F
rom the end of the Cold War to the end of the 2010s, political commentary and scholarly work on the Middle East frequently spoke of “Arab exceptionalism.” They held that the Arabs remained outside the most positive currents in modern human history, such as globalisation, democracy, human rights, and economic development, unlike other regions such as Eastern Europe, Latin America and, increasingly at the time, East Asia. They offered many and diverse explanations but, in general, they attributed the “exception” to the corruption of Arab regimes and their inability to catch up with the modern world, as well as to the lack of ambition among the general Arab public to attain the levels of contemporary knowledge and expertise embodied in the latest technological revolutions and advances in industrial production.
Following the so-called Arab Spring, which was so warmly hailed in the West, the term gained even greater prevalence against the backdrop of anarchy, civil strife, and the sudden surge in brutal terrorist groups from the Muslim Brotherhood to IS and all the Kharijite sects and factions in between. Unfortunately, the “exceptionalism” was not spared what Europe experienced in the 19th century when anarchism became a respectable political orientation with a philosophy that would lead to the political trends that produced two world wars.
The Arab world underwent the transformations that had occurred in other countries and regions in only a hundred years. That period brought the Arab Awakening which eventually led to the independence of Arab states from the Ottoman Empire or Western colonial powers. As for the Arab Spring, it did not just produce chaos and Islamist extremism. It also brought the major reform efforts that we see unfolding in nine important Arab states, namely the six GCC countries, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco. These countries are currently facing a critical test.
“Reform” in its philosophical and ideological sense was also a European response to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. It sought to develop and consolidate the nation state and rescue it from the centuries of violence that resulted from the Catholic-Protestant schism. The reform experience in the Arab region has already achieved many successes, even though it only started recently and despite the immense challenges in the form of the terrorism, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. Today, the Arab reform processes are facing a new challenge: the fifth Gazan war and the attendant erosion of the requisite stability for reform and the looming spectre of a widening war that could even expand into a world war.
These developments stem from three sources. First, the three quarters of a century-old Israeli-Palestinian war that is currently articulating itself in Gaza and the West Bank. It is a conflict based on land (geography), history (time) and human beings (demography). Secondly, the conflict is taking place in the middle of the Arab region, where the Arab Mashreq (east) meets the Maghreb (west). So, neither can remain unaffected and uninvolved, especially as one of the belligerents – Israel – is a product of the colonial era and enjoys immense Western support and nuclear arms capacities. Thirdly, the Palestinian cause overlaps with an issue of central concern to the rest of the Middle East and Islamic world: Jerusalem, an issue and a symbol that has as much power to ignite wars as it does to inspire calls for peace.
The current Arab reform drive cannot ignore these many dimensions. Nor has it. In recent decades, it has attempted to bring it under control, efforts that have resulted in six peace treaties with Israel while three other Arab countries have moved to normalise relations with Israel in exchange for a just solution to the Palestinian cause based on the two-state solution in the framework of the Oslo Accords and other frames-of-reference. All these efforts and the inroads they had achieved are now being jeopardised by Israel’s bid to forcibly transfer the Palestinian population of Gaza to Egypt and Jordan. In Israel, it appears, no one is struck by the irony that they accuse the Arabs of wanting to drive Jews into the sea even as Israeli officials openly declare their intent to drive the Palestinians into the desert.
However, the threat to the Arab reform efforts comes not only from Israel, but also from Iran and its extensions: the Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq, the Revolutionary Guards in Syria, Hizbullah in Lebanon, and the Ansarullah (Houthi) movement in Yemen. The Houthis, moreover, have already taken the initiative to expand the scope of the war into the Red Sea. Other escalations and expansions have preceded this. They included assassination operations, skirmishes along the Israeli-Lebanese and Israeli-Syrian borders, and clashes between the Popular Mobilisation Forces against the US in Iraq and Syria. However, the most dangerous flashpoint at present is in the Red Sea, jeopardising global trade and the security of the entire Red Sea region, which includes Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, and Djibouti.
First, the Houthis intervened militarily to obstruct international shipping as their way of entering the Gaza war. Then the US and Britain formed a military coalition to protect maritime traffic by repelling Houthi attacks. However, when the Houthis persisted, the Western powers moved onto a more offensive posture and began to strike Houthi missile and drone launching bases in Yemen. The war has thus reached another critical escalatory juncture with the Houthis set on retaliation and the West and Israel increasingly inclined to strike the military power (Iran) leading the quartet of pro-Iranian militias. No Arab state can endure this test alone. The Arabs must forge a coalition with the ability to develop collective strategies for conducting a conflict that may not necessarily be inevitable but for the possibility of which they must be prepared.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 18 January, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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