counter-revolution is a cherished Saudi-Israeli investment. Saudi Arabia sends
him ample
funds and Israel sends him abiding love and support.
“I think that the whole world should support Sisi…Sisi and the liberals,
ElBaradei and others, they deserve the support of the free world,” gushed
former Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak in August 2013. Leave it to an
Israeli politician to seriously call on the free world to back an Arab military
dictator.
Breaking with their usual reticence about their “moderate”
Arab friends, Israeli officials have echoed Barak, advertising the emergent alignment.
Israeli defense official Amos Gilad heralded the “heavyweight axis” of Arab
states which doesn’t view Israel as an enemy. “This has huge importance…and
gives us many opportunities,” he enthused.
In the middle of Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza
and in light of the Sisi regime’s crucial collusion, a former Israeli military
intelligence chief was well pleased with Israel’s admission into the Arab
dictators’ club. “For perhaps the first time, there is a true convergence of
interest among Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority and Israel in
limiting the spread of Islamist extremism.”
In his recent press conference, Netanyahu echoed
Gilad’s words, hailing
“the unique link which has been forged with the states of the region. This as
well is a very important asset for the State of Israel. With the cessation of
the fighting and the conclusion of the campaign, this will open new
possibilities for us.”
Thanks to persistent journalists, the
Sisi-Israel link has moved from the closed-door world of military officialdom
to a matter of public knowledge. Last year, Sisi was
in “heavy communication with Israeli colleagues” throughout the coup and
its aftermath, namely security forces’ repeated mass killings of Morsi supporters. In
turn, Israeli officials closely coordinated with Sisi first their strangling
and then their bombardment of Gaza, checking
his “temperature” every day during the war to make sure he was comfortable
with the military operation as it intensified.”
When Egyptian generals are in close contact with
Israeli counterparts as they unleash state violence on dissenting citizens, and
when Israeli officials check in every day with Egypt’s military rulers to gauge
their tolerance for the merciless bombing of Gazans, it won’t do to euphemize
this as anything other than the lethal partnership it is.
The Regional Quest for
Self-Determination
The Arab uprisings did not succeed in setting up
durable representative governments or just economic systems. The threat of such
momentous democratic changes led regional power-holders to band closer together
and reveal their lethal collaboration, quelling for now the massive movements
from below for political and economic emancipation.
But the more that Israel and its Arab
monarchical and military partners pool their efforts to crush popular strivings
in Gaza, the West Bank, Cairo, Manama, and Amman, the more that they
unintentionally crystallize the manifold struggles against them. We already
know that nothing brings together ideological adversaries and divided classes
in the Arab world like the Palestinian cause. Now, instead of merely
sympathizing with Palestinians, other Arabs may see themselves and Palestinians
as part of a common fellowship of the oppressed, especially those Syrians and Egyptians
who have suffered overwhelming state violence.
At this juncture, it would be wishful thinking
to say that the counter-revolutionary alliance will give rise to a reconstituted
regional revolutionary bloc, with the Palestinians at its core. Arab
populations are too battered and dispersed right now, and considerably
war-weary. And pro-change leaders and activists have been killed, are in prison,
or retreated into private life. Still, it’s too early to proclaim the triumph of
the anti-democratic alliance as the new regional status quo. We’re still in the
middle of the grand realignments set in motion by the Arab uprisings, not the end.
