Forget Palestine, focus on ISIL
Danger Signals
The arrival of ISIL makes an Israeli-Palestinian settlement even more urgent. But Hamas is not ISIL, and ISIL is not Hamas.
By Gershom Gorenberg, American Prospect
Autumn 2014
In
Hebrew, “black flag” refers to an immediate, glaring warning—as in, the
“black flag of illegality” that figuratively flies over a military
order that a soldier must refuse, or the actual flag put up by
lifeguards to signal that the sea is too stormy for swimming.
The
symbolism of the color is entirely arbitrary. In Arab culture, a black
flag recalls the battle standards of the Prophet Muhammad and of the
Abbasid caliphate*, which ruled from Baghdad over a vast Islamic empire.
Traditionally, the connotations are positive. In recent months, though,
the two meanings have converged. Inscribed with the words “There is no
god but God,” a black banner is now a symbol of danger, across the
Middle East and beyond.
As the flag of the Islamic State of Iraq
and the Levant, also known as ISIL, the rebel organization in Iraq and
Syria, the banner signals brutality, genocide, and the collapse of what
was left of Iraq as a functioning state. It provokes horror, alarm, and
sudden political shifts. Most obviously, the Obama administration has
reluctantly returned to Middle Eastern wars, attempting to build a
military coalition out of even more reluctant partners. Israel’s
government points to the Islamic State as a catalyst of regional
realignment that puts Israel on the same side as Sunni Arab states—and
by implication allows it to put off, yet again, dealing with the
Palestinian issue.
And therefore, I’d argue, the black banner is a
warning of additional dangers—those created by America’s clumsiness in
dealing with the Middle East and by Israel’s unwillingness to reach a
two-state agreement with the Palestinians. To see why, we must look at
the Islamic State’s rhetoric, its strategy, and its place in the wider
regional conflicts—starting with its claim to have established a new
caliphate.
This
Saturday, July 5, 2014, file image made from video posted on a militant
website, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other
AP reporting, purports to show the leader of the Islamic State group,
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, delivering a sermon at a mosque in Iraq. AP Photo
If
you took a moment off from being horrified by the Islamic State’s
violence, you could find considerable irony in the group’s coronation of
its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as caliph, and his subsequent
appearance at Mosul’s largest mosque in early July. Abu Bakr’s black
garb, the choreography of the event, its venue—the Abbasid heartland—all
were meant to appeal to Muslim memory of the Abbasid caliphate as a
“civilizational golden age,” says Carool Kersten, a scholar of Islam at
King’s College London.
Yet “people who look [to] the Abbasid
caliphate usually point precisely at its cosmopolitanism, its
pluralism,” says Kersten, co-editor of
Demystifying the Caliphate: Historical Memory and Contemporary Contexts.
“All sorts of Islamic groups were allowed to operate side by side, and
Christians, Persians, and Jews all [had] their contribution to make.”
The Abbasid age represents an Islam that embraces science, literature,
and philosophy—an Islam that stands in stark contrast to that of the
Islamic State. The rebels’ use of Abbasid symbols, Kersten suggests,
might stem from “their own ignorance about Islamic history.” Or merely
from intensely selective nostalgia: In the eighth and ninth centuries,
the Abbasid caliphate was a superpower that ruled from North Africa to
Central Asia and united most of the world’s Muslims in a single polity.
Harun Al-Rashid, c. 766 – 809, Caliph of the Abbasids
The
Ottoman sultans were the last Muslim rulers to successfully claim the
title of caliph. Since Kemal Ataturk abolished the institution, the
theme of reestablishing the caliphate has recurred in Islamic political
movements. It can signify a closely formulated alternative to
post-colonial states, or a distant utopia, or be little more than a
battle cry.
ISIL certainly rejects the existing state structure of
the Middle East. Moreover, says Kersten, it appears to be heavily
influenced by a jihadist strategic text that has been circulating since
2004, The Management of Savagery. That book describes the political
division of the Middle East as an instrument of control by the “Jahili
order,” meaning the reign of those ignorant of Islam.
None of this
means that al-Baghdadi is about to be recognized as caliph by large
numbers of Muslims, or even by other movements that call for a
caliphate. It is “very difficult to take a claim to a universal
leadership over Muslims seriously when those making the declaration
appear to declare anyone who is outside of their group … as either
sinful, deviants, or disbelievers,” political scientist Reza Pankhurst
argued in a recent interview. Pankhurst is an adherent of Hizb
ut-Tahrir, the Party of Liberation, an intellectually oriented
pan-Islamic group.
The less bearable people find the present, and
the less hope other political paths offer for more realistic
improvement, the greater the attraction of such a vision and the extreme
means used in its service.
But the Islamic State’s caliphate claim
does help explain how the organization attracts recruits and a wider
circle of support. ISIL purports to offer the immediate restoration of
an imagined glorious past. The less bearable people find the present,
and the less hope other political paths offer for more realistic
improvement, the greater the attraction of such a vision and the extreme
means used in its service.
Thus, one force creating support for
ISIL is “disappointment with the Arab revolutions” of recent years, says
Ofra Bengio, a senior research fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe
Dayan Centre for Middle Eastern and African Studies. That’s coupled, she
says, with the attraction of a group that presents startling victories
along with an ideology that promises “to get rid of all those who have
failed.”
The list of failures begins long before the revolts of
2011. Pankhurst describes Hizb ut-Tahrir’s founding as a response to the
Arab military defeat by Israel in 1948. Another defeat, in the 1967 war
with Israel, widely discredited secular pan-Arabism and created an
opening for movements that present Islam as a political program.
More
recently, “Islamicists who were willing to take a procedural view of
democracy and participated” in it “all felt cheated,” says Kersten. A
key example is the short-lived rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
It’s true, Kersten says, that the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi “made
massive mistakes” as president, and that there’s reason to suspect
Islamicist parties of seeing democracy as “one man, one vote, one time.”
Yet Morsi’s overthrow left advocates of working within the system
feeling cheated, and increased potential support for a much more
uncompromising approach.
Israeli
border police officers carry the flagged wrapped coffin of Druze
Israeli Chief Inspector Border Police officer Jaddan Assad, during his
funeral procession in the Druse village of Beit Jann on Mt. Meron in the
Galilee, northern Israel, Thursday, November 6, 2014. The officer was
killed by a Hamas militant who slammed a minivan into a crowd waiting
for a train in Jerusalem, killing one person and wounding at least a
dozen before being shot dead by police.Photo by Ariel Schalit / AP
All
of which brings us to the Palestinian-Israeli arena, and another chain
of disappointments. Hamas, a wing of the Brotherhood, won the 2006
Palestinian parliamentary election largely because the Palestinian
Authority (PA), under President Mahmoud Abbas and his nationalist Fatah
movement, had failed twice over: It had not achieved Palestinian
independence, and the autonomous PA regime in Gaza and the West Bank was
riddled with corruption.
But Hamas’s election victory, combined
with the organization’s terrorist record, brought an Israeli and Western
boycott of the PA. In the end, Hamas was left governing Gaza alone,
isolated and bankrupt under Israeli and Egyptian blockade. Another
attempt to re-enter the political system by forming a unity government
with Fatah this past June accomplished little—unless one counts helping
to spark the war with Israel, after which Hamas celebrated its supposed
victory in the rubble of Gaza.
Hamas would put all the blame on
its Palestinian rivals and Israel. But this doesn’t remove the sting:
Neither by waging war nor by waging politics has Hamas fulfilled the
hopes of its supporters, or succeeded where Fatah failed. Meanwhile, the
Islamic State scored lightning victories this summer and announced
re-establishment of the caliphate.
During one ceasefire in the
Gaza War this summer, the Bethlehem-based Palestinian Centre for Public
Opinion conducted a poll in Gaza that included the question: “Do you
support or oppose, in general, the …Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant?” The pollsters highlighted the fact that 85 percent of
respondents answered “oppose.” Just as important, though, fully 13
percent said they supported the jihadi organization.
If one
equates Hamas and ISIL, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
says he does, this hardly matters. But the two groups aren’t the same.
Along with its rejection of Israel’s existence and its disregard for the
lives of civilians, in Israel and in Gaza, Hamas has its pragmatic
side. It has negotiated indirectly with Israel; it has enforced
ceasefires and prevented rocket fire by more extreme Islamic groups; it
joined a unity government under President Mahmoud Abbas, who is
committed to a two-state outcome. The support of one-eighth of Gazans
for ISIL is a sign that despair can lead people to positions much more
radical than those of Hamas.
By refusing to distinguish between
Hamas and the Islamic State, Israel does nothing to stop radicalization.
The way to reverse the process begins with understanding that
achievements by Palestinian moderates can be successes for Israel. The
best way to make the promise of a new caliphate irrelevant is to work
seriously with Abbas and Fatah to create a Palestinian state in the West
Bank and Gaza. Which brings us back to America’s dwindling influence in
the region.
“America will lead a broad coalition to roll back
this terrorist threat,” President Barack Obama said in his September 10
speech on the Islamic State. Obama’s only allusion to the
ethnic-sectarian conflict in Iraq was asserting, somewhat prematurely,
that the country now had an “inclusive government.” Obama did lay out a
strategy for a new stage in the war against terrorism. The Islamic
State’s own plan of action didn’t receive a mention.
To better
understand that, let’s go back to The Management of Savagery. (The name
of the author, Abu Bakr Naji, is presumed to be a pseudonym.) The book
denounces any perceived influence on Islamic political movements by
Western ideas, secular or religious. But it shows the immense influence
of one stream of Western thought—the ideologies and strategies of modern
political terrorism, as developed in European revolutions and
anti-colonial armed struggles. To this, it adds careful attention to
manipulation of 21st-century media. The mix is then given a veneer of
religion as principles of jihad.
Violence that
seizes media attention, the book says, attracts new recruits who will
be “dazzled by the operations …undertaken in opposition to America.”
Savagery
affirms the value of what previous revolutionaries called “armed
propaganda,” with the United States as a particular target. Violence
that seizes media attention, the book says, attracts new recruits who
will be “dazzled by the operations …undertaken in opposition to
America.” It also provokes the United States to act directly rather than
through proxies in the Islamic world, eventually revealing American
weakness. Extreme violence is also described as a means of “inflaming
opposition” and polarizing the masses, who will find that there is no
safe middle ground, no way to stay out of the fight.
Viewed in
this light, the U.S. decision to intervene after the beheading of
American journalists appears to be just what the Islamic State sought.
This isn’t proof that American intervention is wrong. It does reinforce
the impression, unlikely to improve America’s image in the region, that
the murder of two Americans prompted air attacks and support for
opposing groups of Syrian rebels, when neither the Islamic State’s
atrocities against the Yezidi minority nor three years of civil war in
Syria succeeded in doing so. It’s also a warning for the future:
Washington needs, finally, to understand the strategic thinking of
terrorists and consider how its own actions can outflank that strategy.
Volunteers
in the newly formed “Peace Brigades” raise their weapons and chant
slogans against the al-Qaida-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant during a June 21, 2014 parade in the Shi’ite stronghold of Sadr
City, Baghdad, Iraq. Former rivals now often find themselves in an
uneasy alliance as they seek to combat the Sunni extremist group. Photo
by Khalid Mohammed / AP.
To avoid another pitfall, it’s
essential to remember that the Islamic State is a Sunni group. While it
is fighting other Sunnis, it’s also part of the multi-sided
ethnic-sectarian war raging across Syria and Iraq. Before 2011 in Syria
and 2003 in Iraq, these regimes “were like little Ottoman sultans” who
held together a mix of religious groups and nationalities by force, much
as the Tito regime once did in Yugoslavia, says prominent Syria expert
Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the
University of Oklahoma. Now, he says, religious identities such as
“Alawite” and “Sunni” have “become much harder ethnic identities.”
Ethnic cleansing has become a feature of the fierce conflict.
America’s
conundrum in Syria has received considerable attention: To attack ISIL
risks helping the Alawite Assad regime. Regionally, the Alawites are
identified with Shiites, so America also risks being seen as fighting
for Shiites against Sunnis.
“The Americans allowed the Shiites to do whatever they wanted,” and the result was ethnic cleansing.
In
Iraq, though, the United States has already stumbled into this trap. At
the end of August, American airstrikes against ISIL helped Kurdish
peshmerga fighters and Shiite militias allied with the Iraqi government
to break the siege of Amirli, a Turkomen Shiite town in northern Iraq.
The Americans “didn’t pay attention” to the fact that Amerli is
surrounded by Sunni Arab villages, says Professor Amatzia Baram, head of
the Center for Iraq Studies at the University of Haifa. “The Americans
allowed the Shiites to do whatever they wanted,” and the result was
ethnic cleansing. “The militias are not just dangerous,” he says, “they
are fanatical.” The Obama administration, he argues, must give help to
the Iraqi government on the condition of using a more disciplined army
to drive ISIL from Sunni areas.
The original American mistake,
Baram says, was the assumption that U.S.-style one-person, one-vote
democracy could be imposed on Iraq, ignoring the internal divisions. In
1990, he recalls, he met in Europe with a “very senior” member of the
Iraqi Shiite Dawa Party, who compared Iraq to “a donkey and a rider”—the
Shiite majority as the donkey, the Sunnis as the rider. “All he wanted
to do was reverse the order,” Baram says, not to bring about democracy.
Elections allowed the Shiites to do so, and accelerated the breakup of
the state.
At this moment, Baram argues, the United States has the
leverage to insist that the central Iraqi government work on the basis
of parity: equal representation for the ethnic-religious communities,
and “nothing moves forward without compromise” between them. Iraq can
survive as a state only if it is federalized, with power transferred to
autonomous regions, he says. Syria, Baram suggests, might best be
divided into three countries—Kurdish in the northeast, Sunni in the
center, and a secular Alawite regime in the West. But that optimistic
scenario could well be wishful. The pessimistic prognosis is continued
chaos.
Palestinians
carry the body of Mohammed Jwabreh, 21, during his funeral in al-Aroub
refugee camp, near the West Bank town of Hebron, Tuesday, November 11,
2014. Jwabreh was hit by a live bullet in the chest in clashes with
Israeli security forces Tuesday. Photo by Mahmoud Illean / ASP
There
are two lessons here for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first is
for the Israeli right: The attempt to maintain a single state where
Jews have power and Palestinians do not is doomed, even if the date of
the explosion is unknown. The second is for foreign proponents of a
“one-state solution” based on one-person, one-vote, most of whom see
themselves as being on the left: They are, ironically, proposing to
repeat the mistake of the Bush administration in Iraq, imposing an
American model that focuses on individual rights and ignores the reality
of communal identities.
As of this writing, the Obama
administration is putting together a Mideast coalition of the irresolute
to fight the Islamic State. On the surface, every country in the region
has reason to want ISIL defeated. In reality, each has contrary
interests. Turkey’s top priority, as Baram notes, is the fall of the
Assad regime, and it fears strengthening the Syrian Kurds. Saudi Arabia
is concerned about ISIL, but more concerned about Iran—and the Islamic
State is a threat to Iran’s Shiite allies in Iraq.
Nonetheless,
Netanyahu has greeted the coalition against ISIL as one more sign of a
Middle East realignment that puts Israel on the same side as Sunni Arab
governments, adding to a shared fear of Iran. “They’re re-evaluating
their relationship with Israel and they understand that Israel is not
their enemy but their ally,” he asserted in a speech about terrorism on
September 11. Implicit in Netanyahu’s message is that common interests
with Israel have pushed the Palestinian issue off Arab leaders’ agenda.
Those
who don’t want to solve this [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict are the
ones who will lead us in the end to a bloody battle with beheaders
Justice
Minister Tzipi Livni, whose advocacy of a two-state agreement has
virtually made her the leader of an opposition faction within the
government, rejects that thesis. The condition for an alliance with Arab
states is renewing peace talks with the Palestinian Authority, she
asserted after a meeting with Netanyahu, the day before his speech,
adding, “Those who don’t want to solve this [Israeli-Palestinian]
conflict are the ones who will lead us in the end to a bloody battle
with beheaders.”
Baram backs up her doubts. Before the war in
Gaza, he says, he attended a meeting with a senior member of the Saudi
royal family and a younger, rising Saudi figure. The former implied and
the latter said explicitly that “Israel has to do something about
Palestinians, or we cannot get married.”
Netanyahu, yet again, is
engaged in either spin or wishful thinking. The realignment he wants
depends on reaching the peace agreement with the Palestinians that he
has evaded. The sudden rise of the Islamic State, with its videoed
horrors and its promises of renewed Islamic glory, hasn’t changed that.
Rather, it’s a warning of where Palestinian despair may lead, and of the
potential consequences of maintaining what has become a de facto single
state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.
The black flag is a warning, but it must be read correctly.
Notes and links
Gershom Gorenberg
is an American-born Israeli historian, journalist and blogger,
specializing in Middle Eastern politics and the interaction of religion
and politics. He is currently a senior correspondent for The American
Prospect. Gorenberg self-identifies as “a left-wing, sceptical Orthodox
Zionist Jew. from Wikipedia
The Abbasid [pron. A – bars -id] Caliphate, the first Muslim ‘golden age’ is the subject of an episode of BBC Radio 4’s In our Time, The Abbassid Caliphs
Why ban Hizb ut-Tahrir? They’re not Isis – they’re Isis’s whipping boys,
CiF, February 12th, 2015. Australia and several central Asian states
have banned Hizb ut-Tahrir. British Prime Ministers from Blair to
Cameron have toyed with the desire to ban them in the UK but have been
advised against it.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian 
PROVINCES,(ST)_Syrian
army has killed over 100 terrorists in Aleppo and pounded several arms
depots belonging to terrorist organizations in Damascus countryside.
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