THE EGYPTIAN REVOLT IS COMING HOME

THE EGYPTIAN REVOLT IS COMING HOME

John Pilger

Western leaders should be quaking in their boots.

The uprising in Egypt is our theatre of the possible. It is what people across the world have struggled for and their thought controllers have feared. Western commentators invariably misuse "we" and "us" to speak on behalf of those with power who see the rest of humanity as useful or expendable. The "we" and "us" are universal now. Tunisia came first, but the spectacle always promised to be Egyptian.

As a reporter, I have felt this over the years. At Tahrir ("liberation") Square in Cairo in 1970, the coffin of the great nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser bobbed on an ocean of people who, under him, had glimpsed freedom. One of them, a teacher, described the disgraced past as "grown men chasing cricket balls for the British at the Cairo Club". The parable was for all Arabs and much of the world. Three years later, the Egyptian Third Army crossed the Suez Canal and overran Israel's fortresses in Sinai. Returning from this battlefield to Cairo, I joined a million others in Liberation Square. Their restored respect was like a presence - until the United States rearmed the Israelis and beckoned defeat.

Thereafter, President Anwar Sadat became America's man through the usual billion-dollar bribery and, for this, he was assassinated in 1981. Under his successor, Hosni Mubarak, dissenters came to Liberation Square at their peril. The latest US-Israeli project of Mubarak, routinely enriched by Washington's bagmen, is the building of an underground wall behind which the Palestinians of Gaza are to be imprisoned for ever.

The grisly peacemaker

Today, the problem for the people in Liberation Square lies not in Egypt. On 5 February, the New York Times reported: "The Obama administration formally threw its weight behind a gradual transition in Egypt, backing attempts by the country's vice-president, General Omar Suleiman, to broker a compromise with opposition groups . . . Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it was important to support Mr Sulei¬man as he seeks to defuse street protests . . ."

Having rescued him from would-be assassins, Suleiman is, in effect, Mubarak's bodyguard. His other distinction, documented in Jane Mayer's investigative book The Dark Side, is as supervisor of US "rendition flights" to Egypt, where people are tortured by order of the CIA. When President Obama was asked in 2009 if he regarded Mubarak as authoritarian, his swift reply was "no". He called him a peacemaker, echoing that other great liberal tribune, Tony Blair, to whom Mubarak is "a force for good".

The grisly Suleiman is now the peacemaker and force for good, the man of "compromise" who will oversee the "gradual transition" and "diffuse the protests". This attempt to suffocate the Egyptian revolt will depend on a substantial number of people, from businessmen to journalists to petty officials, who have provided the dictatorship's apparatus. In one sense, they mirror those in the western liberal class who backed Obama's "change you can believe in" and Blair's equally bogus "political Cinema¬scope" (Henry Porter in the Guardian, 1995). No matter how different they appear, both groups are the domesticated backers and beneficiaries of the status quo.

In Britain, the BBC's Today programme is their voice. Here, serious diversions from the status quo are known as "Lord knows what". On 28 January the Washington correspondent Paul Adams declared, "The Americans are in a very difficult situation. They do want to see some kind of democratic reform but they are also conscious that they need strong leaders capable of making decisions. They regard President Mubarak as an absolute bulwark, a key strategic ally in the region.

“Egypt is the country, along with Israel, on which American Middle East diplomacy abso¬lutely hinges. They don't want to see anything that smacks of a chaotic handover to frankly Lord knows what."

Fear of Lord-knows-what requires that the historical truth of US and British "diplomacy" as largely responsible for the suffering in the Middle East be suppressed or reversed. Forget the Balfour Declaration, which led to the im¬position of expansionist Israel. Forget the secret Anglo-American sponsorship of jihadists as a "bulwark" against democratic control of oil. Forget the overthrow of democracy in Iran and the installation of the tyrant shah, and the slaughter and destruction in Iraq. Forget the US fighter jets, cluster bombs, white phosphorus and depleted uranium that are performance-tested on children in Gaza. And now, in the cause of preventing "chaos", forget the denial of almost every basic civil liberty in Omar Sulei¬man's contrite "new" regime in Cairo.

Overtaken by events

The uprising in Egypt has discredited every western media stereotype about the Arabs. The courage, determination, eloquence and grace of those in Liberation Square contrast with "our" specious fear-mongering, with its al-Qaeda and Iran bogeys and iron-clad assumptions of the "moral leadership of the west". It is not surprising that the recent source of truth about the imperial abuse of the Middle East, WikiLeaks, is itself subjected to craven and petty abuse in those self-congratulating newspapers that set the limits of elite liberal debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps they are worried. Public awareness is rising and bypassing them.

In Washington and London, the regimes are fragile and barely democratic. Having long burned down societies abroad, they are now doing something similar at home, with lies and without a mandate. To their victims, the resistance in Liberation Square must seem an inspiration. "We won't stop," said a young Egyptian woman on TV. "We won't go home." Try kettling a million people in the centre of London, bent on civil disobedience, and try imagining it could not happen.

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BEHIND THE ARAB REVOLT LURKS A WORD WE DARE NOT SPEAK

BEHIND THE ARAB REVOLT LURKS A WORD WE DARE NOT SPEAK

John Pilger

The people of Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and Libya are rising up not only against their leaders, but also western economic tyranny.


Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I interviewed Ray McGovern, one of an elite group of CIA officers who prepared the president's daily intelligence brief. McGovern was at the apex of the "national security" monolith that is American power and had retired with presidential plaudits. On the eve of the invasion, he and 45 other former senior officers of the CIA and other US intelligence agencies wrote to President George W Bush that the "drumbeat for war" was based not on intelligence, but lies.

“It was 95 per cent charade," McGovern told me.
“How did they get away with it?"
“The press allowed the crazies to get away with it."
“Who are the crazies?"

“The people running the administration have a set of beliefs a lot like those expressed in Mein Kampf . . . these are the same people who were referred to in the circles in which I moved, at the top, as 'the crazies'."

I said, "Norman Mailer has written that he believes America has entered a pre-fascist state. What's your view of that?"

“Well . . . I hope he's right, because there are others saying we are already in a fascist mode."

First blows

On 22 January, McGovern emailed me to express his disgust at the Obama administration's treatment of the alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning and its pursuit of Julian Assange. "Way back when George and Tony decided it might be fun to attack Iraq," he wrote, "I said something to the effect that fascism had already begun here. I have to admit I did not think it would get this bad this quickly."

On 15 February, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, gave a speech at George Washington University in which she condemned governments that arrest protesters and crush free expression. She lauded the liberating power of the internet but failed to mention that her government was planning to close down those parts of the internet that encourage dissent and truth-telling. It was a speech of spectacular hypocrisy. McGovern was in the audience. Outraged, he rose from his chair and silently turned his back on Clinton. He was immediately seized by police and a security goon, beaten to the floor, dragged out and thrown into jail, bleeding. He has sent me photographs of his injuries. He is 71. During the assault, which was clearly visible to Clinton, she did not pause in making her remarks.

Fascism is a difficult word, because it comes with an iconography that touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda against America's official enemies and to promote the west's foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary written in the struggle against Hitler. And yet fascism and imperialism are twins. In the aftermath of the Second World War, those in the imperial states who had made respectable the racial and cultural superiority of "western civilisation" found that Hitler and fascism had claimed the same, employing strikingly similar methods. Thereafter, the very notion of American imperialism was swept from the textbooks and popular culture of an imperial nation forged on the genocidal conquest of its native people. And a war on social justice and democracy became "US foreign policy".

As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers such as Suharto, Mobutu and Pinochet to dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, America has sustained every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy. In "Operation Cyclone", the CIA and MI6 secretly fostered and bankrolled Islamic extremism. The object was to smash or deter nationalism and democracy. Most of the victims of this western state terrorism have been Muslims. The people gunned down this past week in Bahrain and Libya - the latter a "priority market" for the UK, according to Britain's official arms "procurers" - join those children blown to bits in Gaza by the latest US F-16 aircraft.

The revolt in the Arab world is against not merely a resident dictator, but a worldwide economic tyranny, designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and the World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries such as Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with 40 per cent of the population earning less than $2 a day. The people's triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.

Enemy with a name

How did such extremism take hold in the liberal west? "It is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity and concern for the poor and oppressed," observed Noam Chomsky a generation ago, "[and] to replace these dangerous feelings by self-centred egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that [an order of] inequities and oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is under way to convince people . . . that this not only is what they should feel but that it is what they do feel . . ."

Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun.
In the US, where 45 per cent of young African Americans have no jobs and the top hedge-fund managers are paid $1bn a year on average, mass protests against cuts in services and jobs have spread to heartland states such as Wisconsin. In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest movement, UK Uncut, is taking direct action against tax avoiders and rapacious high-street banks. Something has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a name now.

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THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION FISSURES IN THE ARAB REVOLTS

THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION

FISSURES IN THE ARAB REVOLTS

By VIJAY PRASHAD

March 11 - 13, 2011

There will be blood. No revolution comes in a straight line. Counter-revolution runs its steady course from Bahrain and Saudi Arabia through Egypt and into Libya. In Qatif, the Saudi National Guard opened fire on a protest, a phenomenon which has become commonplace in Bahrain. Inside Egypt, rumors fly that it is the security services that orchestrated the attacks on Copts and women (at a march on the 100th anniversary of international women's day). Libya is in the throes of an asymmetrical civil war, with Qaddafi's forces and the rebels running a bloody standoff somewhere near the meridian that divides the country into its eastern and western halves. Jubilation at the hasty departure of Ben Ali and Mubarak settle into a time-sequence that is less exhilarating, but nonetheless impressive. It appears as if the people are not to be content by the first flush of victory. What is wanted is more, and this is where the counter-revolution comes in.


Libya.


At one end of the Arab Revolt is Libya, where the guns are not silent, and threats of military intervention confound discussions in Brussels. The itch to invade mirrors the lead up to the Iraq war in 2003, but with the accents reversed: the French and the English are eager to thrust themselves, while the Americans and the Germans hesitate. NATO warships sail closer to the Libyan coast, and talk of "no-fly zones" intensifies. U. S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates rightly warns that any military confrontation would be seen as a declaration of war. An exhausted U. S. military machine is not capable of yet another war. And besides, the political outcomes of intervention in Libya are unclear.


Qaddafi's hardened armies and the rebels, led as they are by ex-ministers of Qaddafi's regime (such as Mustafa Abdul Jalil), continue to battle along the Mediterranean road, between Surt and Ras Lanuf. One day the rebels advance, and the next Qaddafi's forces. In his dreams, Qaddafi saves nations. Awake, he razes cities. That has been the fate of some of these cities on the edge of the Gulf of Sidra. The "oil dole" and clan favoritism has enabled Qaddafi to secure support in the western part of Libya. The east is largely in the hands of the rebels. With a weak military capacity, the rebels nonetheless have Benghazi in hand and the more urbane set within Qaddafi's troupe are loath to assume that it can be taken back militarily. It would probably be mete for the National Libyan Council (the government of the east) to declare themselves as the authentic government of Libya and wait. As oil revenue dwindle to the west and if an arms embargo holds, pressure on Qaddafi from below might set the western part of Libya aflame. The working class of Tripoli is restive. Their neighborhoods, such as Feshloon and Tejura, are on permanent lock-down. Martyrs lie on autopsy tables at Tripoli Central Hospital. The workers are not pusillanimous; they are waiting for their moment. Military intervention from NATO will only strengthen Qaddafi's hand, allowing him to don the robes of the revolutionary against imperialist attack. The workers are also patriots. They might lose their resolve against Qaddafi if they see French and English speaking troops conducting Iraq War style raids into their homes.


Qaddafi continues to insist that the NLC is the mask of al-Qaeda. The Muslim Brotherhood has certainly a long lineage in the eastern part of Libya, bordering as it does Egypt, the home of the Brotherhood. Sections of the Brotherhood morphed into much more hardened fighters after their sojourn as part of the U.S.-Saudi-Pakistani war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. They formed the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (al-Jama'a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah fi-Libya), and returned to eastern Libya to take on Qaddafi. His forces cracked down with force, largely against the main figures of the Group, but also against Salafis who were not radical (such as Muhammad al-Bashti, brutally tortured to death in 1981). The Group tried to maintain its strength, and it did benefit from the Algerian Islamist uprising. A crippling blow came in October 1997, when the Libyan forces killed the Group's most important commander, Salah Fathi bin Salman (who was known as Abu Abd al-Rahman Hattab). Qaddafi's early support for the U. S. led "War on Terror" earned him quick dividends. The Group's remaining intellectual leaders were swept up in 2004, Abu Munder al-Saidi in Hong Kong and Abdullah Sadeq in Thailand: they went into the black hole of Libya's prison system. What could have been the rump of an Islamist uprising had been fully destroyed. What is now in command in eastern Libya is not al-Qaeda aspirants, but regional forces who have long-standing grievances against Tripoli. The counter-revolution prefers to see them as Islamists, and hopes to drive the stake of fear into the heart of nearby Europe.


Emirs.


With the media concentrating on Libya, focus has shifted from the Sultans of Arabia and their crackdown. Money is the oil that lubricates their counter-revolution. The Saudi royal family hastened to provide transfer payments that total $37 billion. The Gulf Cooperation Council has decided to turn over $20 billion to the beleaguered monarchies of Bahrain and Oman. Muscat and Manama have been equally overrun by dissent. Recycled cabinets are not enough for this popular upsurge, and the bullets fired into the crowd have failed to have the required pedagogical effect. The people will not stop their obligation to democracy.


If Qaddafi's counter-revolution takes refuge in fantasies of al-Qaeda on Europe's doorstop, the emirs stoke the fires of the Shia Revival. The Baharnah, the indigenous Shia of Bahrain, for instance, have a political party, the al-Wifaq, that certainly speaks for the Shia working class and middle class who feel a great sense of alienation from Bahrain's institutions. However, this alienation was not always so. In other words, it is not a sectarian alienation whose roots might be found in the 8th century. Rather, the Shia distress in Bahrain has modern roots, even if these are refracted through older lineages. It is an alienation from oil more than a theological dispute.


Bahrain's oil was discovered in 1932, and by 1934 it was the first country to export its oil to Europe. A British protectorate against the Ottoman Empire, Bahrain provided oil and protection for the sea lanes from powers that sought to rival British dominion over the Indian Ocean. In December 1934, a group of educated Bahrainis drafted a petition to their titular ruler, Sheikh Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa (who answered to Sir Charles Dalrymple Belgrave, who fashioned himself as Belgrave of Bahrain). No real reforms were forthcoming, and so in 1938, Shia and Sunni leaders (educated merchants and intellectuals) joined with the oil workers (who went on strike) to call for an elected legislature and the other trappings of democracy (including legal trade unions). They were crushed. Their leaders were sent to India. A second revolt, this time helped along by Nasserism, between 1954 and 1956 was equally beaten back (its leaders were sent to the cell in St. Helena that once housed Napoleon). There was little sectarian in these movements from below. They wanted a better share of the oil profits, and respect.


Independence from Britain in 1971 was greeted by a new struggle for constitutionalism. The al-Khalifa ruler went to visit the leading Shia cleric, Ayatollah Mohsin al-Hakim in his base in Najaf (Iraq), to urge him to moderate the Shia demands. It was in the interest of the al-Khalifas to color the demands from below as sectarian. A toothless constitutionalism was set up. Frustration with the pace of reform was heightened after the Iranian Revolution, and the older (Akhbari Shia) traditions found themselves marginalized by the more aggressive political Shi'ism that emanated from Qom (Iran). Sheikh Ali Salman, the current head of the al-Wafiq party, comes from this latter tradition, schooled in King Saud University (chemistry) and then in the famous al-Hawzah al-Arabiyyah in Qom (he was there during the first Gulf War). A renewed constitutional attempt in the early 1990s was once more crushed (and Ali Salman had to leave Bahrain). It set the stage for the King's new constitution of 2002 that made the King truly sovereign and the various bodies purely advisory. The Shia leader of the time, Sheikh Abdul Amir al-Jamal said of it, "this is not the type of parliament we had demanded." Al-Jamal died in 2006, leaving the field to Sheikh Isa Ahmed Qassim and his protégé, Ali Salman.


Whatever their temperament, the Wafiq Party led by Ali Salman is not in a position to create the vilayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the clerics. In collaboration with six other parties, it has recently made a reasonable demand, that the current government resign and that a new transition government "whose hands have not been stained with the blood of the martyrs" help "pave the way for the transition to real reforms." They point to housing and income, to corruption and monarchical excess as their spurs. Also here is the talk of discrimination, and the "exclusion of competent national talent."


About half of the population of Bahrain comes from South Asia: their needs are not on the table for this revolution. This is a pity. It shows the limits of their demands. The distressed migrants from Egypt and South Asia fleeing from Libya and stranded in Tunisia should give us a sense of the social ecology of the oil industry. These unregistered people produce the world's wealth but are themselves utterly disposable in a time of crisis (only the stalwart agencies of the UN are at hand, and their miserable resources can only do so much). It is unclear to me why the new revolutionary forces in Egypt have not insisted that the border between Libya and Egypt be opened up to welcome their co-nationals homes.


The counter-revolution counts on sectarianism to tear apart the Arabian resistance. During Israel's war on Lebanon in 2006 and the Shia-Sunni conflict in Iraq, the establishment Sunni clerics in Saudi Arabia went on an anti-Shia rampage. Clerics such as Safar al-Hawali and Nasir al-'Umar preached exclusively through an anti-Shia lens. 'Abd al-Rahman al-Barrak produced a fatwa in December 2006 that declared the Shia to be takfir, enemies of the Sunnis. In the last months of 2006, Toby Jones notes, the security forces "arrested Shi'is from Qatif and the surrounding areas, reportedly for supporting Hezbollah." Ten years before, in Bahrain, the minister for justice and Islamic Affairs, Sheikh Abd Allah bin Khalid al-Khalifa, threatened "some Islamic movements" for "taking an extremist path," and so allowed his security agencies to take the violent path against them, mainly Shia. It was a convenient way to pollute the waters of grievance.


In 1845, a British official watched unrest take hold in Bahrain. He wrote, "Numbers of the principal and most wealthy inhabitants, to avoid the effects of increased anarchy and confusion, fled upon the commencement of actual hostilities to Koweit on the Arabian and to Lingah and other places on the Persian Coast, where they have since temporarily located themselves, in order to watch the course of events, and return with the first signs of peace and established government, and consequent security to life and property." The counter-revolution in 2011, similarly, watches and waits for its agents to do its work for it. It too wants to preserve life and property, but not those of the masses; only its own life and its own property. It counts on its allies in the North to bring the cavalry if things turn dire. Intervention might yet come in Libya, but it has already come to the Arabian Peninsula. Last year, the U. S. government inked a $60 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. The kit includes UH-60 Blackhawk and MH-6 Little Bird helicopters, very useful in counter-insurgency. When the Peninsula's political temperature rises, those helicopters will be the "first signs of peace and established government" in the region.

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THE NEW ARAB AWAKENING "NEITHER WITH THE WEST, NOR AGAINST IT"

"NEITHER WITH THE WEST, NOR AGAINST IT"

THE NEW ARAB AWAKENING

By ALAIN GRESH

March 11 - 13, 2011

A large Muslim country is overwhelmed by strikes and demonstrations. This pillar of US regional policy is damaged by authoritarian rule and its resources are looted by the president’s family; there is social and economic crisis; Washington abandons an old ally and the US Secretary of State calls on a dictator to stand down and allow for democratic transition.

This may sound like Egypt in 2011. In fact, it was Indonesia in May 1998, and the call for President Suharto to stand down came from Madeleine Albright, not Hillary Clinton. He had seized power in 1965 with the help of the CIA in a coup in which half a million communists, or suspected communists, were killed.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Indonesia was no longer needed as a bulwark against communism; the US decided it would rather support democratic movements, and direct them to suit its interests. President Bill Clinton wanted to project a more open image of the US. It turned out to be a wise choice, and Indonesia has maintained close relations with the US, even though, as an active member of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, it has taken an independent stance on the Iranian nuclear issue.

What do we learn from this? No dictatorship lasts forever, even when it rules the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Internal changes influence foreign policy, but the extent of evolution depends on the context: Egypt is not Indonesia, and the Middle East is not Southeast Asia.

It has been commonplace for western politicians and diplomats to sneer at the “Arab street”; they asked if we really needed to listen to hundreds of millions of people with their Islamist and anti-western slogans when we got on so well with their leaders, who were so good at maintaining order, and extended such warm hospitality. (Between 1995 and 2001, 400 French government ministers spent their holidays in Morocco.) These leaders maintained the fiction of the Israel-Palestine peace process, even as Israeli settlements spread.

The fantasy that the Arabs are passive and unsuited to democracy has evaporated in weeks. Arabs have overthrown hated authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. In Libya, they have fought a sclerotic regime in power for 42 years that has refused to listen to their demands, facing extraordinary violence, hundreds of deaths, untold injuries, mass exodus and generalised chaos. In Algeria, Morocco, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Iraqi Kurdistan, the West Bank and Oman, Arabs have taken to the streets in vast numbers. This defiance has spread even to non-Arab Iran.

And where promises of reform have been made but were then found wanting, people have simply returned to the streets. In Egypt, protesters have demanded faster and further-reaching reform. In Tunisia, renewed demonstrations on 25-27 February led to five deaths but won a change of prime minister (Mohamed Ghannouchi stepped down in favour of Beji Caid-Essebsi). In Iraq, renewed protests led to a promise to sack unsatisfactory ministers. In Algeria, the 19-year emergency law was repealed amid continuing protests. The demands are growing throughout the region, and will not be silenced.

The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the uprising in Libya, and all the other popular movements that have shaken the region are not just about how people want to live and develop, but about regional politics. For the first time since the 1970s, geopolitics cannot be analysed without taking into account, at least in part, the aspirations of people who have retaken control of their destinies.

This is certainly the case with Egypt. Even if it is too early to predict foreign policy, Washington has lost an unconditional ally: US regional strategy has relied on Egypt, along with Israel (with which Sadat signed a peace treaty in 1979), for the last 30 years. Egypt took part in the 1990-91 Gulf war against Iraq, and Mubarak was at the forefront of the fight against the “Iranian threat”. He maintained the illusion of the Middle East “peace process”, putting pressure on the Palestinian Authority to continue negotiations, and regularly welcomed Israeli leaders to Sharm el-Sheikh, even though it was clear they had no intention of agreeing a peace accord. Egypt under Mubarak participated in the economic blockade of Gaza and helped scupper all attempts at reconciliation by Hamas and Fatah, even one negotiated by another “moderate” country, Saudi Arabia (the Mecca accord of May 2007). During the uprising, some demonstrators waved placards in Hebrew, claiming the only language Mubarak understood was that of Israel’s leaders.

Peace and stability

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, currently in charge in Egypt, has reassured Washington and Tel Aviv that it will respect Egypt’s international commitments, a reference to the 1978 Camp David accords and 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty. It is unlikely Egyptians would want to return to a state of war, but they do not see these agreements as the basis of regional peace and stability: quite the opposite. As Steven Cook of the Council of Foreign Relations in New York put it: “From the perspective of many Egyptians, this arrangement hopelessly constrained Cairo’s power while freeing Israel and the US to pursue their regional interests unencumbered. Without the threat of war with Egypt, Israel poured hundreds of thousands of Israelis into settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, invaded Lebanon (twice), declared Jerusalem its capital, and bombed Iraq and Syria”.

Egyptians have expressed their sympathy with the Palestinians and Lebanese whenever they have had the chance: during the war with Lebanon in 2006, portraits of the Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah were displayed in Cairo shops even as the Egyptian regime condemned Hizbullah’s recklessness. The protesters who fought for multi-party democracy do not much like Iran – a non-Arab, Shia Muslim country and historic rival, whose repressive rule worsens by the day – but they do value its refusal to bow to the diktats of the US and Israel. A more representative future government in Egypt will need to take account of popular feeling over Gaza and relations with Israel, and will probably be more wary of US attempts to form a common (if undeclared) front between Arab countries and Israel against Iran.

Egypt’s room for manoeuvre will also depend on its economic base, which has been weakened by years of “liberalisation”, begun by Sadat’s infitah (opening up of the economy). Egypt remains dependent on US military and food aid, and funding from the EU, which now has a fragile economy. Some commentators suggest that Egypt could adopt an independent foreign policy like Turkey; but Turkey’s diplomatic freedom is based on a dynamic economy, and a GNP three times that of Egypt’s, with roughly the same population.

The upheaval in Egypt worries other Arab countries which are presented as “moderate”. Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah intervened with President Barack Obama on Mubarak’s behalf. The king, and other leaders, are haunted by the fear of a decline of US power in the region. The fact that the US has managed to put together a broad front against Iran’s nuclear programme and impose sanctions does not hide its failure in Iraq (US troops are due to withdraw by the end of this year, and Iraq has been affected by the protests spreading across the region), the stalemate in Afghanistan, and its inability to get the Israelis to halt expansion of settlements.

Saudi media warning

The resignation of Saad Hariri’s government in Lebanon in January and the abandonment of Mubarak worsened the fears of these “moderate” leaders, already alarmed by the way the movement for democracy had spread. The youth of the Gulf are not immune to events in Tunisia and Egypt. On 16 February, the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan called on the authorities to take account of the aspirations of young people, who “take an interest in development projects, follow their implementation and how quickly they are carried out, measure their effectiveness and cost, and share information on who gains and who loses from them” – a reference to the corruption that blights many projects in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia was already trying a more independent path by getting closer to Syria. It responded favourably to overtures by the new Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, in January.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has lost a faithful ally in Mubarak, who was opposed to PA reconciliation with Hamas and supported its policy of negotiation with Israel. The PA has to recognise the change. In February Obama asked PA president Mahmoud Abbas to withdraw a UN Security Council resolution the PA had tabled, condemning Israeli settlement building. Abbas refused, marking a hardening of position towards the US. Will the lack of political progress inspire the youth of the West Bank – and Gaza – to express their desire for freedom and dignity? Will they present their struggle in terms of human rights and equality, and protest peacefully in the streets, against both their leaders and the occupation? According to The Jerusalem Post, the Israeli army is creating a rapid reaction force to counter this.

In Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu’s government was more concerned than the US’s Arab allies by events in Egypt, and made clear its strong support for Mubarak. Daniel Levy, of the New America Foundation thinktank, says this attitude illuminates Israel’s frequent claim to be the “only democracy in the Middle East”: it indicates not a fear of being isolated among surrounding dictatorships but a wish to remain the only democracy. Successive Israeli governments have felt comfortable with pro-western authoritarian regimes because they were aware of the Arab street’s solidarity with the Palestinians.

For the moment Israel is paralysed, deliberately exaggerating the role of the Islamists, drawing parallels with Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979 and rattling sabres more loudly over the “Iranian threat”, which it believes the world does not understand. It has told its soldiers they might be ordered to invade Lebanon again, as minister of defence Ehud Barak warned on a recent visit to the northern front.

If the West has lost (with allies already overthrown), does that mean the Syria-Iran axis, and its allies Hamas and Hizbullah, have won? It does, but their weaknesses are clear. Hamas is confined to Gaza, and the likelihood that the UN special tribunal for Lebanon, into the assassination of Rafik Hariri, will indict Hizbullah’s leaders is weakening the movement. The Iranian leadership may have welcomed the revolution in Egypt, but it has put down its own protesters and intensified repression.

In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has two trump cards: fear among Syrians that unrest will lead to Iraqi-style instability and sectarian conflict, and his firm stance against Israel, which has popular support. However, economic liberalisation and a fast-growing population mean Syria faces severe economic and social problems. Young Syrians want freedom too.

Palestine not forgotten

The US adapted well to the fall of Suharto in Indonesia, but the situation now in the Middle East is very different – mainly because of Palestine, which many commentators mistakenly believe was a minor issue for the protesters. The organisers of Cairo’s protests banned anti-American and anti-Israeli slogans, deciding to concentrate on opposing the Mubarak regime. But at the huge victory celebration in Cairo on 18 February, after Mubarak stood down, many protesters chanted for the liberation of Jerusalem.

For decades the US has been able to give Israel almost unconditional support with impunity: Arab leaders have remained faithful, and the US has cared little about being unpopular on the Arab street. But this is coming to an end. In March 2010, General David Petraeus, then head of US Central Command, said: “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples in the [region] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.” The new geopolitical context will force the US administration to make crucial choices, but does it have the will, and ability, to do so?

These questions also apply to the EU, which has been compromised by its staunch support for Ben Ali and Mubarak. The EU was incapable of maintaining distance from dictators, has made many agreements with an Israeli government that is hostile to peace, and has promoted neoliberal economic policies that have worsened poverty and facilitated massive corruption south of the Mediterranean. Will it now have the courage to listen to the Arab street, which is not in fact a crowd of bearded fundamentalists and women in niqabs? Perhaps, as the Lebanese writer Georges Corm suggests, civil society in the North should follow the Arab example and “raise the level of protest against the dreadful neoliberal oligarchy that impoverishes European economies, creates too few jobs and every year forces more Europeans of all nationalities into insecurity. This backwards evolution benefits a narrow layer of managers whose annual pay eats up more and more of the nations’ wealth”.

In only a few years, the world has become polycentric. Every large country, including Brazil, China, India and South Africa, is trying to find its place – neither in opposition nor subservient to the US, but beside it, defending its own interests. Turkey is a member of Nato and a US ally, but plays an important role in the region by taking an independent stance towards Iran’s nuclear program and Palestine. North Africa and the Middle East want to join this global movement. “What the people of the region demand,” wrote Graham Fuller, former CIA officer and author of The Future of Political Islam, “is to be able to take control of their own lives and destinies. ... In the near term, the prescription is stark – Washington must back off and leave these societies alone, ending the long political infantilization of Middle Eastern populations ... based on a myopic vision of American interests”.

“Neither East nor West” chanted Iranian protesters in 1979, opposing both the US and the Soviet Union. “Neither with the West nor against it” could be the slogan now across the Arab world, expressing a desire for independence and sovereignty in a multi-polar world. They will judge the West by its ability to defend the principles of justice and international law everywhere, particularly in Palestine. But they will no longer allow their governments to use the struggle against the West to justify tyranny.

Alain Gresh is vice president of Le Monde diplomatique and heads its Middle East/Muslim world department.

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THE RISE OF THE ARABS A NEOCONSERVATIVE "SHOCK AND AWE"

A NEOCONSERVATIVE "SHOCK AND AWE"

THE RISE OF THE ARABS

By RAMZY BAROUD

March 11 - 13, 2011

A pervading sense of awe seems to be engulfing Arab societies everywhere. What is underway in the Arab world is greater than simply revolution in a political or economic sense– it is, in fact, shifting the very self-definition of what it means to be Arab, both individually and collectively.


Hollywood has long caricatured and humiliated Arabs. American foreign policy in the Middle East has been aided by simplistic, degrading and at times racist depictions of Arabs in the mass media. A whole generation of pseudo-intellectuals have built their careers on the notion that they have a key understanding of Arabs and the seemingly predictable pattern of their behavior.


Now we see Libya - a society that had nothing by way of a civil society and which was under a protracted stage of siege – literally making history. The collective strength displayed by Libyan society is awe-inspiring to say the least. Equally praiseworthy is the way in which Libyans have responded to growing dangers and challenges. But most important is the spontaneous nature of their actions. Diplomatic efforts, political organization, structured revolutionary efforts and media outreach simply followed the path and demands of the people. Libyans led the fight, and everyone else either obliged or played the role of spectator.


There is something new and fascinating underway here – a phenomena of popular action that renders any historical comparisons inadequate. Western stereotypes have long served an important (and often violent) purpose: reducing the Arab, while propping up Israeli, British and American invasions in the name of 'democracy', 'freedom' and 'liberation'. Those who held the 'torch of civilization' and allegedly commanded uncontested moral superiority gave themselves unhindered access to the lands of the Arabs, their resources, their history, and, most of all, their very dignity.


Yet those who chartered the prejudiced discourses, defining the Arabs to suit their colonial objectives – from Napoleon Bonaparte to George W. Bush – only showed themselves to be bad students of history. They tailored historical narratives to meet their own designs, always casting themselves as the liberators and saviors of all good things, civilization and democracy notwithstanding. In actual fact, they practiced the very opposite of what they preached, wreaking havoc, delaying reforms, co-opting democracy, and consistently leaving behind a trail of blood and destruction.


In the 1920s, Britain sliced up, then recomposed Iraq territorially and demographically to suit specific political and economic agenda. Oil wells were drilled in Kirkuk and Baghdad, then Mosul and Basra. Iraq's cultural uniqueness was merely an opportunity to divide and conquer. Britain played out the ethno-religious-tribal mix to the point of mastery. But Arabs in Iraq rebelled repeatedly and Britain reacted the way it would to an army in a battle field. The Iraqi blood ran deep until the revolution of 1958, when the people obtained freedom from puppet kings and British colonizers. In 2003, British battalions returned carrying even deadlier arms and more dehumanizing discourses, imposing themselves as the new rulers of Iraq, with the US leading the way.


Palestinians – as Arabs from other societies - were not far behind in terms of their ability to mobilize around a decided and highly progressive political platform. Indeed, Palestine experienced its first open rebellion against the Zionist colonial drive in the country, and the complacent British role in espousing it and laboring to ensure its success decades ago (well before Facebook and Twitter made it to the revolutionary Arab scene). In April 1936, all five Palestinian political parties joined under the umbrella of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), led by Haj Amin al-Husseini. One of the AHC's first decisions was to assemble National Committees throughout Palestine. In May, al-Husseini summoned the first conference of the National Committees in Jerusalem, which collectively declared a general strike on May 8, 1936. The first joint Palestinian action to protest the Zionist-British designs in Palestine was non-violent. Employing means of civil disobedience, the 1936 uprising aimed to send a stern message to the British government that Palestinians were nationally unified and capable of acting as an assertive, self-assured society. The British administration in Palestine had thus far discounted the Palestinian demand for independence and paid little attention to their incessant complaints about the rising menace of Zionism and its colonial project.


Palestinian fury turned violent when the British government resorted to mass repression. It had wanted to send a message to Palestinians that her Majesty's Government would not be intimidated by what it saw as insignificant fellahin, or peasants. The first six months of the uprising, which lasted under different manifestations and phases for three years, was characterized at the outset by a widely observed general strike which lasted from May to October 1936. Palestine was simply shut down in response to the call of the National Committees and al-Husseini. This irked the British, who saw the "non-Jewish residents of Palestine" as deplorable, troublesome peasants with untamed leadership. Within a few years, Palestinians managed to challenge the conventional wisdom of the British, whose narrow Orientalist grasp on the Arabs as lesser beings with fewer or no rights – a model to be borrowed later on by the Zionists and Israeli officials – left them unqualified to ponder any other response to a legitimate uprising than coercive measures.


The price of revolution is always very high. Then, thousands of Palestinians were killed. Today, Libyans are falling in intolerable numbers. But freedom is sweet and several generations of Arabs have demonstrated willingness to pay the high price it demands.


Arab society - whether the strikers of Palestine in 1936, the rebels of Baghdad of 1958, or the revolutionaries of Libya, Tunisia and Egypt of 2011 - remain, in a sense, unchanged, as determined as ever win freedom, equality and democracy. And their tormenters also remain unhinged, using the same language of political manipulation and brutal military tactics.


The studious neoconservatives at the Foreign Policy Initiative and elsewhere must be experiencing an intellectual 'shock and awe', even as they continue in their quest to control the wealth and destiny of Arabs. Arab societies, however, have risen with a unified call for freedom. And the call is now too strong to be muted.

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