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[Salon] The Arab world has been crushed between two jaws - Guest Post by Patrick Cockburn
By Patrick Cockburn
Special Correspondent
The Arab world has been crushed between two jaws
Newsletter (£)Brutal and repressive regimes will preside over ruined societies mired in this dismal anarchy
November 30, 2024 7:00 am
Syrian opposition fighters stand guard in Kafr Halab, Aleppo countryside, Syria, Friday, Nov. 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Ghaith Alsayed)
Syrian opposition fighters stand guard in Kafr Halab, Aleppo, Syria, on 29 November (Photo: Ghaith Alsayed/AP)
We are witnessing a new carve-up of the Arab world more radical than anything that has happened since the UK and France as imperial powers grudgingly withdrew from the region in the 20 years after the Second World War.
Israel’s largely successful onslaught on Hamas and the Palestinians in Gaza and Hezbollah and the Shia Muslims in Lebanon is the latest stage in the present-day dissolution of Arab power.
President Joe Biden, in keeping with his well-established habit of calling for peace while providing the means for war, has expressed hope that this week’s shaky ceasefire in Lebanon will be followed by one in Gaza. Such a scaling down of the violence is unlikely, given that Biden has just approved the sale of $680m worth of arms and ammunition to Israel.
Violence is spreading rapidly as US-backed Israeli supremacy reignites deep-frozen conflicts across the Middle East. As Hezbollah’s dominance is shaken in Lebanon, sectarian animosities with the potential for extreme violence resurface between different Muslim and Christian communities that fought a devastating civil war between 1975 and 1990.
Ominous indication
In the last few days, Syrian anti-government forces have launched their biggest attack on government forces in years west of Aleppo, an ominous indication that the Syrian civil war, in which at least 300,000 Syrians died and 5.5 million became refugees, may be restarting. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the most powerful rebel faction, once linked to al-Qaeda, is leading an advance out of the opposition-held enclave of Idlib towards Aleppo. The truce that has prevailed since 2019 is collapsing with at least 242 people, mostly combatants, reportedly killed in the fighting.
Israel is stepping up its air strikes on targets in Syria to deter president Bashar al-Assad from aiding or resupplying Hezbollah with Iranian arms. The Israeli daily Haaretz quotes an expert as pointing to an Israeli air strike near Idlib as a signal that Israel “considers itself free to deliberately strike Syrian army installations, targets that it had refrained from striking until now, at least not intentionally”.
Meanwhile, the Syrian Kurds are expressing fears that their enclave in northern Syria is about to be attacked by Turkish-backed Syrian Islamists, a move that might precipitate the ethnic cleansing of one million Kurds living on the Syrian side of the border with Turkey.
Striking feature of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon
Profound misery though this forced exodus would bring to the Kurds, it is not the largest piece of ethnic cleansing now conceivable in the Middle East. As president-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office in a few weeks’ time, there is growing talk in the region of the possibility that the new US administration will permit Israel to push some of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza across the border into Egypt.
With Israel emboldened by its successes against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, might see the expulsion of Palestinians – a repeat of the Palestinian “Nakba” of 1948 – as an attainable goal during a Trump presidency.
Powerful Israeli ministers openly support this option. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, speaking earlier this year, said that the “correct solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “to encourage the voluntary migration of Gaza’s residents to countries that will agree to take in the refugees”. He predicted that “Israel will permanently control the territory of the Gaza Strip”, where it would establish Jewish settlements.
The Arab world will expect this mass transfer of Palestinians to be anything but “voluntary”, yet it is doubtful if the Arabs can do much to prevent it. Indeed, a striking feature of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon is the lack of push-back from the 456 million Arabs and the 22 countries belonging to the Arab League.
Onlookers
Until about 30 years ago, Arab states – Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Algeria – were still important players in determining the future of the region. But today they are at best onlookers after their countries have been torn apart or gravely weakened by civil wars, foreign invasions, and military coups.
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The leadership of the Arabs has passed to the oil-rich and vastly wealthy Arab monarchies of the Gulf. But they have shown a chronic inability to turn that money into political strength. During the Gaza and Lebanese wars, the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have stood ineffectually on the margins of the crisis, seeking to avoid any involvement.
Where Saudi Arabia and the UAE have used their money to fund political change the result has been uniformly disastrous. This was true when Saudi Arabia supported the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s and equally so when the UAE backed the Rapid Support Forces rebels against the regular army in Sudan in the ferocious civil war that began in April 2023 and has since devasted its 50 million people, half of whom are now in need of aid to survive. Earlier, in the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, the oil states played a key role in funding rebel groups in Libya and Syria while ensuring that autocracies were not replaced by democracies.
The Arab world has been crushed between two jaws: one of which is Israel and the other the Arab monarchies of the Gulf. There is no evidence for complicity between the two, but, both strongly backed by the US, they have together eliminated Arab nation-states capable of exercising self-determination. Several of these states were ruled by dictators like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, but on their fall it became clear that the aim of those who eliminated them was not democracy and human rights.
Dismal anarchy
After US-led forces captured Baghdad in 2003, they made every effort to postpone elections and saw no need for Iraq to have a regular army except on its border with Iran. In Libya, one of the first acts of the incoming transitional government replacing Gaddafi, was to end his ban on polygamy.
In 1916, the UK and France agreed to carve up the Arab world out of the territories of the soon-to-be-defeated Ottoman Empire, along with the non-Arab bits of it. Colonial rule was in turn displaced in the decades after 1945 by Arab nationalist regimes and by a scattering of oil-rich Arab kingdoms in the Gulf. This new status quo was never stable, rocked as it was by military defeats by Israel and by sectarian divisions between Shia and Sunni Muslims, yet this toxic world is now being replaced by something worse.
There will be no new Sykes-Picot agreement outlining foreign zones of influence, but from Damascus to Khartoum and Tripoli to Sanaa, the fate of the Arabs will once again be determined by outside forces, with scant regard for the interests of their inhabitants. Brutal and repressive regimes will preside over ruined societies mired in this dismal anarchy.
“Where they make a desert, they call it peace,” was the bitter verdict of a British chieftain two thousand years ago on the ravages the Roman Empire had inflicted on his people. His words have echoed down the centuries and provide a fitting epitaph for the Arab world in the days of its destruction.
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