Gaza and the Risks of Escalation

Plus all the new articles and opportunities in this week's MENA Academy

The other day, with a hurricane bearing down on my temporary Florida quarters, I joined an excellect Foreign Affairs podcast discussion hosted by Dan Kurtz-Phelan, talking about Gaza and the risks of regional war. The other participants were all recent FA authors as well: Audrey Kurth Cronin (“How Hamas Ends”), Dana Stroul (“The Dangers of an Ungovernable Gaza”), and Dennis Ross (“Why Israel Should Declare a Unilateral Cease-Fire in Gaza”, with David Makovsky, and “Biden’s Middle East Moonshot”). I was there to talk about “The Two-State Mirage” (with Shibley Telhami) and “The Coming Arab Backlash”.

The conversation was very interesting and substantive. All of us noted the extreme difficulty of controlling the current escalation risks, even if Iran and Hezbollah have thus far clearly wanted to avoid such full scale escalation to war. My main contribution was to urge people to not forget about the Israeli-Palestinian context when analyzing potential regional escalation: Israeli right wing provocations in Jerusalem are just the sort of thing which have provoked eruptions in the past, and the ongoing and accelerating settler advances in the West Bank backed by the Israeli military continue to put pressure on what remains of the Palestinian Authority. We shouldn’t let the Iran-Israel war risk blind us to the context in which it has become a possibility.

The second half of the conversation focused on Gaza itself, with Kurth Cronin and I especially insisting on recognizing the scale and magnitude of the devastation of Gaza which Israel has inflicted. I observed, as I have before, that all of the plans on offer for a Gaza “day after” depend on the Israeli government doing things which the Israeli government absolutely is not going to do — and in fact is almost certainly going to continue to do the opposite. It’s hard to see any Palestinian administration set up under the conditions Israel’s war has created succeeding, or even surviving (Dan Byman was very good on this recently). I was especially critical of the ideas floated recently by Netanyahu and others about the need to “deradicalize” Gazans; if one really wanted to deradicalize Gazans, then one probably should not be mass murdering and permanently displacing them, systematically bombing their hospitals and schools, blocking the delivery of humanitarian assistance, and turning a blind eye to the rapid spread of infectious disease. I look forward to the hate mail.

At the end, Stroul (who served in the Pentagon on Middle East policy until late last year) objected to my description of Gaza as a blight on Biden’s foreign policy legacy and an unforgivable failure on both moral and policy grounds (I forget the exact language I used). She argued that Biden should be judged based on the goals he set out after October 7: supporting Israel’s response to the horrifying attack, and preventing escalation to regional war. I didn’t have time to respond, which is probably just as well. I mean, even on those terms, with Israel awaiting Iranian retaliation and everyone bracing for an escalation of the Israeli war with Lebanon, the current potential for regional escalation doesn’t exactly scream success. And, to be blunt, we are talking about a policy which has resulted in some 50,000 dead— mostly civilians, women and children — and the displacement of virtually the entire Gazan population of 2 million, while Netanyahu has repeatedly ignored Biden’s public demands on Netanyahu on everything from humanitarian aid and civilian targeting to a ceasefire, often in the most humiliating ways possible. I have long thought that almost any other Democratic President and team would have done a far better job, as I very much hope we soon find out.

Anyway, feel free to listen to the podcast. And now for this week’s MENA Academy roundup — and it’s a doozy. Seems like a lot of journals are getting pieces published in the dog days of summer, and a lot of opportunities are circulating.

First, the opportunities: POMEPS has announced the competition for 2025 TRE small research grants: awards of up to $3,000 will be offered to support research travel to the broader Middle East in support of an ongoing academic research project or the development of new research projects. Applications due September 30.

The APSA MENA workshops have announced a call for proposals for early-career scholars who would like to participate in a 1-week in-person workshop that examines the theme of identity politics in the MENA region. Organized in partnership with the Center for the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies at Kuwait University (KU), the program will be held from December 14-19, 2024 at KU. The organizers will cover participation costs, including travel, lodging, and materials, for up to 20 qualified applicants. Following their full participation in the program, fellows will receive a three-year membership to APSA. The deadline for applications is Sunday, September 22, 2024. The full call can be downloaded here.

Finally, Making Sense of the Arab State has been officially published — download for free here or use the code UMF24 for 30% off a physical copy. For more, see this:

Now for this week’s extensive roundup of articles and special issues:

Morten Valbjørn, Andre Bank and May Darwish, “Forward to the Past? Regional Repercussions of the Gaza War,” Middle East Policy (July 2024). ABSTRACT: The Gaza war between Israel and Hamas marks the end of the long decade after the Arab uprisings. In this paper, we explore how the conflict has altered the regional political landscape in the Middle East, which bears similarities to the pre-2011 dynamics but includes new elements. On the one hand, the war has taken the region “forward to the past” by revitalizing “Palestine” as a central issue, accentuating the so-called Axis of Resistance, and increasing the prominence of the regimes-people divide in Middle Eastern countries. On the other, the war has generated novel repercussions. “Palestine” today has broader global resonance than previous Arab and Islamic framings. And the regional alliance structure has been altered, with the “moderate Arab camp” fading and new actors, such as the Houthis in Yemen, rising and joining the resistance axis. As we demonstrate, the Gaza war is a critical juncture whose ramifications for both regional and domestic politics in the Middle East will reverberate for years to come.

Middle East Law and Governance has published a special issue on consociationalism and power sharing in Lebanon, organized by Tamirace Fakhoury and Miriam Aitken. Here is the abstract for their introduction: To what extent is power-sharing theory, used as one of the key conceptual frameworks for Lebanon’s political system, still relevant for charting a way forward amid the country’s cumulative crises? This article heeds the call to position research on Lebanon’s power-sharing in a pluralist research agenda that speaks to a wider knowledge base and to a broader set of everyday policy problems. This agenda articulates itself around three axes: first, building on interdisciplinary research perspectives; second, looking at post-war Lebanon through multi-level and relational perspectives beyond the focus on power-sharing theory and “deeply divided societies” as focal paradigms for exploring conflict mitigation; and third, feeding into critical policy perspectives that probe people’s everyday struggles.

Other essays in the collection include Alessandra Thomson, “Lebanon’s Endemic Power-Sharing Dilemmas and their Manifestation in the Beirut Blast”; John Nagle, “Protesting Power-Sharing: Placing the Thawra in Recent Waves of Contentious Politics”; Clothilda Facon-Selelles, “NGOization and Politicization of Aid”; and Miriam Aitken, ““We are the Revolution, Abroad”: Diaspora Protests, Identity Construction, and the Remaking of Citizenship in the 2019 Lebanese Thawra.”

Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East has also just released a special section in its newest issue. Edited by Anne-Marie McManus and Nancy Reynolds, the essays in the special section revolve around “Following Absence: Plotlines of Erasure and Ruination in the Middle East and North Africa.” Essays by an all-star cast of scholars include Anne-Marie McManus, “Race, Time, and the Petrified Subject in Algeria: Reading Frantz Fanon's Algerian Writings and Kateb Yacine's Nedjma,”; Brahim El Guabli, “Forgettable Black and Amazigh Bodies: Boujemâa Hebaz and the Moroccan Racial Politics of Amnesia”; Rebecca Gruskin, ““A Nonexistent Incapacity”: Tracing Chronic Injury through X-Ray Images in Colonial Tunisia's Gafsa Phosphate Mines (1920s–1930s)”; Nancy Reynolds, “Vanishing Nubia: Following Botanists in Egypt”; Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, “Absenting as a Repertoire of Action: A Demolition, a Dump, and a Garden”; Ilana Feldman, “Murmurs of Presence in Objects of Absence”; and Camille Lyans Cole, “The Radical Instability of the Present.”

Jessica Barnes, “Placing the environment in Middle East studies: beyond the single story,” British Journal of Middle East Studies (August 2024). ABSTRACT: Crisis is a recurrent motif in discussions of the environment in the Middle East. Concerns about water scarcity, food insecurity, climate disasters, and resource degradation play into common associations of the region with conflict, malfunction, and despair. Yet this single story obscures as much as it illuminates. In this paper, I draw examples from my work on Nile water politics, climate change, and bread in Egypt to illustrate the power of this dominant narrative and its limitations. I reflect on the multiple stories that emerge when we shift our starting point or scale of analysis. I argue for the need to move beyond thinking about the environment just as a problem space to consider it as the space in which people are living their daily lives.

Ali Kassem, “Knowledge Production in the “Arab-Majority” World and Unlearning in the Field: Autoethnographic Reflections from Lebanon toward Alternative Research Politics,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2024). ABSTRACT: This paper presents and autoethnographically analyzes three key sites in which the author—a Lebanese “Arabo-Muslim man”—failed to interpellate the lifeworlds of Lebanese “Arabo-Muslim” female participants during a research project in Lebanon: the public-private divide, gender, and the autonomous subject. Specifically, the article identifies key forces that produce this failure, including education, presence in the Westernized university, Westernized secularization, social class, family background, and urbanity, all situated within the larger structures of modernity/coloniality. Doing this, the article grates against the assumption that researchers who share a “race,” citizenship, language, or ethnicity and who are “from” the Arab region are de facto well placed to pursue decolonial knowledge production alongside the region and its dwellers. The article consequently posits the possibility of unlearning and relearning—disrupting this failure—through immersive embodied listening fieldwork within the material space of the Arab world, undoing the formation of an alienated, fractured, Westernized self. Moving beyond the cognitive and theoretical to the material, experiential, and embodied, the article accordingly underlines reflexive listening fieldwork's potential as a generative site (among others) from which alternative knowledges of/with/on the global South(s) can emerge.

Gadi Hitman, “What Went Wrong? Israeli Misconceptions And the October 2023 Surprise,” Middle East Policy (July 2024). ABSTRACT: This study examines Israel's failure to prevent Black October, the Hamas invasion that killed more than 1,100 people and sparked the Gaza war. The article synthesizes literatures of security and intelligence to advance three levels at which we must analyze Israel's missteps. The first is the intelligence level, where the state assessed threats. The second is operational, where officials devised military and security solutions, such as relying on technology to police the border with the Gaza Strip. The third level is political-diplomatic, where the government pursued regional normalization agreements without focusing on solutions to the Palestinian file. Failures at all three levels were intertwined. The examination of these cascading mistakes opens a window into the interactions within and across these levels among military and civilian decision makers, and it suggests how they should be addressed going forward.

Hans Morten Haugen, “Evaluating the Practice of Lawfare Against Pro-Palestinian Groups,” Middle East Policy (July 2024). ABSTRACT: For nearly 20 years, nongovernmental organizations backing the Palestinian cause have promoted both “differentiation” and the better-known strategy of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS). Differentiation is the practice of distinguishing between Israel and the occupied territories, terminating contracts with actors—irrespective of nationality—that contribute to and benefit from occupation-related activities, and seeking to promote Palestinian investments and exports. This strategy is fundamentally different from BDS, which targets not just the occupation but the Israeli state and its national entities. However, this article finds that laws and proposed legislation in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel do not delineate between Israel and Israeli-controlled territory, blurring the line between differentiation and BDS as tools to support Palestine. The evidence shows that courts have mostly ruled against differentiation practices, thus allowing harsh campaigns that impose heavy burdens on NGOs. These costs are both direct, through legal proceedings, and indirect in that they restrict the space for humanitarian action and delegitimize groups that employ differentiation. The study considers whether this constitutes lawfare, defined by experts as the exploitation “of the law of armed conflict to achieve tactical and strategic goals.”

Nada al-Kouny, “The materiality of lived citizenship: mobilising against infrastructural neglect in Egypt’s Nile Delta,” Citizenship Studies (July 2024). ABSTRACT: In September 2012, the village of al-Tahseen in the Nile Delta governorate of al-Daqahliyyah launched a civil disobedience movement, announcing ‘administrative independence’ from the local municipal government. The leaders of the village movement cited decades of state neglect in providing basic infrastructural services, primarily a three-kilometre road from the village to the closest regional road. Community members held the government accountable for the harmful consequences of the absence of a viable road, including numerous accidents and deaths. This demand for infrastructure is at the heart of this article. Through a lived citizenship framework, this article argues that people’s everyday interactions and engagements with the state, as well as their understanding of their place as citizens in return, emerge from their engagements, constructions, and demands for infrastructure provision. The article equally sheds light on a case study of rural mobilisation, when most scholarly productions of Egypt’s 25 January 2011 Revolution and its reverberations have focused on urban-based mobilisation experiences.

Bruce Rutherford, “Understanding change in Egypt’s social contract since 2011,” Mediterranean Politics (July 2024). ABSTRACT: This paper applies the Loewe, et al. framework (2024) to the Egyptian case from 2011 to the present. It finds that this framework could be strengthened by further exploring the following drivers of change in social contracts: - balance of power within the state. In the Egyptian case, a longstanding informal contract between the Presidency and the military collapsed in 2011. The new contract between the Presidency and the military that emerged after 2013 altered the elite coalition that underlay the regime and led to change in the social contract; - structure of the labor market. The Sisi regime faced a labor market that was divided into core insiders, legacy insiders, and outsiders. It revised the social contract to direct substantial support to core insiders while reducing support to legacy insiders. Outsiders were left with even less state support. - new technologies of repression enabled the regime to monitor society more extensively, target repression more effectively, and shape the public sphere in a manner supportive of the new social contract; - international sponsors. The Gulf states and China provided financial and military assistance that buttressed the revised social contract.

Kelly Stedem, “Failure or Façade? Why Ethnic Organizations Strategically Forgo Policing,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (July 2024). ABSTRACT: In-group policing is effective at mitigating conflict because ethnic elites have information needed to identify and punish spoilers within their own communities. Yet, ethnic organizations do not always police those who use unsanctioned violence. Under what conditions will an organization forgo its in-group policing responsibility? Relying on the case of Hezbollah, this article argues that in-group policing in patronage-based societies is a strategic choice. Patronage networks induce compliance by tying it to the provision of goods and services, thereby decreasing the likelihood of violations. When individuals utilize unsanctioned violence, leaders must consider the costs of policing relative to three audiences: 1. Their organization, 2. Their domestic partners, and 3. The international community. Organizations may refrain from policing violators if the costs to their organization’s cohesion and reputation are too high, but will seek ways to lessen criticism by domestic and international audiences.

Abdullah al-Kalisi, “Iraq's Authoritarian Democracies: A Conceptual Framework through Tawfiq al-Suwaydi's Political Memoirs,” Global Studies Quarterly (July 2024). ABSTRACT: Political memoirs have been typically utilized for their historical reference, neglecting the wide array of conceptualizations of the political sphere and the state that politicians' narratives represent. Critical discourse analysis methodologies, by focusing on perceptions and interpretations of discourse, provide the tools to uncover these conceptualizations of elites and those that represent the state. This is particularly important in states like Iraq, which struggle against hybridity, where the democratic system is actioned through authoritarianist tendencies that define the political sphere. This manipulation of an otherwise democratic structure requires an analysis of the conceptual framework that informs the manipulation. The political memoirs of Tawfiq al-Suwaydi, an Iraqi PM on multiple occasions throughout the Monarchy Era, cover significantly more than identity construction, confirmation of historical narratives, and his defenses. The discursive foundation of the state and the way it is actioned against a democratic system is qualified throughout his writing. In his narration, we will see a significant outpour of fundamentally authoritarian views of rule rooted in efficiency through domination and absolute control. Meanwhile, the democratic system was conceptualized as serving the purpose of appeasing an otherwise inconsolable people. This article highlights the way memoirs of political elites, through the justificatory and analytical language, are gateways to understanding the perceptions of rule upon which their mode of operation, and so the foundation of hybridity, is based. This aims to further illuminate oppressive continuities within the Iraqi political sphere as we have seen a return to a similar form of hybridity post-2003.

Dina Hosni, “Women’s Religious Agency and the Positioning of the Mosque: a Case Study of State-Sponsored Female Preaching in Egypt,” Middle East Law and Governance (July 2024). ABSTRACT: This paper captures women’s religious agency and their bonding with the mosque by taking a snapshot of the discourse and experiences of female preachers, appointed by the Egyptian Ministry of Endowments, who were confronted with the closure of mosques within the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic. Though these female preachers have managed to perform their preaching roles while being detached from the mosque, their spiritual affinity to the mosque could not escape notice. This paper argues that the detachment of the female preachers from the mosque due to covid-19 offers a novel conceptualization of ‘religious’ agency that could be partially ascribed to their attachment to the mosque, not as a locale for their ‘official’ or ‘semi-official’ affiliation with the state, but as a ‘sacred’ extension of the private space of the home.

Farid Boussaid, “Multilateral financial flows and state–business relations in Morocco,” Mediterranean Politics (July 2024). ABSTRACT: Political economy explanations of regime resilience often look at domestic support bases and patronage systems. Foreign aid to the state is seen as a direct form of propping up regimes. This article attempts to track the flow of foreign assistance to one part of the domestic support base of a regime, namely the economic elite, thereby making a connection between domestic explanations and foreign support explanations of regime resilience. The core argument of this article is that multilateral financial flows from Western dominated institutions may preserve regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. Multilateral flows from the World Bank Group, the European Investment Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development went to regime insiders and thus potentially strengthened existing economic elites during the time in which the former Islamist opposition party led a coalition government. I draw on the linkage dimension of Levitsky and Way’s model to show the importance of specifying the nature and destination of multilateral financial ties with Morocco’s private sector. This contribution helps us link the international dimension to the domestic political economy. It thus potentially adds to our understanding of monarchical regime resilience post-Arab Spring by highlighting how multilateral financial institutions support an important part of the economic elite.

Theo Blanc, “Twelve years a slave? Ennahdha’s constrained (ir)responsibility in post-revolutionary Tunisia (2011–2023).” Journal of North African Studies (August 2024). ABSTRACT: This article accounts for Ennahdha’s post-revolutionary trajectory and its role in paving the way for authoritarian reversal. Going beyond approaches in terms of (post)Islamism and moderation focusing on ideology, I argue that Ennahdha’s failure is not an ideological failure – the famous ‘failure of political Islam’ (Roy [1992]. L’échec de l’islam politique. Paris: Seuil.) – but a governance failure stemming from both structural obstacles and strategic mistakes. Far from intending to change the state’s nature, Ennahdha’s post-2011 trajectory is but an obsessive attempt to secure its inclusion and normalisation in the system, even if this meant sacrificing both reform prospects and electoral support. Internally, Ennahdha’s inability to carry out reforms in matters of leadership selection and decision-making and to clarify its economic vision was detrimental to its cohesion and its role in governance. Externally, its favoured ‘consensus politics (tawafuq)’, which translated into a ‘policy of the occupied chair’, led to freeze rather than solve conflicts and to hamper reforms, which paved the way for a populist interruption of the democratic process in July 2021. Ultimately, this meant that Ennahdha’s strategy of normalisation paradoxically clashed with the party’s self – preservation and the overall democratic transition. To unpack this process, the article relies on a body of 17 interviews, writings by Ennahdha leaders and close intellectuals, and an extensive literature review.