Arab Scholars Take on Gaza

Plus Palestinian governance, Arabic books on civil war, Libyan Islamists, and much more in this week's MENA Academy roundup.

It’s been a busy time lately for me, and it’s summer, and I’m neck deep (and past deadline) in a couple of big projects, and there’s a lot of horrible and quite demoralizing things going on out there (like the palapable drop in attention to Gaza even as the scale and scope of Israel’s devastating war continues, the manifest risk of an eruption of war between Israel and Hezbollah, mass starvation in Sudan, and so much more). I hope to write about a number of them, but for now it’s just time for this week’s MENA Academy roundup of interesting new scholarship, research and analysis. We’ve got two major collections on Gaza by Arab research centers, a fascinating article about Arab book publishing and civil war, an authoritative dissection of Palestinian governance, an intriguing puzzle about Islamists in Libya, and much more. Let’s dive right in.

First up, two Arab research centers recently released important collections about Gaza: al-Muntaqa, published by the Doha Insitute’s Arab Research Center, and Jordanian Politics and Society, the inaugural issue of a Jordanian research center spearheaded by Mohammed Abu Rumman. Both are available for free download. Given the often-noted dominance of Western academic knowledge production on the region, it’s interesting to consider the arguments, evidence and approaches on offer from one relatively new and one well-established Arab research centers. Together, they include nearly twenty original articles by (mostly) Arab scholars focused on the various dimensions of the war — military, diplomatic, humanitarian, legal, social, and ethical.

Al-Muntaqa leads with an impassioned essay by Azmi Bishara on the moral and legal issues posed by Gaza, an appropriate and fiercely articulated overture. Other standout articles include Majd Abuamer’s analysis of Israel’s strategy against Hamas’s tunnels, Raja Khalidi and Qais Iwadat’s discussion of the social and economic impacts of the war, Ayat Hamdan’s article on the effects of the campaign agaisnt UNRWA, and Adham Saouli’s take on Hezbollah’s view of Gaza.

For me, the single most interesting article besides Bishara’s was JPS editor-in-chief Mohammed Abu Rumman’s critical analysis of the impact of October 7 and Israel’s war on Gaza on internal Jordanian-Palestinian relations - a sensitive topic on which he has long been one of the most insightful and thoughtful scholars in Jordan, and one from whom I’ve learned a tremendous amount over the years. He identifes “the return of the fear of “transfer” to the Jordanian political lexicon, after there was a conviction among a broad trend in the Jordanian political elite that such a matter had been buried and was no longer probable”; that’s important, since ending the possibility of “transfer” and “the Jordan option” was Jordan’s primary achievement in the 1994 peace treaty with Israel. As Abu Rumman shows, for decades there have been competing political trends in Jordan with very different visions of the future of Jordanian-Palestinian relations — and events since October 7 have reshaped both those visions and the balance among them.

Next up: Obayda Amer Ghadban, “The Logic of Translation on Civil Wars: Reflections on Arabic Translations, Market and Politics,” Civil Wars (June 2024). This utterly fascinating article explores the relative absence of Arabic language books, including translations, on civil wars. I was pleased to read that Ghadban first came across Stathis Kalyvas’s The Logic of Violence in Civil War through a list of recommended readings on Syria I had published (that recommendation was later repeated by a leading Syrian scholar); in 2022, he published the first Arabic translation of Kalyvas’s book. Ghadban offers insights into the changes in Arabic nonfiction book publishing, including both political and financial constraints, as well as a distaste for the “civil war” concept he encounters across much of the Arab policy, media and academic context.

Follow that with Nathan Brown’s “Palestinians Without Palestine” (Carnegie Middle East Center, June 2024) is a must-read on the cold realities of Palestinian governance in Israel’s one state reality. Brown argues convincingly that Palestinians do not face a situation of statelessness or an absence of governance — the problem is that “none of these structures are close to forming a political entity called “Palestine,” and none are accountable to Palestinians.” Formal recognitions of Palestine or talk of two state solutions won’t change any of this, as Brown notes: “there is thus a complete mismatch between the international ascent of Palestine and its domestic descent.” His detailed, dispassionate explantion of these realities is absolute must reading.

And then we have Wolfram Lacher, “Where have all the jihadists gone? The rise and mysterious fall of Islamist movements in Libya.” SWP Research Paper (June 2024). This is a real puzzle and an important one: what exactly happened to the post-2011 wave of jihadist and Islamist movements? Based on his extensive field research in Libya, Lacher notes how those popular Islamist movements from 2016 onwards “dramatically lost importance and appeal – as occurred in other regional countries at around the same time.” What’s more, he notes, when a third civil war erupted in 2019, it was widely expected that this would lead to a renewed mobilisation of jihadist groups. Nothing of the sort happened. This study explores the question of how to explain the abrupt change of fortune of militant Islamists in Libya – and what it teaches us about the driving forces behind Islamist mobilisation.

Finally, a couple of interesting new journal articles:

Farah Ramzy, “Negotiating politics on campus: dynamic (de-)politicization among student activists in post-2011 Egypt,” Social Movement Studies (June 2024). ABSTRACT: This article examines processes of (de-) politicization among Egyptian student activists in the post-2011 context. Based on ethnographic observation, interviews and focus groups, I argue that the rapid and successive political changes – with the revolution in 2011 then the coup d’état in 2013 – made the boundaries separating institutional, contentious and prefigurative politics fluid. As student activists debated if their claims and activities were ‘student-related’ or ‘political’, several conceptions of politics and political action coexisted among them and their understanding of politics fluctuated. These evolving conceptions created gaps and contradictions allowing for the negotiation of the meaning of their various activities. The negotiation of politics is a collective pattern but was also reflected in, and reflective of evolving individual subjectivities. As young students lived through the revolution, entered university and joined or left a group, their perceptions of their roles and of the political meaning of their present and past activities changed. The rising repression in 2013/14 shaped the activists’ tactics, as well as their perceived priorities and the meaning of activities, thus amplifying the negotiation of politics.

Mona Khneisser, “The Political Economy of ‘Failure’ in The World Bank-funded Bisri Dam in Lebanon,” Development and Change (June 2024). ABSTRACT: The World Bank-funded Bisri Dam in Lebanon represents an emblematic case of a high-modernist project that has foundered on a mix of hydrogeological recalcitrance, popular opposition and compounding crises. Examining the popular contestation surrounding the Bisri Dam, this article offers a socio-ecological material lens on post-colonial state building and the political economy of infrastructural failure. Avoiding the analytical impasse of crisis epistemes and heuristics of failure within the long tradition of development studies on the Global South in general, and Lebanon in particular, the article poses a number of questions. How are ‘crises’ and ‘failures’ constitutive of capitalist development, and for whom are they generative? How can the ubiquitous failures of the promises of infrastructure become an opportunity for the re-animation, re-appropriation and re-politicization of hydrogeologies and political imaginaries? Rather than perceiving them as aberrations, the author argues that failures are constitutive of high-modernist infrastructural development, its liberal prescriptive techno-political models, and the speculative logics of endless ruination. Yet, failures can also become generative, instigating new political imaginaries and historical subjectivities. The article pays special attention to competing modalities of power, focusing on the collective power of oppositional groups, coupled with the material recalcitrant power of local hydrogeology, in resisting unviable, speculative infrastructure.

Gianni del Panta and Lorenzo Lodi, “No smiling for Algerian workers: explaining the modest harvest of the labour movement during the Hirak,” Review of African Political Economy (May 2024). ABSTRACT: Between March 2019 and October 2021, Algerian workers staged no fewer than 214 strikes, playing a vital role in the fall of former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and continuing to mobilise in the aftermath. Yet, they have gained little. This article constructs an innovative dataset on strikes in Algeria, which draws on both French-language and Arabic newspapers, to explain why workers have achieved only modest gains. It does so by pointing to three crucial factors: the separation between the ‘economic’ and ‘political’ wings of the protest movement; the division between workers in the private and public sectors; and the split between the former sole trade union in the country and the autonomous unions.