Tony Klug: Bonfire of the experts: the Arab uprisings and the Israeli-Palestinian question

Tony Klug is a longstanding writer on the middle east, whose contributions include successive Fabian Society pamphlets advocating a two-state solution (A Tale of Two Peoples, 1973) and a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank (The Only Way Out, 1977). In 2003, he proposed a transitional international protectorate for the occupied territories. For many years he worked at the international secretariat of Amnesty International as a campaign organiser and as head of international development; he has also served on the international boards of New Outlook and the Palestine-Israel Journal and as a trustee of the International Centre for Peace in the Middle East. He is a senior consultant at the Middle East Policy Initiative Forum and a special advisor on the middle east to the Oxford Research Group.

I was at a meeting recently where the head of the British Foreign Office’s ‘Near East’ group openly confessed that “Many people in the Foreign Office were caught by surprise by what has been happening in the region”. To be fair, they are not alone in failing to see in advance what, in retrospect, is so obvious. The same comment could be made about the most powerful intelligence agencies across the globe, the finest professors in the best universities, revered international diplomats and indeed the whole shebang of analysts, consultants and foreign policy wonks.

But then why should we expect anything different? When was the last time venerable experts foresaw any of the seismic events of recent years? Who, before it happened, predicted the impending release of the hitherto ‘terrorist’ Mandela and the rapid dismantling of the apartheid South African state? Who imagined the sudden crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the astonishing collapse of the Soviet Union and the other communist regimes of Eastern Europe? How many soothsayers got Northern Ireland right prior to the historic deal between its warring factions?

The list goes on. Within the Middle East region itself, the abrupt fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 was a bolt out of the blue. The dramatic visit of the Egyptian President Sadat to Israel in 1977, just four years after the unexpected war of 1973, took everyone by surprise. So too did the secretly negotiated Oslo agreements in 1993 between the Israeli government and the PLO - until then eternal enemies - which culminated in mutual recognition and handshakes on the White House lawn. Who saw coming either the first or second Palestinian intifada in 1987 and 2000 respectively? Or the Hamas election victory in 2006? Indeed, since the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948, probably every significant development - including every major outbreak of hostilities and every breakthrough peace initiative - occurred when least expected.

I pose the questions but I don’t have the answers any more than anyone else does. But the record is so compellingly and consistently poor that I suspect there must be a common factor or factors linking all these failures of anticipation. Maybe there is a tendency for the human mind to fixate on the status quo and deduce assumptions backwards. There could be an interesting Ph.D thesis there for someone!

Arab uprisings

In the current Middle East setting, the status quo throughout the Arab world, generally speaking, was, until the recent political earthquakes, one of despotic regimes suffering a chronic lack of legitimacy, rampant nepotism and widespread corruption among the ruling families and their cronies, little or no freedom of expression or right to dissent, a striking lack of democratic accountability across the board, a tightly controlled media and judiciary, high levels of unemployment and poverty, and a scary, omnipresent state security apparatus. In the face of such widespread and enduring subjugation, the question that increasingly posed itself was why had the citizens of these states not risen up and overthrown their oppressive rulers? Why had democracy by-passed the region when it had been eagerly embraced in recent times in most other parts of the world where tyranny had previously reigned, such as in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Latin America, Turkey, Southeast Asia, South Africa and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa?

The answer commonly given by self-appointed experts on ‘the Arab mentality’ was to the effect that democracy and the urge for freedom were simply not a part of the Arab DNA. If, as events have since strikingly demonstrated, this was the wrong answer, it was because it was the wrong question. Democracy had not by-passed the region, full stop, past tense. It just hadn’t burst through yet.

The Arabs, it turns out, are no different from the rest of the human race. If you prick us, as an Arab Shylock might have said, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? To which, he might have added, if you oppress us, do we not revolt and kick you out, even if we take our time about it?

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