http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=380578

Peter Beinart’s recent call in the New York Times for Jewish Americans to boycott Israeli settlement goods has been met with angry responses from many Jewish Americans. This includes some who are opposed to the settler movement. The most important of these objections hold that a boycott cannot work because Jewish Americans won’t go along with such a program and there isn’t much to boycott anyway. Both arguments hold little water.

In Jewish American circles, this is a new idea. Initial resistance on the grounds of ethnic solidarity and because of a bitter history of anti-Semitic boycotts was predictable. But there is no reason to think that a sustained campaign to convince Jewish Americans that boycotting settlements is an important aspect of salvaging Israel’s character as a “Jewish” and democratic state cannot make headway.

Already, a significant proportion of Jewish Americans deeply oppose the occupation and settlements. Beinart’s plan is the first program to give them a way to express this opposition in a proactive manner.

Over time, the agenda could catch on, especially among young liberal Jewish Americans in need of a practical program to contest the occupation and support a two-state solution. The vociferous rejection of a boycott implies that one just might work. If the scheme were completely ridiculous, ignoring it would be sufficient.

“Pro-Israel, pro-peace” Jewish American organizations are divided on the idea. J Street has rejected it, while it is embraced by Americans for Peace Now. Others groups argue that the idea is pointless because “there isn’t much to boycott anyway.” This is incorrect.

First, such a boycott need not seek to have a devastating economic impact on the settlement economy. The settlement project is heavily subsidized and is not conceived of as a moneymaking venture. Rather, it is an ideological program. With the exception of the Jewish settlements in the Golan Heights and a few others in the West Bank, what we have is historical irredentism at work, not entrepreneurship. The boycott is a political and symbolic statement. It should be conceptualized as expressing profound political objections, and a refusal to cooperate, whether or not it can make any real dent in the settlement economy.

Moreover, the idea that the economic activities connected with more than 500,000 Israeli settlers are immune from pressure is simply silly. These people live, work and produce on land that does not belong to them in contravention of black-letter international law. In fact, there is a great deal to boycott, while also maintaining the distinction between the occupation and Israel itself.

Since the boycott campaign was initiated by Palestinians, Israel and its supporters have reacted furiously. This again suggests that such a campaign can be effective. However, apart from the refusal of individuals to visit or perform in Israel, almost all meaningful acts of boycott and divestment have been connected to the occupation itself.

British trade unions have endorsed boycotts of companies benefiting from the occupation. The Netherlands recently canceled the visit of a delegation of Israeli mayors because it included settlement leaders. A group of Israeli academics announced they would boycott Ariel University. Several Italian and Irish supermarket chains won’t stock Israeli produce because Israel refuses to label what comes from the settlements, to distinguish it from what is grown in Israel proper. The Norwegian government pension fund divested from two Israeli companies doing business in the occupied territories.

The boycott led by the Palestinian Authority has reportedly led to the closure of numerous factories in several settlements. Elbit Systems, an Israeli company that provides components for Israel’s illegal separation barrier, has been divested from by numerous European companies and governments. The German state-owned rail company has refused to do business with an Israeli firm building a rail line linking Israel to the occupied territories. These are a few examples of how such boycotts can work, and in fact are growing.

Since most countries are united in seeing Israeli settlement activity as illegal and illegitimate, they must at least force the Israeli state to label goods accordingly and maintain separate statistics for the Israeli and settler economies.

Those critics who oppose both the boycott idea and the settlements would be more convincing if they offered viable alternatives, for instance backing the creation of a fund to provide settlers with incentives to return to Israel. But as long as they don’t outline any realistic substitutes, then it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they prefer to let settlement activity go forward with some mild scolding.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/27/bret-stephen-s-crisis-of-empathy.html

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/019_01/9157

ANTHONY SHADID, the lead Middle East correspondent for theNew York Times, died on February 16 at only forty-three, succumbing to an asthma attack as he snuck out of Syria while covering the popular uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. Shadid, who had twice won the Pulitzer Prize, was universally acknowledged as the premier American reporter on the Middle East of his generation. He left behind an extraordinary body of work, culminating in the just-published House of Stone.

However, House of Stone is not a work of Middle East reportage; it is, rather, a memoir, devoted to Shadid’s deeply personal quest to uncover his heritage in war-torn Lebanon—and specifically in his ancestral town of Marjayoun, which his grandfather and grandmother, then neighbors but not relatives, both separately left in the early 1920s for the United States. Between the 2006 war pitting Hezbollah against Israel and the outbreak of a mini–civil war, mainly in Beirut, in 2008, Shadid took a year off from his then position at the Washington Post to rebuild his great-grandfather’s abandoned and dilapidated home in Marjayoun. Shadid describes the project as “a small odyssey,” a “meaningful search” for his family’s roots and a new sense of his own personal belonging in their land of origin. It’s clear from the outset that he anticipated discovery and reconnection as the outcomes of his building project, and as it unfolds, the completed project indeed grants Shadid a new sense of identity and purpose. The house, he writes, “makes a statement: Remember the past. Remember Marjayoun. Remember who you are.”

House of Stone alternates between two stories: the account of Shadid’s effort to rebuild the house (in regular font), and the story of his family’s immigration to the United States (in italics). The structure of an alternating narrative cutting back and forth between a contemporary story and an older history that informs it is well established in both fiction and nonfiction, and in film as well. Think, for example, of another immigrant narrative, The Godfather, Part II, which intersperses the steady assimilation of Michael Corleone (into the culture of the Mafia and the American dream alike) alongside the formative saga of Vito Corleone’s immigration to the United States and gradual emergence as a Mob kingpin. This simple format works exceptionally well for Shadid. His two narratives unfold slowly—like the house itself—in both harmony and counterpoint to explain the motivations behind his project and its deeper purposes.

No one should turn to House of Stone for a sustained analysis of Lebanese politics or of the Arab political condition. This book has no index, and indeed does not need one; it won’t serve as a source for any sustained research project, save into the story of Shadid’s life or his readopted hometown. But it will provide non-Arab readers a very strong sense of Lebanese town culture and mores. Shadid is no anthropologist or sociologist, althoughHouse of Stone conveys tremendous insights into the social forces that shape life (for better and worse) in Lebanese towns—and in some ways in Levantine and even broader Arab societies as well. With the fair-handed sensibility and narrative voice he established in his dispatches for the Times, Shadid spares no one their sins or embarrassments. Yet, like so much else in Shadid’s writing, this book humanizes Arabs, both individually and collectively, for an American audience otherwise starved for such crucial moments of recognition with our present culture’s quintessential “Other.”

Shadid’s great skill as a journalist was that of a master storyteller, and he’s never been more effective than in his final book. The work essentially belongs to the tradition of nonfiction belles lettres, as noteworthy for its style and prose elegance as for its subject matter. But Shadid’s book also very much belongs to a particular genre of postcolonial literature: the journey back from the metropolis to the periphery by the immigrant—or, in this case, the immigrants’ descendant.

Such works have become a major strand of postcolonial literature as the immigrant experience shifts to tracking returns from the metropolitan center to the periphery. Shadid, returning to not only the country but also the physical home of his great-grandfather, provides the latest instance of this narrative of immigrant return to a lost and in many ways imagined homeland. Probably the most famous iteration of this genre is the story of Saladin Chamcha in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). In the moving and powerful closing section of Rushdie’s much-misunderstood novel, Chamcha returns to India, reconciles with his estranged father, and reassumes his previously discarded Indian identity.

Shadid is more than one step removed from Chamcha, as a grandson of immigrants. Yet the project of recovering his Arab, Lebanese, and Marjayouni identity is essentially a hybrid of this literary genre—as well as an Arab-American iteration of the more specifically American “roots” quest of the identity-politics era. One of his relatives even sardonically invokes the name Kunta Kinte, the half-invented protagonist of Roots, Alex Haley’s 1976 book seeking to reconstruct his own family’s African-American migration story. In this “roots” sense,House of Stone is a quintessentially post–civil rights movement American book, exploring the contours of the hyphen in a hyphenated identity.

It’s also, in every sense, not only an Arab-American story, but the Arab-American story. The saga of his family’s emigration from Marjayoun to Oklahoma is a representative snapshot of the Arab-American experience at its core: an all-American immigrant narrative, but shaped very deeply by its Arab protagonists, their circumstances and their cultural heritage. In the United States, he writes, “fortunes were accumulated, not found,” and “for those who worked hard, profits were good.” At the same time, though, his family’s assimilation to American life often meant changing names, negotiating identities, and self-reinvention—as Shadid recalls, the members of his migrant family were “determined to be like their neighbors in Oklahoma.” I doubt that the Arab-American experience has ever received more affecting treatment than Shadid delivers here in his characteristically elegant prose. He describes, for example, the tension for these early immigrants between pragmatic assimilation and a no-less-powerful impulse to cling “defiantly to the traditions that they believed set them apart.” “Food was the mainstay,” he writes, as these Arab immigrants doggedly persisted in eating the familiar fare of their homeland, and “socializing was a necessary priority” among this diaspora community. “Visits kept to a village cadence,” Shadid notes, and “impromptu parties were convened on any night.” And during these gatherings, “never a word of English was spoken. On those nights, they were back in Marjayoun. They were home, together.”

By contrast, Leila Ahmed’s brilliant memoir, A Border Passage (1999), may have been written in English and in the United States, but it’s very much an Arab, rather than an Arab-American, book. Its chapter “On Becoming an Arab”—which describes the process by which Egyptians of her generation were, from her perspective, virtually shanghaied into an ideological Arab-nationalist worldview during the 1950s—has received far too little attention. It’s fascinating to read Ahmed’s account as a counterpoint to Shadid’s enthusiastic embrace of his inherited Arab identity. Shadid, the roots-conscious hyphenated American, sees his journey back from the American metropolis as not only natural but healing and restorative; Ahmed, on the other hand, describes a far more rigid and oppressive Arab identity—and an enforced dislocation from a broader, more cosmopolitan, and richer cultural heritage in her native Cairo.

Several other recent memoirs have narrated the rigors of Arab migration, or in some cases exile—–most notably, perhaps, Edward Said’s Out of Place (1999). But Shadid seems to have tapped into something much more fundamental in the experiences that formed today’s Arab-American community. Said found himself most comfortable in a cosmopolitan, always-alienated, and intellectually rarefied cultural environment informed by Adorno’s “negative dialectics,” which held that “dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible.” More prosaically, Shadid yearns for something reassuringly fixed and settled: a home, and the recovery of something “lost”—a much more typical impulse among third-generation immigrants. For Said, cosmopolitan displacement was intellectually liberating, whereas for Shadid—and I suspect for most people—“being torn in two often leaves something less than one.”

The house in House of Stone serves as a potent and multivalent metaphor in Shadid’s imagination: It represents stability in the present; hope for the future; reconnection with a long-lost—and, he admits, in many senses imaginary—past; the continuity of family memory and commitment; and all the nuanced meanings of the untranslatable and overdetermined Arabic word bayt. As Shadid notes, bayt possesses connotations that “resonate beyond rooms and walls, summoning longings gathered about family and home,” and represents “the identity that does not fade.” It also stands in for Lebanon itself, that anarchic mosaic of ill-fitting parts, stabilized only through an equilibrium of inherently unstable elements. Lebanon is a country with no majority community, instead consisting of dozens of smaller groups often finding themselves in open confrontation and coexisting uneasily in adjacent sectarian enclaves. These qualities have doomed it to be the perennial site of foreign meddling and a venue for devastating civil conflicts and proxy wars. It’s impossible not to read in many passages the suggestion that the house stands in for the country built around it: “In its destruction, the house, liberated, revealed its origins. . . . In chaotic geometry, smaller stones climbed over each other in the rugged, disordered perfection of the Cave’s arcade.”

Indeed, writers addressing Lebanon’s inscrutable and tragic character have often used this same metaphor, characterizing Lebanon as a unique, marvelous, and impossibly divided “house.” Lebanon’s premier historian, Kamal Salibi, titled his definitive work on modern Lebanese history A House of Many Mansions (1988). Salibi was, of course, deliberately citing a saying of Jesus as recorded in John 14:2 to highlight what he viewed as the pressing question of how Arab Christians would fare in Lebanon in particular and the Middle East in general. Likewise, Shadid devotes of a good deal of House of Stone to the troubled history of Christians in his homeland—a theme that emerges as he recounts both his family history and his dealings with a host of Lebanese Christian villagers in the effort to rebuild his ancestral home. There is a widespread sense, which Shadid repeatedly expresses, that numerous factors, including the sectarian attitudes of Arab Christians themselves, are placing the future of Lebanon’s Christian communities at risk. As Shadid unsparingly observes, an allegiance to marginalized, sectarian identity in Muslim-majority cultures for Christians means that “we faced our own extinction.”

Shadid’s book is impressively self-aware and never shrinks from asking difficult questions, but it does not dive deeply into philosophical problems. Still, it’s possible to tease out, in Shadid’s sustained contemplation of the myriad meanings of the terms house and bayt, another body of complex thought from an unlikely touchstone: Heidegger’s musing on the overdetermined meanings of “dwelling” in his renowned essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Heidegger claims that “only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build,” and that “to build is in itself already to dwell.” Heidegger’s ponderous, difficult philosophical essay and Shadid’s light, accessible memoir have an unexpected resonance despite their radical differences. For Shadid, too, home begins with dwelling as thinking, an act of creative imagination that gives meaning to family, identity, and continuity. He imagines bringing his daughter to the house he rebuilt and teaching her the Arabic words of his great-grandfather: “This is bayt,” he writes. “This is what we imagine.”

There are even hints of Freud’s sense of the uncanny as the unhomely—the familiar made unfamiliar by neurotic symptoms—in Shadid’s story. American readers have especially prized Shadid’s work for its accessible transmission of the attitudes and experiences of Arabs in the Middle East—but for highly assimilated Arab-Americans like him, the Arab world (at least at first) is precisely such an uncanny place, simultaneously radically different and oddly familiar. Shadid’s project of rebuilding his great-grandfather’s house of stone is certainly neurotic—he describes it as “quixotic” and explicitly links it to the divorce from his wife that destroyed his American home—an effort to make the unheimlich homely and to refashion himself as “native” to a place that is both familiar and strange. He also seems to relish almost anything that links him with the “crazy” Shadids of Marjayoun village lore, merchants who drove impossibly hard bargains and were quick to anger, take offense, and bear endless grudges. This, too, is the kind of neurotic symptom Freud posited as the indispensable origin of art, culture, and civilization itself.

But if we were to boil the guiding metaphor in House of Stone to one primary element, the home Shadid ultimately discovers at the end of his quest is the book in the reader’s hands. The narrative of the construction of the house is, in effect, the story of the writing process at work. As Shadid patiently reconstructs his family’s home on its original site, he uses this struggle toward completion to recover in these pages the story behind the house—his family’s history. Throughout House of Stone, Shadid’s use of metaphor is simple, elegant, and effective. Tiles evoke historical and family detail, ancient trees summon forth the idea of social and familial continuity, new plants and flowers signal a fresh understanding of the past and present. Shadid’s rich, often anthropomorphic images, presented in the larger framework of the book’s alternating and intersecting narratives, nestle perfectly into each other like Russian dolls, revealing ever more nuance and detail. “The tiles at my feet were the remnants,” he writes, “artifacts of an ideal, meant to remind and inspire, vestiges of the irretrievable Levant, a word that, to many, calls to mind an older, more tolerant, more indulgent Middle East.”

But in more than one passage, Shadid is let down by overexplicitness, explaining the metaphor so baldly that it breaks the spell, like a conjurer walking us through the mechanics of the illusion during the magic trick. In a section describing his friend Assaad’s inability to decide whether he should return to Wisconsin, where he had settled only to leave, Shadid writes, “He was a man caught between two places, one where he would always be a stranger, one where he was no longer a native.” He continues, “Sometimes, it seemed to me, I saw Assaad’s displacement everywhere I looked.” Such painstaking literalness is, paradoxically,too direct: It actually subverts the impact of the narrative’s imagery, which, left on its own and never very far from the surface, generally gives the book a very effective and artful structure. In this manner, the book’s countless seemingly trivial details gain enough breathing room within the narrative to artfully enrich and interrogate its author’s broader concerns. One also occasionally gets the sense that some underzealous editing, probably as a consequence of an understandable readerly enchantment with the rich details and resonant themes of House of Stone, allowed the book to drag slightly in places. But these are quibbles about what is on the whole an exquisitely written text.

Still, the one metaphor that really lets Shadid down is precisely the one that many readers will probably find most urgent: his bid to link his story to the “Arab Spring” protests that have convulsed the Middle East since late 2010. Most efforts to impose any form of grand narrative about these ongoing and unresolved uprisings seem premature and jury-rigged, and that’s very much the case with the epilogue to House of Stone. Shadid’s commentary on the region’s political upheavals feels uncomfortably tacked on to what is otherwise a very finely integrated story, and it stretches a bit to connect the story of Shadid’s uneasy homecoming to the broader quest for democratic reform in the Arab world. In Tahrir Square, for example, Shadid writes that “Egypt reimagined home,” much as he had done—via a collective “act of imagination . . . [creating] a different kind of community linked to what once was.” That’s a reasonable description of a great deal of what happened in Egypt and Libya, although he agrees the liberatory “Tahrir moment” might be very fleeting, referring to “what had once more, at last, been imagined.” Even so, the interpretive scheme here feels rather strained; his readers will be hard-pressed to see an evident connection—or even an implicit one—between the Tahrir protests and Shadid’s struggles to reimagine and refashion his forebears’ house and his own identity in the process. The only way to make sense of such a comparison is to posit that all acts of imaginative redefining are of a kind.

It’s an especially curious elision, since over the past year or so Shadid—who, for most of his career, had lacked the supple feel for political analysis that he typically brought to his reporting on the ground—was starting to emerge as a very impressive analyst of Arab political developments. Consider, for example, an especially trenchant anatomy of the Syrian crisis that he wrote early last November for PBS’s Frontline, titled “In Assad’s Syria, There Is No Imagination.” With a minimum of personal or confessional commentary, Shadid was able to persuasively interpret the Arab uprisings as creative acts of collective imagination, and the crisis in Syria as a failure of imagination. And what he wrote then is still true: The brutality of the government means “Syria is still subsumed in the logic of fear, which forces once diverse societies to hew to their smaller parts, obliterating the ability to imagine broader communities and other identities,” and the “lack of vision” by the opposition has not effectively counteracted this trend. The opposition forces in Syria have thus far crucially failed to reassure ethnic and sectarian minorities that their fears about a post-Assad future are unfounded. Shadid himself takes the leap of imagining a “post-Ottoman” milieu in which “people can imagine themselves as Alawite, Levantine, Arab, Syrian, Eastern—or some hybrid that transcends them all.”

Such a vision might be a little fanciful, but Shadid was extremely incisive in focusing on the indispensability of citizenship, with all its rights and responsibilities—a concept that has not been central to contemporary Arab political discourse—as the key to a better future for Arab societies now emerging from the suffocation of dictatorship. Whether cleverly, naively, or simply matter-of-factly, he cites the Tunisian Islamist Said Ferjani’s observation that “only in citizenship . . . could diversity be preserved and protected,” and allow Arab societies “to become greater than our parts.” Real citizenship, Shadid suggests, “would allow us to imagine” and therefore create an Arab future that is a genuine liberation, a factor that will almost be the single most important force that determines the long-term outcome of these uprisings. Even if he attributed this insight to Ferjani, Shadid demonstrated the rapidly developing strength of his own analytical skills—and, sadly, it still really does take an imaginative leap to dream of an Arab world defined by citizens, none better or worse than any other, free to define themselves and to participate fully in their societies.

A major story based on Shadid’s interview with Ferjani appeared in the New York Times on February 17, the day after Shadid’s death. It is, illogically but inevitably, more uncanny and unsettling to read the work of recently deceased authors—pieces written by my friend Christopher Hitchens are still coming out, though he passed away several months ago—than it is to encounter a newly discovered work of a long-dead writer. The Ferjani story and other short posthumous pieces merely set up the deeply moving experience of reading House of Stone in the full knowledge that Shadid tragically died in the few months between the book’s completion and its publication. It’s impossible not to note, however, the numerous passages that seem almost to anticipate the tragedy—though of course nothing of the sort could have remotely been on Shadid’s mind. A friend says of Marjayoun when Shadid is beginning his project, “The only time people arrive here is when they’re dead. . . . They bring people here to bury them.” A relative tells him defiantly, “This is where I will come when I die. I have a big, beautiful grave ready.”

Shadid’s construction project in Marjayoun was clearly an exercise in self-reconstruction: an effort to recuperate as well as reimagine the history of his family and to provide a new future for them and for himself. He clearly didn’t intend it as such, but the house will now stand not as a tomb, but as a living monument to Anthony Shadid for his relatives and the townsfolk of Marjayoun. A few days after his death, Shadid’s ashes were scattered in the garden he created around the house he rebuilt. To the rest of us, he bequeaths a very different monument: his extraordinary writing, which reached its apex with House of Stone.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/26/show-don-t-tell-why-the-apartheid-analogy-falls-flat.html

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/21/three-cheers-for-a-settlement-boycott.html

The backlash against Peter Beinart’s principled call for Jewish Americans to boycott Israeli settlement goods mirrors a debate that has been raging within the pro-Palestinian community. While many Jewish Americans, including those who are highly critical of the settlements, have reacted angrily to Beinart’s idea and reject the notion of any boycott of any Israelis whatsoever, in pro-Palestinian circles the debate has been whether or not to boycott all of Israel or to focus on the occupation and the settlements.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/14/match-spark.html

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=375483

Last week, I argued that the United States was not doing enough to engage proactively with the unfolding struggle in Syria, and that this inaction was ceding the field to others in an unwise, unnecessary and avoidable manner. The response from many friends and colleagues was, “What would you have us do?”

Opponents of a more robust US policy toward Syria pointed to statements by unnamed senior US intelligence officials quoted by The Washington Post that President Bashar al-Assad is still “is very much in charge” of the country. They generally ignored the second part of the quote in which the official said that even though “the odds are against them,” Syria’s leaders “are going to fight very hard.”

President Barack Obama and other senior administration officials have implicitly defended a policy of inaction by arguing that “the regime’s days are numbered” and that “it is not a matter of whether but when” the Syrian government is overthrown. If that is the case, then why feel impelled to act?

Although it is difficult indeed to sketch a long-term scenario in which the Syrian regime survives in anything like its present form, nothing is inevitable, and that includes Assad’s downfall. This “inevitability” argument serves as stopgap logic for the United States to continue to do very little to influence events in Syria—a policy, or absence of policy, that may have a great deal of appeal during an election year. Of course, if 8,000 Israelis had died in the past year, its relevance to the American national interest would not be debated.

Obama has said that he would not “act unilaterally” in Syria. This is a shot aimed between the eyes of a straw man. Not even the most vocal proponents of robust American action, such as Senator John McCain, have suggested that Washington do anything unilaterally.

Many close allies and supporters of the administration, including the Center for American Progress in a recent report, have beenemphasizing the alleged lack of good options the United States has regarding Syria. A former State Department official, Aaron David Miller, laid out the case for inaction the Foreign Policy website a few days ago. Surveying what he suggested were the options facing American policy, he warned against “reckless ideas of how to make the Syrian tragedy ours.” Miller did admit, however, that “the longer the killing goes on, the more likely we be will dragged into doing more.”

We can be certain that in fact the war will intensify. Miller, the Center for American Progress and others have warned of the difficulties and dangers of creating safe havens or arming rebel groups. No one denies that giving weapons to the rebels carries risks. But critics have yet to answer the point that others will go ahead and arm Syria’s opposition, and by doing so will gain influence, empower their own Syrian allies, and therefore help to define the very nature of the opposition.

It’s a red herring to suggest that because the situation is complex, American leverage is limited and coordination with allies is essential, therefore little can be done. It may be that the diplomatic groundwork and the level of the crisis on the ground, particularly with regard to Turkish policy, is not yet sufficient to establish safe havens or buffer zones. However, that does not preclude developing a policy that anticipates and begins to prepare for limited intervention when it becomes necessary, as even Miller acknowledges it probably will.

In the meantime, there are some clear steps the Obama administration can take to enhance its policies and behave proactively rather than reactively. First, it should stop talking about the “inevitable” fall of the Syrian regime and clearly announce that regime change in Damascus is a goal of US policy. Having determined and announced that, a great deal of clarity should follow.

Second, the United States should, like the European Union and others, formally recognize the Syrian National Council as “a legitimate representative of the Syrian people.”

Third, the administration should publish a series of benchmarks that the Syrian National Council, or any other opposition group seeking this role, must accomplish in order to gain eventual recognition as, in effect, a government in exile. These should include, but not be limited to, developing well-structured relations with the Free Syrian Army and other armed rebel groups, and doing much more to reach out to Syrian confessional and ethnic minorities, as well as offering far-reaching, ironclad guarantees about their status in a post-Assad future.

Fourth, Washington should begin identifying those in the political opposition as well as armed groups on the ground that it believes can represent a better future for Syria. And then it must do everything possible, within the bounds of prudence, to strengthen their hands against both the regime and other opposition forces.

None of these are wild-eyed ideas or flights of fancy. Nor are they reckless or ill-advised. In fact, they are the minimum conceivable corrective to a policy of inaction that is both reckless and ill-advised.

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=375483

Last week, I argued that the United States was not doing enough to engage proactively with the unfolding struggle in Syria, and that this inaction was ceding the field to others in an unwise, unnecessary and avoidable manner. The response from many friends and colleagues was, “What would you have us do?”

Opponents of a more robust US policy toward Syria pointed to statements by unnamed senior US intelligence officials quoted by The Washington Post that President Bashar al-Assad is still “is very much in charge” of the country. They generally ignored the second part of the quote in which the official said that even though “the odds are against them,” Syria’s leaders “are going to fight very hard.”

President Barack Obama and other senior administration officials have implicitly defended a policy of inaction by arguing that “the regime’s days are numbered” and that “it is not a matter of whether but when” the Syrian government is overthrown. If that is the case, then why feel impelled to act?

Although it is difficult indeed to sketch a long-term scenario in which the Syrian regime survives in anything like its present form, nothing is inevitable, and that includes Assad’s downfall. This “inevitability” argument serves as stopgap logic for the United States to continue to do very little to influence events in Syria—a policy, or absence of policy, that may have a great deal of appeal during an election year. Of course, if 8,000 Israelis had died in the past year, its relevance to the American national interest would not be debated.

Obama has said that he would not “act unilaterally” in Syria. This is a shot aimed between the eyes of a straw man. Not even the most vocal proponents of robust American action, such as Senator John McCain, have suggested that Washington do anything unilaterally.

Many close allies and supporters of the administration, including the Center for American Progress in a recent report, have been emphasizing the alleged lack of good options the United States has regarding Syria. A former State Department official, Aaron David Miller, laid out the case for inaction the Foreign Policy website a few days ago. Surveying what he suggested were the options facing American policy, he warned against “reckless ideas of how to make the Syrian tragedy ours.” Miller did admit, however, that “the longer the killing goes on, the more likely we be will dragged into doing more.”

We can be certain that in fact the war will intensify. Miller, the Center for American Progress and others have warned of the difficulties and dangers of creating safe havens or arming rebel groups. No one denies that giving weapons to the rebels carries risks. But critics have yet to answer the point that others will go ahead and arm Syria’s opposition, and by doing so will gain influence, empower their own Syrian allies, and therefore help to define the very nature of the opposition.

It’s a red herring to suggest that because the situation is complex, American leverage is limited and coordination with allies is essential, therefore little can be done. It may be that the diplomatic groundwork and the level of the crisis on the ground, particularly with regard to Turkish policy, is not yet sufficient to establish safe havens or buffer zones. However, that does not preclude developing a policy that anticipates and begins to prepare for limited intervention when it becomes necessary, as even Miller acknowledges it probably will.

In the meantime, there are some clear steps the Obama administration can take to enhance its policies and behave proactively rather than reactively. First, it should stop talking about the “inevitable” fall of the Syrian regime and clearly announce that regime change in Damascus is a goal of US policy. Having determined and announced that, a great deal of clarity should follow.

Second, the United States should, like the European Union and others, formally recognize the Syrian National Council as “a legitimate representative of the Syrian people.”

Third, the administration should publish a series of benchmarks that the Syrian National Council, or any other opposition group seeking this role, must accomplish in order to gain eventual recognition as, in effect, a government in exile. These should include, but not be limited to, developing well-structured relations with the Free Syrian Army and other armed rebel groups, and doing much more to reach out to Syrian confessional and ethnic minorities, as well as offering far-reaching, ironclad guarantees about their status in a post-Assad future.

Fourth, Washington should begin identifying those in the political opposition as well as armed groups on the ground that it believes can represent a better future for Syria. And then it must do everything possible, within the bounds of prudence, to strengthen their hands against both the regime and other opposition forces.

None of these are wild-eyed ideas or flights of fancy. Nor are they reckless or ill-advised. In fact, they are the minimum conceivable corrective to a policy of inaction that is both reckless and ill-advised.

http://www.democracyjournal.org/24/arabian-fights.php

How does one evaluate or even describe the nature and effects of a tornado when it’s still swirling? This is the conundrum facing anyone writing about the tumultuous changes taking place in the Arab world. These qualities of extreme flux and fluidity—what Frantz Fanon termed an “occult zone of instability”—are what have given rise to the dizzying plethora of terms coined to try to describe the unrest: “Arab Spring,” “Arab uprisings,” “Arab revolution(s),” “Arab awakening,” and Iran’s particularly misguided phrase, “Islamic awakening,” are just a few. Since concerted popular protests began in Tunisia on December 18, 2010, anti-government unrest has spread to many Arab countries. Several dictators have fallen, and others appear to be on their way out. But the outcomes in different Arab states undergoing these radical changes, and for strategic relations in the region as a whole, remain undetermined and, to some extent, unreadable.

The reshaping of the political and strategic landscape of one of the most important regions on earth properly commands the attention of the entire world. There are profound implications for U.S. foreign policy given that virtually everything most Americans, including policy-makers, thought they knew about Arab societies and political culture turns out to be incorrect or no longer applies. The uprisings clearly require a thorough reconceptualization of American and other Western attitudes toward Arab peoples, culture, and societies, and the casting aside of moldy orientalist stereotypes and anachronistic assumptions.

Because everything is changing so quickly and in so many places at the same time, following the trajectory of developments is daunting enough, let alone trying to analyze and understand exactly what they mean or where they’re going. The most obvious and persistent questions are almost impossible to answer. Are we seeing the emergence of liberal Arab democracies, Islamist systems, or entirely new hybrid post-Islamist political orders? Will the new Arab world be more pluralistic or embolden sectarianism? Will the changes bring greater stability or more conflict? Will they be the basis for economic revival or the chaos underwriting economic collapse? Developments are shifting so dramatically that it is difficult even to formulate the right questions, let alone to investigate possible answers.

Under such circumstances, reporters and journalists who limit themselves to narratives describing and contextualizing events have it a little easier than analysts and academics, who are supposed to produce “big picture” evaluations. Two new books, Liberation Square by Ashraf Khalil and The Arab Uprising by Marc Lynch, are excellent illustrations of the strengths and limitations of both approaches. Khalil focuses primarily on telling the story of the days between the outbreak of the protest movement in Egypt on January 25, 2011, and the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak 18 days later. Lynch, on the other hand, tries to provide a broad-based analysis of the unprecedented events in the region, and to posit a comprehensive methodological framework for understanding them.

Having set himself a much more limited, manageable, and straightforward task, Khalil, a reporter who has covered the Middle East for several major Western publications including The Los Angeles Times, succeeds admirably. But his book doesn’t offer any guide to what happened after Mubarak fell in Egypt, or what is likely to happen in that country or anywhere else in the future. Lynch’s project is infinitely more complex and, ultimately, unrealizable, at least at this stage. He certainly deserves a lot of credit for trying, and I’m not sure anyone else could have done any better than Lynch, a professor of political science at George Washington University. As a consequence of being both impossibly broad and clearly premature, Lynch’s book suffers from serious flaws. In many passages it feels rushed, at times even becoming a hodgepodge of incongruous arguments, and Lynch is fixated on the influence of the Qatar-based Al Jazeera television network. But unlike Liberation Square, The Arab Uprising does offer a broad framework for understanding not only what has happened, but what may well happen in the Arab world, and some sober suggestions about what this implies for the United States.

For a detailed, day-by-day account of exactly what happened in Tahrir Square, one need look no further than Liberation Square. This is exemplary reportage: fair, serious, dynamic, and engaging. It is at its most vivid in Chapter Nine, “The Fall of the Police State,” in which Khalil describes in detail the process by which protesters finally overwhelmed the Egyptian security units and forced the military into making a final decision whether or not to intervene to crush the rebellion. He is clear, and correct, that this was the decisive turning point: “Egypt’s nonviolent revolution wouldn’t have happened without some people who were willing to be extremely violent at times. Over a four-day period, a hardcore cadre of protesters confronted and physically shattered the Egyptian police state.” Khalil brings to life a “full-blown rock war” on the crucial day of confrontation, January 28, pitting stone-throwing protesters against tear gas and baton charges from security forces. He explains how “the protesters worked in organized shifts; those returning from the front lines of the conflict were treated for tear-gas exposure and buckshot wounds by makeshift triage units,” while others “dragged a blanket loaded with hundreds of rocks and concrete chunks toward the front to be thrown at the police.”

But Khalil’s three-word final paragraph, after describing the removal of Mubarak by the military, is profoundly misleading: “It was over.” As subsequent events in Egypt have conclusively shown, if by “it” one means the tumultuous changes transforming the Egyptian political scene and system, then “it” had only just begun. The overthrow of Mubarak was, in fact, not a revolution at all, but a regime decapitation by elements of the existing power structure seeking to preserve as much of their supremacy, privileges, and wealth as possible in the face of a popular rebellion. As this essay goes to press, Egypt is still firmly in the grip of the Mubarak-era military. A year after Mubarak’s downfall it would still be possible, and probably accurate, to argue that the fundamental transformation of that country, if that is indeed what is taking place, remains in its infancy.

The greatest strength of Liberation Square is Khalil’s masterful contextualization of the genesis of the Egyptian uprising. He grounds it in the plight of what University of Illinois sociology professor Asef Bayat has perfectly described as the “middle-class poor” in the Arab world, mainly educated and primarily young people who simply cannot find jobs commensurate with their education and expectations. Khalil’s most revealing passages vividly describe the “palpable sense of despair and helplessness…taking hold” in much of Egyptian middle-class poor society in the last decade of Mubarak’s rule. Through an insightful reading ofCultural Film, a superficially lightweight comedy released in 2000, Khalil describes how, because “[t]here are no jobs out there—at least none that pay enough” for young professionals and couples to get their own apartments, their lives are placed on hold for years if not decades. Both careers and romantic relationships fall apart under such strains. Khalil suggestively wonders “just how much pure sexual frustration fed into Egypt’s revolutionary rage.” While the film ends on a contrived happy note, he aptly points out that its main characters in fact “would have no true options other than to start a revolution, join a fundamentalist cell, or kill themselves.”

It’s hard to overstate the centrality to these uprisings of the economic, social, personal, and, indeed, often sexual frustrations faced by the young middle-class poor that make up such a huge percentage of so many Arab societies. One of the most serious problems with Lynch’s book is that it occasionally acknowledges but ultimately pays very little attention to this vital class and materialist element. Instead, Lynch grounds his analysis in the subject of his last book, 2005’s Voices of the New Arab Public, which was mainly about Al Jazeera. He therefore reads the uprisings, which he thinks of as a unified movement or phenomenon, as primarily driven by “the rise of the ‘new Arab public sphere.’” He mainly attributes this to Al Jazeera, and also to some extent social media and the Internet, as well as cheap mobile phones.

There’s no doubt that the phenomenon that Lynch returns to time and again of a technologically driven and relatively new “Arab public sphere” is essential to understanding the uprisings. Lynch is correct in noting that because of this development, “the ability to credibly align with the Arab public on its core issues and to shape those convictions will become an ever greater source of power and influence,” and that “the unified political space will increase the linkage between issues across the region.” He also correctly identifies this as a significant challenge to American foreign policy, particularly regarding the question of Palestine.

But Lynch ultimately is too focused on the media. One could make a drinking game based on every time he mentions Al Jazeera. You’d be in real trouble on page 90, in which Al Jazeera is mentioned no fewer than nine times, as well as credited with having “owned the revolution.” This fixation occasionally draws Lynch into indefensible hyperbole such as “Al Jazeera now found itself in a position to make or break uprisings,” as if Arab public opinion were simply a marionette dancing on the strings of the puppet masters in Doha.

Lynch acknowledges that Arab politics in the past decade were dominated by competition between a “resistance axis” and a “moderate axis,” and that this “came to define all regional interactions in classic bipolar fashion, giving regional strategic meaning to local events and bringing together unlikely coalitions.” But he doesn’t explain what those unlikely coalitions were, how they have broken down and, most importantly, what they have been replaced with. The primary narrative promoted by Al Jazeera and some other influential Arab media in the past decade was that the Arab world was the scene of a historic confrontation between a “culture of resistance” (mainly the Islamist groups and the Iranian-led alliance) and a “culture of accommodation” (most of the Arab governments). This narrative informed and rationalized extremely strong and sincere Arab Sunni support for Hezbollah in its war with Israel and, more emphatically, the combined Sunni Islamist and Iranian-alliance support for Hamas.

But Lynch misreads Al Jazeera’s role in promoting the “culture of resistance” as merely a symptom of “its refusal to sign on to the Saudi-led campaigns.” He is likewise wrong to say that the network’s “sympathetic coverage of Hezbollah” simply “reflected the views of the vast majority of the Arab public with which it identified.” Both assertions elide the domination within Al Jazeera’s on-air talent and management of Islamists and pro-Islamist anti-imperialists and left-nationalists with a strong ideological tilt toward the “culture of resistance.” (They also elide the usefulness of such rhetoric to Qatari foreign policy.) The narrative spread by Al Jazeera and other like-minded Arab media in fact created the ideological space for these trans-sectarian alliances, based on the mythology of the “resistance axis.” This “accommodation versus resistance” story line threatened to give the various protest movements that Lynch describes in detail a prescriptive character—that “accommodationist” governments needed to be replaced by “resistance” movements—but in the event it did not.

Al Jazeera no doubt did help create a new Arab public sphere and consciousness. But its rhetoric over the past decade did not, in fact, anticipate or set the stage for the uprisings in Tunisia or Egypt. Had it done so, those uprisings would have been far more Islamist in character and oriented toward anti-imperialism regionally rather than mainly focusing on social justice, accountability, and democracy at home. A very different emancipatory spirit took hold on the streets of Arab capitals. Like the Islamist parties it generally promoted, the station and its analysts were also largely taken aback by the protests and essentially had to play catch-up with movements they neither informed nor fully understood. Both rushed to try to benefit from the unexpected uprisings, and to some extent they have, but neither were the authors of them.

While developments in each individual Arab state are shaped mainly by local contingencies, the effect of the uprisings regionally has been the emergence of a new strategic landscape based mainly on sectarian identification that has been increasingly pitting Arab Sunnis against all confessional minorities and vice versa. Lynch incorrectly implies that sectarianism in the Middle East was much stronger in the middle part of the last decade than it is now. In fact, the sectarianism that has been emerging in recent months is far starker than what was circulating then. The space for trans-sectarian alliances is now foreclosed. Hamas, for example, can no longer be aligned with the Syrian regime, Iran, or Hezbollah because it has been forced to choose between its Sunni Islamist ideology and its alliance with Damascus and Tehran. It has an identity and a branding crisis of unprecedented proportions, and is hoping to avoid paying a major price in having to readjust its policies in a manner that would severely undermine its ability to challenge the mainstream Palestinian nationalists. The identities of both the pro- and anti-regime camps in the Syrian struggle have changed. This is not a reflection or extension of the old dichotomy, but a new and largely sectarian one. It doesn’t fit well with Lynch’s model of a new, unified, empowered Arab public brought together by Al Jazeera and the Internet, but in fact it’s defining how regional actors are lining up on issue of the legitimacy and survival of the Bashar al-Assad regime and, indeed, how Syrian society itself seems to be dividing internally.

Lynch argues that because Al Jazeera shone the spotlight on the regime’s violence, “both Syrians and other Arabs consciously placed the unfolding events within the broader Arab story. In that story, Assad was the villain, regardless of his ‘resistance’ foreign policy.” That’s an accurate reflection of how almost all Sunni Arab public opinion has shifted regarding the Syrian regime and its allies, but it doesn’t reflect the completely different understanding of events embraced by most Arab Shiites, many if not most Levantine Christians, and others. Yet Lynch manages to write almost 20 pages entirely devoted to the uprising in Syria without ever delving into its increasingly sectarian character, or the nature of its minority Alawite government and all that this implies given the new regional realities.

He briefly acknowledges that the conflict in Syria seems to be giving rise to “a sectarian narrative” in “troubling ways,” but it’s a momentary flash of recognition. Lynch suffers from a similar blind spot regarding Bahrain, which is a mirror image of Syria: an oppressive minority Sunni regime almost unanimously supported by Arab Sunni governments, Islamist groups, and most prominent organizations. He is convinced that “the Arab public saw the Bahraini protesters as part of its shared struggle, and the regime as equivalent to its own hated regimes,” until a Saudi-led “steady barrage of sectarian accusations” undid this solidarity. But it was difficult to ever detect any particular Arab Sunni sympathy for the Bahraini protesters outside of narrow circles of liberal youth and online activists.

Lynch is at his strongest when discussing the American policy debate on how to respond to the Arab uprisings, and he provides a powerful and convincing intervention. He makes the case, which I agree with strongly, that the Obama Administration has done a reasonably good job in reacting to the immediate challenges of the unanticipated uprisings, but that the United States needs to develop a much more coherent approach to Middle Eastern change, because “if it continues to act as a status quo power…it will fail” to promote either its interests or its values. Lynch is absolutely right that the more empowered Arab publics and the highly significant emergence of “the new Arab public sphere” will make the issue of Palestine more, not less, important and that as long as the United States is mainly perceived as “playing defense on Israel’s behalf…this will no longer work.” He offers powerful and effective critiques of the realist and neoconservative approaches, and sensibly puts little faith in “a left-leaning academic tradition” that “likely does not want to offer useful advice” for the United States to advance its interests in the region.

He clearly outlines the challenges facing the United States: It must engage more fully with the Arab publics and position itself on the right side of history and Middle Eastern transformations; undertake “a serious rethinking of America’s relationship with Israel”; “respond rationally to the public participation of Islamist movements” by accepting they are an unavoidable and important part of the new Arab political scene; combat Islamophobia in the United States; and “accept the limits of its ability to control the Middle East.” This is an excellent summary of the challenges facing the development of a new, more effective American policy toward the Arab world, which will be urgently required in the coming months and years. I don’t think Lynch can be faulted for very ably laying out the challenges rather than suggesting any solutions.

Khalil’s book describes the economic and class bases that are central to the uprisings, as well as their liberationist passion. Lynch’s book foregrounds the crucial development of a “new Arab public sphere.” Above, I have described the rise of a dangerous new sectarianism in the emerging regional order. Many others have noted that while their rhetoric and organizations did not dominate the protests, Islamist parties are proving to be the primary and immediate beneficiaries of newly opened political space in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Others point out that the process of rebellion and of participating in new systems is itself transforming the Arab Islamists and forcing them to adopt a more pragmatic and less dogmatic worldview. Still others note the regional rise in influence of Turkey and the precipitous decline of Iran. Yet all of these dramatic changes are but strands in a complicated weave, the broad patterns of which we cannot yet fully discern.

The causes and the symptoms of the uprisings are identifiable, but not their ultimate nature or outcomes. Both Lynch and Khalil have written significant books that should help the American public and policy-makers alike comprehend the complexity and the magnitude of the challenge facing the American role in the Middle East. A little bit of humility under such circumstances, not only for commentators and analysts, but also for the country, goes a very long way indeed.