Case in freaking point

I've said many times (though perhaps not here) that no communicative technology is instrumental to a political revolution in and of itself, for its own special reasons. Rather, a technology can be important in this respect simply by virtue of being new. The revolutionaries, being naturally future-oriented and tuned to marginal or otherwise non-institutionalized means of movement and communication, can dominate and make use of these new channels; meanwhile, the existing regime, which at the point of revolution is almost always stultifyingly conservative, backward-looking, and disproportionately focused on the spheres it already controls, has not bothered to learn anything about how to lock down those channels.

This is what's really at work in all the "Twitter revolution" and "Facebook revolution" buzz. (Note that things are constantly called Twitter revolutions and rarely, in my experience, called Facebook revolutions; this has nothing to do with which is more useful but rather with which is newer and trendier at the moment.) I tend to get really ornery about all the "Twitter OMGZZ" and "IT WAS WIKILEAKS" coverage, but it's not because I necessarily think those things are irrelevant. It's because the fact that new communication technologies played a role in a political revolution is so not news that most stories on those phenomena place way too much emphasis on the particularities of the medium in question.

My classic favorite example is the role of the new railways in the 1917 Russian Revolution; as I learned in high school, the critical mass of people, and the necessary in-advance networking, could not have occurred without them. Of course, trains' ability to move people around was very important to that; but if there had been a giant public taxi service, or a local teleportation service, more or less the same thing could probably had been achieved. The point is not trains; the point is the ability of people to communicate and organize in ways that the ruling regime has not managed, or bothered, to figure out how to dominate yet. Today, trains are about as likely to be a major factor in a political revolution as wagon trains are. (Perhaps they'll get so forgotten as a factor that they'll come back around to effectively edgy, but it's a long shot.) Meanwhile, who knows? Maybe we'll have a recorded-Skype revolution someday soon (there's a huge potential for a charismatic politician there--not unlike what Ayatollah Khomeini did in 1979 with cassettes).

Anyway, I bring all this up because this Middle East Channel post by Ashraf Khalil does a great job of giving a medium its factual due without way overemphasizing its impact:

I spent the day moving throughout downtown Cairo trying to keep track of a dizzying series of fast-moving events. It started with a lesson on how a new generation of activists -- dismissed ahead of time by Interior Minister Habib al-Adly as "a bunch of incognizant, ineffective young people" -- is using electronic means to stay one step ahead of the authorities.

Organizers announced long ago that the protesters would gather outside the Interior Ministry downtown, prompting police to lock down that area. But shortly after noon, it became clear that was a clever bit of misdirection, as a whole new set of gathering points was distributed via Facebook and Twitter.

Egyptians used the #jan25 Twitter hashtag to spread news and encouragement about the course of the protests. "If Mubarak goes down, there are going to be enough presidents in Saudi to make a soccer team!" read one representative tweet by @MinaAFahmy. Other tweets linked to Facebook groups that listed a series of new meeting spots and contact numbers.

As the day progressed, the series of scattered protests moved through different parts of the city, growing in strength as they joined up with other groups and induced onlookers and residents to join in.

Now that's what I'm talking about in terms of covering the role of a medium in revolutionary organizing! It gives the medium its due, explains how it's working, gives the humans involved full credit (rather than making it a technologically determinist story), and embeds it within the larger, and ultimately more important, human-social story. The real thrust of the piece, you see, is this:

The Egyptian government's standard operating procedure is to overwhelm any public protest with a massively disproportionate wave of black-clad police. As a result, most protests tend to boil down to the same 500 noisy hard-core activists hopelessly penned in by thousands of riot cops.

But today those numbers were reversed, and the police, at times, seemed completely confused and struggling to keep up. In one confrontation outside the Supreme Court building in downtown Cairo, the riot police attempted to lock arms in a human chain to block the protesters' path. Their effort, however, proved hopelessly ineffective -- waves of marchers simply overwhelmed them and continued on their path.

Which is to say that the point of the piece is that something real is happening in Egypt, and we should pay attention to it. The mechanics are just mechanics. Social media should not be the why; they should be a how.

Rolling Stone ventures to MENA (!)

Rolling Stone is launching Rolling Stone: Middle East.

Needless to say, I subscribed immediately. I hope it's obvious why this is a huge deal; for one thing, this is a major American pop-culture publication showing major interest in the cultural products and pop life of a region that is almost uniformly understood as backward, primitive, and totally lacking in anything Rolling Stone could ever be interested in. That in itself is a huge deal.

If people in the region read it, that could be even better. It would be complicated, as validation by Western observers always is for almost any Arab group, individual, movement, or trend; but it could also be very valuable. It depends on how they play it at RS, and on how many people in the region actually read it and take it seriously. (Those variables are, of course, related--it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing). As much as it can be fun to make fun of RS these days, when I was in high school that magazine was incredibly important to me. I was the proverbial sad indie kid, and it was kind of a lifeline at times. There are some kids in the Middle East who are probably already consuming this kind of Western media, whether they can actually get their hands on the glossy or whether it's via an Internet cafe; how great is it that they could get their own deal? Something actually meant for them?

The major caveat is that as far as I can see, it's all in English. That worries me a little, and it throws the emphasis back toward the remedial-Orientalist perspective. Maybe there is or will be an Arabic-language version or website; I really, really hope so. Even if that doesn't happen, I still very much applaud this step.

And finally, it'll just be fun for me.

rollingstone.me.com, people: go. Read. Be pleased.

Proof

We can now see once and for all that the Mongols were the biggest badasses of all time. I think at the end the video should have marked Damascus in addition to Baghdad and Jerusalem--it is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, after all--but then, I'm biased.

H/t Juan Cole.

Oh, just kill me now

The Camel Method, it seems, is a method of converting Muslims to Christianity by using the Qur'an.

“Camel” is not (readers might be gladdened to learn) a reference to a beast of burden in Arab lands. Rather, it is Mr. Greeson’s acronym — Chosen Angels Miracles Eternal Life — to help missionaries remember aspects of Isa’s story.

Sure it is. And the rifle sights supplied to the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan with Christian scriptures engraved on them are just a celebration of the manufacturing company's faith.

"We believe that America is great when its people are good," says the [manufacturer's] Web site. "This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals." [...]

Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group [the Military Religious Freedom Foundation] who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they've told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as "spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ."

Well, hey, we'll get 'em from the inside and out. Use the Gospels to shoot 'em down on the battlefield and to convert them in the streets until soon there won't be any pesky Muslims to deal with anymore. At least, not any upper-case ones:

“At the extreme,” Dr. Reynolds said, “these Christian missionaries will grow beards like Muslims, give up pork, even say that they are ‘muslims’ — lower-case ‘m’ — in the Arab-adjective sense of ‘submissive to God.’ ”

So what if there are a million ways of saying you're a believer in god that wouldn't elicit this kind of confusion? So maybe you have to engage in a little shell game to get your foot in the door. It's for their own good. Come to Jesus, hajji.

New steps by Hizballah

A recent article from the Washington Post says that Hizballah has redeployed its long-range rockets "deep into northern Lebanon and the Bekaa valley"--that is, away from the southern border with Israel--which would mean conflicts between Hizballah and Israel would now involve a much broader territorial swath of Lebanon, probably forcing a conflict between the two states (or a crackdown by the Lebanese government on Hizballah, which seems unlikely, though I would be fascinated to see how that would play out--it would be very tricky PR for the government and a very interesting test of the rebuilt Lebanese army).

This is an interesting development for its own sake, but particularly so coming fairly quickly after Hizballah's announcement of its new political platform, which has been received by most observers as a sign of moderation and a swing away from militiadom and toward full-fledged political party status. Qifa Nabki agrees.

Nabki in particular is not necessarily saying that this represents a moderation or a path toward full political engagement and military quiescence, but that is a sense I get from much of the commentary. I didn't quite buy this notion at the time and I still don't. Hizballah is and has been a political movement for a few years now; they are also, at the same time, a guerrilla fighting force. I don't think they have any plans to give up either end of the operation, because what they are is, in fact, something different from either of these characterizations. I'll wait to talk more about what that is after I've actually written my thesis, but this is what it's about.

In addition, I find this bit from the WaPo article interesting:

Hezbollah "learned their lesson" in 2006, when vital intelligence enabled the Israel Defense Forces to destroy the group's long-range launch sites in the first days of the conflict, said reserve Gen. Aharon Zeevi Farkash, a former head of IDF intelligence. In effect, he said, "the 'border' is now the Litani River," with Hezbollah's rocket sites possibly extending north of Beirut.

It's an interesting statement because the original objective of Israel's 1978 intervention into Lebanon was to make the Litani river the actual border (see Benny Morris's Righteous Victims). The notion of annexing Lebanon south of the Litani and leaving the rest for a Christian Maronite state that would enter an alliance of religious minorities with Israel in a sea of Arab Muslims goes back to David Ben Gurion.

I have no way of knowing if it was Gen. Farkash's intention to reference this particular tradition. If it was, it's an unfortunate reference to make on the public record (or at all, one would like to think). Either way, his statement seems to interpret Hizballah's move as a defensive one, a form of retreat. This is inaccurate. It represents, as most other observers have concluded, Hizballah's confidence in its penetration of greater areas of Lebanon and its aim to strategically invest more of Lebanon in its endeavors, rather than remaining limited to the South. (Of course, the Bekaa is and has been a Hizballah stronghold for years, but as far as I know this represents a new level of military investment.)

I'm interested to see what Hizballah's next move is.

What I'm doing with myself

Today (yesterday) I had to write and send in a 6-page (double-spaced) statement about what my B.A. thesis will be. I was pretty happy with it and figured it wouldn't hurt to post it here. So without further ado:


I intend to examine Hamas and Hizballah from a perspective much different from that prevailing in political and journalistic discussions of these organizations. It is my view that the existing literature on political organizations does not account for the particular forms of power and violent tactics practiced by Hamas and Hizbollah. While these two are probably not the only organizations to employ such practices, my intention is to begin to build a framework for understanding their particular roles, capabilities, and structures as political organizations that could be applied more broadly to other cases.

I will show that Hamas and Hizballah are an unusual type of political organization, which I will term parallel or alternative government. Both Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories have been in the process of building a strong, democratic state for decades, but both have been hamstrung by a lack of agreement among their respective populations on questions that are fundamental to the statebuilding project. They have consequently been unable to build the robust institutions that would begin to constitute a state. In Lebanon, the question of a quota system in government institutions—whether one should exist, and whether the existing one is correct, just, and so on—is still contested; the current system has weakened the government to the point of paralysis, while the disagreement still existing over this structure has sapped the government’s authority and legitimacy. In the Palestinian Territories, the population is riven over the proper methods of “resistance” to Israel; the existing Palestinian institutions were created in negotiations with Israel and as such are inherently illegitimate to those Palestinians who reject negotiation and rather favor violent resistance. In both cases, the government structure represents a “side” of this fundamental question and so is inherently politicized, illegitimate to a significant segment of its population. Rather than serving as the location of policy, institutions themselves are policy. Finally, structural factors in the military, economic, and international political spheres have served to further weaken these regimes’ abilities to project power, deliver services, and command loyalty.

This weakness and the political divisions at its root have created a political space in both polities for a second, parallel government to spring up with the support of those factions which are in opposition to the “side” represented by the existing political structure. These parallel governments perform many functions of a governing institution: service delivery, security, national defense (as perceived by their supporters), and political representation. They are parallel rather than rival in that they do not seek simply to control the institutions of the existing regime, nor do they attempt to create a separate state; rather, they build their own institutions to further their preferred outcomes while remaining committed to a united Lebanon or a free Palestine. Rather than attempting to secure the reforms and policy shifts they want within a system that is too weak and dysfunctional to produce the desired outcomes, these constituencies have chosen simply to build the state they want.

Hamas’ and Hizballah’s use of violence has been one of the primary factors agitating the international discourse about them. I will examine the particular ways in which these groups deploy violence—when they use it, when they do not, against whom and employing what techniques—in order to show that their violent methods also distinguish them from most other political organizations. They are neither states, nor insurgents, nor guerrillas, nor decentralized terrorist networks; and they do not use violence in the same way as any of these. I will attempt to link their unique employment of violence to their status as parallel governments and to elucidate the relationship, if any, between their particular forms of violence and their particular forms of political power.

Both Hamas and Hizballah have used a variety of violent tactics, borrowing methods from a variety of forms of political organization. Hamas, in particular, has taken on statelike functions in terms of controlling violence. The group has done more to secure Gaza than the PA had ever accomplished: it integrated its police forces into the Gazan security forces (Crisis Group 2006: 9), secured the interior of Gaza against clan warfare for the first time, and made a credible attempt at controlling the inflow of weapons through the tunnels to Egypt (Crisis Group 8) as well as their display and sale within Gaza (Crisis Group 2003: 10). The Qassam Brigades were converted into an external security force and set to patrolling Gaza’s borders—a strong statement in the context of their longstanding domination by Israeli forces. Hamas also did its best to coordinate and control military resistance to Israel for the first time (Crisis Group 2003: 8), though this effort was not fully successful.

At the same time, Hamas has continued to use violence against Israel in ways that do not reflect the behavior of a state; rather than deploying an army, invading, or attacking Israel’s military capabilities, Hamas has continued to fire rockets into Israel, a tactic widely described as terrorist since the rockets largely impact civilian life. However, rather than mounting spectacular exhibitions of violence connected to high civilian deathcounts in connection with specific demands, Hamas has more often used its rockets as a reminder of its continued presence and resistance: the rockets are often aimed to avoid harming anyone, and do not have the sophisticated technology that would allow them to target specific Israeli buildings, persons, or resources. Hamas’s rocket fire is curiously ambivalent: it constitutes neither full-on war nor straightforward terrorism. Rather, it is a legitimacy-seeking exercise: Hamas is simultaneously able to demonstrate its commitment to the cause by being seen to be doing something and to declare its existence, defiance, and relevance to Israel and to the international community. Through rocket fire, Hamas carries out its mission of resistance and refuses to allow itself—and by extension Palestine—to be forgotten.

Hizballah, meanwhile, emerged from “a loose coalition” of Shi‘a groups who were radicalized by U.S. and Israeli interference in the Lebanese civil war (GlobalSecurity.orgb 2008), and originally most resembled a militia, drawing its soldiers from ordinary people in villages as needed. Its first major accomplishment was Israel’s ignominious withdrawal from southern Lebanon, and the group employed classic insurgency tactics in this struggle. Hizballah sought to secure the IDF’s complete withdrawal from Lebanon, including the Security Zone, and made its point with missiles, attacks, and suicide bombings. Their efforts lasted up through the 1990s, when the civil war officially ended (Morris 2001: 558), and have continued sporadically since. Suicide bombing was not a common tactic at the time, and it proved to be a crucial innovation on Hizbollah’s part in terms of making its name as well has having a clear impact on American and Israeli forces in Lebanon.

But Hizballah, too, has taken on statelike military functions. The Lebanese Army disintegrated more than once under internal and external pressures during the civil war, and Hizballah’s military wing was far more effective, disciplined, and cohesive. Its military no longer consists of The group has, essentially, taken on the task of national defense and border security against Israel, without regard for the policies of the official Lebanese government but with the approval of its constituency (primarily, but not exclusively, Shi’a in the south of Lebanon). Hizballah de facto rules several areas of Lebanon, including the northeast and, of course, the South, and one is more likely to find a Hizballah member or supporter than a government policeman in these areas.

These are a few of the variety of tactics Hamas and Hizballah have adopted as part of their repertoire of violence. While their individual practices or campaigns can be described using existing terms—insurgency, state-within-a-state, terrorism—the combination of them all within single, coherent organizations has so far gone unnamed in political science literature, just as the political function of these groups remains undescribed. What remains to be seen is whether there is a connection between the groups’ idiosyncratic uses of violence and their anomalous political status. How do Hamas and Hizballah view themselves as acting? What effect do these views have on Hamas’s and Hizballah’s parallel statebuilding projects, and on their countries’ statebuilding projects more generally?

Both Hamas and Hizballah not only practice violence but have constructed strong ideological links between their exercise of violence and their political identity. Hizballah has declared, “our military apparatus is not separate from our overall social fabric. Each of us is a fighting soldier” (Hizballah 1988: 1). Hamas’s mission is connected to violence at the most basic level: it exists for the purpose of violent resistance to Israel. In parallel with Hizballah, it argues that “It is necessary to instill the spirit of Jihad in the heart of the nation so that they would confront [sic] the enemies and join the ranks of the fighters” (Covenant: Article 15). Furthermore, both have asserted their independence from their supposed governments through maintaining their violent practices and capabilities against these regimes’ wishes. Alone of all the militias that sprang up in the civil war, Hizballah has refused the state’s injunction to disarm; it has also resisted political pressure to integrate its military wing into the Lebanese national army (Jamail 2006). Prior to its electoral victory in Gaza, Hamas maintained the operations of its military forces (Boudreaux 2007; Crisis Group 2008: 6) despite the orders of the Palestinian Authority and later took over government of Gaza through a violent coup.

These facts are suggestive of several links. The first, and simplest, is between the groups’ violent tactics and their political constituency: after all, their basic mission is violent resistance to Israeli dominance and to Western interference. Second, they seem to understand themselves and their operations—including nonviolent undertakings—in terms of war, as shown by their rhetoric. Even a worker in a Hizballah-run hospital is in some sense a soldier, just as a Hamas member who guards the tunnels through which necessary goods are smuggled from Egypt correctly understands himself to be committing an act of war against Israel. The role of religion and religious history in this understanding is important and bears further exploration, not only in terms of teachings regarding jihad but also because another aspect in which the groups are metaphorically fighting is for particular practices of Islamic life in their respective territories.

Third, violence and control of violence has been used by both groups in constructing their parallel governments, often directly in opposition to the regimes that ostensibly rule (or ruled) Gaza and Lebanon. One of the basic definitions of a state is a political entity that monopolizes violence within a bounded territory; by exercising and controlling violence, Hamas and Hizballah have concretely removed territory from the states in which they live and constructed separate zones of domination—yet they have managed to do so without seceding or attempting to partition the territory in question. Through a delicate balance of both internally and externally directed violence, service delivery, construction of parallel institutions, and participation in existing political institutions, Hamas and Hizballah have successfully built their parallel states.

Qifa Nakbi makes many funnies

The Qnion is totally my new favorite thing. It's like the biggest inside joke ever (in that people who don't follow the Middle East wouldn't find most of it funny, but if you do it's brilliant).

From a recent post from Alex at Syria Comment:

“The Syrians knew that the Israelis were following their official in the U.K,” says retired Russian intelligence specialist Vladimir Balakhoff. “So they loaded all of these false photographs of nuclear reactors, diagrams, and documents in North Korean onto his computer. And the Israelis fell for it.”

“Why do you think that no one in Israel made a big deal out of the bombing?” asks Egyptian political affairs expert Gamal Galagala. “Once they realized that they’d been caught with their hand in the cookie jar, they tried to sweep it under the carpet, but that’s hard to do when the milk’s already been spilled. If you catch my drift.”

High-level Syrian sources are now confirming that the laptop decoy was intended to veil a much more sophisticated security project, one with the potential to change the strategic balance of power in the region.

This project, known as the Syrian Computer Society (SCS), is headquartered in another remote town, Hassake, not far from the site of the fake nuclear power plant. It boasts three desktop computers – two IBM compatibles with 486 processors and an iMac G3 – and a 14.4 kbit/s dial-up modem.

The project’s director, Dr. Samir Mahdoum, suggested that Syria could use these advanced machines to spy on Israel, thereby denying their arch-enemy the element of surprise. “Using Google Maps Satellite View, we see all of Israel,” said Dr. Mahdoum, stroking an albino hamster. “Their troop movements, their weapons, everything!”

Regional specificity be damned, it was the albino hamster that really did me in.

Obama's speech

The reactions I've seen so far:

Jihadi reactions

Israeli public opinion

Noah Millman: East-West vs. North-South dynamics in Obama's characterization of America's role

Larison: Obama failed to reach the one audience that really matters

Arab students: many versions of "Deeds, not words"

Some signs of undercutting extremists

Daniel Levy: Still Accumulating, Not Expending, Capital

Michael Keating: Obama's speech an end, not a beginning

Abu Muqawama: Speech a bigger deal in the Western world than in the Middle East

This is a fairly diverse range of opinion, the main point of consensus being that none of this will matter down the road if it's not followed up with credible action. Disagreement centers on whether the speech itself was successful or not as rhetoric and as a tactic to buy time and the benefit of the doubt.

I have read many many more reax than this; these are linked because I consider them valuable and thought-provoking. If you only read one, I would say read Marc Lynch:

This was a challenging, thoughtful speech which will be picked at and discussed for a long time. It wasn't as revolutionary as some might have hoped, but that's not surprising -- the ground is so well-trodden that it would have been astonishing to see something genuinely new. Instead, it struck me as a thoughtful reflection and invitation to conversation, with some important nuance which might easily be missed. It was neither "just like Bush" nor a total departure from past American rhetoric.

After that, too many to make sorting worthwhile, really. Daniel Levy, Michael Keating, Larison, and the Arab students. All linked above.

Bah humbug

All I can say is that the American media can really be a bunch of downers when it comes to peace and reconciliation efforts. It's just not as fun for them as war cheerleading, I guess.



It should not be possible to put together a video montage where the two least crazy and least stupid people involved are Valerie Jarrett and...Pat Buchanan.

Also, why is Liz Cheney on TV so much lately?

Link dump: Obama in the Middle East edition

Obama invited the Muslim Brotherhood to his speech.

God forbid the president have manners. Those make you look weak.

The trip is getting overwhelmingly positive coverage in the Arab--and Iranian--media.

But Osama bin Laden's not a fan. The Saudis push back.

Also, I am rather pissed off that the option to receive text messages updating you on the President's speech in real time is available everywhere in the world but the U.S. Not all of us own televisions and some of us will be busy today. It would have been a nice thing.

My B.A. thesis proposal

Well, I gave in a BA proposal today, and for anybody who might be interested here it is.


I am interested in investigating political violence in the modern Middle East, particularly violence that takes place within national borders. This classification will primarily include civil conflict, as in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Mandatory Palestine; repressive violence perpetrated by the state against its citizens and the political ramifications thereof, as in Iraq, Syria, and the Gaza Strip under Hamas, may also be considered. Finally, time and length permitting, I hope to explore the products of torture and other state-sanctiond and –practiced forms of institutionalized, ongoing violence within the broader political landscape of violence in relevant countries (Iraq, Syria, Gaza, perhaps Pakistan).

My aim is to create a healthy balance between theoretical analysis and fact-driven, concrete insights. (I may or may not include policy recommendations, depending on the structure of my conclusions, but I would like to.) Theoretically, I hope to investigate such violence from a political science perspective, discussing the political mechanisms and structures that variously shape, allow, encourage, thrive off, or are destroyed by such violence; and from an anthropological perspective, attempting to understand the meaning of violence in specific cultural and temporal locations, its technologies, and what work it does for its constituents. I will employ Foucauldian analytical tools throughout in considering the power structures and institutions shaping the environments in which violence has developed. Concretely, I plan to incorporate statistical and econometric research on conflict onset, statebuilding and state repression; firsthand research documents such as Crisis Group Reports and, I hope, my own observations from the two months I am about to spend in Syria this summer; and, of course, a historical perspective, examining causes and effects on a broad timescale. When completed, the paper will offer one attempt at a fairly comprehensive perspective on some of the most controversial and thorny political intra-state conflicts of the 20th century. If I am successful in achieving my desired balance between theoretical and grounded analysis, the paper will function both as an edifying policy document and as an interesting academic analysis.

Andrew Sullivan passes on some thoughts about what Israel's bigger strategy in Gaza could possibly be (answer: an indirect blow to Iran). An excerpt:

The first is an absolute cease-fire. Previous cease-fires allowed Hamas to launch two or three rockets a week into Israel and to smuggle weapons into Gaza through tunnels. To obtain a cease-fire now, the international community should recognize Israel's right to respond to any aggression over its international border and monitor the closure of Hamas' weapons-smuggling tunnels.

Above all, the goal is to ensure that Hamas is unable to proclaim victory and thereby enhance Iranian prestige in the Arab world.

The trouble with apocalyptic movements like Hamas is that they will proclaim victory regardless, no? Hamas will only be defeated by the Palestinians, in the end. Which is why Kramer's notion of pitting the PA against Hamas makes more sense. But the idea that this time, pure violence and enforcement of a blockade will force a change of heart among Palestinians and Arabs more generally seems utopian to me. The risk is that this could ignite pro-Iranian Jihadism across the region.

A couple of thoughts:


The one big problem with closing the weapons-smuggling tunnels is that they are also the food-and-supplies-smuggling tunnels. The tunnels have played an important role in keeping Gaza afloat, from a humanitarian perspective, under Israel's economic embargo.

The tunnels existed in some form before this particular depressing situation occurred, since (as I understand it) Israel has not allowed Gaza's economy to operate freely across borders in decades. I read at least once, I believe in the 2008 Crisis Group Report on Gaza, that tunnel smuggling began because cheese was cheaper in Egypt (the tunnels are primarily under the Gazan-Egyptian border). When Israel created the embargo after Hamas's 2006 victory, activity increased; when the embargo was intensified after Hamas violently took over the Strip, Hamas took over and expanded the tunnels as a way to generate revenue (they instituted taxes on particular goods) and maintain the role they have played since before their electoral victory as a provider to the people of necessary goods and services.

Furthermore, Gazans have come up with other methods of smuggling and I don't doubt they'd find a way to get weapons in without the tunnels. (I remember a story of a Gazan trader smuggling powdered cement--cement is not allowed into Gaza under the siege--disguised as flour.) Smuggling, via the tunnels and otherwise, has proven extremely difficult to stop or police. The only solution is to eliminate the need for smuggling, since many of the items smuggled are quite necessary for civilized life (cement, medical supplies, spare parts, food, whatever) and demand for them is not going anywhere. This means that Israel will have to lift the embargo if it wants better control of weapons going into Gaza, through closing the tunnels and other means.

Ironically, part of Hamas's domination of the tunnel economy was an effort to control weapons' entry into Gaza and their dispersal within the territory--another move by the organization was to institute rules making it illegal to sell weapons or carry them in public. If Hamas had been more successful in this effort, it would have been better able to control groups like Islamic Jihad that also fire rockets at Israel--with or without Hamas's permission--and that see Hamas as having sold out and moderated too much (hard to believe, but there it is) since rising to power, and Israel could arguably have seen fewer rockets into its territory since these groups could have been neutralized or at least controlled. Hamas's ability to control these groups has never been very strong, and part of their argument for including lifting the embargo as a condition for ceasefire was that they would never be able to get these organizations to respect one without the kind of political capital that that promise would give them.

For both of these reasons, then, the ceasefire that Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren call for in the quotation probably will not happen, and certainly will not be effective, without lifting the embargo. This would be the smart thing to do anyway, as all the siege does is make Gazans more dependent on Hamas for their livelihoods, give Hamas an easy scapegoat for anything that goes wrong on its watch, and make Israel look mean. I think the current offensive may actually provide an opportunity to do so: when Israel decides to end this round of warfare, it can pull out and then, perhaps, lift the embargo while looking generous and measured rather than weak. Indeed, it could even look like a sign of confidence in their victory.


With regard to "pro-Iranian jihadism", I don't have comprehensive empirical knowledge to offer, but I can tell you that Iran is hardly universally popular in the region. It is seen by what I believe to be a decent chunk of Arabs as meddling in other countries' business and politics and as a general promoter of chaos and instability. Reasonably, they're not fans of that. I was talking to an Egyptian friend yesterday about this and he feels exactly this way.

Furthermore, Iran is not the automatic ally of all Shi'ites in the region--their puppetmaster image and their Persian ethnicity can and do set them apart. Shi'ite militias in Iraq, for example (including the Badr brigades) don't like the idea of Iran meddling with them and have disparagingly referred to each other as "Persians" or lackeys to Tehran.

On a practical note, jihad (which I take to mean terror in Sullivan's usage) as practiced by non-state actors is much easier to mobilize in response to visible suffering like Gaza's current situation than in response to a diminution of political capital. Yes, Iran could be struck a blow here, but it's hard to see that blow as an effective rallying cry for terrorist recruitment. Established organizations like Hizballah or Al Qaeda (though AQ is highly unlikely to engage on Iran's behalf) that more easily practice a broader political agenda are better positioned for this, but the advantage is that such organizations are known quantities that can be attacked with rhetoric and military force.

When it comes to Iran's traditional allies, Hizballah would certainly be very unhappy; in light of the recent backroom negotiations between Syria and Israel over the Golan, Syria is a bit of a wild card here. However, if, in this scenario, Israel had just lifted the embargo, it would be better positioned politically to denounce any repercussions against it by these or other actors and to strike back forcefully against any aggression. Going back to the difficulty of mobilizing around what I think would be a fairly abstract political point, it's true that aggression as retaliation for Israel's invasion of Palestine could be an effective rallying cry, but Arab rhetoric about abuses toward Palestinians would be deflated by a lifting of the embargo. It would make little sense to strike Israel on Gazans' behalf after Israel had taken such a positive action toward Gaza, and the international community would, I think, have little sympathy.

Which doesn't mean no one would do it. We've seen people do stupid things in this conflict for decades. It just means that if someone did, it would likely be a fairly limited phenomenon, not a wave "across the region," and Israel would have a much better chance of looking like the good guy as well as better cover for dealing with it forcefully.