Heart of a Nation International Policy Forum with Hussein Ibish: Can New Leaders in Jerusalem and Ramallah Bring Change?
Maci Hall: Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. He is also a weekly columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and The National, which is published in the UAE. He previously served as a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, and as executive director of the Foundation for Arab-American Leadership.
Hussein is a good friend and a tremendous resource for Heart of a Nation. He has a keen understanding of politics in America, Israel, and Palestine, and will share his thoughts with us today on the question: “Can New Leaders in Jerusalem and Ramallah Bring Significant Change?”
Hussein Ibish: I really do admire what Heart of a Nation is doing and find myself in tremendous agreement with it. Whatever I can do to be supportive — I’m very happy to do that. And this conversation is the first, but I’m sure not the last, that we will have to work together to affect positive change.
What I want to look at, really, is the obstacles to new leadership providing a new direction. Because I think that’s really what we’re experiencing. There are new voices but they’re not able, for various reasons — including structural, political, and cultural — to bring about positive impact on social interactions between political communities. I want to explore why that is, as a way helping us think through what we can do differently that would open that space.
There are two main issues that are at play here. The first are structural and political realities. And the second are narratives. I want to look at structural and political realities that have prevented a new generation of Israeli and Palestinian leaders taking a course that would develop better relations, and that would create the groundwork for improved mutual understanding and cooperation, which is obviously what’s necessary, since people are going to be living together, and neither is going anywhere. And they simply require a viable modus vivendi and they’ve never had one.
Israel’s political system is an obstacle. Because it is the kind of proportional representation system that we see in Italy, and in Spain, that tend to empower small kingmaker parties. And because of the way the Israeli political scene plays out, it tends to be — over the past couple of decades — very right-wing, very nationalistic; smaller Jewish parties have held sway, and that has tilted and pushed the rest of the country in an uncompromising right-wing direction. Of course, now we have a government that looks a little different in Israel, but it’s really just a coalition to remove Benjamin Netanyahu. I don’t see it surviving well beyond that. So, I don’t see it as a major change.
Among Israelis there’s no consensus policy towards the Palestinians. What does Israel want? What is the Israeli imagination of the future? I can’t give you a clear answer because I don’t think there is one. There are competing visions, but no national consensus. And politically, because of proportional representation, and because of the political landscape in Israel, there’s no effective counterweight to the settler movement. Unless the military comes into play, as it did when Ariel Sharon did the unilateral redeployment from Gaza and the northern West Bank. That was really responding to decades of pressure from the Israeli military.
One of the biggest problems is that there is no real pressure on Israel to compromise with the Palestinians. Israel holds almost all the cards — except for demography and some diplomatic stuff — but basically in terms of hard power, it holds all the cards. And because Palestinians don’t have any real leverage over the generalized Israeli public, it becomes extremely difficult for Israeli politicians who are democratically answerable, particularly to the Jewish Israelis, to propose and push through concessions It’s a little bit like the gun control issue in the United States. The Second Amendment movement completely overwhelms the huge majority that is much-less-passionately interested in gun control. This is how things go in democratic systems.
So, in the Israeli case, democracy is actually an obstacle to peace. I’m not saying an autocracy would be better, but I’m saying it’s difficult for a democratic system to make sweeping changes where there is no sense of existential threat.
Now, regarding the Palestinians, the opposite is true. The lack of democracy is one of the biggest obstacles. You’ve got this terrible situation on the Palestinian side where there’s no real government of any kind because it doesn’t have any independence. Even if you had a well-functioning PA in Gaza and the West Bank, it still wouldn’t have any authority since the PLO is the representative of the Palestinians, at least diplomatically, in terms of talks with Israel, relations with other states, and the U.N.
And one of the biggest problems is that Hamas’s commitment to armed struggle — and to maintaining its militia, and its rockets, and whatever else it does — is its structural advantage against Fatah, politically. What would distinguish Hamas from Fatah if they both said: “We’re Palestinian nationalist parties and we seek an independent state alongside Israel.” Then what’s Hamas’s appeal? It would be the party of the hijab, and religious conservatism, and “stop smoking”, and “no drinks” and “are you married to each other,” and “men over here, women over here.” That’s not the path to a majority among Palestinians right now — even in Gaza. People may be conservatives. They are mostly religious conservatives — they are mostly devout, mainly Muslims, some Christians, and they’re all pretty conservative. But they’re not Islamists. This has been one of the biggest mistakes made by the world — a lot of Arabs, and certainly the Islamists themselves, have been assuming that because most Arabs are devout Muslims, they’re proto-Islamists. And I think everyone has learned that — and we see it again in Tunisia — that when Islamists get too powerful, the majority says, “it’s great if they get crushed.” It’s really hard for these guys to win complete power, because they don’t represent a large majority. They represent a large minority. Among Palestinians, I don’t think more than 20 percent are sympathetic to the Brotherhood and their version of Islam.
Abu Mazen in Ramallah has been so compromised, so corrupted, so frustrated, so ridiculed and humiliated over the years, that he has gone from being a not-very-corrupt person 20 years ago, and really committed to non-violence. He resigned as Arafat’s prime minster during the second Intifada because he knew that violence was a disaster, and he though there was a better way, so he walked away. And there was no guarantee he was ever coming back. But now he’s become thoroughly corrupt, and increasingly brutal, as we saw from the beating to death of this protester recently, and the crushing of civil society in the West Bank. Civil society in the West Bank still does exist, but it’s under constant attack from the PA and from the Israelis. And it is barely holding on. And Abu Mazen has been very bad at trying to impose an Arab dictatorial rule over civil society in the West Bank and that has prevented a new generation of leaders from becoming effective. They’re definitely there, but there’s a limit to how much they can do, because they don’t have the space to operate. Certainly not in Gaza, but also increasingly less, as time goes on, in the West Bank.
Another thing to remember is that Palestinians are an impoverished people. There are entrepreneurs in certain sectors — they can do stuff, but it’s a poor society. Therefore, politics is about patronage. And this is incredibly important in the West Bank. You can’t get people’s loyalty without providing them what they need. And what they need is a means of survival. So local activists can rise to a certain point, but they can’t break through that final hurdle.
The third thing is narratives. It’s very hard for a new generation of leaders to be constructive because narratives have always been completely at odds. Because of the failure of the peace process, and especially because of the second Intifada, Hamas became a contender for national leadership they never were before. They were a loud, violent minority. But the One-State Movement among Palestinians, on the Left, and in the West emerged out of the violence of the Second Intifada. Rejectionism on both sides became hyper-empowered, because a lot of people were getting killed and because they perceived the other side as having never wanted peace, not meaning a word they said, always lying, and “we were in good faith, and they weren’t” and all that stuff. I think the death of the peace process really confirmed a zero-sum narrative, not only the historical narrative, but in understanding the present and current developments. The turning point was not just the Second Intifada, but what immediately preceded it and caused it, which was the failure at Camp David.
The failure of Camp David is really instructive in two ways. First because it revealed that, even at the highest level, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were talking past each other. They were using the same words without meaning the same things. Words like Palestinian state or refugees: they were using the same signifiers, but not referring to the same signified objects. That was a gap that was very devastating. The second thing is that Camp David remains a Rashomon situation, where no matter who you talk to who was there, they perceived it differently, in terms of who offered what and who said what to whom, and what was going on. Even the Americans that were there don’t agree on what was said. Aaron Miller has one narrative, Dennis Ross has another narrative, Rob Maley has another narrative — they’re all different narratives. Even more so the Israelis and the Palestinians. Because nothing was put in writing except the Clinton proposal which was really Barak’s proposal — even the details of that are not agreed on. There are no maps from Camp David, there’s nothing. It’s all subject to “he said, she said, I said, you said.”
Between Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, the problem is really a structural relationship of dominance and subordination. The presence of the Israeli military, particularly in the West Bank, is a disciplinary equation. A small number of troops to control a large number of people. And the underlying reason is ultimately to facilitate the settlement movement, and I’m not going to harp on that, but it makes the bitterness even deeper. So, the question is, how do you get people to think about each other differently, when they only encounter each other in situations of tension and violence? Palestinians in the West Bank used to know Israelis all the time before the Second Intifada, but now they don’t. Now, they see them at the checkpoints, now they see them when they come into their homes in the middle of the night, now they see them as prison guards. And Israelis who live in the Tel Aviv-Haifa corridor can ignore Palestinians completely and not deal with them at all, unless they go into the military, and serve in the checkpoints and go into the villages in the middle of the night. You have a situation where direct personal encounters are either not there, or they’re really negative.
If Israelis think Palestinians are dangerous and violent, it’s because they may well only meet them when they are dangerous and violent. If Palestinians think Israelis are abusive colonists and kind of ethnically dominant oppressors, that’s because they experience a lot of that every day.
How do you change narratives before changing the structural relationships that give rise to and reinforces those narratives? I don’t know. But how can you change the structures without changing the narratives? Because these narratives prevent reasonable people making even limited concessions on either side, that would help to change the structure, that could then be the basis for changing the narratives — it’s a tangled web. That means that even when new voices rise up, they can only do so much. And it’s really hard for them. And I tried to explain as easily as I could why that is. Hopefully, we can pursue this conversation beyond today and start talking about what we can do, little things, real things, practical on-the-ground things, that can start to open up those spaces.
Jonathan Kessler: Hussein, thank you so much. I guarantee that there will be future opportunities to engage you and to broaden this conversation in exactly the way that you’re recommending. I am so appreciative for your insights and encourage those on the call to pose questions.
Steve Sheffey (Chicago): Thank you, Hussein, that was absolutely fascinating. There are clear distinctions between right-wing political movements in the U.S., Israel, and Palestine, but are there commonalities as well?
Ibish: There is authoritarianism on the left and right, but right-wing authoritarianism is what’s on the rise in much of the world today. I think the whole ethnic, chauvinistic version of right-wing nationalism is very strongly present. There’s usually a religious component, there’s a cultural component, and there’s a socially reactionary element to this. Nostalgia is a big part of it. Returning to something better. Resurrecting a fictional golden era is essential, so the “good old days’’ of the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire, the “good old days” of pre-Civil Rights America, the “good old days” of whatever it might be. This sort of nostalgia, religion, ethnic, chauvinistic stuff, is a sweeping international movement.
The only positive thing I can say is, despite the efforts by Steve Bannon and other people to create an international alliance of reactionary ethnic chauvinists — luckily their ethnic chauvinism precludes real success. They appreciate each other from a distance and wave, but when they try to get them to cooperate, they just can’t.
Ros Roucher (Kfar Saba): I’m wondering if you feel that there is an impetus or motivation for progressive Palestinians to join in something like Heart of a Nation or other progressive, pro-peace movements?
Ibish: Yes, I definitely think so. However, it’s necessary to convince them that you’re sincere. Because there have been many efforts to create dialogue that Palestinians have perceived as wasting their time or as simulations of cooperation but not real cooperation — the box that cooperation came in but no actual cooperation. They’re very suspicious, and they think they lack power. So it’s going to be necessary to convince them of bona fides. Really much in the way that Palestinians will have to convince Israelis that they’re sincere when so many Israelis have concluded that they’re just irreconcilable opponents. The second thing is that it will become self-reinforcing. You need to begin with a few people who have a name, that will give other people a cover and a reason to cooperate. They have to be people who are willing to take flak from others. They’re going to be really criticized. There is this word “normalization”, which is stigmatized, as if it’s good to be abnormal. There is a constituency for abnormality. One of the mistakes the Palestinians have made when it comes to the Abraham Accords is that they missed their chance to say, “Okay, normalization between two countries is fine; we want our countries to have embassies with each other. We want to be normal too. If Arab countries, Gulf countries, and Israel want to be normal, we also want to be normal too. We are in a more abnormal situation than anyone else, so help us normalize.” That would have been a very powerful response, but it doesn’t express the rage, the pain. That’s a problem because people need the catharsis of rage and even of violence to purge themselves, but it’s morally wrong, and they can’t afford the consequences of that. It’s the worst possible thing, but it’s the human response.
Lauren Strauss (Washington, D.C.): You mentioned in a recent article the current bete noire of American politics: Critical Race Theory. I’m a historian, and so I’ve been thinking about that a lot. There’s a lot that’s problematic in the rhetoric in the American space, but I was wondering whether you think that some of that could be a way for people in disparate societies to connect; people who have been structurally disadvantaged in both societies to start a dialogue?
Ibish: I think it could be, if people are willing to recognize each other’s realities and not say, “no, no, you didn’t, it wasn’t, no, we didn’t, no, no, no.” You have to begin with an honesty about facts. Dates and times. Who did what, when? Almost none of that is disputed among genuine historians. The actual facts of the history are very rarely disputed. What gets disputed is motivations, intentions, goals, policies; that’s subjective. If you can get people to that stage, you can maybe have an interesting conversation. The other thing, though, is where I would like to take people, both in the United States and in the Middle East — to a real embrace of liberal values. I think where I agree with the critics of what they call CRT, is that sometimes things can take on an illiberal character. And I think a simple restatement — as some college presidents have done — that we don’t do that. We let people talk. We let people think. For me, I’d want to be very clear about the primacy of core liberal values. Much of the right has abandoned it entirely, and it’s under a certain degree of pressure among parts of the left as well.
Rotem Oreg (Tel Aviv): Regarding Arab-Israeli leadership, what’s the significance of the fact that the ones who joined forces with Israeli right-wingers is Mansour Abbas from the conservative Islamic party?
Ibish: I think there are two reasons why that’s true. First of all, he represents a part of the Palestinian religious right that is self-confident enough to do that. No one can accuse him of being a Zionist. No one can accuse him of being in love with Jews or anything like that. He’s a Muslim Brother. At the same time he’s been pretty clear that he wants a list of still unspecified benefits, that are much the same thing that Shas wanted to get. So, he’s gambling that he can deliver to his constituents enough in terms of goodies — patronage — that he can bring them along. And so far, he hasn’t been disowned.
Kessler: Thank you Hussein, we look forward to working closely with you in the future.
Transcription by Heart of a Nation Summer Interns Adina Siff and Rochelle Berman
