This transcript is from a CSIS podcast published on September 18, 2024. Listen to the podcast here.
Jon Alterman: Hussein Ibish, welcome to Babel.
Hussein Ibish: Thank you so much, Jon. It's a real honor to be here with you. Thank you.
Jon Alterman: On October 17th, protests swept the Arab world after accusations that Israel had bombed the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza. But rather than grow, all those protests seemed to level off. Why is the Arab street not in open revolt about Gaza?
Hussein Ibish: Well, because there is no “Arab street.” It's a term that should be retired. It should never have been imported from French into English and then into the Arab world. There is no Arab street. There are Arab public opinions, and there's 24 national subsets within a huge kaleidoscope of sub-national subsets based on differences of class, ethnicity, tribe, and clan.
All these differences make for a really complicated sociopolitical scene in the Arab world. The birth of Arab nationalism, which was kind of an importation of a European model of a post-Westphalian nation statehood, especially the nineteenth-century ethnocultural nationalism that dominated Europe, was not really suited to a post-Ottoman Middle East, frankly.
Within these structures, you have a myriad of different national and subnational identifications, right? There was this expectation during the period of Arab nationalism, during and after the Nasser era, that all Arabs were prototype Arab nationalists, and all they needed was the chance to demonstrate their Pan-Arab nationalism. Then, they would unify, and they would love it.
People expected unity out of Nasserite Arab nationalism, and they didn't get it. Then, they expected Islamism to at least take over in the Arab republics after the fall of dictators during the Arab Spring. The Muslim Brothers, the Qataris, and the Turks expected it. A lot of people on the left and the right in the West expected it as well because most Arabs are devout Muslims, so they thought most Arabs were proto-Islamists. It turns out that wasn’t the case at all, because there are competing values. The Arab political culture is a lot more variegated and complex than people say.
Jon Alterman: But certainly, the Palestinian cause was something that people cared about and would get people on the street.
Hussein Ibish: Does the Palestinian cause stir heartstrings? It does. Did it then? Yes, it did from its very outset, and it has always stirred heartstrings. I'm sure it always will. It is unreasonable to expect Arabs to undo their domestic societies because a subset of Palestinians is being brutalized by Israel because of an action taken by Hamas. That's very important. If it happened absent October 7th, it would've been very different, but I think people have a lot of hesitations about Hamas.
I also want to point out that Gaza is not a place that resonates with a lot of people in the Arab or broader Muslim world. It commands a lot of attention among Palestinians, a lot of Israelis, and some Egyptians. That's it. But generally, it doesn't have a lot of resonance the way East Jerusalem does. If Al-Aqsa Mosque, or even any part of occupied East Jerusalem, had been involved in this, it would have stirred heartstrings. But Gaza doesn't. It's very important to understand people have their doubts about Hamas and to them, when they think about Gaza, they question, "Where exactly is this?"
While there's a lot of anger, who to aim it at is not clear. When you are demonstrating in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, or Iraq, ultimately, if you're sensible, you know you're demonstrating largely against the local forces. Why would the Israelis care if somebody's demonstrating in Morocco or Saudi Arabia? That's another problem. How does that help Palestinians?
Jon Alterman: One of the explanations for why there aren't more protests in the Arab world is because Arab governments fear that if there were protests, they would rapidly turn into anti-local government protests. Having learned the lessons from the Arab Spring, governments don't want to open that door. There's another argument, which is that people are principally concerned with their daily lives, and Palestine preoccupied an earlier generation that was looking for an issue to unite around. However, this generation is interested in jobs, getting married, and consumer culture.
Hussein Ibish: There's a lot of truth to the second explanation. The first explanation is manifestly wrong for a couple of reasons. First, you have not seen an effort by Arab governments to suppress nascent demonstrations, to show people a whiff of grapeshot, or to scare them back into their homes. You really haven't seen that.
I think it served some of the regimes. Take the Sisi regime in Egypt, which is a really repressive government. Their reaction to anti-Israel, pro-Hamas, and anti-war protests in Egypt was not to say, “You mustn't,” but to say, "Great idea. Go do it next to the pyramids." In other words, in the middle of nowhere where it wouldn't matter. Now that didn't work, so they had to allow people to do it a bit in Cairo. By allowing the protests without trying to suppress them in a violent way or in a mass “incarcerator” way, they've let off some steam.
There are two kinds of Arab societies where you've seen major public expressions of disruptive and unruly outrage. The first are places with a lot of Iranian influence, with organizations connected to Iran's so-called “Axis of Resistance,” of which Hamas is kind of a junior member in bad standing, but still a member. They can get people out in Beirut, Tehran, and Iraq.
Then, you've them where there are lots of Palestinians. Jordan was he place that really was threatened, and where the government was actually worried. Jordan had the most passionate, most unruly, and least controlled demonstrations. Jordan is the place where these demonstrations hint at or point towards a very different kind of domestic political arrangement. The Jordanian regime had to tread very carefully between allowing protests and suppressing protests. They decided to allow them and hoped they would peter out, and they sort of have. However, they have been destabilizing to state and society. They brought to the fore the uneasy social contract between Jordanians, who support the Hashemite monarchy, and Palestinian Jordanians, who are about half of the population, maybe even more. After Black September, in 1969 and 1970, the most extreme wings of the PLO, the PFLP, took over some parts of Jordan and turned them into a de facto Palestinian state for the purpose of waging guerilla war against Israel.
In Amman, there was a war, and the Palestinian national movement was driven from Jordan into Lebanon. Since then, the basic social contract has been, "You can live here as citizens, you can do anything you like, but don't pursue your national aspirations in Jordan. Pursue them in Palestine, in the West Bank, in Gaza, in Israel, or somewhere else, just not here.”
This conflict brings to the fore the fact that the worse things get between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the higher the likelihood that large numbers of additional Palestinians end up in Jordan from the West Bank, driven out or fleeing conflict, as Israel ends up annexing chunks of the West Bank.
Jon Alterman: Of course, most Palestinians in the West Bank have Jordanian citizenship, so they have that ability to move.
Hussein Ibish: They can renew their Jordanian citizenship. There's a real issue there. In addition, there's been this Israeli mantra for many decades that Jordan is Palestine, and the Jordanians fear that that could become true if the Palestinians cannot pursue self-determination in Mandatory Palestine.
Jon Alterman: Let me go back to your first answer about the nature of protests in the Arab world and this idea of voice. As you know, Marc Lynch wrote a book in 2007 called Voices of the New Arab Public. It feels to me that after 2011 in the Arab Spring uprisings, maybe there was some learned helplessness, and Arab publics decided a lot of these issues are the ambit of governments and not really for the public to challenge. Are you seeing some of that at play here as people talk about Gaza?
Hussein Ibish: I think that's true. We saw what uncontrolled bottom-up change can look like when dictators fell. It didn't look good anywhere. Even Tunisia has gone backwards majorly. The whole democratization program has been a failure everywhere for now. None of the essential grievances of the Arab Spring have been resolved in any way. I fully expect all those issues to come back at some point and probably with a vengeance. I think there is, you could call it learned helplessness, or you could call it acquired wisdom. Either way, the idea that uncontrolled bottom-up change is a good idea and that it will work out well has been discredited.
It is similar to the way the Muslim Brotherhood Project became discredited over the same period of time for many of the same reasons. Most Arabs don't want it, and they won't put up with it if you try to shove it down their throat. They'd rather stick with the old regimes that better lives.
There is a sense that the chaos version of change is not popular. At the same time, you have a great surge of nationalism. There was a competing value when the Islamists were fighting for power during the Arab Spring decade of 2011 to around 2019, which was that even though the Brothers had the Qur’an, other people had the flag, and the flag was at least as powerful as the Qur’an. Some of the people with the flag could grab the Qur’an and pull it back, which happened in Libya, and say, "Hey, I know this book as well as you do. Don't tell me I'm not as good a Muslim as you just because I'm not fundamentalist. Get lost. Besides, you're a traitor." This is maybe a worse term than an apostate, frankly, in a lot of these countries.
For example, in the Gulf a country like Saudi Arabia has undergone a complete transformation of its government legitimation narrative. It used to be heavily based on the Islamic heritage of Saudi Arabia. Now it's partly that, but more the kind of history of power, authority, and military conquest of the Saud family representing Saudi national interests going all the way back to the eighteenth century, but before Abd al-Wahhab. The origin story of the modern Saudi state is no longer said to be in the pact between the Saudis and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. It's now dated to an earlier Saudi conquest, and the military prowess and authority of the Sauds as a ruling family. You see this all over.
You've got a Saudi-first agenda. You've got an Emirati-first agenda, where there's been a huge emphasis in the past 10 years in the UAE on national service and other programs designed to take these seven emirates and make people believe they are UAE citizens and not people from Ras Al-Khaimah, or Abu Dhabi, or Dubai, or Sharjah. No, you're an Emirati first. There is something similar in Qatar, especially due to the boycott. All over the Arab world there was a resurgence of patriotism as part of a backlash to the Islamist moment, which fizzled. But it's not Pan-Arab nationalism, it’s domestic nationalism and state-specific nationalism. That's one thing that Arab societies that remain functional are trying to foster as a bulwark against the state failure of a lot of the republics like Iraq and Lebanon, Syria, Libya, etc. The idea that it's not enough just to have a monarchy. You need to also have a patriotic citizenry that conflates the two.
Jon Alterman: Does Gaza sort of consolidate that inflection point that you felt was really captured by the Arab Spring? Is there a way in which Gaza consolidates it? Does it move it? Is Gaza part of a new kind of Arab politics? Does it accelerate a new kind of Arab politics?
Hussein Ibish: That's to be determined. If the war ends soon, it's likely we'll look back on this as an inflection point that consolidates the new nationalism, the new domestic nationalism, and the death of Islamist projects in the Arab world for now. One of the things holding people back from embracing everything about the Gaza war is that they don't want to help Hamas. It's not just true of governments. It's true of people. And October 7th was not designed to make them love Hamas if they didn't like them in the first place.
More to the point, none of it really felt like a great idea in most of the Arab world in theory. That does hold people back. However, Hamas knew they were going to be sacrificing what they had built in Gaza and throwing over the apple cart, embracing what they said they wanted, which was a state of permanent war with Israel—an open-ended insurgency. I wrote about this around December 12th in the Atlantic. I said, "This is a trap. Israel's walking into a trap." What I meant was that the Israelis were being lured into a first phase where they would do what they did from north to south, ending at Rafah. However, then they wouldn't go. As long as they are there, it gives Hamas the opportunity to have the war they want.
The war Hamas wants is an open-ended insurgency against Israeli forces that will give them every week, if not every day, a bloody shirt they can wave in front of the other Palestinians and say, "We are the national movement. We are the only ones who are fighting and dying for control of Palestinian land, here in Gaza, against the Israeli occupiers. Look at those idiots in the West Bank. What are they doing? They are the gendarmerie of the occupation, and the PLO sits at an empty negotiating table where no good can come of it. We are the leaders, so we should take over the PLO and be there in the UN."
They're playing a long game. They're thinking in terms of 10, 15 years. And they're thinking in terms of Palestinian politics. This is very consequential. If the Israelis stay in Gaza, and they provide Hamas with the open-ended insurgency they want, it will immediately become a quagmire for Israel because it will lack a goal. It will lack a strategy. It will just be a self-reinforcing Whack-A-Mole. You see that in every counterinsurgency that's open-ended unless you build up a political alternative, which would mean doing that while building up the PA in the West Bank, but the Israelis don't want that at this point, anyway.
If it just continues the way it is, as Netanyahu seems to want, this could be the beginning of an Islamist resurgence led by Hamas. That is not impossible. At the moment, the Arab reaction to the war in Gaza is held back by the fact that it's being led by Hamas. But over a five, seven, eight-year period, you could see that pendulum swing completely where Hamas becomes the vanguard, not just of the Palestinian national movement, but of Arab sentiments in general and the revival of an Islamist trend. I find that entirely plausible. It's one of the many of the worst of the “parade of horribles” that precedes from Netanyahu's policy of generally making this into the war that Sinwar wants.
Jon Alterman: How do you think Hamas is doing on the information warfare piece? How do you see it? What do you think its principal instruments are and its principal storylines?
Hussein Ibish: Its principal instruments are the statements that very effective Hamas spokespeople make on Telegram, Signal, other social media, and sometimes even on the news. It's the spin that is given by Hamas diplomats in Qatar, who used to pretend to be their political leaders but never were, and now it's official that Sinwar is in charge. And it’s the fact that Israel's propaganda is so bad. Israel's ability to explain what the hell they're doing has been so poor because they haven't known.
The biggest bolster for Hamas here is the way Israel has conducted the war, which has been a war of vengeance. On October 7th, Netanyahu got on Israeli TV and promised "a mighty vengeance." That's a direct quote, and that's exactly what's happened in Gaza. Nothing else has been accomplished, to my mind, except a mighty vengeance. The whole society has suffered to the point of Gaza delenda est. This is how I see it, and a lot of the Arab world sees it that way, even if other people don't. I think it's kind of obvious. Under such circumstances, people are genuinely outraged. So, first of all, Israel's own behavior is Hamas' best communications victory.
Secondly, Israel has not been able to articulate why it's doing what it's doing except in its own context. Among Jewish Israelis, and I think even other Israelis, it works okay because people feel threatened, so vengeance, war sounds good. To the rest of the world, it just looks like a rampage, to a large extent, because it was a rampage. Under such circumstances, all Hamas has to do is to say, "We're surviving, we're here, and here are the number of people who died. Here is what they did today. Here is what we suffered today." Israel is still stuck on October 8th or 9th or 10th. They're still emotionally transfixed in the horror of October 7th, and that's understandable for Israeli society. For the the rest of the world, however, it is not. It’s been really helpful for Hamas.
On the other hand, October 7th sentences Hamas to be a non-player for the foreseeable future in Palestinian national representation. There is no way that Hamas can become a respectable interlocutor. They have made themselves the de facto Palestinian-Israel interlocuter on matters of war and peace. That's mainly because of the extent to which Israel has marginalized and belittled the PA and the PLO in the West Bank. It’s not so much a victory of Hamas; rather, it's walking into a vacuum. It would not be that difficult to create a plausible Palestinian alternative to Hamas just by rebuilding Fatah and the PA, which you can do with incentives, money, support, and with a series of measures, and benchmarks that if the PA meets, then they get this much more power, independence, and money. That's absolutely never been tried. Maybe the death of Abbas might be an opportunity to try to do it. He is sort of the living embodiment of the condition of Fatah.
Jon Alterman: He’s 88 with a smoking habit.
Hussein Ibish: Yeah. 88 with a smoking habit. You wonder what kind of battery is behind there. But you've still got an opportunity, in my view, to take the Gaza war and October 7th and use it to create something better among Palestinians. But you have to be willing to do it. If you keep backhanding the PA and refusing to give them their own money and siccing settlers on everybody like the Ku Klux Klan nightriders, it's not going to work.
Jon Alterman: But as you said, Hamas has not been skillful in many ways.
Hussein Ibish: My point is that they haven't needed to be skillful. I mean, they have been kind of skillful in terms of messaging to the Arab world.
Jon Alterman: But as you pointed out, they’re not really getting large numbers of people in the street. They're not affecting public policy.
Hussein Ibish: Correct. The biggest thing is that it was a complete shot in the dark, but they were hoping that October 7th would spark a regional war against Israel. That Hezbollah, ran, al-Hashd al-Shaabi groups, and Houthis would all run to their defense, as they thought they had been promised, or as they hoped they had been promised in Beirut last summer. That didn't happen. That's the biggest letdown for them. What they would be looking for is unrest in these countries pushing those groups and societies toward more conflict. However, you see the opposite. In Lebanon, you don't see any appetite for war, including among the Shi’ites of southern Lebanon. There's just nobody pushing for Hezbollah to have a war with Israel under current circumstances. Not at all.
Jon Alterman: I've known you for about 15 years, maybe a little more. I know your thinking on Palestine has evolved a lot over that period of time. Where do you see the Palestine issue going over the next 5 to 10 years? I'm not saying a single scenario but give me a sense for what you think some different scenarios might be.
Hussein Ibish: I think there are only two likely scenarios, maybe three. The first is the main one. I have been saying since the failure of the Camp David Summit in 2000, and I think it's becoming more and more true with every year, that we have been on a very slow train that's becoming a fast train and could become a bullet train soon, on the way to a station called annexation/expulsion. There is a clear intent on the part of a lot of people in Israel with power to annex big chunks of the West Bank, the Jordan Valley, everything behind the settlement barrier, everywhere there's a major Jewish settlement, and beyond. This has gone from being a fantasy of extremists to being a de facto policy of the current coalition and a plausible scenario.
You can see easily how it would happen. There would be an explosion of violence in the West Bank. It would seem out of control, and the Israelis would say, "This is too much. We can't take it anymore. We need a divorce. We've got to separate the two peoples—in their interest and ours. This is the last thing we want to do. With a heavy heart, with tears rolling down our cheeks, we will do this thing. We're going to annex this area, and whoops, a lot of people ended up on the other side. Well, they're just going to stay there. This is good for everybody, and we would never have wanted to do this, but we have to."
I think that's a very likely scenario in the long run because I just don't see how the Israelis square the circle otherwise, and I don't see them as being willing to give up this land, the land that is more important to many Israelis than most of Israel. If you look at this from a religious or even historical irredentist perspective, you’d want the West Bank more than you'd want those areas. Having got it, and having held it for so long, you're just going to give it back because you lost the debate in a moral universe? Because it’s right to do it, or because the UN charter demands it? My fear is the Israeli-Palestinian relationship has degenerated to the point that this is where we are: I think enough Israelis have decided they prefer annexation to any other scenario. There's nothing stopping them. I think that's likely to happen. On the other hand, you could have an epiphany.
Jon Alterman: It's the right neighborhood to have an epiphany.
Hussein Ibish: It certainly is. Well, I'm kind of anti-epiphany. I'm a great agnostic. Anyway, back on planet Earth, there could still be this moment of recognition in Israel that they have two choices. Right now, they could recognize the Palestinian right to a state and, at some point, get into negotiations to eventually create one and end the Gaza war. That would be enough to get a deal with Saudi Arabia and the United States and really consolidate Israel's security.
It would be the beginning of a new relationship with the Palestinians based on propping up the Palestinians who want to talk to Israel rather than the Palestinians who want to kill Israelis. Or you can just kick back and wait for the war to get worse and worse, which is ultimately what would happen. This annexation/expulsion scenario is so beguiling because it has the appearance of a solution, which it wouldn't be. It would be a catastrophe beyond imagination, but it looks like a potential solution. That's what makes it such a siren song.
The third scenario is that none of that happens, and everything limps along in the status quo. This status quo includes a Whack-A-Mole insurgency and counterinsurgency in Gaza. I can see the potential for Hamas to become the leader of the Palestinian national movement, which would functionally kill it at the international level under current circumstances. I don't think that's terribly likely, but the sort of stumbling along is possible.
In other words, the three scenarios are: you could try to eliminate the Palestinian question altogether through annexation and expulsion, you can build up an alternative to Hamas, or you can continue dealing with Hamas and whoever else in the West Bank and just stumble forward blindly. In Israel, blind is a good word. It's been acting like a giant with a club, waving it around with great smashing capability, but with no vision at all.
Jon Alterman: Hussein Ibish, thank you for joining us on Babel.
Hussein Ibish: Thank you so much, Jon, it's an honor.
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