August 1, 2011
Awe and History in the Arab Revolts
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
BEIRUT -- For those many honest people around the world who are perplexed by the variations and inconsistencies in so many aspects of the current citizen revolts across the Arab world, historical analogies may be a good starting point to understand the full dimensions and implications of the momentous current developments. In their ongoing revolts against police states and overly centralized autocratic governments, ordinary Arab men and women are compressing into a single moment their equivalent of perhaps the two most outstanding global historical movements of the past 300 years or so: first, the democratic revolutions that engulfed the world from their starting points in France and the United States in the late 18th Century; and, second, the global decolonization movement that swept much of the Third World in the mid-20th Century.
July 27, 2011
The Critical, Cleansing Role of Justice
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
BEIRUT -- One of the most important, but also most delicate, aspects of the transformations in Tunisia and Egypt following the popular overthrow of their regimes is the series of court trials of former officials who are accused of various crimes, including killing demonstrators, abuse of power and corruption. This process is moving ahead more decisively now, with the announcement Monday by a Cairo court that it would merge the trials of former President Hosni Mubarak and ex-interior minister Habib Adly, both of whom are accused of killing protesters earlier this year. Adly and six of his aides would be tried on August 3 along with Mubarak and his two sons Alaa and Gamal, and exiled businessman Hussein Salem. Adly already has received a 12-year jail sentence for corruption. Former Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif has also been charged with corruption and will face a military trial.
July 25, 2011
Reconnecting Sect, Tribe and State
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
BEIRUT -- One of the striking contrasts between current political tensions and clashes in the Arab world and the tone of the many demonstrations for freedom and democracy across the region is about the role of sectarian and ethnic identity. We are reminded of this again in Syria these days, where some brutal killings in the city of Homs last week seemed designed to inflame destructive passions between the majority Sunnis and the minority Alawites who dominate the ruling power elite. In the past year Egypt similarly experienced ugly incidents that seemed to target or provoke the Christian (Coptic) minority. Bahrain and Yemen also have experienced serious ethnic- and sectarian-based tensions recently. Iraq, Lebanon and Sudan have endured their own sectarian problems, conflicts and occasional atrocities for years, to the point where Iraq and Lebanon have seen most of their once integrated populations separated into more neat and “pure” demographic zones, and Sudan has registered the first case of secession from a modern Arab state.
July 20, 2011
If It Smells Like Apartheid
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
BEIRUT -- The Israeli parliament’s vote last week making it a prosecutable crime to support any boycott of Israel, including products from Israeli settlements in occupied Arab lands, has rightly generated considerable debate about what this means for Israel, Zionism and Israelis. The complex and larger than life tale of the modern state of Israel has always been seen by its two very different faces around the world. For Jews and many others, Israel has been about a vibrant nationalism, miraculously reborn from the horrors of the European Holocaust and centuries of discrimination and subjugation of Jews by white Christian Europeans and Russians. For most Palestinians and Arabs, Israel has been about a predatory and malicious combination of colonialism and racism, the creation of an exclusionary ethnic state on land that was taken from others, with Jews and Israeli citizens having a higher quality and priority of personal and national rights than the indigenous Arabs.
July 18, 2011
Hallelujah for Egypt
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
BEIRUT -- What is happening in Egypt is stunning in the context of modern Arab history: Egyptians are compressing into months processes of national self-definition and governance configuration that other countries in the world conducted over decades, or even centuries, in their drive to stable and equitable democracy. Every day, literally, we witness developments on the street and in the public media that define three principal components of democratic transitions, and are particularly poignant in the annals of the modern Arab world’s bitter legacy of persistent security states: the role of the military and security agencies in governance, the empowerment of the citizen as the ultimate reference point for the legitimacy and efficacy of national decision-making, and the checks-and-balances relationships among the principal actors in public politics (the citizenry, the presidency, the legislature, the judiciary, the cabinet of ministers, the bureaucracy, civil society, the private sector, the religious-tribal forces).
June 15, 2011
The Beautiful Racket of Regional Transition
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
BEIRUT -- Do you hear all that noise out here in the Middle East this week -- government coalitions, refugee flows, parliamentary elections, constitutional changes, and everywhere people demanding their rights? Listen carefully, because what you hear is the beautiful racket of citizens trying to create stable and responsive governance systems all across the Middle East, and the process is both noisy and messy -- and also slow by nature. The important thing is that nearly a century after the false birth of nominally sovereign Arab states around the World War One period, the people of the Middle East now work in earnest to establish governance systems that respond to their rights and needs more efficiently than has been the case to date.
June 8, 2011
The Crucial Link Between 1948 and 1967
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
BEIRUT -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed his great deception skills again Sunday when he said that the clashes on the border with Syria that day prove that the Palestinians are not interested in a solution based on 1967 borders, but rather seek a solution based on 1948 borders. For once, though, there was a nugget of truth in his comments, because he correctly mentioned the importance of 1948 in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
June 6, 2011
The Egyptian Epic Enters Phase Two (II)
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
CAIRO -- Egyptians refer to their “revolution” that overthrew the regime of former President Hosni Mubarak last February, and they revel in its continuing afterglow, appreciating how significant and satisfying was their deed. The post-revolution phase now underway in the country is a more difficult challenge than the weeks of street demonstrations that sent Mubarak into retirement, where he, his two sons and some of his senior officials are detained and will soon be tried in court. Everyone asks in Egypt every day: Did the revolution really change much beyond removing the top officials from office, and will a new democratic system of governance fully take root in the country?
June 1, 2011
The Egyptian Epic Enters Phase Two (I)
Op-Ed
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
CAIRO -- Egyptians individually are easy-going, fun-loving, and self-deprecating people who treat the world and their place in it in a live-and-let-live manner. They endure hardships, celebrate small achievements, ridicule the government, take care of their families and friends, praise God for the bounty of their lives, and wake up day after day to do the same things they and their society have done for nearly 6000 years: manage the business of statehood and nationhood on a cosmic scale, because everything Egypt initiates has a way of spreading around the Middle East and other parts of the world.
May 30, 2011
Fault Lines in Netanyahu’s Dazzling Show
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Senior Fellow, Middle East Initiative
BEIRUT -- By any standard, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s performance in Washington last week was stunning in its audacity and intensity -- but probably will be seen as negative rather than positive for Israel in the long run, for the fault lines it revealed and the precedents it set. His performance revealed four major breaches that may be damaging for Israel -- those between him and President Barack Obama, between the American presidency and the Congress, between the pro-Israel lobby in the United States and the rest of the country (Congress excepted), and between the Israeli people and their government. All four dynamics have their ups and downs, but when they converge, as may be the case now, Netanyahu the brash star performer in Washington last week may soon be seen as a political jerk, in his country and in the U.S.
