This issue of Middle East Critique presents five articles that challenge many conventional media and political interpretations of domestic and international affairs in the Middle East. We believe readers will welcome the opportunity to engage with the articulate and thought-provoking ideas that our authors are advancing here. Mid-2016 seems an appropriate time to introduce these articles, because the initial euphoria that so many of us experienced during the early 2011 protests collectively termed the ‘Arab Spring’ seems like a distant memory. The early successes of non-violent demonstrators in Egypt and Tunisia inspired imitative movements in several Arab countries. Unfortunately, the subsequent results did not favor groups demanding more inclusive and less authoritarian governments. In Bahrain, the ruling family relied on local supporters and foreign allies to help crush the democracy movement; in Libya, the military fractured, as both loyal supporters of and determined opponents of Mu’amar Qadhdhafi’s regime battled in the towns and rural areas; in Syria, a brutal, sectarian civil war had overwhelmed the voices for reason and peaceful political change by the summer of 2011, while the sectarian strife has intensified in the past five years; and in Egypt, a military coup in 2013 re-established a repressive, non-democratic government. For most people in the aforementioned countries, the political developments since 2011 have been disappointing at best, and for too many even tragic or deadly.
Beyond the Middle East, especially in the major European Union countries and the United States, i.e., the West (which has been deeply involved in the Middle East for more than century), the foreign policy elites never understood what the Arab street desired, and they sought to frame political developments in the region to mesh with their own security-driven views of stability. This notion actually is the theme of our first article by Stefan Borg, ‘The Arab Uprisings, the Liberal Civilizing Narrative and the Problem of Orientalism.’ Borg argues that Western foreign policy elites tended to interpret the 2011 protests as examples of pro-democracy movements that fit into their own biases of a liberal political civilization—read as market capitalism, which inevitably will emerge all over the globe. Borg demonstrates how this representation of the 2011 events is found in the speeches of US President Barack Obama and US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, as well as in major EU policy statements. This liberal narrative equates human rights with political rights, i.e., voting and economic freedoms, the latter being (since the early 1990s) neoliberal economic policies with respect to investment and trade. Borg acknowledges that this narrative is an advance over classic Orientalism, which perceived the Middle East as ‘irredeemably different’ from the West. However, he also argues that it is a representation that still denies agency to Middle Eastern actors, who are seen simply as awakening to follow an inevitable and preordained path toward a Western liberal vision of political rights. The problem with this Western elitist view, Borg posits, is that it cannot comprehend that individual Arab protestors (as well as protestors in Western countries) might yearn for other rights, such as cultural, economic, gender, human, privacy, religious, social, etc.
Our second article, ‘The National Body in Israel and Syria: Comparing Processes of Unity and Fragmentation,’ also challenges us to rethink how we analyze the connection between political elites and the broader population. Co-authors Sophia Hoffmann and Katherine Natanel argue that Israel and Syria are very appropriate states for comparison in this respect because the political elites in each country have striven to create a defined national body through processes of exclusion and inclusion. Furthermore, these elites consider the ‘national body’ as a marker of modern statehood. Israeli political elites, for example, prioritize loyalty to the Jewish character of the state as paramount, and thus Israel’s non-Jewish citizens—primarily Palestinians—effectively are excluded from certain privileges and rights. Some Jewish citizens may feel it is inappropriate to treat citizens differently based on religion, but the state relies on security arguments to silence their criticism. In Syria, the political elites profess the ideal of a secular state, but in reality loyalty to the ruling Assad family became the litmus for being included within the body politic. Indeed, after 2003, Syria accepted thousands of Iraqi refugees, and while the latter were not granted citizenship, in practice most enjoyed the same rights to education and social services, as did Syrians. However, suspected critics of the regime, whether Syrian citizens or Iraqi refugees, were excluded from privileges and rights, and could even be arrested. In both Israel and Syria, the policies of whom to include and whom to exclude from the body politic have contributed to political and social fragmentation rather than cohesion.
Our third article also explores the relationship between the state and its citizens. ‘Bourdieu in Beirut: Wasta, the State and Social Reproduction in Lebanon,’ by co-authors Martyn Egan and Paul Tabar, analyzes the interaction between what Pierre Bourdieu called (social) reproduction mechanisms and (social) reproduction strategies and how this interaction actually can reinforce the power of the state. In contrast to many scholars who have deplored a ‘weak state’ in Lebanon, Egan and Tabar demonstrate how the Lebanese state is a strong social entity that effectively distributes resources and power relations within an unequal social space. A key means of sustaining this process is the practice of wasta, or using one’s social connections to secure government influence, jobs or services. Thus, the effects of wasta, rather than negating the state, actually enhance the state’s organization of politically and socially desirable resources.
In our next article, ‘Hasbara 2.0: Israel’s Public Diplomacy in the Digital Age,’ Miriyam Aouragh examines how Israel for more than a decade has been using the internet as a social media space both to counter pro-Palestinian politics and to mobilize pro-Israel sentiments. As the Israeli state’s public diplomacy, hasbara’s expansion into internet technology has been accompanied by an increase in its funding, professionalization and centralization. Simultaneously however, Palestinians and the international Palestinian solidarity network have been using social media to document Israeli aggression against Palestinian civilians, especially during the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip in 2008–09 and 2014, and these images have undermined hasbara’s efforts to promote an image of Israel as a peace-loving society under threat. Aouragh argues that Hasbara 2.0 is a rebooting of public diplomacy designed to counter the growing negative international perceptions of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, as well as similar criticisms among some Israeli groups. Nevertheless, asks Aouragh, can hasbara be effective as long as official Israeli policy remains the denial of justice to Palestinians living under its occupation?
Our final article by co-authors Billie Jeanne Brownlee and Maziyar Ghiabi, ‘Passive, Silent and Revolutionary: The “Arab Spring” Revisited,’ returns us to the theme of our initial article, i.e., reassessing the 2011 Arab Spring. The authors criticize much of the pre-2011 political science literature about the Arab countries of the Middle East for focusing on the ‘stability’ of authoritarian regimes and failing to pay attention to the ‘politics of silence’ among the mass publics. Consequently, most analysts were surprised by the outbreak and depth of popular uprisings in several Arab states in early 2011, and nor did they perceive the connections between these movements and similar popular protest movements in Europe and the United States. Brownlee and Ghiabi argue that scholars of politics need to incorporate into their analyses research from such disciplines as anthropology, political philosophy and sociology in order to appreciate the significance of the ‘silent’ grassroots politics that too often are unheard and unseen by political elites in democracies and dictatorships alike. Since this idea is one that has been a primary raison d’étre for our journal since its inception in 1992, readers are encouraged to reflect seriously on the argument of these two young scholars.
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