Palestine: A Socialist Introduction by Sumaya Awad brian bean

Author:Sumaya Awad, brian bean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2020-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

2011 and the end of the status quo

An “Israeli-inspired regional status quo” is the term academic Yaniv Voller used to describe the regional state of affairs prior to the Arab Spring. “With the overthrow of the Mubarak regime, Israel has now lost a leader who shared with it a desire for maintaining the ‘stable’ status quo,” Voller wrote in 2012. In a policy paper published by the World Bank, Nadia Belhaj Hassine explains that “deteriorating standards of living, high and rising unemployment, and growing perceptions of exclusion” were factors that pushed Arabs to revolt in 2011. The combination of these factors cannot possibly describe a situation as stable, unless stable here means the silencing of popular demands for the sake of prioritizing Israel’s interests.13 Stability, from Israel’s perspective, means the domestication of the region while it continues its settler-colonial expansion on Palestinian and Arab lands without facing any form of resistance or accountability. A major instrument for maintaining the status quo was the peace agreements signed between Arab states, the PLO, and Israel—agreements that were possible only because of the influence of the presence of elites and leaderships that benefit from such agreements against the interests and wishes of the people they claim to rule in their name.

For the Israeli political and security establishment, the terms “Arab Spring” and “uncertainty” became almost interchangeable. While Tunisian and Egyptian masses were on the streets calling for “bread, freedom, and social justice” and demanding their presidents to “dégage” (get out),14 the prime minister of the “only democracy in the Middle East” stated that the Arab world was engulfed by an “Islamic, anti-western, anti-liberal, anti-Israel, undemocratic wave.”15 How is it that “the only democracy in the Middle East,” with its political leadership and intellectual class, can speak of uncertainty and impending doom, when its neighbors ask for exactly what Israel claims to stand for—a thriving and representative political system where leadership can be held accountable if they deviate from maintaining the interests of their nations? For years, Western intellectuals and policy makers spoke of lack of Arab readiness for democracy; chiefly among them of course was Bernard Lewis, who, in response to the Arab uprisings’ call for democratic reforms stated that Arabs “are simply not ready for free and fair elections.”16 He added that “in genuinely fair and free elections, [the Muslim parties] are very likely to win and I think that would be a disaster.”17

Other commentators and writers in the West shared Lewis’s grim vision of how things will unfold as a result of the uprisings. David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist, wrote in July 2012 that the Arab Spring was “Israel’s problem.”18 Ignatius cited Netanyahu’s fear that the election of Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood would lead to “an erosion of the relationship with Egypt over time.” Yet the détente between Egypt and Israel has never been about temporary changes in leadership, reflecting instead a deeper alignment between the political and economic establishments of both countries. This discourse, which makes the

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