https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/the-black-banner-in-tunisia

The Tunisian group Ansar al-Sharia is about as close as one could fear to being an al-Qaeda-front organization operating freely in an Arab country. And it’s on the move.

For months, Ansar al-Sharia and its allies have been violently harassing Tunisia’s mainstream society and troika government led by Ennahda, the Muslim Brotherhood-style party. But now it has welcomed, if not indeed forced, an open confrontation.

As ever, Tunisia is just ahead of the curve in the “Arab Spring.” The confrontation between Ansar al-Sharia and Ennahda illustrates a potential fault line within the Arab Muslim religious right throughout the region.

Salafist groups, including Salafist-Jihadist and takfiri organizations like Ansar al-Sharia, may agree with less extreme Islamists about many things in theory. But in practice, they always find them both a political obstacle and insufficiently “Islamic.” Since they rely on literalism, militancy, categorical assertions, and extremism virtually unrestrained by almost any pragmatic considerations, such organizations will invariably find the power-oriented political realism of Brotherhood-style parties to be religiously and politically objectionable. More importantly, they will see political benefits in attacking them rhetorically and, eventually, literally.

That’s exactly what is happening in Tunisia. Ansar al-Sharia, which does not hide its links to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and proudly flies the gruesome black banner of Salafist-Jihadism, sought to hold their annual gathering in Tunis again this year. The group’s organizers predicted a massive turnout of 40,000 people. Even if they were overestimating participation by double, or indeed quadruple, the actual likely turnout, this was an extremely disturbing prospect for the Tunisian government and mainstream society alike.

Ansar al-Sharia has been growing ever more brazen and militant in recent months. The group is no longer satisfied with attacking “un-Islamic” cultural expressions such as cinemas, art galleries, literary festivals, and bars. Instead it has been adopting a much more openly Salafist-Jihadist, as opposed to simply Salafist, rhetoric, replete with implicit and explicit calls to violence. Its determination to challenge the government, and even set the stage for civil conflict, became impossible to ignore.

Under conditions of growing instability in the country, exacerbated by continued economic woes and other stressors, the government banned the Tunis meeting on the grounds that Ansar al-Sharia is not a legally recognized organization in the country. In response, the group shifted its gathering to the “holy city” of Kairouan. The government banned that meeting as well, and brought a major security presence to bear in order to enforce its decision.

The resulting violent confrontation outside the ancient and revered Kairouan Great Mosque left one person dead under murky circumstances. But two things were clear. First, the government was able to enforce its decisions, but only through brute force. And second, Ansar al-Sharia felt politically and organizationally capable of, and interested in, confronting the government and its security forces.

The implicit message is also clear. The government was able to win this battle, but it’s losing the war to ensure that Ansar Al-Sharia remains a largely impotent and fringe movement.

A grim set of factors is combining to empower this openly and extremely radical group. Ongoing economic distress has undermined the government, including Ennahda, and strengthened the impact of Ansar al-Sharia’s aggressive social services program. Ennahda’s political compromises with its coalition partners undermine its ability to appeal to Muslim extremists who find conciliation, even in the service of gaining political power, to be distasteful at best. Instability, and the growing power of their Salafist-Jihadist allies in Libya and the Sahel region, have provided Ansar Al-Sharia a new degree of strategic depth.

And, most worryingly of all, Ansar al-Sharia and other Salafist-Jihadist groups around the region are using the war in Syria in the same way similar ideologues used the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ansar al-Sharia has reportedly been a huge, and possibly decisive, factor in sending some 3,000 Tunisian militants to fight in Syria. This not only increases its political credentials in Islamist constituencies; much more importantly it’s starting to provide them with a growing stream of battle-trained and hardened cadres ready for armed conflict under the black banner.

The discovery of Ansar al-Sharia minefields along the Algerian border has been taken by almost everyone, including Ennahda, to confirm that this is actually beginning to happen. Ansar al-Sharia now openly warns of civil war.

This is a confrontation Ennahda sought to avoid. Its leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, last year asked Salafists, including associates of Ansar al-Sharia, to give his party peace and quiet to secure Islamist control over the police and military. But clearly Ansar al-Sharia is in no mood for patience.

The un-strategic, self-defeating Salafist-Jihadist mentality typically combines violent extremism with the lack of political judgment characteristic of most real fanatics. Yet, for now, Ansar al-Sharia appears to be entitled to an alarming degree of growing self-confidence.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/the-islamist-purge-splurge

What’s a poor Islamist to do? All they ever wanted was to take over Arab states and impose their reactionary ideology on everybody else. For decades, they assumed that the only thing really holding them back were non-Islamist dictators. But as dictatorships have fallen and political space has opened up, they’ve discovered something exceptionally disturbing: their followers don’t appear to be majorities in Arab states, and they have run up against unexpectedly powerful and widespread opposition.

Islamist “revolutionaries” are therefore now turning to that time honored method of undemocratically consolidating power, the mass purge. The urge to purge is directly proportional to the level of frustration in attempting to gain and consolidate state power.

Therefore, not surprisingly, the crudest and most far-reaching purge is being organized in Libya. Pro-Muslim Brotherhood militias started flexing their muscles in support of a dreadful “political isolation law” back in March. But as Congress found itself mired in endless debates about this terrible legislation, the pro-Islamist militias simply laid siege to numerous government buildings and ministries.

Staring literally and figuratively down the barrel of a gun, Congress passed an impossibly far-reaching version of the legislation, with only four members daring to vote no.

The new law is so broad-based and vague that calling it “insane” wouldn’t be hyperbole. It bans anyone who ever held very loosely defined “senior positions” in the Libyan government or official institutions from 1969-2011 from holding public office for the next 10 years.

But if that wasn’t good enough, the law applies the same ban to anyone who “opposed the revolution.” So, it should cover just about everybody anybody else doesn’t like, depending on how such practically meaningless language is interpreted.

The law is in stark contrast to the attitude of the National Transitional Council, which led the successful revolution against Moammar Qaddafi. The NTC’s rational policy was, come one, come all. It welcomed long-term exiles and opposition leaders alongside anyone willing to defect from the regime. This openness was an essential component in the rapid downfall of the dictatorship.

But it couldn’t last, particularly when Islamists were decimated in the party section of the parliamentary election by a non-Islamist and nationalist coalition led by Mahmoud Jibril. The situation got even worse when, after a false start, non-Islamists were able to successfully install Ali Zeidan as Prime Minister.

It was only a matter of weeks later that Islamist groups in Libya became obsessed with ramming through the “isolation” law. There’s no doubt they see it as the best way to get rid of most, if not all, of their opponents including Zeidan, Jibril, former NTC head Mustafa Abdul Jalil and Congress speaker Mohammed Magarief. They can now go after any or all of these figures either through legal processes, or by force while also claiming legitimacy by appealing to the law.

The militia rampage in Tripoli was not only designed to ram through the bill, but to bring down Zeidan as quickly as possible, and as a show of power. It demonstrated their brute force but simultaneously highlighted their political weakness.

In Egypt, where Islamist frustration is mounting but nothing like as enraged as in Libya, the Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohammed Morsi have also been moving towards a purge surge. In this case, the target is the judiciary, which Egyptian Islamists see as the most problematic branch of the government not yet under their control.

Legislation being pushed in the upper house of Parliament would force the early “retirement” of some 3,000 of the most senior judges, one quarter of the total in the country. It would make Gamal Abdel Nasser’s notorious 1969 “massacre of the judiciary,” which unseated a paltry 189 jurists, look like a judicial jobs program. And for Brotherhood members and allies, it might eventually prove to be just that.

Neither of these attempted purges is a fait accompli. Indeed, neither has really begun yet. But the groundwork is being laid. Anyone who expected Islamists to accept democratic outcomes, the separation of powers, or real, long-term compromise was deluded.

The good news is that in both cases there is significant pushback. Morsi has chosen to at least delay the confrontation by hosting a “justice conference” to discuss the issues. And thousands of Libyans took to the streets to protest the abusive and reactionary Islamist militias. The militias responded by beating and kidnapping protesters, yet another indication of their brutality, repressive attitudes and political desperation.

That Islamists in Libya and Egypt are resorting to a purge splurge to gain or consolidate political power is a symptom of the welcome fact that they are finding it difficult to do so legitimately. However, while purges are quintessentially abusive and anti-democratic, when they actually happen, they typically tend to work. So preventing them is not only achievable, it’s absolutely imperative.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/09/the-middle-eastern-sectarian-calamity.html

Today’s belligerent, bellicose and highly dishonest speech about Syria by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah—which appears to have outraged much of the Sunni Middle East—is only the latest indication that sectarian divisions in the region are reaching a new and incendiary low.

Over the course of 2011, one of the most troublesome fallouts from the Arab uprisings was an explosion of unprecedented regional sectarianism. After several months of (perhaps unwarranted) optimism, 2013 has proven, if anything, even worse than ever. Almost everything in the Middle East is now being defined along sectarian lines, and disastrously so. This is particularly evident with regard to Syria, but also in Egypt, Iraq, parts of the Gulf, Lebanon and just about everywhere one looks in the region generally, and inside many of its states.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/americas-self-defeating-policies-in-syria

There’s only one way to describe US policy toward Syria: self-defeating. Everything the United States said it wants to avoid is actually happening. Its policy of relative inaction has created gruesomely self-fulfilling prophecies. This policy continues more or less unchanged, as negative consequences persist in accumulating.

From the outset, the United States was determined to keep involvement in Syria to a minimum. The reasons were understandable. It feared Syria would explode rather than implode, destabilizing the region. It wanted to avoid a proxy conflict with regional rivals such as Iran. It did not wish to see the carnage in the country degenerate. It wanted to avoid national fragmentation or another failed Arab state in Syria. And, most of all, it feared the rise of al-Qaeda-like extremists amid the chaos.

Therefore a risk-averse president and administration chose to do little, even when several high-ranking officials towards the end of the first Obama term were urging greater engagement. Instead of doing anything significant to change the balance of power on the ground, the administration restricted itself to strategically meaningless humanitarian efforts.

Worse still, it relied mainly on lecturing all of the armed parties to stop doing what they were already doing. It pursued pointless international diplomatic efforts that were utterly disconnected from the logic of conflict on the ground. And the predictable and predicted consequence was that everything that the United States did not want to see happen in Syria was, in fact, facilitated by this woeful American inaction.

The low point to date has been the extraordinary reluctance on the part of the Obama administration to acknowledge the growing evidence of the cautious introduction of chemical weapons by the Damascus regime into the conflict. President Barack Obama’s ‘red line’ in practice proved to be some delicate shade of translucent amber.

All those who have counseled against more robust American engagement in Syria bear a heavy responsibility for the consequences of their ill advice. They said sending more arms to Syria would only expand the conflict. That’s happened anyway. They warned about the potential rise of al-Qaeda-like groups. But it is precisely this misguided hands-off approach that inevitably led to the rise of such extremists, at the expense of the woefully neglected more moderate, patriotic Syrian opposition forces. It’s a perfect example of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And now these same voices have the unmitigated gall to suggest that arming rebels is now even more undesirable given the fact that, as a consequence of their own ill-conceived advice, takfiri groups have indeed risen to prominence. They add that it’s now too late to do anything constructive, as if they ever wanted to in the first place!

These critics were wrong in the past, and they’re wrong now. Woefully, dreadfully wrong.

It’s not too late, because the situation can always get worse. Gains by Salafist-Jihadist groups can still be countered by aid to patriotic forces, and it is not credible American intelligence can’t tell one from the other. It’s entirely possible to change the strategic equation on the ground in Syria by aiding politically acceptable rebel groups – which most certainly exist – with shoulder-fired missiles, other heavy weapons and no-fly zones. Syrian air defenses are being exposed as significantly overestimated, most recently last Saturday in the second Israeli airstrike this year against a military target inside Syria.

Indeed, if there is to be a political solution, it can only be based on the transformation of the strategic equation on the ground that will provide an incentive for government forces to seek an accommodation. At present, the Assad regime sees no need to engage in any meaningful political process.

And why should they?

Their allies – Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and increasingly the Al-Maliki government in Iraq – are supporting them in every possible way and enthusiastically. Many of them have even introduced fighters on the ground, and most are committed to the struggle as an existential necessity.

Meanwhile, the “friends” of the opposition are providing them some support, but with infinitely less enthusiasm and largess. For none of them is the struggle existential, and they are hampered by all kinds of doubts and fears that don’t impede Assad’s allies.

So the American policy of relative inaction and diplomatic kabuki shows in multilateral institutions continues to be self-defeating and produce the very results the United States says it most wants to avoid. As for critics of more robust engagement, the evidence is undeniable that their approach has been a disastrous failure, at least in terms of avoiding the consequences the United States says it fears: an expanded conflict, more carnage, the metastasizing of the conflict regionally and the rise of al-Qaeda. As former President George W. Bush might’ve said, “You’re doing a heckuva job!”

Perhaps for friends of President Bashar al-Assad, except Russia, the struggle is existential, whereas for friends of the opposition it isn’t. But that doesn’t explain how abandoned the Syrian people and opposition forces have been, particularly when Assad’s allies are stopping at nothing to keep him in power.

It certainly doesn’t explain why the United States persists with what is evidently a self-defeating policy that ensures it has almost no influence in Syria now, and will have even less when the dust settles.

“This isn’t our war,” some Americans say. Well, then don’t complain when chaos spreads, al-Qaeda thrives, atrocities proliferate, and no one cares what the Americans want. You can’t have it both ways, folks!

Perhaps the Obama administration sees the Syria conflict as a subset of the broader problem with Iran. If they really do see Syria as a sideshow in the broader question of whether Iran will have to be confronted or an accommodation can be reached, the inaction might be explicable, but it’s extremely cynical. It would mean the people of Syria, and their lives by the scores of thousands, are being treated as pawns in a broader ‘great game.’

If that’s the fundamental explanation for an otherwise bewildering American policy that looks entirely self-defeating, it is both unwise, and unworthy of a great country.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/whats-blunting-a-post-boston-backlash

Human beings make sense of our realities by telling ourselves stories. In political life, perceptions are everything. There is no independent, underlying “objective” reality. There are only subjective understandings of events and actors, refracted through various framing narratives. Competing, interlocking, and intersecting accounts, therefore, are the actual substance of social and political life. They determine its “reality.”

The identification of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnayev as the culprits responsible for the attack against the crowd at the Boston Marathon has proven surprisingly resistant to quick or easy narrativization. In the United States, instead of a clean and simple account that could be the focal point for anger and grandstanding, many different – and often mutually incompatible – interpretations are competing for the public’s attention.

The facts are so unexpected, incoherent, and bewildering that most Americans are continuing to grasp for a dominant – and of necessity reductive but comprehensible – account of why these men lashed out so viciously and pointlessly at what still seems to have been a random target.

Last week I warned about the danger the attack on the Boston Marathon might reinvigorate slowly fading anti-Muslim sentiments, and that it could have a highly negative impact on how Americans perceive terrorism and with whom they associate it. It still may, over time.

What was not expected by anyone is that the facts as they emerged would be so convoluted and contradictory that, instead of fitting into any given prefabricated framework, they would hint somewhat at many but strongly reinforce none. So, for now, the broad American reaction to the attacks has been split between multiple, competing narratives.

Of course Islamophobes see in this act a confirmation of their notion that Muslims in general are to be associated with terrorism. But even though it’s become clear that Tamerlan Tsarnayev, at least, had become religiously fanatical and intolerant in recent years, that does not explain the political motivations for the attack – assuming there were any at all.

Many focused on the fact that the brothers are half-Chechen. But their connection to Chechnya – where neither were born or ever lived – seems tenuous. They appear more American than anything else. Moreover, the biggest political losers here are probably the Chechen rebels themselves, whose cause and interests don’t include being seen as enemies by the United States.

It did not matter if the focus was on crimes committed against or perpetrated by Chechens over the past century. Again, this narrative failed to provide a stable, comprensible explanation for what had happened.

Others focused on some kind of family drama. The relationship between the much-older brother and his younger sibling is assumed to be one of manipulation, which it almost certainly was. But again that does not explain the act itself at all.

Another family drama account conjectured that the Tsarnayevs were acting in a kind of oedipal rebellion against their secular – and possibly pro-Moscow– father. It’s a neat bit of pop psychology conjecture but again explains little.

And then, of course, there are conspiracy theories on the political margins, blaming the US or Russian governments – or some other “hidden hand” – for the attacks. And that’s only to skim the surface of the interpretations of the known facts now competing for attention in the American public sphere.

The main effect of this proliferation of speculation and confusion has been that righteous anger has been blunted by the fact that – beyond the two suspects themselves – most Americans simply have no idea who or what ought to be held broadly responsible.

The Islamophobic impulse seems to have actually been stronger before the Tsarnayevs were fingered as responsible than it has been since then.

The other factor that has seriously undermined a major backlash has been the almost universal perception among Americans that this tragic tale had a bittersweet and heroic dénouement. For almost 24 hours, the public began to wonder if, in Boston, their society was slipping out of control, with multiple incidents reported involving shootings, bombs, and other potential sources of mayhem.

But when Dzhokhar was successfully captured alive the country breathed an enormous collective sigh of relief. The police and national guard were seen as valiant, the social system as working, and order finally restored.

Anger was thereby mingled with feelings of ultimate reassurance and vindication.

In the short run, the lack of a hegemonic framing narrative – combined with an uplifting ending to the saga as it was experienced by Americans in real time – helped mitigate the emergence of a major misguided backlash.

In the long run, much depends on what, if any, hegemonic narrative regarding the marathon attacks emerges. As the 9/11 backlash, which reached its peak many years after the event itself, demonstrated, the reaction can be a delayed one.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/the-long-term-impact-of-the-boston-bombs

The bomb attack on the Boston Marathon could prove a defining moment in American political culture and attitudes. Particularly for a new generation of young Americans, this tragedy is likely to be a profound formative experience. But it will also have a huge impact on the whole of American society.

The identity of the still entirely unknown culprits will probably play a major role in who and what is most closely associated with terrorism in the American imagination for years to come. And such a broad cultural impact could have significant political and policy implications, for better or worse.

The night of the attack I was scheduled to give a talk at an institution for college students from around the United States serving as interns in Washington DC. But I arrived early, just as American President Barack Obama began addressing his country regarding attack.

The atmosphere was deadly quiet and electric. Approximately 60 college students of every description were transfixed around a TV. I watched them watching him.

On September 11, 2001, I was Communications Director for a large Arab-American organization. As I looked at those college students, I instantly recognized facial expressions, body language, and a raw intensity I haven’t seen since then.

It’s significant that these were 18-22 year-olds, none of them old enough to have experienced the 9/11 attacks as American adults did.

They’ve already seen their share of tragedy, to be sure. Last year, Hurricane Sandy ravaged large sections of New York and New Jersey. And on December 14, Adam Lanza – at 20, one of their own age cohort – shot and killed himself, his mother, 20 schoolchildren, and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut.

But this is different. While traumatic events, neither of them were regarded as terrorism. No other terrorist act in the United States since 9/11 has had the profound symbolic resonance of the Boston bombings.

It seemed clear that for these students this was a defining experience: an unmistakable confrontation with political violence and sabotage directly aimed at highly symbolic national targets with an evidently ideological, although still mysterious, motivation.

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, terrorism in American culture has been virtually synonymous with extremist Muslim political violence. The memories of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and more recent experiences with other kinds of terrorists, have not shattered this false equation. But doubts have been growing.

The Boston Marathon attack comes at a crucial cultural moment, just as the zone of impunity surrounding anti-Muslim bigotry has begun to palpably recede. Even on the political and cultural right, a major pushback against Islamophobia has been well underway.

The Boston bombings are perfectly positioned chronologically to have a maximal impact on how broadly or narrowly “terrorism” and “terrorists” are defined in the imaginations of many Americans.

If the culprits prove to be Arab in origin or Muslim, that could well reinforce a highly damaging stereotype that has been steadily receding back to the American social and cultural margins where it belongs. It could, at least partially, undo years of painstaking effort by so many Americans to push back against post-9/11 prejudices.

If, however, as is at least equally plausible at this stage, the perpetrators are found to be from an entirely different identity group, that would almost certainly prove the biggest blow yet to the illusion that Muslims and terrorists are more or less synonymous.

It’s difficult to overstate how much is at stake.

Many Arab and Muslim Americans have been open about their anxieties, and organizations have rushed to issue condemnations.

A similar, and sometimes sinister sentiment, is also brewing on the far-right. Some Tea Party activists are accusing the government of staging a “false flag” operation to blame them and suppress their political activities.

The white, Christian extreme-right has less to fear, since their core identity makes them part of the majority community. But some of their advocates are conveying profound concern about the consequences should they find themselves collectively and politically blamed.

The false equation of behavior and identity has to be broken.

The conscious or unconscious conflation of “Muslim and “terrorist” in contemporary American culture is completely dysfunctional. Replacing stereotypes about Muslims with stereotypes about the far right not only isn’t going to happen – it also wouldn’t be an improvement.

Distinguishing between behavior and identity is essential for the health of American culture. It’s also vital to sound counterterrorism and law enforcement policies, free from the distortions of false assumptions.

The outcome of the Boston investigation, and how the American government and society deals with it, could provide a historic opportunity for a step backwards into deeper prejudice or a leap forward towards clearer thinking.

Watching those students watching their President left me with little doubt of how much impact it is likely to have, one way or the other.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/16/boston-attacks-will-now-define-terrorism-for-americans.html

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/what_the_israeli_peace_initiative_has_to_offer

On April 6, a group of prominent Israelis released the “Israeli Peace Initiative,” an answer to the Peace Initiative adopted by the Arab League in 2002. The biggest difference between the two documents is that one is official, formally adopted by a large group of states, and the other is a civil society initiative. This puts the two documents on significantly unequal footing. However, the new Israeli private initiative bears serious consideration, given the paucity of any other Israeli response to the API and the lack of diplomatic activity generally.

Most of the signatories to the IPI are associated with the political left, which has lost ground in Israeli society over the past decade.

The extent to which their proposal resonates with the Israeli public or the cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is questionable.

But both the API and the IPI demonstrate that there are clear grounds for negotiating a two-state outcome whose outlines are clear but whose details still need to be worked out. They show there are plenty of Arabs and Israelis eager to negotiate in all seriousness, and that a meaningful peace process is no fantasy if the parties really want peace.

The IPI joins a long list of other civil society peace process thought experiments from recent decades. But it does have some particular features. It introduces the idea of Jewish refugees from Arab states in a more sustained manner than has been raised in formal negotiations or in most other informal peace ideas. It accepts that the Palestinian state must be on land equivalent to that of the 1967 borders, but talks of land swaps incorporating up to 7 percent of the Occupied Territories, far in excess of anything Palestinians have considered acceptable. It entirely avoids the question of Jewish Israelis remaining in the Palestinian state, presumably on the reasonable assumption that no Israeli government will want the responsibility for their security and will insist on a full evacuation.

It essentially accepts the Clinton parameters in Jerusalem, that what is now Jewish will be Israeli and what remains Arab will be Palestinian, and that the city will be the capital of two states. It also includes the following interesting anomaly that: “the Western Wall and Jewish Quarter will be under Israeli sovereignty; [but] The Temple Mount will remain without any sovereignty.” It therefore dismisses the idea of a special regime for the old city in general or the holy basin, a mainstay of many other civil society plans. Perhaps the most “Israeli” part of the IPI is its categorical rejection of anything other than a “symbolic” return for an apparently very small group of refugees.

These ideas are intriguing, but much more important is the underlying diplomatic reality. The PLO knows what it wants, but lacks the leverage to achieve it. The Obama administration has hit a brick wall and is presently embroiled in detailed soul-searching about a potential American statement of principles. And, most worryingly of all, it has become disturbingly clear that Netanyahu has neither a vision for the future nor any meaningful diplomatic strategy other than a single-minded emphasis on security to the exclusion of peace.

This has left many Palestinians feeling that an effort to shift the diplomatic process to the multilateral level, probably through the United Nations, is becoming almost unavoidable even though without at least tacit American support this will almost certainly prove a dead end. These efforts are presently focused on the coming September, but there seem to be few grounds for believing that anything that really changes the strategic equation will take place at the UN or elsewhere this fall.

Many thoughtful Israelis are deeply concerned about the potential effects of such multilateralism, even if opposed by the United States, especially since Netanyahu appears to have no alternative approaches.

These worries were carefully dissected in a recent article by Jerusalem Posteditor David Horovitz, who suggested Israel should not oppose a declaration of Palestinian statehood but use it to its advantage.

The multilateral track is beguiling in many ways, but unless it is being used by the United States as a proxy for its own continued leadership – as with the imposition of a no-fly zone in Libya – it will not produce the actual establishment of a Palestinian state.

Neither will the plethora of South American and other international recognitions of Palestine in its 1967 borders, which help reinforce the international consensus about the need for Palestinian independence but do not change either the balance of power or realities on the ground.

In the final analysis there is only one state’s recognition of Palestine that will be decisive: Israel’s, since it is in complete control of the territory that will constitute the Palestinian state.

All roads ultimately lead back to negotiations, which is why documents like the IPI that reinforce the understanding that such a process is entirely plausible, and that therefore peace is genuinely achievable, are more relevant than they may appear at first glance.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/fate-of-christians-will-define-the-arab-future

The assault by Islamist thugs – with the apparent connivance of Egyptian government security forces – on a funeral at the Coptic Cathedral in Cairo on Sunday may be looked back upon as a grim milestone.

It wasn’t just that two people were killed and 90 hospitalized. This wasn’t just a violation, by hoodlums and police alike, of the revered center of an ancient religious tradition and community. It was rather that the whole idea of a tolerant, pluralistic Egypt – one that can fully include, honor, and respect its Coptic minority – came under a physical, psychological, and, most importantly, political assault of the first magnitude.

As Egypt goes, so goes the Middle East. If the Coptic community of Egypt is thus abused, disparaged, and attacked, what kind of societies are emerging in the Arab world? The regional implications are chilling.

Pluralism will be unattainable if long-standing and traditionally well-regarded Christian communities cannot be respected. Forget about skeptics, agnostics, or atheists. Never mind smaller religious groups like Yezidis, Alawites, Baha’is, and Druze. If ancient, large Christian communities find the Arab world fundamentally inhospitable, Muslims will turn on each other just as readily.

And it won’t be just the Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide that is already evident throughout the region. It will be an endless series of ferocious doctrinal inquisitions between various Sunni Muslim orientations and denominations. States will become, at best, merely the geographical battlegrounds and, at worst, the principal weapons of repression between battling groups of intolerant religious fanatics.

This future is by no means certain. It may indeed be apocalyptic, but it is still entirely avoidable. Yet it is hardly beyond imagining, as Sunday’s tragedy in Cairo so gruesomely reminded us.

For at least the past hundred years, the Christians of the Middle East have been slowly dwindling. Many of them fled the Ottoman Empire, discrimination, war, conscription, and even famine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for the New World. It has been both a blessing and a curse for these communities that, for cultural and religious reasons, it was historically easier for them to immigrate to and assimilate in Western societies than their Muslim compatriots.

But this process has been accelerating in recent decades. Much of the Iraqi Christian community fled the country after the US invasion. In Syria, the Christian community is among the most vulnerable in the entire country, spread out and lacking any organized defenses.

Some of these woes are at least partially self-inflicted. In Lebanon, the Christian community – particularly the Maronites – have both over- and under-played their hand in equally disastrous ways.

First they were seized by an impulse to try to impose national hegemony in a country that stubbornly resists any controlling power. Next, their traditional leadership was beset by bloodthirsty vendetti.

More recently, Lebanese Christians have been roughly evenly divided between the March 8 and March 14 factions. This is basically a split between those more fearful of Syria, Hezbollah and Iran versus those terrified by regional Sunni domination and therefore opting for a bizarre “alliance of minorities.” Worse still, this division is driven by megalomaniacs fixated on quixotic and doomed plans to grab the Lebanese presidency for themselves.

The Lebanese Christian community will certainly survive physically. But it is headed for political oblivion, with no one more to blame than itself. The latest example of this self-destructive tendency is the preposterous so-called Orthodox law its own leaders spearheaded which mandates that Lebanese can only vote for candidates of their own officially designated sect. Had anyone else proposed such a law, Lebanese Christians would’ve risen as one in outrage, denouncing it as an anti-Christian plot (which it would have been). Instead, they brought this calamity on themselves for the most misguided reasons.

Meanwhile, Jewish Israelis and Muslim Palestinians can’t do too much sneering at each other about the crisis facing the Christians of the “Holy Land.” Israel discriminates against all Palestinians equally. The Christian flight from the West Bank is mainly a reaction to the intolerable occupation, despite Israeli propaganda that tries to shift the focus to Palestinian Muslim intolerance. However, such bigotry is all-too-real in Hamas-ruled Gaza, where the small and beleaguered Palestinian Christian community struggles to maintain its identity and freedom under an increasingly abusive fundamentalist theocracy.

The bottom line is this: if the Arab world, and the broader Middle East, cannot accommodate Christians and other minorities, it won’t be worth living in for anybody. And if the region emerges from a period of ethnic and sectarian conflict – of mountanish inhumanity when minorities are hounded out of areas in which they have lived for generations and been an integral part of the culture – those societies will one day look back on it as an unprecedented calamity.

But then it will be too late.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/09/hamas-the-palestinian-fashion-police.html