The Daily Star - The new pan-Arabism thrives on negativity
On February 12, Palestinian security officials reported that they had received death threats against Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, warning him against going down the track of peace negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Those threats did not come from Palestinian groups opposed to talks with Israel, but from Lebanon's Hizbullah. Similarly, the February 18 suicide bombing in a Tel Aviv nightclub, which killed four Israelis and left Sharon on the brink of pulling out of talks with the Palestinians, was claimed by the Damascus branch of Islamic Jihad. In Iraq, the satellite television station Al-Jazeera was accused by interim Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib of "encouraging the criminals and gangsters to increase their activities."
What do all these incidents have in common? Palestinians and Iraqis are suffering because the rest of the Arab world feels it owns them and their causes. This misguided sense of ownership emerges from pan-Arabism, which echoes the far older idea of a pan-Islamic umma, or community. Pan-Arabism rests on solid foundations. It speaks to a community united by language, culture and faith, and often also by ethnicity. Its precepts are reflected in the not-too-distant past: The 20th century saw the creation of the Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan and the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria (both established in 1958 and both short-lived), and the more successful United Arab Emirates which exists to this day.
But if pan-Arabism is based on the idea of a rightful and legitimate union of the Arab world, the idea took on a negative political impetus since it defined itself as against the West (even if the West's behavior has often been a uniting force among the Arabs). Pan-Arabism's "light unto the nations" principles have been entirely replaced by anti-Westernism, which, justified or not, has had very damaging consequences for the Middle East as a whole. This neopan-Arabism today is a hypocritical religion since it implicitly contends that the Arab world is incapable of sorting out its own problems. There is no distinguishing between West-blamers or West-haters in the Arab world, who would have America take sole responsibility for the ills of the region, and those many Westerners who consider the West somehow superior to the Arabs. Both sides are implicitly neocolonialist. With neopan-Arabism, it is the nation state that suffers, which is exactly what is happening in Iraq and Palestine.
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Copyright (c) 2005 The Daily Star
Saturday, April 02, 2005
The new pan-Arabism thrives on negativity
By Turi Munthe
Commentary
On February 12, Palestinian security officials reported that they had received death threats against Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, warning him against going down the track of peace negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Those threats did not come from Palestinian groups opposed to talks with Israel, but from Lebanon's Hizbullah.
Similarly, the February 18 suicide bombing in a Tel Aviv nightclub, which killed four Israelis and left Sharon on the brink of pulling out of talks with the Palestinians, was claimed by the Damascus branch of Islamic Jihad.
In Iraq, the satellite television station Al-Jazeera was accused by interim Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib of "encouraging the criminals and gangsters to increase their activities."
What do all these incidents have in common? Palestinians and Iraqis are suffering because the rest of the Arab world feels it owns them and their causes. This misguided sense of ownership emerges from pan-Arabism, which echoes the far older idea of a pan-Islamic umma, or community. Pan-Arabism rests on solid foundations. It speaks to a community united by language, culture and faith, and often also by ethnicity. Its precepts are reflected in the not-too-distant past: The 20th century saw the creation of the Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan and the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria (both established in 1958 and both short-lived), and the more successful United Arab Emirates which exists to this day.
But if pan-Arabism is based on the idea of a rightful and legitimate union of the Arab world, the idea took on a negative political impetus since it defined itself as against the West (even if the West's behavior has often been a uniting force among the Arabs). Pan-Arabism's "light unto the nations" principles have been entirely replaced by anti-Westernism, which, justified or not, has had very damaging consequences for the Middle East as a whole.
This neopan-Arabism today is a hypocritical religion since it implicitly contends that the Arab world is incapable of sorting out its own problems. There is no distinguishing between West-blamers or West-haters in the Arab world, who would have America take sole responsibility for the ills of the region, and those many Westerners who consider the West somehow superior to the Arabs. Both sides are implicitly neocolonialist. With neopan-Arabism, it is the nation state that suffers, which is exactly what is happening in Iraq and Palestine.
In the case of Iraq, neopan-Arabism has shown all the weaknesses, inexcusable weaknesses, of any overarching geopolitical ideology. Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's record of atrocities with his own people was widely known across the region, reported by hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees and exiles. But in the Arab world Saddam was portrayed as one of the only Arab leaders capable of saying "no" to the neocolonialist West. An empty idea had triumphed over human considerations; Arab popular opinion was happy to sacrifice its Iraqi brothers to safeguard its idea of itself. It was an unjustifiable price to pay, and the hint of schadenfreude detectable in, for example, Al-Jazeera's coverage of the turmoil in Iraq might suggest there is truth to the Iraqis' sense that the Arab world plays out its ideological battles with scant regard for those it is supposed to represent.
If Iraq is a newly forged symbol of Western neocolonialism, and a new banner under which to rally Arab opposition to U.S. foreign-policy, Palestine has occupied that dubiously privileged position since 1948. It is the symbol of the Arab world's 20th century - a symbol of betrayal by the West, of victimhood, humiliation and powerlessness. And the Palestine issue has served as the foundation stone of neopan-Arabism (not to mention much Jihadi terrorism), since its predecessor pan-Arabism foundered on the united Arab armies' defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967.
A now famous survey conducted by Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestine Center for Policy and Survey Research in Nablus, during the first half of 2003, showed that 70 percent of Palestinian refugees would forego the "right of return" in exchange for compensation. Reactions to the poll results were explosive. Shikaki received countless death threats, his methodology was slandered, and he was labeled a traitor and a Zionist. A left-wing American journalist even called him a racist.
Yes, UN General Assembly Resolution 194 granting Palestinians a right of return has been betrayed. Yes, Israel's entry into the UN, predicated on the acceptance of that resolution, is therefore tainted. But the outrage elicited by the Shikaki poll, whose results seemed to contradict Arab myths about Palestine, was not one of solidarity with the Palestinians' plight, it was directed against that plight. If Palestinians don't want peace with Israel, if they believe they can claw their way back into their homeland, if they refuse to negotiate, that is their business. But Arab public opinion and the self-congratulatory, principled Western left should be clear that while they nourish their sense own of "justice," Palestinians are suffering.
Palestinians and Iraqis have, for some time now, been screaming at the rest of the Arab world to leave them alone and allow them to get on with their own business. It seems the Arab world cannot because Palestine and Iraq provide the ultimate symbols of neopan-Arabism. But blaming the West deflects attention from the gross failures of domestic politics in the separate nations of the Arab world and usefully serves the purposes of ruling elites in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Neopan-Arabism plays to the worst majority-rule instincts within the Middle East. It disallows distinctions between cultures, but also between political experiences and history.
The war in Iraq is to blame for adding more fuel to this old ideological fire, because it has narrowed the margins of political discourse in the Arab world even further and has tarnished the principle of democracy. But regardless, it is time to say that pan-Arabism of this nature does not serve anyone's interests. Let us hope that broad Arab support for something like the Lebanese "revolution" (whatever its character) heralds a new era - when the Arab world realizes that in order to stand up to the West, it must also be willing to use it.
Turi Munthe is head of the Middle East program at the Royal United Services Institute. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
Copyright (c) 2005 The Daily Star
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