I want to congratulate the Cairo Review of Global Affairs’s writing and editorial family for our team’s outstanding achievements and stellar performance over the last decade. When I asked former Time Magazine Cairo Bureau Chief and professor of Journalism Scott MacLeod to join me in creating the Cairo Review in 2011, the objective of the journal was to bring a discussion on global affairs to Cairo while ensuring that an international audience could read a vibrant Arab Middle Eastern voice on these issues. I dare say the Cairo Review has succeeded far beyond our expectations. The publication has gained supporters even among skeptics who at the inception of our magazine were doubtful that an English language quarterly from Cairo with a Middle East accent could succeed.

Needless to say, transformative events over the last decade have made discussions on global affairs increasingly topical to our audience and provided much food for thought on how international, regional, and domestic communities engage with each other. Since the early 1990s, some pundits and leaders have questioned the validity and relevance of the post-World War II world order following the end of the Cold War and the emergence of new centers of power. Also, the efficacy of the nation-state system has been critiqued following the emergence of legitimate and illegitimate non-state actors. The forces of globalization have brought tremendous opportunities as well as diverse and complex challenges for individuals, communities, and state institutions. In the past decade, communities have faced the illusive paradox of meeting immediate demands, fulfilling ever-expansive dreams and ambitions, preserving security and stability, and at the same time ensuring good governance. The people of our global village have also had to start learning how to live on finite resources which must be shared and used wisely.

In essence, the paramount challenge of this time is to simultaneously determine our respective identities and embrace a balance of interests which provide the most efficient use of resources without irrevocable ramifications on the quality of life for future generations. Finding a collective response to climate change is one example of this paramount challenge that we as a world society must face.

This search for balance between group/national identity and international interests has found expression in the Middle East in the proliferation of political conflicts, inefficient and unresponsive governance, and huge income discrepancies. Additionally, a substantial Middle Eastern youth bulge has increasingly heightened expectations and shortened the patience of the body politic. The Cairo Review of Global Affairs has covered many of these issues both from a broad public policy perspective and a micro-current events lens. Among the journal’s iconic issues were those published in 2011 which vividly described the yearnings of the Arab street. Our first issue was on the Arab uprisings and was soon followed by an issue on the new world order. Other issues discussed the successes and failures of peacemaking efforts between Arabs and Israelis, including a review of the 1978 Egyptian Israeli Camp David Accords and the Madrid Conference in 1991 on Arab-Israeli peace. Issues on a nuclearized Middle East, the politics of water, energy, and food, and post-conflict reconstruction were rich in helping public policy reflection.

Every country in the Middle East is still searching for its 21st century identity. Many states seem to be torn between the past and the future, but this is not unexpected, especially among communities with long histories.

The non-Arab states in the region remain cognizant of the fact that the Middle East and North Africa is mostly an Arab region. Thus, irrespective of their military power or economic wealth, many of these non-Arab nations are constantly attempting to assert themselves. Meanwhile, the Arab World has been resistant to incremental change. Ironically, change is the only inevitability, if not incremental, then through abrupt disruptions.

Equally challenging is the imbalance of influence and power in the region. Such imbalances have resulted in prolonged political conflict in complete disregard of international law and have fueled adventurous regional policies with hegemonic tendencies, further inciting adversarial attitudes between a significant number of regional players.

It is time, then, for the Middle East to become cognizant that just as markets are more globalized, conflicts have become regionalized. Both of these trends make efficient management and governance imperative. States in the region must take economic change seriously. These same states need to enhance their national security. Active diplomacy, with an unwavering commitment to international law, coupled with creative, future-oriented perspectives, is imperative. A new Middle Eastern political, economic, and security architecture is a project that we all must embark upon with a sense of urgency, but equally with the wise realization that this process will be incremental and slow.

Publications of thoughtful public discourse on the issues of today, such as the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, are invaluable in highlighting important topics, ideas, challenges, and solutions from both global and local perspectives. Congratulations to our whole editorial family and authors as we look forward to another great decade!

This edition marks ten years of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs. The very first issue, published in the Spring of 2011 under the title Arab Revolution, included articles by leading scholars, academics, and public intellectuals who offered perspectives on the seismic changes happening in the region at the time. In the editorial of the first issue of the Cairo Review, Dean Nabil Fahmy wrote that this journal is “intended to be an outlet for people in the Middle East who follow global affairs. We also want it to be a platform that gives perspectives from the region a greater voice in international policy conversations and debates”. Since that first edition, the Cairo Review has adapted to a rapidly changing environment and has lived up to its promise of writing the voices of the region into a global conversation. It tackled key international and regional issues— from urban development, science and innovation policy, mobility of art and the future of news, to an analysis of shifting dynamics on the global stage around Iran, Turkey, China, and the United States.

The Cairo Review is the flagship publication of AUC’s School of Global Affairs and Public Policy (GAPP). Founded in 2009, GAPP has established itself as a regional leader in preparing the next generation of civil servants, policy leaders, and development professionals to take on the challenges of the Arab World and Africa. Through regular degree programs and tailored executive education offerings, GAPP plays a critical role in upskilling public sector employees in Egypt and the region. A relatively young school at the university, GAPP has quickly distinguished itself as one of the most visible examples of the role AUC can and should play in supporting the advancement of Egypt and the region.

In the Cairo Review’s inaugural issue, Lisa Anderson, AUC’s president at the time who as provost oversaw the creation of GAPP, is quoted as saying that “East and West is a 20^th century way of looking at the world. Now we need to be thinking about what’s going to happen in the next 25 years on a global level, and about what role Egypt and the region will play there.”

In many ways, that is as true today, if not more so, than it was back then. It is gratifying to see Professor Anderson among the distinguished contributors to this issue, titled The Middle East: After a Turbulent Decade…What Next? Many of the themes explored in this issue are not new to the discourse about the region, and yet there are clear shifts and open questions about the future. The prominence and diversity of the voices represented in this issue—Nathan Brown, Thomas L. Crisman, David Dumke, Zachary S. Winters, Robert Mogielnicki, Paul Salem, Joost Hiltermann, Ibrahim Awad, Khaled Elgindy, Lorenzeo Kamel, Hesham Youssef, and Muhamed Almaliky—is a testament to the essential role the Cairo Review plays as a conveyer and forum for ideas.

The 10th anniversary issue of the Cairo Review returns to the themes covered in the inaugural issue, and examines the evolution of these issues over the last decade: the current outcomes of the Arab uprisings; the changing politics of religiosity; the deepening fissures within Arab polities and societies; the need for a new regional order; the scenarios for managing multiple regional conflicts; the prospects for post-oil economies; the possibilities of mitigating climate change impact on water availability, salt water intrusion and desertification; the potentials for future regional cooperation within the water and renewable energy sectors; the question of Palestinian statehood and the status of the two-state solution. These and more remain relevant topics that demand our focused attention. Our world is far from idyllic: wars and conflicts abound; global inequalities continue to shape the international order; and humanity’s relationship with nature continues to undermine the sustainable future of all humans. So, we must continue to ask the hard questions about our changing world, and strive to bridge the divide between academic knowledge and policy.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us firsthand, the challenges and opportunities of the future will necessarily require a global outlook and a way of thinking about politics beyond borders. Indeed, interconnection is a defining feature of our time. A more inclusive and equitable vision is the only way to effectively confront the growing list of issues such as pandemics, climate change, forced migration and refugees, supply chain disruptions, economic downturns, and food and water shortages.

The interconnectedness of our world and the need to engage globally on the issues of our time make the role of institutions like AUC all the more profound. We are a unique space—both physically and through publications like the Cairo Review— where ideas can meet, collide, and compete, and where new and innovative solutions can be found. We draw on a deep academic tradition of knowledge creation and the youthful energy of the next generation of problem solvers on our campus. We are enriched by our location in Egypt, the nexus of both the Middle East and Africa, and the primary interlocutor from the region with the world. Accounting for more than a quarter of the region’s population and centuries of history, civilization, culture, and knowledge, Egypt, and in turn Cairo, is the ideal venue for addressing global topics in ways that are regionally and locally relevant. Egypt’s regional vantage point shapes the way we identify the problems of world politics, and the voice from Egypt increases the opportunity of making this conversation truly global. Situated in Egypt, the gateway to the Middle East and Africa, AUC is keenly aware of both its responsibility and opportunity to contribute to the convening space, people, and ideas that shape the future.

Ahmad Dallal

President, American University in Cairo

During the second half of the 20th century, there was at least order in the Arab World, even if precarious. Represented by the League of Arab States, the practice of Arab summitry provided some semblance of regional order. However, this precarious order broke down in stages, firstly as a result of Egypt’s separate peace with Israel in 1979 and later due to Iraq’s invasion of a fellow Arab state, Kuwait, in 1990. Meanwhile, the positions of non-Arab players shifted. After 1979, Iran turned away from the West to focus on building influence in the Arab-Muslim world. Two decades later, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has also recalibrated Turkey’s foreign policy, balancing a continued interest in Europe with rebuilding influence in the former Ottoman Arab World.

To this day, the region continues to undergo dynamic changes as new regional alignments and divisions ebb and flow, but all without yet arriving at an overarching political, economic or security architecture that could build on common interests, manage areas of difference, and work to avoid direct or proxy conflict.

There is an increasing need for such an effective regional order. Already beset by high levels of conflict, inequality, and unemployment, the region is facing a future further challenged by climate change, water scarcity, and other unpredictable systemic challenges, as vividly illustrated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. There is a budding awareness of the need to turn away from decades of geopolitical contestation and focus on the common systemic issues faced by the societies of this region in a challenging century.

But a history of division and tension runs deep, and the goal of regional order still seems dangerously beyond the horizon.

The Arab Regional Order Leading Up To 2020

In 1987, Egypt had been readmitted into the Arab League after its membership was suspended for signing the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. Cooperation between Egypt and Saudi Arabia provided a partnered leadership between the most populous and wealthiest Arab states. Saddam Hussein’s regime, which had challenged the Arab order in 1990 by invading Kuwait, was removed by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq—an invasion which would generate its own set of major regional threats and challenges. Arab summits resumed with a sense of complacency and assurance that an old familiar order had been restored. But that order was facing serious challenges from within and without.

From without, external players began intruding into the Arab region in new and unprecedented ways. During the Cold War, global powers—namely the United States and the Soviet Union—built enormous influence in the Middle East by choosing and aligning client states along the East-West axis. But it is noteworthy that the global powers competed largely by proxy, avoiding large-scale direct military interventions of their own for fear of escalating direct conflict with the rival superpower. The collapse of the Soviet Union removed that constraint. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the United States went ahead with a full-scale military deployment in the Middle East without any concern for a backlash from Russia. And when Al-Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, the United States, again, felt no restraint in sending forces to topple the Taliban regime in Kabul and the Saddam regime in Baghdad. The United States was not the only global power to take up direct military intervention. Russia would recover from the collapse of the Soviet Union and follow suit in 2015 with a military intervention in support of the Bashar Al-Assad regime in Syria, although it was not the only actor in this multi-party-led external intervention. From without, regional powers were increasing their presence as well.

Iran

Since the emergence of the Islamic Republic in 1979, Iran signaled its interest in becoming a direct and powerful player in the Arab World. Throughout the 1980s, Iran had remained fairly contained by Saddam’s power and by an Arab state system that held firm. Iran’s main breakthrough, however, was in Lebanon. State collapse from the 1975 civil war created conditions that allowed Iran to build up Hezbollah as a powerful Iranian proxy throughout the 1980s and beyond.

Iran’s second chance came in 2003, when the United States toppled an Iraqi regime that had kept it largely in check, enabling Iran to emerge as the dominant power in Iraq. Iran’s third breakthrough came as Al-Assad’s regime in Syria risked collapse at the hands of a popular uprising that started in 2011. Iran rushed to the aid of its ally, sending in Iranian, Lebanese, Iraqi, and other militia and military forces under the leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, solidifying its influence in Syria. Its most recent breakthrough came in 2014 in Yemen, where an alliance between the Houthis and former president Ali Abdallah Saleh toppled the transitional government in Sanaa and unleashed a civil war that continues to this day. The Houthis welcomed Iranian support, and Iran has now added another Arab capital to the list of capitals in which it has a strong and seemingly long-lasting presence and influence, including Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad.

Turkey

After almost a century of shunning the Arab-Islamic world and looking westward, Turkey has also sought to reclaim its influence in the Arab World under Erdoğan’s leadership. In 2010, this appeared to be a fairly benign and constructive interest: Turkey was presenting a convincing model of political democratization and economic development; a balance of traditional values and vigorous modernization projects; and the potential for integration with the West via the European Union. Erdoğan promoted a “no problems with neighbors” foreign policy, focused on improving regional cooperation and integration based on common economic interests and win-win solutions, and exported an increasing number of consumer goods and TV soap operas to the Arab World. This changed dramatically after the Arab uprisings of 2011.

Erdoğan saw an opportunity to regain a powerful role for Ankara in the Arab World by backing the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, who seemed on track to become the ruling party in several Arab countries including Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen, and potentially major players in Morocco, Jordan, and Kuwait. However, his gamble did not pay off, as the Muslim Brotherhood was removed from power in Egypt and failed to make the promised gains in other Arab countries. A chastened but frustrated Erdoğan scaled back his ambitions but compensated with a direct military intervention in Syria and Iraq and a strong proxy presence in Libya.

States of the Arab uprisings

However, the main challenge to the Arab order came from within, in the form of the 2011 Arab uprisings. These uprisings shook the Arab state system to its core, as people finally expressed decades of pent-up frustration over unequal socioeconomic conditions and repressive political institutions. The effect of these events at the regional level was significant. First, they led to full or partial state failure in a number of key Arab states, including Libya, Yemen, and Syria. These collapses created vacuums that would be filled by a number of state actors such as Iran, Turkey, Russia, and the United States, as well as non-state actors such as Hezbollah, the Houthi forces, the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and affiliated jihadist groups. At the regional level, the uprisings and the potential rise of the Muslim Brotherhood—as well as the rift with Qatar which appeared to be encouraging both—also cemented the Arab Quartet, a regional alliance between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain.

All of these events, especially those following the 2011 Arab Spring, helped form the current relationships and alignments within the Middle East. The Arab Quartet acted as the new center of the Arab World, commanding the bulk of its economic resources. But Iran has successfully become the dominant power in the “center” of the Arab World with its dominance in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. It has also gained a long-term foothold on the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. Turkey’s influence has ended up well below its ambitions, with only pockets of influence, mainly in Syria and Libya.

Israel

The breakthrough country, since 2020, has been Israel. In that year, the Abraham Accords, signed between Israel, Bahrain, and the UAE, catapulted Israel into key partnerships with wealthy and influential Arab monarchies. It has also begun normalizing relations with Morocco, the major player on the western reaches of the Arab World. This Israeli breakthrough, particularly in the Gulf, is likely to have important impacts on economic development, technology, trade, and investment, but is also transforming the security relationship between Israel and the Arab Gulf states, as both share an existential fear of Iran. The accords also mark a definitive shift away from years of Arab policy on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which, since the Arab peace initiative of 2002, has offered normalization only in exchange for a two-state solution for the Palestinians. After decades of being a player excluded from the region, Israel—like the non-Arab Middle Eastern states of Iran and Turkey, but in very different ways—is now also a player inside the Arab World.

The 2022 Regional Order

There is no overarching Middle East order today. We can speak perhaps of two (or rather, two-and-a-half) sub-orders. The first is the centrist Arab order led by the aforementioned Arab Quartet. It promotes stability and economic development, believes in top-down governance, and is, therefore, antithetical to democracy. It is hostile to Iran and radical Islamist groups and is aligned generally with the United States, although it enjoys growing economic relations with China and is open to relations with Russia.

The second sub-order is one that is dominated by Iran and includes the Levantine countries and a big part of Yemen. It is debatable whether this can be considered a sub-order of states, as most of the states in this Iranian sphere of influence are either fully or partially failed, or are in extremely precarious situations. Iran’s agenda in these states is partly aggressive defense against the perceived threats from the United States, Israel, and radical jihadist groups like ISIS. Iran has enjoyed a fair measure of backing from both Russia and China, who share part of its ambition to limit U.S. influence. But it is also a forward-leaning ideological agenda representing both the Islamic Republic’s own revolutionary ambitions to transform and lead the wider Muslim world, and also a revived Iranian appetite to reclaim its prominence in the heart of the Middle East—a role that it has enjoyed on and off in past centuries and millennia. The remaining “half order” is the small Turkish sphere of influence scattered between Syria, Libya, and other parts of the Middle East, although this hardly rivals the other two.

Internationally, the great powers cast long shadows across this Middle East. The United States is still the most present and influential, although its presence and role are diminished compared to the watershed years of George W. Bush. The United States pulled out of Iraq in 2011 (although it had to return in 2015) and Afghanistan in 2021. Successive U.S. administrations from Obama to Trump to Biden have recognized that while the Middle East remains significant, America’s main contest and challenge is further east with a rising China, and that America’s resources must be recalibrated accordingly. The United States is, in a sense, moving back to its pre-1990 level of involvement in the Middle East, which amounts to maintaining sizable diplomatic and economic relations, as well as significant naval, counterterrorism, and other military assets in the region.

An assertive Russia has certainly reemerged in the Middle East, but its return is limited. It has projected military power into Syria, and engaged via proxies in Libya, but its ambitions and capacities are restricted. The Russian economy is only around 7 percent of the U.S. economy and 10 percent of that of China, rendering it unable to compete on par with those two powers.

China, on the other hand, is still playing the long game in the Middle East, focusing on maintaining access to energy resources, finding markets for its products, and investing in its One Belt One Road infrastructure. While it is geopolitically challenging the United States in the South China Sea and over Taiwan, and in the realms of cyberspace, artificial intelligence, cell phone technology, and satellite security, it has chosen not to directly challenge America’s geopolitical role in the Middle East, at least for now. Although China disagrees with U.S. oil sanctions on Iran, American naval presence and policy in the Middle East generally serves Chinese interests as it ensures the free flow of much of the region’s oil to China and ensures the protection of trade routes through which much of China’s global exports flow. How China’s posture and strategy will evolve in 2030 or 2040 is harder to predict.

Navigating the Road to 2030

In the long run, a regional order would need to include all the main Arab and non-Arab states of the region, but given the current differences and divergences, one could suggest a three-track way forward. First, the Arab League should be strengthened and leveraged as a mechanism for rebuilding and enhancing intra-Arab cooperation in order to better face the myriad socioeconomic, security, and environmental challenges of the near future. But the Arab League—in effect, its main leaders—must also better articulate what future it is promising to the region’s youth. We have seen how the gap between youth ambitions and conditions led to wide-scale uprisings in the past decade, and such frustrations might boil up again. For example, what message are the Arab states that dominate the Arab League sending to the region’s youth if they are contemplating readmitting the Syrian regime, after all the ways it has decimated its own population, into the League? Intra-Arab state cooperation is necessary, but the Arab League and its main leaders going forward need to make clear what future they are proposing for the Arab World, if this cooperation is to build stability in the long run. Second, until one can imagine Iran and Israel participating in the same regional forum, the two tracks might need to be kept separate. This could include one regional forum that includes the Arab states, Turkey, and Israel. This platform could be used to address differences, work toward solutions to intractable problems—most notably, the rights of Palestinians to self-determination—and potentially build on common interests. A separate regional forum, including the Arab states, Turkey, and Iran, could also work to reduce conflict, enhance trust and cooperation, and build on common interests. Over time, whether enough progress could be made to merge these two into one overarching regional order is hard to predict, but at least it will be building the pathways and habits of intra-regional cooperation across a wide cross section of states.

Regional cooperation is essential to creating lasting stability, and the same can be said for the international relations of the Middle East. The region must integrate more fully into the global economy, must be a leader in energy transition, and must build fruitful relations with the major economies of the world. But Middle Eastern leaders should also be aware of the need to prevent global competition from sparking division and conflict within the region. This certainly was the case during the Cold War, and as the United States and China face off over the next few decades, history could very well repeat itself. As they navigate the next decade to 2030, regional leaders must figure out how to build and balance their global relations so as to reap the fruits of global economic and technological integration without getting dragged into global rivalries that could take the region down the path of more division and internal conflict.

The challenges of the coming decades will not be easy for the Middle East, nor for any region, to confront. But they will be nearly impossible to overcome if the region’s states remain mired in division and conflict or if global powers choose, once again, the Middle East as a battleground. Building a regional order and enhancing regional cooperation and integration, while dissuading global powers from exporting their differences to the region, is an urgent necessity if we are to stop our region from sliding into chaos. Also, giving our younger generations the means to confront and overcome the challenges lying ahead is a step in the right direction. If done correctly, it is possible to build a future of security, prosperity, and self-actualization together.

The year 2011 was a watershed in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as the popular uprisings that cascaded through the region precipitated the collapse of several regimes at astonishing speed. These developments in turn triggered civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen that converged in dangerous ways, raising the potential for a wider conflict between regional actors, directly or through proxies, including potent armed groups supported by powers external to the region.

Over ten years later, Yemen is going from bad to worse, but the big war in Syria is for now frozen. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a shadow of its former self, and the Libyan civil war isn’t raging on as it used to. Some of the intersecting disputes have calmed down—at least for the moment—as states in the region direct greater energies toward diplomacy.

Yet, the situation remains fragile and could turn at the merest incident. This could be a rocket fired by Houthi rebels in Yemen landing in Abu Dhabi or Riyadh; a Hezbollah rocket striking a school in Israel; an Israeli raid on Iranian assets in Syria to which Iran retaliates by attacking the U.S. military base at Al-Tanf with drones; an accidental confrontation between the Iranian and U.S. navies in Persian Gulf waters; or any event of similar impact, including what may follow a possible Donald Trump return to the White House in 2025.

The complexity of the region’s conflicts has created unprecedented challenges for conflict management and resolution. This is because wars may have more than one fundamental driver. Addressing one may aggravate another. Take Libya, for example: a deal to end the conflict by forming a unity government will likely come at the expense of improving governance and accountability, thus potentially giving rise to new popular protests. Or Iraq: when the United States and the Kurds fought ISIS together, Iraqi Kurdish leaders felt empowered to try for independence in 2017. But their bid escalated an old conflict over secession with the central government in Baghdad and neighboring countries, triggering a fight in disputed territories.

External intervention also tends to exacerbate conflicts more often than help resolve them. Such meddling draws in competing forces, directly or by proxy— for example, Saudi Arabia and Iran in Yemen, or the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Turkey in Libya. Another challenge is that armed non-state actors, presenting themselves as state-like entities but without the true trappings of states, are less accountable. Meanwhile, the region’s states themselves often start to crumble through their partial loss of territorial control, sovereignty, and authority. An additional complicating factor is that the “international community” as a whole is going through a period of severe turbulence, in which multilateral institutions are increasingly driven by internal zero-sum competition and are losing legitimacy and influence.

The continuation of conflicts in the MENA region without the prospect of a durable resolution—even if they are temporarily stalled—raises two critical dangers. One is that any conflict can metastasize at any point, covering even larger territories and involving a greater number of actors. The second is that external power interventions in places such as Syria where their interests collide can generate hair-trigger situations that could spiral rapidly out of control, possibly with global consequences. That is in addition to the constant presence of regional conflict drivers such as the struggle between Iran and the Gulf monarchies or the continued Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories, which prevent conflicts from coming to a negotiated conclusion.

Under these circumstances, there is no direct or optimal approach to tackling the region’s conflicts. What we are left with is trying to find ways to manage and contain conflicts before they intensify. This will require diplomatic efforts and tactical deals, as well as the creation of channels of communication and dialogue between adversaries that can help prevent unintended and uncontrollable escalations.

Regional Turning Points
In the century since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, the modern Middle East maintained a certain coherence: the initial post-Ottoman borders remained in place for the most part (despite some opposition to established boundaries), and the states survived (even as political systems changed), at least until 2011.

Yet, the region’s history has been dotted with several turning points. The first of these upheavals was the region’s birth from the remnants of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. The victorious great powers of Britain and France divided the spoils by appropriating territories through a series of accords, starting with the famed Sykes-Picot Agreement. They demarcated Arab lands and established within them direct or indirect administration or control, in many cases mirroring their own monarchical and republican systems, respectively. These countries have survived for a hundred years, and counting.

The next upheaval came in 1948 with the creation of the State of Israel following a gradual three-decade-long build-up culminating in a war with neighboring Arab states. Arab leaders saw Israel’s ability to implant itself in Palestine as a Western attempt to divide and weaken an Arab World in which nationalism and decolonization had become the dominant ideologies following the Second World War. Ever since, Israel has remained a sharp Western-backed wedge stuck in the Arabs’ backs. It is only recently that Israel started to partially overcome its isolation by establishing closer relations with a handful of Arab states, such as the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan (after earlier agreements with Egypt and Jordan delivered a cold peace in each case).

Arab nationalism had its major triumph in 1952, when Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Free Officers Movement overthrew the British-backed monarchy in what became known as the July 26 Revolution. This ushered in dramatic change throughout the Arab World, and placed Egypt and others on a non-aligned course in the worsening Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Domestically, the new secular republic outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, its main potential challenger.

Fifteen years later, the tide turned in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which Israel refers to as the “Six-Day War”. It spelled the end of Nasser’s standing as the most widely admired regional strongman, and ushered in the gradual end of Arab nationalism as the ideological glue unifying the region. Islamism started to slowly overtake Arab nationalism as the only ideological alternative that enjoyed widespread popular support. However, it would take decades of grassroots organizing and struggling against state repression before Islamist forces could turn their political ambitions into formal power; this materialized in Egypt in 2012, with the Muslim Brotherhood taking up the presidency.

The next upheaval came in 1979 in two pivotal events. The first was the Iranian revolution, which saw a popular uprising oust the Shah’s repressive secular monarchy, and supplant it with a Shiite theocratic republic, a system known as vilayet-e fakih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist), no less repressive than its predecessor. The second was the so-called siege of Mecca later that year. Here the near-success of Sunni radicals in overthrowing the House of Saud prompted Saudi Arabia to further empower its religious establishment and export its particularly intolerant brand of Islam, Wahhabism, by using its growing oil income to fund mosque building, literature distribution, and recruitment of preachers throughout the Muslim world. While there is no direct link between Saudi Arabia and the establishment of Al-Qaeda, the generation of Muslims steeped in Saudi-fed Wahhabist Salafism provided a fertile ground from which Al-Qaeda could recruit followers and fighters in several wars—first in Afghanistan, later in Iraq and Yemen, and then in Syria and Libya.

The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq unleashed another wave of jihadism (following jihadists’ successful effort to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan over a decade earlier; the return of volunteers from fighting against the Soviets to join insurrections elsewhere; and a series of Al-Qaeda attacks on Western interests that culminated in the September 11, 2001 attacks). It provided the space and motivation for Al-Qaeda, which had been scattered and on the run after losing its safe haven in Afghanistan and never had a presence in Iraq, to rebrand itself. Its newly established Iraq branch, under the leadership of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, increasingly confronted a perceived Iran-backed Shiite ascendancy and helped fuel sectarianism within the country. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was the basis for what would become the Islamic State a decade later.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq and its mismanaged aftermath had other implications: it caused enormous harm to the U.S. standing in the world, and arguably marked the beginning of the decline of its influence in the region. At the same time, the Bush administration’s decision to move forward with the invasion against the strong advice of Arab leaders who feared Iran’s rising power convinced them that they could no longer confidently count on Washington to protect them. Some, like the UAE, became even more convinced of the need to gain greater political and security autonomy from the United States. This disposition first began to emerge in the 1990s and increased especially after the 2011 popular uprisings.

These became the final transformative events of regional proportions. The home-grown revolts precipitated not only the ouster of a number of long-time autocrats but also the collapse of several Arab states. Capable regional actors such as Iran, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar stepped into the security vacuum that opened up in a number of countries, most notably in Syria, Yemen, and Libya. In these wars, upstart non-state actors recognized opportunities to advance their respective causes, the jihadist groups most aggressively among them. Kurdish groups challenged the post-Ottoman Iraqi and Syrian borders in pursuit of a state of their own while the Islamic State rejected the whole notion of the nation state, seeking to reinstate the long-lost Caliphate instead.

In brief, the uprisings exposed the bankruptcy of the century-old order in the region. From the inchoate voices in the squares, a single message rang loud and clear: a rejection of the status quo and the forces upholding it. But the protesters, who had no coherent vision for the future, nor leadership or organization, failed to present a workable alternative and were quickly outflanked by powerful military actors. These were driven by the need to fill a political and security vacuum, while pursuing objectives that reflected longstanding and deep regional fault lines.

Regional Conflict Drivers
Triggered by these political earthquakes, four conflict drivers were propelling parts of the region into four separate but increasingly intersecting areas of conflict.

The first one concerns the borders and the nature of the state systems established a century ago, and how well they held up their end in the social contracts between states and their citizenry. These states may have survived, but not without challenges to their rule. Chronically incapable of reliably providing infrastructure, services, jobs, and sometimes even security, the legitimacy of these states in the eyes of their citizens is constantly tested and often found wanting. Yet, their autocratic nature leads them to hold onto power instead of fostering a greater degree of political participation; they ultimately cannot sustain themselves, as the 2011 uprisings showed. In some ways, it is a miracle that the borders have endured when states themselves have faltered. Part of the reason may be that the elites in these countries have bought into the notion that the nation state is preferable to an overarching (yet unachievable) Arab nation or an all-encompassing Islamic caliphate.

The second fundamental conflict driver is the tension between Israel and its neighbors and Iran, and especially the way it projects itself as an outsider imposing itself militarily while professing an innate legitimacy through its origin narrative. In the adversarial dynamic between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel and Arab actors, and Israel and Iran, armed conflicts are endemic. The overall confrontation between Israel and these various actors has contaminated the region, putting states up against one another and people against their governments, while offering Arab leaders an excuse to indefinitely postpone long-overdue fundamental reforms.

The third driver is the ongoing struggle between Iran and the Gulf monarchies— an outcome of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The Islamic Republic continuously tries to replicate its ideological victory throughout the wider Shiite community and beyond, while Saudi Arabia attempts to counter that. Iran’s attempt to export vilayet-e fakih has been met with only mixed success, but it has been very effective in projecting its power throughout the Middle East—first and foremost through Shiite communities—but also in Syria and with a group as closely aligned with the (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood as Hamas. The Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s and the stand-off between Iran and Gulf Arab states today, with the UAE choosing to side with Israel as part of an anti-Iran front, attest to the potency of this particular conflict driver.

The fourth one concerns the unsettled debate in the Sunni world over the role of Islam in politics. (In the Shiite world, the Iranian revolution settled the matter for now.) It stems from the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt early last century in response to secular Arab nationalism—although it has far deeper roots—and has spread throughout the Muslim world. This debate fuelled the rise of jihadist groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State that challenged the sitting secular regimes, as well as the Brotherhood itself. It also incited conflict that is evident in the relatively recent rivalry between the UAE and both Qatar and Turkey, playing out in battlefields such as Libya, Syria and Yemen; in the 2013 seizure of power from the government of President Mohamed Morsi that was elected following the 2011 uprising in Egypt; in the 2017 spat between Saudi Arabia and the UAE at one end, and Qatar at the other, which was only partly overcome early in 2021; and most recently in the Tunisian president’s grab for greater power in the face of an Islamist-dominated and paralyzed parliament.

Outside interventions, especially of the military kind, dangerously interact with these four basic conflict drivers. External actors can play a constructive role as relatively non-partisan mediators, but more often than not, they side with one party to a conflict, deepening internal fault lines and elevating them to regional ones. Witness the separate Russian and U.S. interventions in Syria (one to protect the regime, the other mostly to fight jihadists in what at times became overlapping efforts), which raised the dangers of an inadvertent clash in the skies between their respective air forces.

In Syria, all these conflict drivers, compounded by external interventions, converged, and thereby rendered a peaceful solution more elusive. The war, which first erupted as a popular challenge against an unresponsive, unaccountable, and repressive regime, soon evolved into a civil war between the regime and an externally backed insurgency, and then, into a proxy war in which regional powers, and later Russia, the United States, and Western members of the anti-ISIS coalition, came face to face. These powers included Turkey, which pursued the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and its Syrian affiliate, and Israel, which struck back at its Lebanese enemy Hezbollah, as well as Iran, which had used Syria as its main transit point for arms shipments to Hezbollah.

Syrians’ popular insurgency ultimately failed, in part because the financial support that Gulf actors, who disagreed over the role of Islam in government, funnelled to different rebel factions sowed division among them. Russia’s 2015 intervention then provided the final and fatal blow. Jihadists thrived in the chaos. The war became the mother of all perfect storms, one that is far from having spent its energies, even if it appears frozen for the moment.

Spreading Risks
The ways in which such drivers of conflict intertwine have complicated efforts to bring these conflicts to an end through negotiations leading to ceasefires and transitional political arrangements. Diplomacy’s traditional instruments have proved to be insufficient, especially if they are not backed up by the unified actions of the world’s greater powers. The most a UN envoy can hope to achieve is to emerge from the assignment having avoided a sharp escalation, with his or her reputation intact.

Under these circumstances, the risks posed here are obvious. First off, it is unclear how these conflicts can be contained within certain territorial boundaries and without exerting a certain degree of lethality. The Syrian war, in particular, has highlighted how conflicts can suck in new actors, and spread to engulf wider areas. What began as a popular anti-regime protest in the provincial town of Daraa in March 2011 soon consumed the capital Damascus and the entire Sunni Arab heartland; it then prompted military interventions by Hezbollah and Iran on the regime side, and financial and material backing from Turkey and Gulf Arab actors on the other.

Global powers also entered the scene. Turkey, which has vital interests at stake as Syria’s neighbor, remains lodged militarily in Idlib province; an incursion by the regime and its allies, which would prompt a new refugee flow into Turkey, has sparked repeated direct confrontations between Turkey and the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian allies. Moreover, Hezbollah extended its military power from Lebanon into Syria. The Islamic State then built on its territorial gains in northern Syria to invade (or return to) Iraq, erasing the official border between the two countries; the anti-ISIS coalition followed suit, chasing ISIS in both countries. Both sets of actors thus jointly infected an entire sub-region with armed conflict.

The Syrian war also saw the reintroduction of chemical weapons on the battlefield (by both sides, but most intensively and lethally by the regime), the first time since the Iran–Iraq war. The war’s most defining feature may have been the regime’s wholesale use of barrel bombs dropped over civilian areas in which rebels were active. That level of lethality prompted the United States to respond with missile strikes. If the stakes had been higher for the United States, perhaps it would have introduced even heavier weapons, as it did in Afghanistan in April 2017, when it dropped the most powerful conventional bomb in its arsenal on an Islamic State cave complex. As it was, Russia and Iran together appeared to have “escalation dominance” through their superior strategic interest in Syria and therefore comparatively greater willingness to counter U.S. military moves.

A second, and related, risk is that any proverbial flash in the pan could set off a wider conflagration. Several armed stand-offs in the region would need just a small trigger to push the conflict into a rapid and uncontrolled escalation, causing a chain reaction of destructive events. The following scenarios share the same premise: that none of the primary actors involved in them seeks a direct confrontation with the other for the time being.

In the first scenario, conflict would arise if any of the principal actors on either side of the Israeli/Lebanese or Israeli/Syrian border were to inadvertently cross the other’s (often undeclared) red line. For example, a Hezbollah rocket barrage retaliating for Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah assets hits a school in northern Israel, with casualties. It is inconceivable that Israel would not launch a major assault in response. Both Israel and Hezbollah have observed mutual deterrence across the Israel–Lebanon border since the 2006 war.

Transplant the scene to northern Syria. Confrontation between Turkey and Russia may arise, for example, should a Syrian regime rocket attack on a Turkish forward base in Idlib kill Turkish troops, and Turkey retaliates, accidentally hitting Russian military advisors deployed alongside Syrian troops. It is very difficult to imagine that Russia would not take significant retaliatory measures, even if it has avoided harming Turkish soldiers in Idlib so far. Retaliation could even take the form of a combined Syrian regime-Russian frontal assault on Idlib in an attempt to wrest the area from Tahrir Al-Sham and Turkey, and restore Damascus’s authority.

Attacks on shipping in the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz or Gulf of Oman are nothing new. But a naval mishap between U.S. and Iranian vessels could lead to an undesired confrontation in the absence of instant communications in the form of a hotline or otherwise. In 2016, the United States could have met Iran’s detention of U.S. sailors who had entered Iranian territorial waters, possibly because of navigational errors, with an attack on Iranian assets inside the country or on the high seas. Instead, Secretary of State John Kerry’s calls to Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, almost instantaneously led to a quick de-escalation and the sailors’ release after 15 hours. During the Trump administration, a similar incident might have had a different outcome, as the circumstances surrounding Iran’s downing of a U.S. drone in June 2019 suggest; the United States reportedly was within minutes of carrying out a retaliatory military strike on Iran before Trump’s aides persuaded him to undertake lesser drastic actions.

And a final example: after ISIS was defeated in Iraq, Iran and its allied paramilitary groups stepped up the pressure to drive U.S. troops away after their partial return to the country, mainly through rocket attacks on facilities in which U.S. and Iraqi soldiers were housed together. This tactic carries great risk, because the United States may retaliate—as it has in the past—and this could cause casualties. One such incident came in the wake of the U.S. killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike at Baghdad airport in January 2020. Iran struck back by launching missiles at Iraqi bases that housed U.S. and other Western soldiers, injuring many. What reportedly prevented further escalation was an Iranian message to the Trump administration, transmitted through a Swiss diplomatic backchannel, that Iran did not intend to carry out further strikes; fortunately, Trump decided to leave it at that.

Managing Impossible Crises
What, in this fragile state of affairs, could be done to prevent the region from sliding into greater chaos and the expansion of armed conflict to all-out war? “Very little,” is the correct answer. If there is any change for the better, it appears to be mostly unrelated to diplomatic activity and more tied to a political or military event, such as, for example, the arrival of Joe Biden in the White House and the expectation in the region that the United States would return to the nuclear deal, reset relations with Iran, and start balancing the books diplomatically between Iran and U.S. Gulf allies. It is because of this latter perception that Saudi Arabia reached out to Iran in 2021 and, perhaps, also mended its ties with Qatar. This set off a chain reaction, allowing Turkey to start rebuilding diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE. The overall result has been a lowering of the temperature, but the fundamental problems remain. Another major political or military event could easily reverse all these surface-gains. Available options to address the underlying tensions and grievances are limited but there are steps that could at least minimize risks of a wider escalation.

The first relates to activating the UN’s special mechanisms, such as the SecretaryGeneral’s envoys, which are meant to mediate between conflict parties and bring a conflict to an end through negotiations, a ceasefire, and a political transition. Although heroic, such efforts have a low rate of success in bringing individual conflicts to an end, or even preventing further escalations. Even in helping to contain these conflicts, the envoys should communicate more actively, not just with headquarters in New York, but also with one another in the region, as the various conflicts are interlinked through their historic drivers and through countries’ political leaderships who see these connections and use them to their advantage region-wide.

The second relates to those actors external to the region that have an interest in its stabilization. They should open their own channels to non-state actors such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and encourage enemies to talk to one another at various levels. This could take the form of military hotlines, direct talks between political leaders or intelligence chiefs, multilateral security dialogues, or Track-2 discussion forums involving a broader spectrum of political and security elites. Such channels of communication are no panacea, but they can help prevent the worst in a situation where more ambitious progress remains improbable.

As long as the region’s principal actors seek no direct confrontation but think they must engage in brinkmanship in order to manage their disputes, accidental escalations based on miscommunications or a misreading of events are very likely to happen again and again. The best way to prevent them from turning into something bigger is to ensure that working channels of communication at the right level of leadership are open and available in moments of acute crisis.

Since the successive accession of Arab countries to independence and statehood starting in the 20th century, Arab unity has not ceased to be a subject of discussion, dreams, and disappointments. Debates about Arab unity are grounded in several factors that underpin and should facilitate them. Arabic is the common language of the very vast majority of inhabitants of the Arab states, which are situated in a geographical continuum in West Asia and North Africa and have been brought together in successive imperial formations between the 7th and 20th centuries. Ideologically, Arab nationalism articulated these basic tenets of unity, and was joined by the complementarity of natural and human resources in the Arab states in recent decades.

A century after the genesis of the Arab state system, the debates over bonds between Arab peoples and relations between Arab states have not abated, even though the perspective has changed. The debates are no longer about unity, but bear on the regionalism in which Arab states have been engaged since the 1940s. Participants in the debates lament that this regionalism has not at least resulted in Arab regional integration.

Regionalism and Arab Nationalism
For our purposes, two definitions for regionalism seem appropriate. In the first, regionalism is a policy and project whereby states and non-state actors cooperate and coordinate strategy within a given region. In the second definition, the strategy aims at building a type of world order, is associated with a formal program, and often leads to institution-building. Regionalism is considered to promote common goals and to aim at region-building, and at establishing regional coherence and identity.

The League of Arab States (LAS) is the foremost expression of regionalism in the Arab World. It is currently and overwhelmingly also considered the expression of the Arab World’s failure to achieve its common goals. It could not reach a satisfactory and just solution to the Palestinian question, which was its essential raison d’être for over seven decades. Nor could it achieve coordination, cooperation, or coherence in the actions of its members. To which extent are these diagnoses and verdicts true?

The ire, lamentation, and even sarcasm of observers and analysts from within and without the Arab World are aimed directly at the LAS Secretariat rather than the organization itself. This is unfair, regardless of the Secretariat’s actual and possible shortcomings. Though secretariats—specialized bureaus or offices, such as the International Labour Office within the International Labour Organization or the International Bureau of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) within the UPU itself, for example—were clearly distinguished from some international organizations established in the second half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th, this changed with the establishment of the United Nations in 1945, signifying a new generation of internationalization.

In fact, the LAS Secretariat’s weakness stems from the very charter of the organization. The Charter of the LAS is a simple document of a preamble and twenty articles. It does not compare with the 111 articles of the UN Charter, the 112 articles of the Charter of the Organization of American States or even the thirty-three articles of the Constitutive Act of the African Union adopted in 2000, fifty-five years after the LAS. The Charter of the LAS refers to the Secretariat’s composition, made up of the Secretary-General and other senior officials, in one article. In another, it identifies just one function for the Secretary-General, which is preparing the draft budget of the organization. This is a far cry from the UN Charter’s five articles on the Secretariat, and particularly from Article 99, which empowers the Secretary-General “to bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security”. Therefore, the LAS Secretariat cannot be blamed for the failure of Arab regionalism.

Secretaries-General have tried to make up for the silence of the Charter on their functions and those of the Secretariat. For example, Secretary-General Amre Moussa assumed the functions attributed to the League’s Council by Article 5 in the Charter when he visited former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and attempted to convince him to take an action that would forestall an American military intervention in his country. He even attempted a mediation in a political dispute internal to an LAS member state, Lebanon, a function totally unforeseen by the Charter. If under different Secretaries-General, and despite their efforts, the Secretariat did not achieve its goals, the fault must lie elsewhere.

The LAS attempted to build a regional order around it made up of organizations and specific norms, on par with those at the international level. It worked for the independence of Arab states, which were deprived of sovereignty when it was established in 1945. According to Marco Pinfari, professor at the American University in Cairo, a fair assessment of the regionalism promoted by the LAS cannot judge it as a total failure. For Pinfari, the picture is more complex than what is portrayed in a number of empirical studies, including one by this author. The LAS managed to settle, at least partially, a number of minor wars in the Arab region. Even in a potentially major dispute, it was able to preserve Kuwaiti independence acquired in 1961. Importantly, the LAS has also preserved the sense of an Arab identity.

Arab regionalism is not confined to the LAS. Movements of labor migration between Arab states, the mixed production and consumption of cultural goods over the entire region, inter-Arab tourism, bilateral financial assistance, and investments are further expressions of Arab regionalism. Nevertheless, the assumed failure of the LAS to embody Arab regionalism must be taken seriously. Perceptions command understanding and action.

The establishment of the LAS highlighted a chasm between two strains of thought: Arab nationalism and nascent Arab regionalism. Arab nationalism espoused that Arabs were one nation and as such they should be united in one state. For them, the LAS was a colonial enterprise meant to keep the Arab states disunited. Indeed, the drafters of the Charter confirmed the misgivings of the nationalists. In Article 2, they declared that the League’s purpose was “the reinforcement of links between member states and the coordination of their political plans with a view to realizing their cooperation and preserving their independence and sovereignty”. In one report, the foreign minister of a member state in the late 1940s or early 1950s said to the militant first Secretary-General Abdel Rahman Azzam: this is “the League of Arab States, not the Arab League”.

Arab nationalist thought affected the entire regional environment that encompassed the LAS, its specialized agencies, and first and foremost the Arab states themselves. It implicitly cast doubt upon the legitimacy of distinct Arab states, especially in certain sub-regions such as Greater Syria where Arab nationalist thought originated. Arab states were nation states, logically unacceptable for advocates of the Pan-Arab nation. Nationalism also implicitly meant that Arabs of one state had a legitimate say in what happened in other Arab states, which naturally suggests that it also creates claims for Arabs to the resources of all Arab states.

The tension between the nationalist perspective and the interests of constituted Arab nation states to protect their sovereignty and prerogatives precluded sustained progress in regionalism as an intergovernmental process, even when attempts to reinforce it were made. The problem was not with the LAS as an embodiment of regionalism in the Arab World. It was in the tension between two concepts of common Arab action. The higher and most encompassing Arab nationalism concept kept the lower regionalism one from developing. For nation states, common action could develop into Arab nationalism, which was not acceptable for a good number of them. Moreover, the same advocates of Arab nationalism were fiercely divided for much of the past several decades. (No judgment is made here on the merits of Arab nationalism and regionalism). It is only observed that neither could override the other. Furthermore, the legitimacy of Arab nation states is reinforced by the fact that the international and regional systems are those of nation states. Whether in Europe, Africa, South America, or Southeast Asia, despite the frequent inadequacy of the concept, nation states, fully recognized as legitimate, are the foundation of processes that further regionalism to higher levels of regional integration.

Regional Integration: The Past and the Future
Regional integration is the most advanced form of interstate cooperation at the regional level. Writing about the European experience, political scientist Ernst Haas, who has primarily theorized neofunctionalism (a theory of regional integration), provides the most authoritative definition of regional integration as “the process whereby political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expectations, and political activities to a new center, whose institutions possess or demand jurisdiction over preexisting national states”. The end result, according to Haas, is a “new political community, superimposed over the preexisting ones”. In fact, regional integration is a process establishing one legitimate decision-making system that produces policies that are binding for participating states. Economic and sectoral policies are the first areas of regional integration.

Arab states were not unaware of the value of cooperation for their economic growth and development. Their earliest cooperation came in the form of a joint defense against the newly established state of Israel. Thus, they adopted the Treaty on Joint Defense and Economic Cooperation in 1950, the same year the process of European integration was launched. In 1962, they adopted the Agreement on Arab Economic Unity and in 1964, by a resolution of the Council of Arab Economic Unity, they established the Arab Common Market Agreement. The latter was a misnomer since the resolution was only about the establishment of a free trade area. Still focused on trade in their cooperation, after another iteration, Arab states ended up adopting the Agreement on the Establishment of the Great Arab Free Trade Area (GAFTA) in 1997. GAFTA has advanced more than its predecessors. However, the last seventy years have far from realized a cooperation that reinforces the development of Arab states, not to speak of their integration.

Across the globe, regional integration has played out in different manners. The first stages of European integration proceeded in accordance with a neofunctional dynamic, which was driven by exchange of benefits, package deals, and spillover processes. Some states drew benefits in one policy area while others reaped them in others. Therefore, decisions were made as a package so that states could be confident about the exchange of benefits. Integrated policies in some areas commanded that integration spill over to others. Later on, European integration also proceeded as an intergovernmental, in addition to neofunctional, process. Whereas in the neofunctional dynamic the spillover in integration areas was decided by organs of the regional integration institution in accordance with its governing document, in intergovernmental processes, every new step required a novel international treaty. In West Africa and South America, different doses of neofunctional and intergovernmental processes steered integration with the intergovernmental approach dominating. In Southeast Asia, following the so-called ASEAN way (referring to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) of prolonged discussions, consensus, and slow progress based on the least common denominator, the process was exclusively intergovernmental. Even if it took time, this did not impede tangible progress in Southeast Asian integration.

Regional integration in the Arab World cannot measure up to any of the regional and subregional processes referred to above. Several political and economic factors may explain its poor performance. Even if it is in economic and sectoral policy areas, regional integration is a political process. Establishing one integrated decision-making system, which implies giving up exclusive sovereignty, is in the essence of politics. For states having recently grasped sovereignty, giving it up is a far cry. Furthermore, Arab states also have relatively simple and similar economic production structures. In regional integration processes centered on trade, varied, complex, and diversified production structures exchange goods and services and expand their markets to the benefit of all parties. There is nothing much on which the integration can bear when economies produce few and similar goods. More advanced integration processes provide for the freedom of movement of capital and labor.

In the case of the Arab World, disparity in capital and labor endowments, rather than promoting complementarity, further impedes it. A comparatively rich country (such as Saudi Arabia or the UAE) may not find lucrative investment opportunities in a little-developed economy with low per capita income and weak purchasing power. The same capital-rich state, sparsely populated, does not have reason to open its labor market to workers from large-population, labor surplus states which may flood it. For its authorities, the repercussions of such openings would be political and economic. Politically, Arab nationalist claims may result in competition with nationals of the rich state for the privileges they enjoy. By the same token, they may undermine the governing arrangements of the rich state. Economically, for rich states, unchecked access of workers from labor surplus states (such as Egypt or Yemen) at all skill levels to their labor markets might create problems of unemployment and underemployment and depress wages. Not recognizing that national and migrant workers are active in separate segments of their labor markets, they consider the latter responsible for the employment challenges they face. Therefore, freedom of movement of labor could not be envisaged by rich states. In any case, the large international supply of migrant labor allows them to secure the workers they need.

Advancing Integration
Purely identitive considerations and unsubstantiated claims of a common destiny for all Arabs have advanced neither unity nor integration in the past. They are not likely to have success in advancing them in the future. The political and economic challenges that stood in the way of effective integration in the last several decades need to be recognized. This would also mean the unquestioned recognition of the legitimacy and sovereignty of Arab states, and separately, of their national interests, which may not fully converge with one another. In the logic of the international interstate system, interests and security are those of each nation state, not those of a group. It is only after recognizing each others’ sovereignty that states can start efforts toward giving up exclusive rights to certain functions, with the expectation of realizing commensurate benefits that reinforce the legitimacy of each state. This would pertain to certain policy areas. The integrating states would jointly exercise parts of their sovereignties that they had given up. Dismantling the exclusive rights to exercise parts of sovereignty and jointly exercising those parts is the process of achieving regional integration.

The key is to identify sectors of activity where integrating states can exchange benefits. Trade can be kept as a sector of cooperation under the GAFTA agreement, but it should not be relied upon to achieve integration for the reasons briefly discussed above. Sectors that combine production and exchange should be identified. Moreover, not all Arab states must necessarily engage in the integration process from the start. This means that regionalism as expressed in a reformed LAS, or a new interstate organization, and in regional civil society, would subsist alongside the integration scheme. In Africa, the Americas, and Europe, interstate organizations exist alongside regional and subregional integration schemes.

Because of the challenges they represent, the potential they hold, and the relationship between them, the water and renewable energy sectors are prime candidates for launching the integration scheme. Water scarcity is common in the Arab World. Eighteen out of the twenty-two Arab countries are suffering from severe water shortages, and ten of them face “extremely high” water stress due to increasing demand, as 2019 data from the World Resources Institute shows. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the Arab region’s renewable energy potential is high, particularly for wind and solar projects. Most Arab states are part of the Sun Belt and benefit from solar insolation levels that are among the highest in the world (the country-level Sun Belt regions are the tropical climate countries, according to Köppen climate classification). Hydroelectric power is energy produced by water, and energy is used to desalinate and treat used water. Several Arab states can draw significant potential from their cooperation in and integration of their water and renewable energy sectors.

Environmental policy is a third policy area where integration could spill over. Given its obvious relationship to water and energy, it can also be integrated from the start. Interested states can declare their intention to integrate and identify the sectors to be integrated. Technical experts can support them by addressing the scientific and technical challenges of the common action.

From a political perspective, the challenges facing integration are different. They are first about managing the progressive renunciation of the exclusive exercise of sovereignty in the integrated sectors. Second and most importantly, they are about the management of the pool of shared sovereignty, and third, about sharing in the costs and benefits of the integrated sectors’ outputs. All these challenges revolve around the integration scheme’s institutions and its decision-making. The establishment of a strong executive that is the engine of integration, comparable to the European Union’s Commission, and the progress in integration following the spillover rationale may be the most effective. But an intergovernmental approach, where governments take the lead and treaties are signed for every new integration stage, can also be envisaged.

What is important is that the decisions, jointly made, should be binding. The promised and well-assessed benefits of integration are the best guarantees for decisions to be complied with. In making the decisions, population and gross domestic product, reflected in the financing of the scheme, should be taken into account in the distribution of votes so as to encourage larger and richer states to participate in the scheme. A threshold for the adoption of decisions should protect smaller states from being overridden by the larger ones. In other words, the threshold should ensure that a coalition of small states forestalls the adoption of decisions that major states with large numbers of votes alone want. Whether in a neofunctional or intergovernmental approach, the package deal rationale based on the exchange of benefits is essential in maintaining and advancing the integration process.

An essay such as this can only flag the issues to be addressed in establishing and managing an integration process. Negotiators for concerned states should analyze and address these and others in a spirit aimed at making the projected process a successful reality. They may also envisage the spillover of the process into other sectors of activity. Negotiators may finally discuss the degree of openness of the process, which allows, after some conditions are met, to connect to other states in the vicinity or neighborhood of the Arab World. The Middle East, subregions in Africa (other than North Africa), and Europe are the most obvious candidates for expanding the Arab integration scheme.

The phrase “political Islam” can conjure an assortment of ideas, movements, institutions, and arrangements—anything in which Islamic beliefs, practices, teachings, or actors are pushed or pulled into the political arena. The politics of Islam includes many aspects to consider. And indeed such a diverse family of meanings is precisely what the term “political Islam” should be understood in 2022.

But this marks a change from a decade ago, when the term suggested something far more specific: an attempt by a certain group of social actors—labeled “Islamists”—to enter the realm of political contestation, especially through established (if often unstable and negotiated) electoral channels and rules. Seen from this latter perspective, the story of the past decade in the region can be described as the decline, even the defeat or disintegration, of the political Islamic project.

But seen from the perspective of the much wider variety of meanings, the politics of Islam continues to operate in a number of ways. In that sense, the politics of Islam is more of a transnational force today than it was a decade ago. It used to be the case that Islamists (and their opponents) were primarily focused on what happened within the borders of their own states. They looked abroad to be sure, for models, slogans, tactics, and trends. But today, more than imitation is at work at a transnational level: arms, funds, and alliances cross borders across the Middle East and North Africa.

Finally, while there are distinctive elements to the prominent role religion plays in regional politics, there is nothing exotic; the field of affairs that we refer to as “religion” is rarely hermetically sealed from politics wherever one travels in the world. Yet, political Islam’s particular manifestations in the Middle East have taken on distinctive forms in recent years.

The Defeat of Political Islam?
Over the previous two decades, Islamist movements in many countries in the region had invested unevenly, but increasingly, in electoral politics. None gained political authority as the result of an election (nor were elections sufficiently competitive to allow such an outcome) except in Palestine. And the results of Hamas’s triumph in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections were sufficiently destabilizing that most Islamist parties more fully embraced the “participation, not domination” formula they had developed. In Jordan, Morocco, Kuwait, Algeria, and Yemen, Islamist movements fashioned party-like organizations as one way to pursue their mission of increasing the role of Islam in public life.

In 2012, Islamists seeking authority through the electoral process seemed to be one of the most powerful trends operating in many countries in the region. This rise was not sudden except in its post-uprising phase, when it offered the potential for Islamist parties to actually govern. This reversed the previous adage of “participation, not domination” that Islamist movements had long used to assure rivals and regimes that they simply wanted a seat at the table, but not to establish theocratic orders.

Yet the uprisings that swept the Arab World in 2011 appeared to open new possibilities—and they briefly did. Tunisia’s Ennahda emerged from illegality into becoming the country’s largest parliamentary party; Morocco’s Party of Justice and Development (PJD) headed a cabinet; Islamists were active in Syria, Yemen, and Libya as well. Most notably, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood took the step it had always balked at—forming a political party—and won a parliamentary plurality and then the presidency.

It was this last achievement that saw the most radical and sudden reversal: the history of the Muslim Brotherhood’s role in Egyptian governance in 2012 and 2013 is too fraught and controversial terrain to rehearse here, and the rapidity and totality of its fall were not repeated elsewhere. But in the years after, its sister parties in the region suffered setbacks: Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood experienced fissures and lost its legal status and Kuwait’s Islamic Constitutional Movement opted out of Kuwaiti elections for two cycles.

At the same time, other countries saw more subtle shifts that suggested electoral politics was limited in what it would ever achieve. Palestine’s Hamas remains bottled up in Gaza to this day (where it has ruled, internally uncontested, since a brief Palestinian civil war in 2007). Yemen’s Al-Islah found its ability to run parliamentary campaigns moot as the country descended into bitter armed conflict, and the Iraqi Islamic Party similarly found that its limited ability to field candidates in Arab Sunni regions hardly seemed relevant in the tumultuous and sectarian environment of post-Baathist Iraq. Syria’s uprising degenerated into a civil war in which armed and radical actors edged others out of the way.

And even in North Africa, results were disappointing. What seemed to be a process of compromise eventually gave way not to respectability, but to Islamists being sidelined in 2021. A decade after the hopeful events of 2011, even Morocco’s PJD found itself tossed out by election results. Tunisia’s Ennahda found that the electoral path first led to gridlock and then seemed on the verge of collapse when the president’s autogolpe of July 2021 moved totally outside the constitutional order.

Some of these events were unrelated; others were loosely linked by a powerful regional coalition that had risen against the project of Islamization through the ballot box. But the overall regional trend was clear. A pious and ambitious young Muslim in 2011 might have cultivated electoral skills; in 2021, such a path would have seemed irrelevant almost everywhere in the Arab World. Political Islam in that sense had either been defeated, sidelined, or forced into hibernation.

The Continuing Politics of Islam
However, Islam has hardly exited the political realm. While Islamist party and electoral politics experienced a general regional collapse, there is still political contestation about the role of Islam in public life. This contestation does not take the form of electoral competition, but has moved into different realms, some of them sharply defined and others amorphous, but none of them irrelevant to the politics of the region.

First, certain groups that had shown some inclination to follow the path of political Islam—particularly Salafist movements that had forayed into electoral politics, most notably in Egypt and Kuwait—have largely reversed course. They have not disappeared, however, and their withdrawal is not a sign of erasure.

And that leads to a second trend that is now visible: the various categories of the politics of Islam have deepened their influence on one another across borders, often with cascading effects. For instance, the quashing of electoral options in some countries has made jihadist movements more credible in others; shifts in the religious establishments of some leading countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, had an impact on other areas where Islam and politics mix. In particular, the sharpening positions of the leaderships of the Saudi, Egyptian, and Emirati establishments against the Muslim Brotherhood may have deprived that movement of a zone where it could count on sympathetic pockets, if not support.

And third, those state religious institutions—some of the leaders of which have been regarded warily by Islamist political activists as too close to existing regimes—have shown themselves to have powerful voices in society. No state religious institution is a bastion of opposition to the regime heading the state apparatus, but some (most notably perhaps Egypt’s Al-Azhar) achieved significant autonomy in the aftermath of 2011; in Tunisia a more muted struggle has taken place over management of Al-Zaytouna, another Islamic university with international clout and influence. Ministries of religious affairs often monitor—or draft—sermons. Religion is a mandatory subject in the primary and secondary schools of most states of the region, making curricula another battleground between rival approaches to religion. Whether organizing teachers in Jordan, debating the desirability of government-mandated sermons in Egypt, or sidelining state university faculty deemed close to the Muslim Brotherhood in Saudi Arabia, state religious institutions are a frequent arena for contest among different orientations.

Fourth, personal status laws have sparked a series of debates in the region—over inheritance in Tunisia, divorce in Egypt and Palestine, and even over legislative drafting in Saudi Arabia. At first glance, the significance of these debates might seem exaggerated since they often generate more talk than fundamental change. But that is precisely the point: even in countries where politics is sharply constrained; where freedom of expression is limited; where mutual suspicions among various orientations (conservative, feminist, reformist, security-minded) run very deep, actual change in the law is difficult to navigate precisely because of the number of people deeply (and personally) affected and the number of political actors (within and outside the state) closely following any proposed change. Even in countries where political leaders can make their will into law without serious discussion—much less opposition—personal status law, with its sensitivity for religious groups, is resistant to fundamental change.

Fifth, jihadism is still a force in the region. In one sense, jihadism often presents itself as the antithesis of political Islam (in the narrow definition of that term): jihadists evince deep contempt for the idea of islamicizing society through the legal political process, through parliamentary committee meetings and door-todoor electoral canvassing, or through gradual reform. But if jihadism represents a radical alternative path, it does not seem to represent a viable one. It reached its zenith with the rapid spread of the Islamic State in the middle of the past decade and remains a force in various countries of the region. Countermeasures against this militancy have left a deep residue in harsh security regimes, so that even if jihadism has peaked as a force, its impact will be felt for some years.

Sixth, sectarianism has greatly increased as a political force in the region. It always played a role in some countries (most explicitly in Lebanon), but the most remarkable development in the past decade has been its rise on the level of regional politics. To be sure, “sectarianism” is an imprecise term—it is not doctrinal matters in and of themselves that dictate international alignments and cross-border interventions. But rivalries, arms flows, and political loyalties are far more connected with the sectarian identities of populations and leaders than at any time in recent centuries.

Finally, there may be quiet but portentous contests occurring under the radar, whose political significance may not become clear for years. In most countries in the region, there is a chasm among generations in terms of cultural orientations, sources of information, and modes of social interaction. The uprisings of 2011 are often understood as rebellions of the youth—but now an even younger generation is entering adult life. The religious revival that occurred in many countries a half-century ago did not initially appear all that political but had a profound political impact over the long term. If something similar is happening now, we may not know for a while. Anecdotal and impressionistic reports of declining religiosity in some circles, lessening deference to older authority figures, and disappointment with most prevailing ideologies suggest that similar changes may be afoot but have not yet emerged clearly enough to define or precisely describe.

The Global Normal
So is the region likely to be distinctive in the high and continuing relevance of religion to the political realm? If the narrowly conceived project of political Islam seems like yesterday’s news, is the politics of Islam likely to be a uniquely Middle Eastern story over the coming decade?

Sort of. There is nothing at all unusual about the relevance of religion for politics. Indeed, the relationship between religion and politics often evolves but it rarely disappears. What differs over time and place is less its significance than the form it takes. Political struggles over centuries in Spain focused on the position of the Church—its property, its place in national identity, and its role in the educational system. This struggle was not only long-lived; it was violent. The place of Buddhism in the Sri Lankan order, the relationship between Hinduism and the Indian state, the place of Islam in China, and arguments between traditionalists and social justice advocates in Catholicism are matters that have become more contentious in recent decades, not less. Thomas Jefferson famously called for a “wall of separation between Church and State” in the United States. But even in that country—seemingly one of the birthplaces of secularism—the authority of that phrase as well as its meaning in practice are subjects of sharp political debate to this day.

There is nothing exotic about religious politics. What is distinctive in the Middle East might be the specific set of structures (ministries of religious affairs and state muftis, for instance), and arenas for conflict (personal status laws, regulation of sermons) that are common in the region but often do not have precise analogs elsewhere. Those structures and arenas do not lie outside of politics; if anything, they have become more sharply contested over the past decade.

The political trajectories Arab societies have followed over the past ten years have hardly resolved any debate. The force of political Islam, narrowly conceived as an electoral project, has been blunted and dealt a series of very painful blows, but the coming decades are by no means headed down a path to separate the political from the religious.

Regional politics in the Arab World are often characterized as an endless game of rivalry, struggle, and competition for influence; the players may vary, but the rules don’t change. In fact, however, today’s rivals are fighting battles over very different stakes and deploying different arsenals than their predecessors in the 1950s, or even in the 1990s. Just as the early post-independence battles about the configuration of states gave way to Cold War struggles to sustain the stability of regimes, today’s competition reflects new divides over the instruments and beneficiaries of government policy. To understand the patterns of contemporary Arab politics, we must examine not just the new players, but their new purposes and new powers.

Securing Independent States: Debating the Past
In the early postimperial years, when memories of European control were still fresh, political debates within the Arab World centered on the shape of the postcolonial order: how much of the legacy of European rule would survive? Sovereignty and statehood were prized as the symbols of autonomy, authority, and agency in a world structured, at least in part, by a global order reflected in the new United Nations. But who would exercise that sovereignty, and which states would be recognized as exercising it?

From the 1950s through the 1970s, these questions were debated in many forms and fora, as the relationships between nations, states, and governments were all contested. During this period, Egypt was not only the largest country in the region but also the most powerful, thanks to its demographic weight, cultural influence, and charismatic president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser’s embrace of pan-Arab nationalism reflected and sustained the tension between revolutionary nationalism and state sovereignty that characterized the era. As Nasser wrote in the Philosophy of the Revolution, “There is an Arab circle surrounding us and this circle is as much a part of us as we are a part of it.”

From the toppling of European-imposed monarchs in Egypt, Iraq, and Libya and the wresting of Algeria from France to the creation (and dissolution) of the United Arab Republic to the repeated (and failed) efforts to liberate Palestine from what was widely seen as an illegitimate foreign occupation, the region was convulsed in existential argument and dispute. Boundaries were porous and identities fluid as pan-Arab aspirations justified intervention in states across the region and republics and monarchies alike pursued proxy wars in civil conflicts in Yemen, Lebanon, Jordan, and elsewhere.

With the Arab military defeat and loss of territory to Israel in 1967, the heady ambitions to redraw the European map of the region gave way to more modest efforts simply to secure its borders. The withdrawal of the British from their last possessions east of Suez and the independence of the small Gulf states in 1971 marked the end of formal European control, and by the end of the decade, the Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty signaled the triumph of state interests over nationalist ambitions. Efforts to remake the past were finished. The arena of contestation was to move inside states and, as the oil embargo of 1973-74 suggested, power was to be defined not only by territory and population but increasingly by financial resources.

Safeguarding Stable Regimes: Prolonging the Present
In the struggles over the shape and even existence of newly independent countries, statehood and sovereignty had been the prize. Over the succeeding decades, however, as control of territory was secured and international recognition assured, regime stability came to take precedence over state-building. The global superpowers settled into a Cold War détente and, prizing predictability over uncertainty, supplied client regimes with the foreign and military aid that ensured policy continuity and, not unrelatedly, regime stability. So, too, did the availability of increased oil revenues—among both the oil producers and their regional allies— support regime stability. After decades of military coups, there was no regime change in the Arab World in the thirty years between the oil price increases of 1973 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Orderly succession upon the death of the rulers in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, and Syria illustrated the investment in regime continuity across the region.

Yet, this stability obscured important changes in the dynamic of regional politics; it represented not only the surrender of earlier nationalist aspirations, but also the abandonment of more conventional state-building. Regimes began to supplement and eventually supplant states as the focus of political loyalties. These autocratic rulers relied not on the popular support of citizens so much as on financial subsidies from external patrons that, in turn, they used to create and sustain networks of patronage at home. This shifted the discourse from appeals to citizens—appeals that might have produced demands for greater freedom and participation—to claims for allegiance based on ethnic and religious solidarities. This deliberate and often cynical tactic to evade accountability to a broad-based citizenry quickly escaped the control of the regimes; however, as such, identities proved at least as effective in mobilizing opposition as support. By the 1980s, the state-based order was challenged by Islamist and sectarian mobilization as groups based on networks of religious affiliation and ethnic kinship proliferated, providing aid and solace in communities where the state itself was weakening.

Indeed, although state boundaries were largely immovable and regimes seemed similarly secure, ordinary people were increasingly vulnerable. Conflict raged across the region, taking a major toll in human life without discernible impact on political regimes. The Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990 cost an estimated 150 thousand lives and the exodus of almost one million people from the country, but it produced no change in the regime that governed the state. Shortly after the war ended, the parliament declared amnesty for all political and wartime crimes, promoting an outcome in which there was “no victor, no vanquished”. Similarly, after more than eight years and as many as a million casualties, the Iraq–Iran war of the 1980s produced a stalemate, and again, no change in regime. In 1990, the war was settled with an exchange of prisoners and a return to the status quo ante. The global investment in stability was confirmed in the decisive rejection of Iraqi claims on Kuwait in 1991 and, less decisively, in the continuing failure to address Palestinian aspirations to statehood.

The human costs of regime stability were reflected not only in war casualties and refugee counts. By the 1990s, population growth and economic stagnation had converged to erode the gains in health, education, and employment of the preceding decades across the region, and the post-Cold War era saw little improvement as neoliberal policy prescriptions discouraged large-scale government investment in social welfare provision. By the turn of the century the Arab World had among the lowest adult literacy rates in the world; only 62 percent of the region’s adults could read, well below the world average of 84 percent and the developing county average of 76 percent. The region’s economies had stagnated: its share of global exports fell from 2.3 percent in 1990 to 1.8 percent in 2008, most of which was accounted for by oil and gas. This reliance on oil and neglect of labor-intensive sectors amplified scandalously high unemployment, especially among the young.

In fact, as the 21st century opened, the Middle East was becoming what economist Thomas Piketty and his colleagues called “a pioneer region in terms of extreme inequality”. Between 1990 and 2016, almost all income growth in the Arab World was absorbed by population increases. Although the wealthy got wealthier—even excluding the Gulf countries, the top ten percent of the region’s population received more than half of total income—two-thirds of the population was living precariously in 2018. Some 40 percent of the population were classified as poor and an additional 25 percent as vulnerable to poverty. As columnist and journalist Rami Khouri observed, “this trend seems to be directly associated with the steady recent decline in the quality of state managed basic social services, mainly outside the Gulf region, including health care, education, water, electricity, transport, and social safety nets.”

As urban slums proliferated and corruption ate away at the public bureaucracy, welfare responsibilities were assumed by charitable associations and governments saw their control of their citizenry slip away. And, indeed, perhaps ironically, the state-based order that was the platform for the region’s regimes was decaying and citizens knew it, as one Cairene observed that “here there is no state; here people live in a state other than the state”. From Hamas to Hezbollah to the Muslim Brotherhood, region-wide networks secured support from private benefactors, rallied followers across state boundaries, and opposed regimes whose stability had been built largely on external rents, from oil money to foreign and military aid. And there were plenty of prospective recruits. Many governments complained of the inroads made by Islamist movements and other sectarian organizations in providing social services, but few were prepared to compete for support. As military analyst Anthony Cordesman observed, it didn’t matter whether “the regime is ruled by a King, Sheikh, President, or some [product of] a coup d’état,” it was apparent that “many Middle Eastern states have no enemy greater than their own governments.”

It was in this context that the uprisings of 2010-2013 broke out. The governments were taken by surprise, itself an indication of how detached they had become from the preoccupations of their citizens, and the initial response to the popular disturbances was confused. Many governments—and some of their opponents—resorted to the by-then tired reliance on sectarianism to frame expressions of popular discontent, despite its irrelevance to the calls for bread, freedom, dignity, and social justice. Civil disobedience and protest in Bahrain was characterized as Shiite rather than popular; the post-uprising presidential elections in Egypt eventually turned to a contest between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood; the Syrian regime quickly rallied Alawite allies to battle protesters; Yemen slid into civil war characterized by claims of Iranian support for Shiite rebels.

Within a few years, however, many of the efforts to capture popular support by reference to the early nationalist commitments or the religious and sectarian loyalties of the succeeding decades had been abandoned. As governments struggled to regain the upper hand in battles with their own people, a new emphasis appeared, a product of the previous decades of both neoliberal hostility to the state and growing disenchantment with profligate regimes: the polity as enterprise. Power would no longer be measured by chanting crowds or soldiers under arms. The revolutionary nationalist and the patronage-dispensing coreligionist were giving way to the business leader promising customer service and shareholder value. As Muhammad Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, the prime minister of the Emirates, wrote in My Story: Fifty Memories of Fifty Years of Service: “Today’s leaders are not the same as yesterday’s. Today’s leaders are the silent giants who possess money, not the politicians who make the noise… the babble of politics and its messy entanglements [are] of little benefit to us in the Arab world.”

As the decade after the Arab uprisings wore on, the “messy entanglements” of regional politics were sorted out. The triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was quickly reversed as the UAE and Saudi Arabia supported the installation of a new military regime. The temptations to prolong sectarian mobilization within the region, represented principally by Qatari and Turkish support of groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Tunisia, Libya, and elsewhere, were firmly and decisively resisted. In 2020, in a spectacular indication that neither nationalist pride nor religious allegiance would define the new political landscape, the UAE and Israel signed what were known as the Abraham Accords, a move that opened the door to Israel’s normalization of relations not only with the UAE but also with Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. Economic cooperation, tourism, and foreign investment—especially in technology industries, including artificial intelligence and defense production— soon followed.

Ensuring Private Interests: Promising the Future
What was the logic of the newly emerging regional dynamic? Al-Maktoum suggested an answer in describing his counterparts in government as “in the business of shaping lives, planning futures and building nations”. The neoliberal foundations of globalization were presented as a new opportunity to reframe state–society relations, bypassing both states and regimes for an entirely new notion of governance modeled on the modern multinational corporation. To again quote Al-Maktoum (a prominent advocate of this new approach): “Maybe the time has come for [the Gulf Cooperation Council or the Arab League] to be overseen by leaders, managers, businessmen, heads of industry and entrepreneurs instead of foreign ministers.” He added, “Never underestimate your role for you are in the business of shaping lives, planning futures and building nations.”

The ruling families of the Gulf were among the most eager proponents of the retreat of the state and the restructuring of regimes as they adopted the watchwords of the global private sector, positioning their countries as “flexible, adaptive, entrepreneurial, and innovative”. They characterized themselves less as stewards of states or members of political regimes than as management committees of family-owned businesses. Indeed, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia was soon dubbed the “CEO of Al-Saud Inc.,” having taken control of Aramco, the national oil company. The prince quickly became “deeply entwined with the fabric of the global financial system” as the major investor in the $100 billion Vision Fund as well as in other international government funds. These were roles the rulers embraced publicly: As Ahmed Kanna, professor of anthropology and international studies, notes in Dubai: the City as Corporation, Al-Maktoum called himself the “CEO of Dubai”.

But the Gulf rulers were hardly alone in highlighting finance, entrepreneurship, and investment. Many governments, including a number of military regimes, seized the initiative to drive economic investment that had once been left to crony capitalist allies. In 2020, Algeria’s government, for example, announced that foreign investors could take majority stakes in projects in non-strategic sectors and took additional steps to seek new financing sources, including developing the Algiers stock exchange. Many of the countries of the region managed sovereign wealth funds—of the world’s top fifty sovereign wealth funds, twelve were in the Middle East, including Egypt’s at number forty-three. These funds were invested in projects designed both to generate domestic growth and employment and to partner with international private funds that typically made investments in riskier ventures such as technology firms, entertainment companies, and real estate projects—as befits funds responsible not to citizens, but to shareholders.

Other ways to attract private investment were proliferating as well. Various kinds of exceptional jurisdictions and privatized enclaves operating under special legal regimes, profiting and protecting their investors, appeared across the region. From special economic zones, self-contained “techno-cities” and science parks, gated residential communities and offshore cruise ships, to labor compounds and private islands, such enclaves provided a regional and even global class of wealthy entrepreneurs with bespoke legal regimes. Such regimes were afforded not only tax exemptions but dispute arbitration mechanisms outside the jurisdiction of national courts, and private security in lieu of the local police.

The role of the “shareholder” was increasingly complicating and even supplanting rights-based claims on governments. This citizen-as-economicactor may have been born in the Gulf but was also transregional; wherever there was foreign investment, there were local partners, agents, and representatives looking for shares of the wealth, and governments prepared to accommodate them. When protests against a law granting amnesty to corrupt civil servants broke out in Tunisia in 2017, in what researcher and political scientist Nadia Marzouki called a “shift from transitional to transactional justice,” former President Caid Essebsi argued that it was necessary to restore the confidence required to bring back investors after the upheavals of the uprisings earlier in the decade.

For the beneficiaries of such arrangements, the rights of citizenship are superseded by the privileges conveyed by patronage and protection in private systems of governance that are often inconsistent with, even contrary to, national law. This disregard for local law permitted the growth of what might be called an archipelago of enclaves stretching across the region that knit together transnational networks of special financing, exclusive investment opportunities, commercial security firms, isolated airports, cloistered villas, and private meetings.

Although Saudi Arabia had ambitious plans for Riyadh, one of the most dramatic efforts to create a new investment-ready governmental enclave is Egypt’s new administrative capital. As part of Egypt’s Vision 2030, the new capital is being built halfway between Cairo and Suez, with all of the national ministries in a dedicated campus, twenty-one residential districts, several thousand schools, a technology and innovation park, nearly seven hundred hospitals and clinics, 1,250 mosques and churches, a ninety thousand-seat football stadium, forty thousand hotel rooms, a theme park four times the size of Disneyland, and a new international airport. The population is expected to be 6.5 million; part of the avowed purpose was to decant the overcrowded downtown of Cairo with its overburdened and decaying infrastructure.

From the vantage point of the denizens of these kinds of gated communities with private security and special economic zones with exclusive jurisdiction, the purpose of government had shifted from securing independence or safeguarding stability to ensuring the ease of doing business. In the 21st century, the purpose of government was fast becoming to facilitate the ability of captains of industry and finance to fly from enclave to enclave, making deals, securing licenses, and visiting theme parks conveniently. In this context, establishing relations with Israel was merely a smart business arrangement; the Jewish state was understood as neither a nationalist settler-colony nor a sectarian regime, but as a business-friendly enclave of technology transfer, investment financing, and technological innovation.

The appeal of this new approach to governance in the Arab World—the promise of socially tolerant, economically prosperous illiberal autocracy— was considerable, at least for those who expected to benefit. It shared the “techno-optimism” of Silicon Valley, where companies from Facebook to Amazon transformed social life by making communication and commerce easier and more convenient, all the while creating vast invisible stores of surveillance data and fast growing disparities in wealth. Still reeling from the Arab Spring, many governments were, as political scientist Jon Alterman put it, “converging on a model that combines authoritarianism with a social safety net, strict limits on religious expression, a more liberalized social space, and an invigorated private sector. It might be called the ‘GCC consensus,’ but its practice reaches from Tunisia to Jordan and beyond”.

The Politics of Private Power and Public Risk
The visionaries understood both sides of the coin they were tendering. AlMaktoum’s first rule of leadership, for example, was that “processes, laws and systems” are to “serve the people, make their lives easier and more comfortable”—hardly a clarion call for freedom or social justice, but appealing in a context of decades of frustration and disappointment—and to that end, “they can be changed at any time”. These rulers are not subject to the rule of law nor accountable to citizens; they prefer consultants to voters, marketing to campaigning, customers to citizens.

The designers, promoters, and beneficiaries of this new pattern of Arab politics were optimists. As Yousef Al-Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates’ long-serving ambassador to Washington, put it: “What I’ve watched over the last several years is a shift in mindset, a shift in attitude; younger people are tired of conflict, they’re tired of ideology. They want solutions. They want jobs. They want what every young person around the world wants. We’re trying to approach long-standing issues with a completely different lens…essentially going from analog to digital.”

The challenge to this model of governance is the question of what will happen to those in the interstices, outside the enclaves. There were millions of people in southern Tunisia, across Libya, in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere across the region who were left outside, neglected by these new regimes, abandoned to fight over remnants of older political loyalties, nursing envy and grievance. Indeed, even within countries whose rulers were embracing the business-friendly future, there were those who saw themselves left behind. As historian Khaled Fahmy wrote of the Egyptian capital: “Assuming that the aim of building a new administrative capital is to alleviate the pressure from downtown Cairo where the majority of government offices are located, and assuming, for argument’s sake, that the 5 million inhabitants will actually be moved from overcrowded city, what will happen to the rest of us?”

“The rest of us” in the region have reason to worry. Companies solicitous of their shareholders, concerned for their customers, even willing to care for their employees, are not accountable to the people who don’t buy their shares, purchase their products, or produce their goods. In a world of competing business enterprises, who is responsible for the public interest?

Lebanon serves as a salutary, if disquieting, warning. After the end of the civil war, the Lebanese political elite, like many of its counterparts elsewhere in the region, used a mixture of sectarian identity politics and patronage to secure support. But the merger of business and politics was evident early in the role of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s construction company, Solidere, in the rebuilding of Beirut. According to the International Crisis Group, “In reality these leaders were mostly serving themselves—they have amassed considerable wealth in the post-war era. In the process, they neglected economic development and helped ruin the country’s finances.” By the opening of the third decade of the 21st century, they went on, Lebanon was “rapidly becoming a mosaic of disjointed fiefdoms in which political actors struggle, sometimes violently, to control access to basic resources and security. Extreme poverty is on the rise, threatening a humanitarian crisis and further destabilization”.

Lebanon’s humanitarian catastrophe was kept at bay by remittances sent by the millions of Lebanese living abroad—a private solution to a very public calamity. Might other private solutions to the challenge of providing public goods be found? Perhaps. We are all, as Ambassador Al-Otaiba put it, “in the very, very early stages of re-imagining what the Middle East looks like and how it operates”. However, in the absence of governments that see themselves as more than investors—responsible to citizens above shareholders, promoting constituents over customers—what is for some a tantalizing dream of opportunities may be a daunting vision of bleak prospects for those left behind.

The outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011 threw into question many of the core assumptions underpinning the predominant policy approaches in the Arab World. A decade’s worth of reform, reconstitution, and recapitulation has done little but exacerbate the several deep-rooted political, social, and economic crises in which the region finds itself still mired. Numerous intertwined armed conflicts in Syria, Libya, and Yemen have worsened an already fragile structure, while other nations like South Sudan and Lebanon teeter on the brink of collapse. Together, this puts an increasingly fragmented Arab World at an increasingly precarious position considering the geopolitical competition it faces from non-Arab powers such as Turkey, Iran, and Israel, not to mention the internal divisions generated by sub-state ethnic and sectarian strife.

The resulting strategic disarray has led to a pronounced absence of future-oriented, long-term visions for progress in the region––what can otherwise be thought of as a “futures deficit”. The overarching political preoccupation with remedying this “futures deficit” has, in turn, compounded economic hardship and poor governance in such a way that no current political program seems capable of addressing. The emphasis on the short-term goals of maintaining sovereign integrity, avoiding state collapse, mitigating intrastate violence, and eradicating armed conflict, although far from inconsequential, has come at the expense of formulating pathways to achieve alternative and potentially more enduring visions for the future of the Middle East.

In an effort to address this challenge of a “futures deficit” in the Arab World, and to mark the occasion of its centennial anniversary, the American University in Cairo launched an ambitious project under the title “AlMostaqbal: Envisioning a Better Arab Future”. AlMostaqbal, meaning “the future” in Arabic, brought together a distinguished group of forty leading Arab statesmen, intellectuals, and academics with a mandate to address a set of broad interrelated questions: How can we assess the current trajectory of the Arab World in light of the predominant security and economic policies adopted by its leading states? How can this trajectory be rectified and what corrective policies can be adopted to ensure mutual benefit? What are the different policy approaches that can be To fulfill this mandate, the participants of the AlMostaqbal project divided themselves into two working groups; the “Regional Conflict and Security Working Group” and the “Socio-Economic Working Group”, each producing an in-depth report which was subsequently incorporated into a blue-ribbon report published by AUC to document the work of the project as a whole.

The following is an excerpt of the major highlights of the report.

A Long Overdue Reckoning

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is one of the most fragmented in the world, plagued by a lack of security frameworks on one hand and viable socioeconomic planning on the other.

The deficit in regional security has stymied attempts to promote cooperation and mitigate common threats and has ushered in prevailing regional instability. For decades, the Arab World has undergone several transformations, often violent and chaotic, leaving the region more vulnerable to growing instability and insecurity. The Arab World is now caught in a vortex of intertwined armed conflicts in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, geopolitical competition, regional and international interventions, weakness of Arab states vis-à-vis their sub-state ethnic and sectarian loyalties, the threat of nuclear proliferation, as well as identity politics and rising humanitarian crises. Furthermore, these trends are compounded by the specter of terrorism, looming environmental crises, and poor governance. Rarely has the Arab World experienced together such holistic threats amid strategic disarray.

The breakdown in the region’s security environment proceeded in parallel with a general failure in addressing the region’s pressing socioeconomic challenges. The point of departure in assessing this reality is the acknowledgment that the position the combined Arab countries of the region occupy in the global division of labor has been both a cause and an effect of socioeconomic underperformance when compared to other regions of the world that could redefine their mode of specialization into higher-value niches (i.e., East Asia). Nevertheless, they have offered some opportunities for major human development achievements compared to other parts of the world, such as South Asia and different subregions in Africa outside North Africa. This is crucial in putting socioeconomic development in a global perspective and thus denying any explicit or tacit assumptions about the uniqueness or exceptionalism of the Arab MENA, which have infected much of the scholarship on the region.

The position occupied by the Arab MENA countries in the global division of labor raises two interrelated but conceptually separate questions. First, what does the Arab MENA produce for exchange with the rest of the world? This entails the descriptive questions of how the Arab MENA is tied to the global economy: What does it sell to the world and what does it import? How intensively are MENA-based firms integrated into global value chains? Second, how much does MENA benefit from its position in the world economic hierarchy, and how does this explain its socioeconomic development record thus far?

Surveying a Region in Disarray

These trajectories highlight the pressing need to formulate alternative policy approaches that can steer the region towards a different, more hopeful path. This in turn requires an in-depth assessment of the deep-seated drivers behind these trends; what are the structural and more immediate factors underlying these trajectories? To what extent are these factors located regional or globally? Which of these are more amenable to alternative policy frameworks?

The Weakening of the “Arab Core”

The security repercussions of the Arab uprisings are one example of the historical developments that contributed to the weakening of the Arab core of the regional order, which formed during the rise of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s. These uprisings broke out in 2011 against a backdrop of an already-unstable regional situation shaped mainly by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and polarization between the Arab powers.

Furthermore, the inability to forge a negotiated political contract to address such grievances and the parallel attempts by regimes to manage these disagreements by force ultimately militarized the uprisings. Several of them were transformed into civil wars—in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. This violent turn of the uprisings gave rise to transnational terrorism, regional and international intervention in Arab regional and domestic politics, and geopolitical rivalries.

Arab nationalism thus ceased to be the dominant ideational framework for the Arab governments or aspiration for the Arab peoples, and has gradually been superseded by a transnational ideology of Islamism, sectarianism, sub-national loyalties, and state-based nationalism. This shift paved the way for the legitimization of Turkish and Iranian intervention in different parts of the Arab World.

The Challenge of the Non-Arab Middle Powers

The failure of “Arab” solutions to the burgeoning security deficit ceded the diplomatic, military, and political initiative to the non-Arab periphery comprising Israel, Iran, and Turkey, which have had long, problematic historical relations with the Arab World. These middle powers have taken advantage of the Arab regional order to advance their own distinct regional interests. These three countries imposed geopolitical and ideational challenges For Iran, this framework is based on “resistance” to both Israel and the West, particularly the United States, and Shiite Islamic militancy. Turkey’s regional project is predicated on neo-Ottomanism and an Islamist Sunni ideological framework. Meanwhile, Israel seeks to prioritize forging relations with Arab countries to transcend its conflict with the Palestinians and pressure its primary adversaries.

Threats to Arab Regional Security: Intersecting Conflicts

The region’s multiple conflicts and rivalries have become more interconnected, complicating conflict management and resolution attempts. Civil wars are no longer internal affairs, and intersecting conflicts in the Arab World are not new. For example, the Syrian civil war began as a local uprising inspired by the precedent events in Tunisia and Egypt. The threat to the Al-Assad regime invited intervention from its allies.

The civil war fomented the intra-Sunni radicalization that had already plagued Iraq. Iraqi jihadists, mainly affiliates of Al-Qaeda, fought in Syria, as did the pro-Iran Iraqi Shiite-militias. Sunni jihadists mutated to form ISIS, which declared its “Caliphate” in 2014 after occupying a vast area along the Iraqi-Syrian border. This inspired other jihadists in the region and beyond to pay allegiance to ISIS. The Syrian war also had its ramifications on the fragile politics of Lebanon. As a result of the jihadists’ infiltration in the region of the Syrian-Lebanese border, Hezbollah was able to justify a more assertive posture as a counterweight to such groups.

Arab State Weakness

Although the Arab states had long suffered structural weaknesses since their independence, they did succeed, for the most part, in developing centralized and robust power centers in terms of penetrative and administrative capacities. Although most of the ruling regimes lacked popular legitimacy, thereby blurring the lines between the state and the regime, they were able to deliver the essential public goods and services, above all security, defense, and assertion of sovereignty.  This situation prevailed until the 1980s when these states reached their fiscal limits and had to painfully transition away from a social welfare state to a neoliberal model in which they attempted to cede much of the above functions to the private sector. State fragility is thus ubiquitous in the Arab World. Among the twenty-two members of the League of Arab States (LAS), only the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait were identified as highly stable countries according to the 2020 Fragile States Index. Meanwhile, Yemen, Syria, and Somalia are classified as a very high alert. On a regional level, the weakened structures of Arab states consolidated the ties between non-state actors and regional powers. These relations are thus enhanced due to the security vacuum resulting from the weakening of centralized state structures.

The Erosion of the Two-State Solution

The two-state solution has been recognized as the basis for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’s just and lasting settlement. However, the prospects for realizing a two-state solution are rapidly fading. Little meaningful progress has been achieved in the peace process since the last attempt at negotiations undertaken by the Obama administration in 2016.

The Trump administration’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in June 2018, along with U.S. recognition of the Golan Heights as part of Israel, were both manifestations of the departure in U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. Prospects for serious international intervention to revive the peace process are minimal, with no indication that the Biden administration will renew serious U.S. engagement toward a negotiated final status settlement.

Growing Militarization

Militarization can be understood as both a cause and a result of the region’s conflict and regional insecurity. Since the 1970s, the MENA region has been one of the most militarized regions in the world.

The region constitutes a major epicenter for international arms deals. Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest arms importer, receiving 11 percent of the world’s arms sales in 2020. The United States is Saudi Arabia’s largest supplier, providing 79 percent of its imports during the same period.

Militarization induces escalation but does not necessarily bolster deterrence. Miscalculation can push disputes and rivalries to armed conflict, be it direct or through proxies. The risk of miscalculation is high as problem-solving mechanisms are absent from the region’s security architecture.

What, How, and How Much?

A common denominator of all three empirical, theoretical, and normative dimensions of the AlMostaqbal project is the investigation of the position that the Arab MENA occupies—and should occupy—in the world. This section reflects research on the region from within the region, but not in isolation from the rest of the world. Conversely, it engages extensively with the extra-MENA economic, geopolitical, and intellectual context.

The point of departure is the conceptualization of the world economy as a hierarchy where better-positioned regions, nations, and firms produce and exchange higher value-added goods and services. Accordingly, socio-economic Furthermore, there has been a general inability to upgrade to higher-value-added manufactured goods or services. According to the World Bank, the share of high-tech exports in the MENA has remained negligible, indicating weak industrial policies and poor educational outcomes. Between 2007 and 2018, the ratio of high-technology exports to total manufactured exports averaged 5.9 percent for MENA compared to 29.76, 13.74, 7.48, and 6.07 for East Asia, Latin America, South Asia, and different sub-regions in Africa other than North Africa.

There were two main issues with these diversification efforts. On the one hand, they had little impact on redefining the niche the Arab MENA region occupied in the world economy. On the other, MENA showed a peculiar drive for diversification compared to almost all other regions of the Global South. In the MENA, industrialization remained relatively lower than other regions of the world, including South Asia and Africa (minus North Africa).

Human Development with Little Social Empowerment or Participation

Despite some impressive human development gains, their unequal distribution in the Arab MENA region and their quantitative bias should not be overlooked. Likewise, these indicators should also cover war-torn countries in the region such as Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Yemen which witnessed a significant deterioration in almost all aspects of human and physical development throughout the past decade.

Therefore, the particular mode of insertion of the Arab MENA as a supplier of raw materials, namely fossil fuels, did, somehow, pay off. It also indicates that some processes of redistribution of income did take place between and within the MENA countries and enabled this general improvement.

Also, it is essential to highlight that the Arab MENA is home to some of the countries with the highest per capita income globally, for example Qatar and the UAE. It also hosts some of the poorest, such as Yemen and Sudan. However, there is considerable evidence of significant disparities along most class, gender, generational, subnational, and ethno-sectarian lines, and the Arab MENA is home to the highest ratio of educated youth unemployment in the world.

Socioeconomic exclusion was often a cause and an effect of authoritarianism, poor governance, and conflict, creating a vicious circle that proved hard to escape, as revealed by the post-2011 dynamics. Throughout the past decade, the Arab MENA has shown the highest concentration of conflict between and within nations in the world. The MENA region has also been the seat of significant international protracted clashes.

In the same vein, social and economic inequalities were exacerbated by decades of neoliberal reforms, especially in the oil-poor countries, which resulted in the increased concentration of wealth and income in the hands of a few, often politically-connected elites at the expense of the majority. Rounds of neoliberalization did not give rise to competitive markets.

Weak International, Regional, and National Integration

It is essential to demonstrate that the MENA region “is still not integrated in regional or global value chains like other regions”. Using the World Bank Enterprise Survey to estimate the Arab MENA’s position in global value chains, the region is slightly outperforming South Asia but falling behind East Asia. However, these aggregated figures mask the reality of an overconcentration of international trade and investment flows in extractive industries, especially oil and other raw materials.

Not only does the Arab MENA suffer from a poor mode of global integration, it also shows remarkably low levels of regional amalgamation, once again expressed in terms of value chains. Intra-Arab MENA exchange has been predominantly in non-trade areas, through the exchange of capital and labor as part of the recycling of oil rents.

MENA in the Global Development Discourse: The Why Question

There is an evident need to change key development questions to address the Arab MENA region comprehensively. However, the rationale behind policy and institutional reform requires the intellectual positioning of the region within the global development discourse.

Prioritizing numerical growth and the attraction of foreign direct investment and export promotion, once known as the “Washington consensus fetishes” according to Dani Rodrik, came at an expense of the majority. Most importantly, continuous rounds of neoliberal reforms have not significantly altered the development trajectories undertaken by the countries in the region.

The paradigm of wellbeing equity is at the center of the present discussion. Emphasizing equity as the distribution of wellbeing implies two things; first, the distribution question should be held as a criterion for the success or failure of the development model rather than an after-the-fact, secondary concern. Second, equity concerns the absence of systematic, unnecessary, and preventable differences in wellbeing across groups in society.

Envisioning a More Promising Arab Future

The following policy recommendations are derived from the comprehensive discussions of the Regional Security and Socioeconomic working groups.

Recommendations for Regional Socioeconomic Policies:

i. The region needs to free market space for autonomous socioeconomic actors, which is possible in sectors not occupied by powerful, politically connected interests.

ii. Market-freeing reforms can thus be pursued in some areas of the economy in many Arab MENA countries where: a) the political resistance to the removal of specific market barriers is minimal; b) the cascading impact on the market is high and; c) the potential to generate a new social and economic constituency is the strongest.

iii. The growth of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) should be encouraged by offering better access to financial and physical capital and technology. The rise of robust SME strata would likely strengthen inter-firm linkages on the national scale, and potentially regionally as well. These strata need not contradict the interests of already powerful and connected actors either, as SMEs often operate in more labor-intensive sectors, unlike large enterprises. Moreover, SME growth can provide opportunities for the creation of supply chains for larger firms in productive sectors.

iv. Previous experience has revealed that markets do not automatically generate market actors; they emerge from sociopolitical processes that allow them to possess the capacity to produce and grow. Therefore, SME-development is ultimately part of a sociopolitical project that promotes an enabling environment in which to invest in the potentials of youth and women, the redress of structural inequalities, and the opening of prospects for development and mobility.

v. Improved national economic integration along the lines prescribed above is commensurate with a larger potential for regional integration. As a matter of fact, recently many Arab leaders have mentioned regional integration as part of long-term development schemes and/or regional security arrangements, such as the Saudi Arabia-Egypt-Jordan coordination in the Red Sea as well as the recent rapprochement between Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq. The real issue, however, seems to lie in the approach to regional integration rather than the lack of the long­sought-after political will or the failure to recognize the importance of the issue.

vi. The Arab MENA countries need to abandon the shallow trade liberalization approach they have followed in the past, which primarily focused on tariff reduction. A deeper form of integration, preferably on a sectoral basis, is a better alternative.

vii. Trade policies must be tied with industrial strategies to allow deeper forms of integration and the creation of regional value chains, a clear departure from the neoliberal stress on a minimal state role.

viii. Economic integration is a political endeavor on a regional scale. It is hard to imagine such a long-term and complex process in the absence of its strategic prioritization by the ruling incumbents in concerned nations. Despite the dampening past experiences in the Arab World, there might be room for the emergence of some regionalism in the wake of recent developments.

ix. Similarly, there is an opportunity to push for reform through the processes of economic reconstruction in war-torn and war-affected countries in the Arab MENA. By necessity, economic reconstruction is more encompassing than postwar stabilization. It would include not only the rehabilitation of basic services and infrastructure destroyed during war, but also the creation of a basic macro- and microeconomic institutional and policy framework necessary for the emergence of a viable economy providing employment opportunities allowing citizens to make a decent and licit living.

Recommendations for Alternative Security Policy Approaches

i. Prioritizing National and Human Security

As a result of the complexities of the current regional security landscape, national security and human security are, in fact, inseparable. This reciprocal relationship is nowhere more pronounced than in the Arab World. Threats to human security often translate into national security threats and vice versa.

To reverse the lasting, devastating impacts of conflict on human security, the following dimensions should be incorporated in the stabilization process:

a) Economic: ensuring that people are free from need by providing employment and decent incomes with functioning infrastructure.

b) Health: providing basic and universal health services, especially to the victims of violence, and establishing programs of rehabilitation.

c) Personal: ensuring the safety of citizens by reducing violence and crime.

d) Political: raising the level of political participation within an inclusive framework, ensuring basic human rights, and removing discrimination based on ethnicity, race, or political orientation.

e) Food: ensuring enough nutritious food is always available and accessible for all people.

f) Environmental: mitigating threats posed by the deterioration of natural resources and the consequences of an increasingly hazardous environment on the food security and safety of people.

ii. A Holistic Approach to Post-Conflict Stabilization and Reconstruction

The challenges of post-war reconstruction have become both more apparent and more pressing. Four countries caught up in conflict—Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Iraq—will face the urgent task of post-conflict reconstruction in the face of current domestic, regional, and international power dynamics. Reconstruction is not a process of the physical rebuilding of infrastructure. It is, by design, a political process, and the interplay between political and economic factors is essential in determining the prospects for post-war stabilization and reconstruction, especially in the MENA region’s competition environment.

iii. Addressing the Arab Conflict Resolution Policy Deficit

Amidst the multiple regional security crises facing the region, Arab approaches to regional conflicts have been marked by a pronounced “policy deficit,” and thus lack the initiative to devise conflict resolution processes within an Arab framework, or to contribute effectively to international conflict resolution processes. As a result of the inability of the region to address the region’s multiple conflicts within an “Arab” framework, the initiative was ceded to regional and outside actors.

Therefore, most current initiatives aimed at resolving the unfolding conflicts in the Arab World are proposed by external actors. The “Arab” region needs greater constructive engagement with regional and international conflict resolution processes, and to eventually anchor such processes in robust regional frameworks.

iv. Integrating the Practice of Arms Control as a Tool of Conflict Management

To counter the trend of growing militarization in the region, serious consideration must be given to developing regional arms control approaches. As a policy tool, arms control is predicated on achieving security at lower levels of armament by delinking areas of mutual agreement on different arms categories from broader conflicts between states.

v. Devising Regional Security Frameworks

The absence of regional security frameworks can thus be identified as a major policy challenge for envisioning alternative security futures for the Arab World and the broader MENA region. Most significant in this regard is the need for a region-wide security framework that includes both the countries of the Arab World and those that comprise the non-Arab Middle East: Israel, Iran, and Turkey.

The core approach behind devising a stable Middle East security architecture is anchored in a set of norms, operational procedures, and conflict resolution mechanisms as well as a gradually-evolving process based on the experiences of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Arms Control and Regional Security in the Middle East (ACRS) process. The following principles would constitute the elements of such a framework:

a) Giving priority to disarmament, arms control, and attempting to prohibit nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction;

b) A reorientation of the relations between the conflicting regional powers and the design of confidence-building measures to limit conflicts and enhance cooperation;

c) Development of general guidelines for regional practices of both security and political natures. These could include combating terrorism; the illicit arms and drugs trade; noninterference in the internal affairs of others; and ensuring good neighborly relations;

d) Designing a Middle Eastern common human rights declaration to protect human security, predicated on the idea that the wellbeing of the individual will lead to the wellbeing of the community;

e) Middle East countries must reach agreements toward a joint regional security agenda while considering regional and international threats;

f) Establish proactive diplomatic and conflict resolution missions to settle the conflicts within the region in order to stabilize regional security and prevent superpowers from using the region as a proxy battlefield.

vi. Preserving the Tenets of the Two-State Solution

The continuing stalemate in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, including the potential total demise of the prospects for a two-state solution to the conflict, continues to be a major source of regional instability. The current status quo is deceptive and, simultaneously, unsustainable. Consequently, it is the recommendation of the working group that the major focus of Arab efforts be toward preserving the tenets for a viable two-state solution. The unfortunate but realistic assessment finds that the conditions for such a solution are not currently present, and the prospects for their revival are remote in the near term. However, this should not preclude concrete policies seeking to preserve the tenets of the two-state solution as a minimal objective.

vii. Leveraging the Abraham Accords to revive the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative

The numerous cooperation agreements enacted in the context of recent normalization agreements between Morocco, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Israel in the fields of energy, commerce, and security constitute valuable leverage that can be utilized toward reviving the prospects of a negotiated solution. In particular, the focus should be on reviving the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative (API). At the heart of the API was an approach predicated on providing regional security guarantees for Israel within the context of a just and lasting settlement to the conflict based on ending Israel’s occupation of Arab territories; the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with its capital in East Jerusalem; and a just settlement of the Palestinian refugee problem.

viii. Reinforcing the Diplomatic Parameters of the Two-State Solution

The prolonged absence of any negotiation process between Israel and the Palestinians highlights the urgency of reinforcing the basic tenets of the two-state framework diplomatically to foreclose the prospect of future diplomatic initiatives that would seek to accommodate the “prevailing realities on the ground,” as was the case with the Trump plan. Such an effort could take the form of different steps, including:

• Introducing a new UN Security Council Resolution restating the fundamental principles of a two-state solution. This can be done via the UAE during its upcoming tenure as a non-permanent member of the Council;
• A new League of Arab States resolution reinforcing the principles of the API;
• Pressuring the Biden administration to rectify the decision to relocate the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. At a minimum, the United States should commit to opening a consulate in East Jerusalem at the earliest possible date.

ix. Supporting Efforts Towards Palestinian Reconciliation

The ongoing division within the Palestinian national movement between Fatah and Hamas, mirrored in the territorial division between the West Bank and Gaza, constitutes one of the greatest obstacles toward a two-state solution. Various Arab and international efforts, on the part of Egypt in particular, have thus far failed to overcome this division. Greater Arab political support should be provided in order to increase the prospects of success for such efforts.

There are some fourteen million people currently living under Israeli rule between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Half of them, around seven million Israeli Jews living on both sides of the 1967 border or “Green Line”, enjoy full citizenship rights. The other half—seven million Palestinians—enjoy no such rights. The bulk of these Palestinians, some 5.2 million, are stateless persons living under various forms of Israeli military rule in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

Over the past quarter century, the conventional wisdom in Washington and among the wider international community has held that the solution to this problem could only be achieved through a territorial partition resulting in two independent states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security. Pundits and policymakers alike had agreed that the two-state solution would involve establishing an independent Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders encompassing Gaza and virtually all of the West Bank. Such a solution would allow for limited and mutually agreed upon land swaps, including a sovereign Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, plus the return of an agreed upon number of Palestinian refugees, who will receive some form of compensation.

While such an outcome remains theoretically achievable, a variety of physical as well as political developments, especially since 1993, have all but foreclosed the possibility of a negotiated two-state solution—at least the kind of territorial partition envisioned in previous negotiations—to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The disintegration of the Oslo process (a five-year interim arrangement that lasted more than twenty-eight years and which has been dying a slow, tortured death since 2000) and the likely demise of a two-state solution requires us to rethink old assumptions and explore new possibilities. These may include alternative solutions like the possibility of one state with equal citizenship or confederation, while addressing the unequal and repressive reality on the ground.

Collapsing Pillars

While the international community continues to uphold the two-state framework, most of the pillars of a negotiated two-state solution have in practical terms either collapsed or are collapsing. The Oslo process has effectively run its course. Numerous rounds of formal negotiations—in 2000-01, 2007-08, 2012, and finally 2013-14—along with an array of protocols, memorandums, commissions of inquiry, peace plans, and other initiatives have failed to produce a conflict-ending agreement or prevent periodic outbreaks of violence. The few conflict mitigation mechanisms that had existed, such as the Quartet’s ill-fated “Roadmap for Peace” plan in 2003, have long since been abandoned, while successive U.S. administrations—including those of Barack Obama and Joe Biden—have shown little interest in reviving them or establishing new ones.

The slow demise of the Oslo process has occurred in parallel with that of its signature achievement: the Palestinian Authority (PA). Once seen as the embryo of a future Palestinian state, the PA is now facing its own inexorable decline thanks to a perfect storm of internal and external threats. Notwithstanding the international community’s rhetorical support for a two-state solution, international donor aid to the PA has dropped by more than 85 percent since 2008. The sharp decline in donor aid, exacerbated by the sweeping aid cuts of the Trump era, as well as the loss of tax transfers collected by Israel on the Palestinians’ behalf, have put the PA on the brink of financial bankruptcy. Internally, the debilitating fourteen-year division between President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip has paralyzed Palestinian institutional politics and eroded the legitimacy of the Palestinian leadership. The division also helped fuel violence and instability, particularly in Gaza.

Keenly aware of his growing weakness and declining legitimacy, Abbas has generally responded by pursuing periodic attempts at reconciliation with Hamas, working to internationalize the conflict through the United Nations and other international bodies, and participating in U.S.-sponsored peace negotiations. Yet, instead of piecing these three approaches together into a comprehensive political strategy, Abbas has opted to pivot back and forth between all three tracks without fully committing to any of them as a means of ensuring his own political survival. Despite momentary boosts to his popularity, Abbas’s domestic standing has continued to decline, with polls in recent years consistently showing between two-thirds and three-fourths of Palestinians saying they want Abbas to resign. Abbas’s decision to cancel long-delayed national elections at the last minute in the spring of 2021, along with the murder of Nizar Banat—a popular political activist and outspoken critic of Abbas—at the hands of PA security forces, have underscored the increasingly erratic and repressive nature of his leadership.

The failings of the peace process and the PA stand in stark contrast to the enormous success of Israel’s ever-expanding settlement enterprise, which now dominates both the physical and political landscape of the West Bank. Since the start of the Oslo process, Israel’s settler population has soared from roughly 250 thousand in 1993 to nearly 700 thousand today. Although formal annexation has been taken off the agenda—for the moment at least—de facto annexation in the form of ongoing settlement expansion and the continued fragmentation of Palestinian territory has continued unabated, even as the international community looks on. Moreover, the absence of any meaningful consequences— economic, political, or otherwise—has emboldened Israel’s settler movement and other “Greater Israel” proponents in domestic politics and fueled their sense of triumphalism. As a result, settlement projects—such as so-called “doomsday” settlements in Jerusalem, and the wholesale removal of Palestinian communities, including the forced evictions of dozens of Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan—which were once seen as redlines, are now moving forward in earnest.

Perhaps the clearest sign of the impending demise of the two-state solution can be seen in the fact that the precarious consensus within Israeli, Palestinian, and American politics that has kept the concept afloat during the last two decades is now collapsing on all sides. The PA leadership, which has staked its political fate on the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, remains firmly committed to the goal of two states. Even Hamas, which has a long history of violent opposition to the Oslo process and rejects any recognition of Israel, has steadily come under the two-state consensus.

In contrast to the political echelon, however, ordinary Palestinians in the occupied territories, the constituency that historically has been the most supportive of a West Bank/Gaza state, are abandoning the two-state vision in ever greater numbers. This is one of the many growing gaps between the Palestinian public and the political leadership in Ramallah. According to a September 2021 poll, just 36 percent of Palestinians said they still supported a two-state solution— the lowest proportion since the signing of the Oslo agreement in 1993. As Palestinian public opinion shifts against the two-state solution, Palestinian political factions, including the next generation of Fatah leaders, may have no choice but to follow suit.

In Israel, meanwhile, the political consensus around two states has already collapsed. Right-wing parties opposed to Palestinian statehood have dominated the Knesset and successive governments for most of the last two decades and the traditional peace camp has all but disappeared. Current Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is from the hard-right Yamina Party and, like his long-serving predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu, has explicitly ruled out the possibility of a Palestinian state or even a return to negotiations. While the Jewish Israeli public remains split—with some 41 percent supporting and 48 percent opposing a two-state solution—a majority of Israelis favor retaining the status quo.

A similar trend can be seen in the United States. One of the two major political parties, the Republicans, has formally abandoned the goal of two states. As Israeli politics have shifted further to the right, so too has the Republican Party. Even before Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the Republican Party had already officially removed references to a two-state solution from their party platform while declaring that it “reject[s] the false notion that Israel is an occupier”. Moreover, once in office, the Trump administration worked to translate this approach into policy.

In addition to recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital (thereby overturning 70 years of U.S. policy and international consensus) and eliminating all forms of U.S. aid to the Palestinians, the Trump administration worked to dismantle the basic principles that had undergirded the peace process for more than half a century. This included abandoning UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called for ending Israel’s occupation on the basis of “land for peace,” as well as the two-state solution itself. Trump’s so-called “Prosperity to Peace” plan, which was released in January 2020 and called for a Palestinian “state” made up of disconnected fragments of territory surrounded and controlled by Israel, was more reminiscent of the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa than anything that might reasonably be called a sovereign state. At the same time, the administration worked to erase the distinction between Israel and the territories it occupied by declaring that it would no longer consider Israeli settlements to be illegal. The Trump White House even went as far as requiring products originating in the settlements to be labeled as “made in Israel”.

Moreover, regional trends are working against the two-state solution. While Arab Gulf states have significantly cut financial assistance to the PA—literally divesting from a future Palestinian state—the so-called Abraham Accords (a series of normalization agreements between Israel and various Arab states in late 2020) have further marginalized the Palestinians politically. The normalization deals between Israel and both the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, in addition to nullifying the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, are key signs that leading Arab states have effectively moved on from a two-state solution and are no longer willing to hold up their bilateral or geopolitical interests waiting for the “unicorn” of a Palestinian state.

The argument put forward by some that normalizing states might leverage their budding relations with Israel in the service of the Palestinians or a two-state solution has amounted to little more than wishful thinking. Neither the UAE nor Bahrain, for example, attempted to intervene during the crisis surrounding the impending eviction of Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood or during the subsequent fighting in Gaza last May. Also, these Arab states did not attempt to use their influence in response to the recent announcement that Israel plans to build more than three thousand new settlement housing units, (which even earned a rare rebuke from the Biden administration) or to the ongoing threats to the status quo arrangement in relation to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. On the other hand, UAE officials have had little compunction about doing business with Israeli settlers or investing in Israeli occupation infrastructure like checkpoints.

Biden: Hyper-minimalism

Joe Biden’s arrival in the White House has given new hope to the proponents of two states, which despite everything remains at least theoretically achievable. However, the Biden administration’s decidedly minimalist approach to the issue is likely to leave two-state supporters disappointed. Despite reaffirming the goal of two states, the Biden administration has made it clear that the issue is not a priority and that it sees little hope in reviving a diplomatic process. In the meantime, it has stressed its desire to avoid public disagreements with Israel over issues like Israeli settlement expansion. Moreover, apart from restoring aid to the Palestinians—albeit at more modest levels than in previous years—and promising to reopen the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, the Biden administration seems content to maintain the status quo. In addition to maintaining the previous administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, key elements of the Trump agenda—such as the reversal of longstanding State Department policy on the illegality of Israeli settlements and new “rules of origin” guidelines legitimizing Israeli settlements—remain in place. These all raise real questions about the administration’s commitment to Resolution 242.

The May 2021 crisis sparked by the pending expulsions of Palestinian families in Jerusalem and the ensuing war in Gaza further highlighted the administration’s minimalist approach. Throughout the eleven-day conflict, which left around 250 Palestinians and twelve Israelis dead, the administration’s response consisted mainly of blanket support for Israel and its right to defend itself while repeatedly blocking attempts by the Security Council to call for an immediate ceasefire.

The one new element introduced by the Biden administration was the oft-repeated assertion that Israelis and Palestinians “deserve equal measures of security, freedom, opportunity, and dignity”—an apparent nod to its claim that it was recentering human rights as a pillar of U.S. foreign policy. The formula is all the more notable in light of the glaring asymmetry that exists between Israelis and Palestinians in all of these. Whereas Israelis on both sides of the 1967 line enjoy relatively high levels of “freedom, security, and prosperity,” the 5.2 million Palestinians living in the occupied territories enjoy very little of these. Although no previous U.S. administration has so explicitly couched the conflict in terms of basic rights and equality, the Biden administration has not clarified what “equal measures” would mean in practice or how they might be achieved, much less upheld these principles through its actions. If nothing else, the formula signals a shift in the official policy discourse toward a more values-based approach. Indeed, Israel’s recent designation of six prominent and well-respected Palestinian human rights groups as “terrorist organizations,” widely seen as an attack on Palestinian civil society, suggests that Israeli officials also understand the growing relevance of a rights-based approach.

In contrast, any attempt to salvage a two-state solution would require a different approach than what we have seen in the past and considerably more effort and political capital than the current administration seems willing to invest. For one, any new process should uphold and reaffirm international norms—Resolution 242, the unacceptability of acquiring land by force, and the goal of ending Israeli occupation—with the same force and clarity that the Trump administration sought to do away with them. The sheer magnitude of the power asymmetry between Israel and the Palestinians requires an almost fundamentalist adherence to these principles. At the same time, a credible peace process must focus on altering, and ultimately reversing, the dynamics that drive the conflict, namely Israel’s occupation and all that it entails, including settlement expansion, land confiscations, home demolitions, expulsions, and other measures aimed at deepening Israeli control over the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It must also consider ending the Gaza blockade and the ongoing Palestinian political division. Most crucially, there must be concrete mechanisms of implementation and accountability, both of which were absent from the Oslo accords and U.S. mediation, including tangible consequences— whether economic, political, or diplomatic—for non-compliance and other violations by either side.

All of these would necessarily entail applying pressure on Israel, as both the occupying power and the stronger party, including the possibility of linking Israel’s $3.8 billion annual U.S. military aid package to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians—something Biden, like his predecessor, has categorically ruled out. In the absence of any meaningful pressure, Israeli leaders have no incentive to alter the status quo much less take the kinds of difficult and politically unpopular steps needed to achieve a two-state solution such as the evacuation of tens of thousands of Jewish settlers, the transfer of biblically-significant West Bank territory to Palestinian sovereignty, and perhaps most difficult of all, dividing Jerusalem.

Neither One State nor Two

The probable end of the two-state solution does not mean alternative models are any more viable, including the old-new idea of a single state with equal citizenship rights for both Israeli Jews and Arab Palestinians. The idea of a binational state for Arabs and Jews was first seriously broached by the renowned Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said at the apex of the Oslo process, and it has steadily gained ground among diaspora Palestinians and, more recently, among younger Palestinians in the occupied territories. Unlike the old one-state vision embraced by the PLO prior to 1988, which called for undoing the events of 1948, the contemporary binational vision imagines a more straightforward and egalitarian future based on existing demographic realities in the whole of Israel/Palestine. The appeal of equal citizenship and “one person/one vote” is difficult to deny. The main obstacles to the one-state vision, however, are not moral but political—most notably how to reconcile the competing (and often mutually exclusive) nationalist narratives of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, as well as the vast power asymmetry between the two groups. While growing numbers of Palestinians are embracing the idea of one state, the vast majority of Israeli Jews—which remains the dominant group on both sides of the Green Line— remains steadfastly opposed to the enfranchisement of millions of Palestinians, which they see as ending the Jewish character of the state.

Even on the Palestinian side, where support for one equal state is strongest, political support for one state has not yet reached a critical mass. Although growing numbers of Palestinians in the occupied territories, particularly the youth, are embracing the idea, there is currently no organized Palestinian political movement, party, or actor pushing for a one-state solution. Nevertheless, it may only be a matter of time before the idea of one state with equal rights begins to take hold in Palestinian and perhaps even in Israeli politics. After all, it was not so long ago that the idea of two states for two peoples, now considered conventional wisdom, was itself dismissed as both unrealistic and unachievable, including in Washington where the idea did not catch on until the 1990s.

There is another set of options that may offer a reasonably equitable solution to the conflict, but which has largely been overlooked by American policymakers, namely the idea of shared sovereignty, or confederation, which envisions the creation of two states but without physical or territorial separation. Under the “two states in one space” model, there would be two states, Israel and Palestine, along the 1967 border with each side having its own parliament and governing bodies but with open borders in which citizens of both states enjoy full freedom of movement, and even residency, in the whole of the land between the river and the sea.

The chief advantage of confederation is in the recognition that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are prepared to abandon their own national identities and narratives, and that both groups continue to maintain an attachment to both sides of the 1967 border. Confederation also unlocks the possibility of new solutions to some of the most intractable issues of the conflict. Thus, it would be possible to imagine the return of large numbers of Palestinian refugees to their former homes or villages in Israel without altering Israel’s demographic balance. Likewise, certain settler populations might be allowed to remain as residents of a Palestinian state while maintaining their citizenship in Israel, thus reducing the political and financial costs associated with a largescale evacuation by Israel while preserving the contiguity of a Palestinian state. The idea of open borders also helps to avoid many of the practical problems arising from a territorial division of Jerusalem, particularly in the highly contentious Old City and its surroundings.

On the other hand, with many more “moving parts” to connect, confederation would be considerably more difficult to negotiate than either the traditional two-state or one-state models. The confederal model also assumes a much greater level of trust and goodwill between the parties than presently exists, making practical arrangements on settlements, internal security, and defense against external threats difficult, if not impossible, to imagine, particularly in light of the massive power asymmetry between the two sides. Moreover, while confederation seems to be gaining traction among growing numbers of academics and political elites, unlike both the two-state and one-state models, it does not yet have a significant popular or grassroots constituency.

Changing the Status Quo

In the meantime, with no realistic prospect of achieving any of these theoretical solutions in the foreseeable future—either one state, two states, or confederation—we are left with the unequal one-state reality that exists on the ground.

In the past, scholars and diplomats could defer the uncomfortable issues raised by this “separate and unequal” reality by focusing on the peace process and the understanding that Israel’s occupation was temporary. However, the obsolescence of the Oslo framework along with the growing understanding that Israel’s fifty-four-year occupation is anything but temporary, have forced policymakers and analysts to reconsider how they think about the situation in Israel/Palestine. Not surprisingly, the prospect of permanent Israeli rule over five million stateless and disenfranchised Palestinians has led a number of international and Israeli human rights groups to conclude that it is guilty of apartheid. Moreover, the more people conclude that a two-state solution is no longer reachable, the more prominent the “apartheid” framing is likely to become.

While the goal of two states for two peoples remains the guiding framework in Washington and the broader international community, the likely foreclosing of the classic two-state model makes it necessary to now look seriously at alternatives like one egalitarian state and various types of confederation, while working to address the gross inequality that exists on the ground today. Any solution—whether one state, confederation, or even the traditional two-state model—requires a fundamental change to the power dynamics between the Israelis and the Palestinians. There is no solution that does not entail Israel, and specifically Israeli Jews, giving up some degree of power and privilege. The question of which of the three scenarios is most feasible, therefore, may ultimately depend on which one is deemed the least costly for Israeli Jews as the dominant group. However, as long as the status quo remains less costly than any of these other scenarios, Israeli leaders will have no reason to ever make such a choice.

In recent years, as obstacles to achieving the two-state solution (2SS) to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict deepened and proliferated, those declaring its death have likewise multiplied. In op-eds and think tanks across the Middle East and influential capitals around the world, an increasing number of voices have come to view the “two states for two peoples” paradigm as a notion whose time has passed.

For about three decades, especially since the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991 and the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the underlying assumption of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking efforts has been the necessity of separating Israelis and Palestinians into two independent states. Today, both those who remain supportive of the 2SS and those who see it as impossible have ample evidence to support their case. It is important for public policy makers to examine the arguments of both sides and the suggested alternatives if an agreed separation is not possible, and to assess what all this means for the future of the conflict.

There are widely varying understandings of what constitutes the 2SS, a one-state approach, and other suggested alternatives for resolving the conflict. International consensus on the two-state solution calls for the establishment of a sovereign, democratic, contiguous, and viable Palestinian state based on the 1949 armistice lines that prevailed until the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. This would have Palestinians living next to an Israeli state in peace and security— with East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine and West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. However, the predominant thinking espoused for years by Israeli political leaders never included full or effective sovereignty for Palestinians and instead presented a vision closer to enhanced autonomy. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to the potential end goal as “state-minus,” similar to U.S. President Donald Trump’s approach which envisioned a Palestinian “state” with almost no real attributes of a state. Current Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett thought that the Trump plan leaned too far in the direction of a Palestinian state.

Meanwhile, there are different understandings of a one-state approach. The view adhering to liberal values of democracy and human rights envisages a state with equal rights for all those inhabiting historic Palestine, regardless of race, ethnicity, and religion, with little agreement on how it will deal with Palestinian refugees. However, there are Israelis who would define a one-state outcome as a Jewish state from the river to the sea, with a Palestinian population that does not enjoy the same rights as Israelis, living in Bantustans similar to those proposed in the Trump plan.

The Case for Burying the Two-State Solution

The strongest argument for abandoning the 2SS is the seeming impossibility of separating the two peoples. For decades, unilateral Israeli steps have created new realities on the ground. Israeli settlements are now so far into the West Bank and so enmeshed in Israeli life that they seem to be an irreversible reality, making the establishment of a Palestinian state a near impossibility. Forty years ago, in 1982, Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Meron Benvenisti warned that the establishment of a two-state solution was already, even then, almost impossible because a hundred thousand Jewish settlers would soon inhabit the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Today, there are an estimated 650 thousand settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Even staunch supporters of the 2SS admit the tipping point that would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state is fast approaching. While it is difficult to say exactly what number of Israeli settlers or how much land appropriation in the West Bank would make the two-state solution an impossibility, many pundits and governmental leaders agree that we are moving toward settler levels that would result in destroying the two-state paradigm. One need look no further than the previous Israeli government’s annexation plans which were supported by the Trump administration and, had they been fully implemented, would have constituted the end of the two-state solution.

Moreover, the leadership and political will necessary to achieve the 2SS is absent. In different ways, both Israeli and Palestinian leaders are not ready to come to the negotiating table. In 2016, former Secretary of State John Kerry referred to the Israeli coalition as “the most right-wing in Israel’s history”. Since then, Israel has moved further to the right. This means that the international community must wrestle with an increasingly uncompromising Israel that is unwilling to accept any equitable territorial compromise. Furthermore, the continued Palestinian division between Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Fatah in the West Bank is weakening the Palestinians’ negotiating position. Trust between the Palestinians and the Israelis remains low, and the risks taken for peace by Sadat in the 1970s and Rabin in the 1990s will not be repeated by current Palestinian or Israeli leaders.

Another roadblock in the implementation of the two-state solution is that the international community has never mustered the will to effectively spur the parties toward it. Current trends suggest that this will continue to be the case. Most Arab countries, the United States, and other powers are preoccupied with more pressing priorities central to their own national interests. The United States has taken steps to reduce its footprint in the region and is focusing on great power competition, climate change, COVID-19 implications, and migration. When Washington looks at the Middle East, U.S. leadership is singularly prioritizing the Iranian nuclear file. The European Union has similar preoccupations in addition to dealing with the repercussions of Brexit. Pertinent Middle East actors are no different when it comes to prioritizing a host of national and regional challenges over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This dramatically reduces the international pressure necessary to urge parties— particularly Israel—to take meaningful steps toward peace.

At the same time, there are continued efforts to hollow out the concept of the 2SS. Israeli leaders have used terms such as “state-minus” and “autonomy-plus,” but few are willing to entertain a sovereign state for the Palestinians as defined by international law. The Trump administration further weakened the prospects of the two-state solution. Initially, Trump indicated support for the 2SS, but then indicated indifference, offering support for one state, two states, or whatever the parties would agree on. And then, before announcing its plan in January 2020, the Trump administration stated that the new plan was not based on the 2SS. When his Peace to Prosperity plan failed to garner support and was criticized for being heavily skewed toward Israel, Trump reframed his narrative indicating that the plan was based on a “realistic two-state solution,” which ultimately only epitomized for many onlookers the hollowness of his two-state concept.

The Biden administration clearly supports the 2SS, and opposes settlement expansion, but is struggling to reverse what it considers unjustified policies of the previous administration. While the Biden campaign promised to reopen the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, this was not actualized once in office. Other challenges over the past year have included reversing Trump’s decision to remove designation of the occupied Palestinian territory from the website of the State Department, acknowledging the illegality of Israeli settlements, removing “made in Israel” labels on settlement products, and reopening the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) mission in Washington. Given these multiple challenges and the limited political capital the administration is willing to expend on this conflict, a diplomatic breakthrough is unlikely.

Another challenge to the two-state solution is that the asymmetry of power between the Israelis and Palestinians has been deepening over the years. The 2SS was based on a premise of Israel’s conceding land occupied in 1967 in return for peace. Israel gained power and continued its unchecked actions, while the strength of the Palestinian national movement has significantly declined.

In 2002, and working within the two-state solution model, Arab countries offered incentives for Israel to recognize an independent Palestine along the 1967 lines. The Arab Peace Initiative (API) promised Israel normal diplomatic relations with all Arab countries, extended later to all Islamic countries, in return for ending occupation and establishing the Palestinian state. In 2020, four Arab countries normalized relations with Israel for reasons that are unrelated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, except for the agreement with the United Arab Emirates that was linked with Israel suspending its annexation plans. This dramatically reduced the significance of a crucial dimension of the API. At the same time, Palestinians were becoming even weaker because of their continued divisions, deteriorating governance and public support, and the shifting priorities mentioned above that have negatively affected the level of political support that they had enjoyed for decades.

Within the realm of the two-state paradigm, the Palestinians feel they have already made a historic concession and have nothing left to concede in terms of territory. In 1988, after decades of determined rejection of compromise with Israel, the PLO implicitly recognized Israel and accepted the creation of a Palestinian state on the land occupied by Israel in 1967—representing only 22 percent of what they believed rightfully belonged to the Palestinian people. More recently, they further agreed to limited territorial swaps on a one-to-one basis to accommodate incorporating a number of major settlements within Israel. In all permanent status negotiations, Palestinians have been pressured by the United States to agree to further concessions and have adamantly refused. They will not agree to any additional territorial concessions and the next shift in their position will most likely adopt the one-state approach. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas warned as much in his last statement in the United Nations General Assembly, the most forceful he has ever been on this alternative.

When Israel built the Separation Wall in 2002, one aim was to expropriate 9.4 percent of the occupied West Bank territory into Israel. As occupation continued and the Trump plan accommodated all the Israeli requests, Israeli occupation plans called for annexing 30 percent of the occupied territories’ most fertile land and water resources in exchange for 13.5 percent of Israeli arid land in the Negev Desert. The Trump administration’s “realistic two-state”—which twisted itself in knots to co-opt the 2SS—was vehemently opposed by the Palestinians as the plan did not secure a Palestinian state at all. When historians look back, they may cite the Trump plan as one of the clearest nails in the coffin of the 2SS.

If the issue of security remained high on the Israeli list of concerns, Arab countries and the international community have stated their willingness to address Israel’s legitimate security concerns in a balanced and effective manner. This position was included in the peace agreements signed between Israel and both Egypt (in 1979) and Jordan (in 1994). It is also understood that a future Palestinian state would be demilitarized.

But over time, numerous Israeli policies—settlement expansion, creeping annexation, demolishing houses, evictions, revoking residencies—have proven unnecessary for Israel’s security. Rather, they aim at territorial expansion with the underlying goal of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state.

All these developments lead many to argue that Israel will not agree to a compromise that Palestinians can accept, making a two-state solution impossible. A drumbeat seems to be growing that, if separation of these two peoples will ultimately be impossible, a global political movement for equal rights—akin in approach to the South African anti-apartheid struggle—may be the future solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Exploring the Alternatives

The growing discourse among experts asserting that the 2SS has failed argues that if current Israeli practices continue, the result will be an apartheid state and/ or instability that could lead to the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank. Both outcomes would be politically unacceptable, morally unpalatable, and devastating for all parties involved.

Concerns around such a dystopian future are not new. At the end of his term, Secretary Kerry warned that “if the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic, it cannot be both, and it won’t ever really be at peace”.  It is not coincidental that the Trump plan proposed redrawing the Israeli border to transfer around 300,000 Arab Israelis to the Palestinian entity. Mass expulsion is a major Jordanian concern as Israel may try a solution at Jordan’s expense if the two-state solution fails. Thus, an active search for alternatives has intensified— though virtually all alternatives come up short on meeting the aspirations of both sides and may create as many problems as they aim to solve.

Increasingly, the one-state approach is presented as the main alternative. Support for this approach—including by many who previously supported the 2SS—is borne out of the failure to advance toward the two-state solution. Alternatively, a recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace urged the Biden administration to adopt a “rights-first approach” that would “prioritize protecting the rights and human security of Palestinians and Israelis over maintaining a peace process and attempting short-term fixes.” The argument is nuanced and complex but remains equally difficult to achieve.

Furthermore, confederation models have been envisaging a confederate agreement in which Israelis and Palestinians would have separate governments. Although the Century Foundation, Brookings, and Carnegie have examined the confederation model and have called on the Biden administration to pursue it, it has not received meaningful political attention. While some view a confederation model as a replacement for a 2SS, others suggest that this approach does not necessarily replace the two-state solution but could change the contours of negotiations in a way that would make the 2SS more plausible. However, an Israeli-Palestinian confederation would be extremely difficult to negotiate and implement as it is both a formula to separate and unite Palestinians and Israelis. The two sides would need to prepare themselves for if, or when, the confederation fails as this would result in a return to the two-state approach.

The Two-State Solution Is the Only Route to Achieving Peace

Those who persist in advocating for the 2SS recognize that its likelihood is rapidly fading. Nevertheless, it remains the position adopted by the international community and continues to be held by the key stakeholders. Netanyahu himself endorsed the two states as a goal in 2009, though he continued to work against it. Among the public, the 2SS still maintains a plurality of support that no other approach enjoys. So while a 2SS may be impossible, forcing a one-state outcome may be equally impossible for many reasons.

The one state will not be able to accommodate two diametrically opposed narratives. For example, Israel’s day of joyfully celebrating its independence will continue to be a day on which Palestinians mourn their catastrophe (the Nakba). Unless ways can be found for these two narratives to coexist and until both sides can forge a shared national vision for the future, the one-state approach would be a recipe for continuous tension, violence, conflict, and ultimately a situation resulting in perpetual civil strife.

Another major challenge is demography. Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the number of Palestinians already exceeds the number of Israeli Jews. Additionally, the issue of refugee return will be consequential. In a one-state option, the law cannot continue to allow any Jew in the world to receive automatic citizenship, while denying Palestinian refugees the right to return to the one state or denying first-degree relatives of Arab Israelis the right to become citizens of this state. Tensions are already close to the surface over forging a shared society between Israel’s Arab minority and Israeli Jews. In a one-state context, the demographic challenge will be magnified, and Jews will eventually become a diminishing minority, which is a situation that Israel, the most powerful party in the conflict, will never accept.

A one-state approach could hypothetically overcome some of the difficulties associated with settlements and borders. However, it will make many other issues more contentious. The name of the country, its flag, national anthem, and all its laws and policies will need to be jointly navigated and determined. So will merging governmental and security institutions—dealing with Israeli nuclear weapons; bridging economic gaps; identification of friend and foe; as well as dealing with extremist groups on both sides, which will be daunting whether it is Hamas and Islamic Jihad or the Kahanist movement and those that insist on having Jewish prayers in the Al-Aqsa complex.

Efforts will need to be made to find ways to balance the interests of Palestinians and Israelis in a manner that ensures neither of them have exclusive control of the land. However, in a one-state solution, it is more likely that one identity will dominate or endeavor to dominate the other, either by force or by sheer numbers. In a one-state option, one side or both will feel underrepresented; it seems clear that the two national identities are hardening rather than softening, with less respect for the identity and history of the opposing society. Ultimately, neither side is genuinely interested in sharing territory or sovereignty. Israel will not abandon its Jewish identity, and the Palestinians will not abandon their aspirations for sovereignty and self-determination. The asymmetry of power that prevents the 2SS will also prevent a one-state approach.

Where to Go from Here?

Those in despair over the state of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking are warranted in their dismay. Yet, many hope that the two-state solution can re-emerge after being sidelined, especially as the international community, including the United States, the European Union, all Arab states, and a number of political forces in the new Israeli government continue to support the 2SS. Israel’s Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz recently told Abbas that their mission is to preserve the hope for peace based on a 2SS.

In the United States, political winds around the issue may also be changing. In September 2021, a few members of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a bill entitled the “Two-State Solution Act.” Its aim is to preserve a 2SS that secures Israel’s future as a national home for the Jewish people, and the establishment of a viable, democratic Palestinian state. It stipulates that the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip are all occupied territories. It bars U.S. defense assistance from being used to expand Israel’s control beyond the Green Line through settlement building, and prohibits demolitions of Palestinian homes or evictions of Palestinian residents. Additionally, it calls for reopening the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem and allowing the PLO to reopen its mission in Washington. The bill is unlikely to pass but it represents an unprecedented comprehensive legislative effort regarding the 2SS.

In the meantime, those committed to peace should abandon the “all is lost” stance. Continuously repeating that an agreement is not possible anytime soon relieves pressure on the parties to make hard decisions, dramatically lowers expectations regarding what can be achieved, and prolongs suffering particularly for the Palestinians. It is unfortunate that supporters of the 2SS and those who believe it is dead accuse each other of being detached from reality. This is quite detrimental to the dialogue and the collective brain power required to advance a just resolution to the conflict.

While many Israeli leaders find the status quo acceptable, regional and international powers must work together to persuade Israel that maintaining it is illusory. Israeli Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked indicated that “the current situation is the best for everyone,” adding that the Israeli government believes “in economic peace to improve Palestinian lives…but not a state”. The illusion that the status quo can be maintained without risk of disaster must be addressed.

Palestinians under occupation do not consider the situation static or sustainable. Despite having different legal status under Israeli law, Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as Arab Israelis are all enraged to varying degrees and for different reasons. The result is a series of periodic wars against Gaza, recurring violence in East Jerusalem and the West Bank—including in response to settler violence that is widely condemned, even by the United States—and oppressive Israeli practices in East Jerusalem. Violence erupted between Israeli Jews and Arab Israelis in mixed cities during the recent war in Gaza, a phenomenon that may recur in anticipated future rounds of violence. As such, friends of Israel in the United States, Europe, and increasingly in the Arab World, must help Israel avoid the slide toward disaster. Even the Trump administration indicated that the status quo was untenable and rejected the one-state approach.

As for the political settlement, the 2SS should either be preserved in a firm manner or relinquished altogether. Only the Palestinians have the power to end all pursuit of the two-state solution. Such a decision would be historic, irreversible, and comparable only to their 1988 decision to accept the 2SS along the 1967 lines. Their abandonment of the goal of Palestinian statehood would transform the conflict from one over territory to one over equal rights. But those who believe that a struggle over equal rights has an easier path to peace because of equality’s powerful moral imperative are probably incorrect. Compromise over land remains easier than relinquishing identity, history, and long-held beliefs. As international law and the official position of the main regional and international players continue to be supportive of the 2SS, the pursuit of this paradigm will persist, particularly since there is no significant lobbying by political forces on the ground or internationally for any alternative.

In setting the course back toward Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution, one of the most important steps has to be championed by the United States—in coordination with the Middle East Quartet and the Arab Quartet—to reach a clear agreement on the parameters of the endgame, and for the United States and the international community to ensure that no steps are taken to undermine peace efforts. Preservation of the road to peace requires ending Israeli policies that would prevent the achievement of that goal, including those mentioned in the Two-State Solution Act.

Moreover, the Biden administration’s policy of pursuing “equal measures of freedom, security, dignity, and prosperity” for both sides needs to be translated on the ground by recognizing that improving living conditions for Palestinians is crucial, but that economic peace will fail as it has before. Implementing previous agreements between Israelis and Palestinians is also crucial. This means allowing Palestinians to conduct elections in East Jerusalem—a step which can be instrumental to Palestinian reconciliation and reform.

Recent reports by the Center for a New American Security and Carnegie suggest a number of steps to reverse the present negative trends. First, players in the peace process must raise the costs of the status quo by sending a clear signal to Israel that undermining U.S. policy goals will have consequences, particularly regarding freezing settlement expansion in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. At the same time the U.S. administration needs to end Washington’s practice of automatically vetoing UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israel and also put conditions on its military aid to Israel. Peacemakers ought to work to reconcile Fatah and Hamas and invest in reforming Palestinian institutions. Finally, there is a need to conceptualize what an acceptable two-state solution would look like, which would need to allow some West Bank settlers to remain if they agree to Palestinian rule. Currently, many of these recommendations are seen as too ambitious or unrealistic in U.S. policy circles—which clearly indicates the need for policy makers to raise their level of ambition.

Further, the way in which Washington addresses the following four developments will determine its relevance in conflict resolution going forward: ending the approval of new settlements, reopening the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, ending the evictions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem’s particularly in the Sheikh Jarrah district, and reversing the designation of six Palestinian human rights organizations as terrorist organizations. If the United States does not address these issues in a manner that can advance progress, these four developments will curtail the administration’s ability to advance peace, further undermine its role in the region, and may lead to even more violence.

The challenges are enormous and hopes for a final settlement are distant, but there are constructive steps to be taken, including on the most intractable challenges to the peace process such as the final status of Jerusalem. Policy makers must embrace the fact that there is no substitute for allowing Palestinians and Israelis to fulfill their national aspirations. All sides must refocus on resolving the conflict and putting their dual national aspirations on a constructive path toward peace.

Resolution 181, passed by the UN General Assembly (UNGA) on November 29, 1947, suggested the creation of two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The plan to partition Palestine would have established the Jewish state on an area of approximately 14,100 square kilometers, or 56.47 percent of the total land, to be inhabited by five hundred thousand Jews, four hundred thousand Arab-Palestinians, and ninety-two thousand Bedouins (in the Negev desert). This means that the Jewish state was expected to host an almost equal number of Jews and Arab-Palestinians. At the time, in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, Jews accounted for about 30 percent of the total population, and owned approximately 6.7 percent of the land (“land ownership” was not common in the region: in 1951 Iraq, for instance, only 0.3 percent of the registered land was owned as “private property”).

As f or the Arab state envisioned by the UNGA, it would have covered approximately 11,500 square kilometers (42.88 percent of the total), with ten thousand Jews and eight hundred thousand Arab-Palestinians. Jerusalem, on the other hand, was expected to be subject to a Special International Regime under UN control.

The Partition Plan provoked territorial, demographic, and existential claims. For instance, the Arab-Palestinians complained that, despite Britain’s immigration policy to Palestine in the late 1930s and 1940s, a large percentage of the Jewish population was made up of recent immigrants, and that just four decades earlier, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Arab-Palestinians represented about nine-tenth of the total population. This local majority included only a small percentage of recent immigrants from neighboring areas (not from other continents), which to a large extent compensated for a wave of outward migration. In the second half of the 1930s, due to a state of public disorder, Palestine saw a substantial outward movement of Arab-Palestinians, mainly towards South America, which hosts the largest Palestinian presence outside of the Arab World.

The Zionist leadership, on the other hand, claimed that the future Jewish state included the Negev Desert (known as Naqab in the ancient Egyptian texts), an inhospitable environment that could only be used after major capital investments, and where Jews constituted about 1 percent of the total population of the time. On top of this, the exclusion of the area east of the Jordan River (Transjordan) was heavily opposed by Zionist Jews, with some of them claiming that “Great Britain robbed the Jewish people of three quarters of its country”.

Most Zionist leaders were convinced that the Mandate for Palestine, entrusted to Great Britain by the League of Nations to administer Palestine, encompassed both the area west of the Jordan River and Transjordan. In their view, Transjordan was therefore included in the “Jewish national home”, although it contained no Jewish community at the time.

However, this narrative, which is still popular among a minority of scholars, overlooks the fact that the June 1922 British White Paper—which excluded Transjordan from Palestine—was requested and received by the League of Nations before the Mandate was confirmed in July 1922. In the words of the future first president of the State of Israel, Chaim Weizmann: “It was made clear to us that confirmation of the Mandate would be conditional on our acceptance of the policy as interpreted in the White Paper [of 1922], and my colleagues and I therefore had to accept it, which we did, though not without some qualms.”

The role of the UN and its Resolution 181 triggered several other claims and counterclaims. It was argued, for instance, that the UN assigned to the Jewish state a substantial area of land that had never been an integral part of any ancient Israelite kingdom (including the coastal plain between Ashkelon and Ashdod), and that, on the other hand, it assigned to the Arab-Palestinians several areas which were part of ancient Israelite kingdoms. Moreover, according to the Arab-Palestinians, the UN did not adequately take into account their economic and social needs: they were in fact precluded from having a strategic port on the Red Sea or a direct communication route to Syria. This is besides the fact that about one-fifth of the land cultivated with wheat, and all the area cultivated with citrus fruits, went to the Jewish state. In the words of the then-secretary of the Arab League office in London, Edward Atiyah (1903-1964):

“Not only were the Jews…given the larger and more fertile part of the country with the most useful section of the coastal plain and the only good port, so that the Arabs were almost debarred from effective sea communications, but also 500,000 Arabs (or nearly half of the Arab population) were to be left in the Jewish state. A large number of these were the inhabitants of Jaffa, the biggest purely Arab city in Palestine and the Arabs’ principal seaport.”

Who Voted for the Partition Plan?

Resolution 181, passed on November 29 of 1947, had by far the most meaningful international reverberations in UN history. However, it is important to note that the resolution was not discussed at a General Assembly composed of the 193 countries that comprise it today. In fact, the General Assembly was made up of only 56 states, representing about one-fifth of the world population. More precisely, the resolution was approved by thirty-three countries, while thirteen expressed their opposition, and ten abstained.

Out of 56 member states, the votes of 37 countries would have been necessary to meet the two-thirds majority needed for approval. However, because the abstaining states were excluded from the overall count, the resolution was able to pass with only the yes-vote from thirty-three member states. Had the abstaining states been counted, as was the case with other resolutions, the resolution might not have passed.

The countries that did not participate in the vote because they were not yet member states were Switzerland, Sweden, Malta, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and, of course, the main losers of World War II: Germany, Italy, Japan, Austria, and Romania. Also excluded was almost the whole of Africa, whose countries were still under the rule or direct influence of colonial powers such as Great Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, and Spain. Apart from Ethiopia (“liberated” by the British in 1941), Liberia (established on the base of “the political principles of the United States Constitution”) and Egypt (which voted against partition), the only non-Arab African state admitted to the General Assembly was apartheid South Africa.

The situation in Asia was not dissimilar. It is enough to mention that the figure chosen by Western powers to represent China was Chiang Kai-Shek, a despotic anti-communist leader heavily supported and funded by the United States and its allies. Even in the years and decades to follow, Western powers continued to provide unconditional support to Chiang Kai-Shek, and when the latter was forced into exile on the tiny island of Taiwan (1949), the majority of Western governments recognized him as the sole representative of the world’s most populous country. Despite having neither control nor sovereignty over almost the entirety of the country, Chiang Kai-Shek’s “Republic of China” continued to represent the whole of China at the UN until 1971.

The countries that voted in favor of Resolution 181 included the states of Central and South America, which at the time were little more than satellite countries of the United States, economically fully dependent on Washington. Other countries that approved the resolution included states that, at best, had limited sovereignty such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the other countries that had been freed by the two emerging superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. Regarding the latter, Bernard Lewis noted that Stalin “saw in Jewish migration to Palestine and the struggle for a Jewish state a useful way of weakening and eventually eliminating the power of Britain, then still his principal Western rival in the Middle East”, while Daniel Pipes went a step further and contended that “Stalin apparently believed in a Jewish power so vast that, in league with the British, it would overwhelm Soviet efforts”.

All this illustrates that the Soviet Union, Western powers (with the exception of Britain, which abstained on Resolution 181), and their “subordinate countries” suggested a solution that supported their specific interests, and had very limited international support.

While some may consider Resolution 181 an act of justice in favor of a persecuted people and/or the only practical solution, others may regard it as an unfair and unacceptable imposition on hundreds of thousands of humans, and part of a process which fostered “racialized categories”. It might indeed be all of this. However, one aspect holds true beyond question: it was in no way a solution born out of the unprejudiced judgment of the “free and sovereign” world states of the time. This consideration appears even more relevant in light of the words written by a protagonist of that historical phase (and of the decades which followed), Israeli writer and politician Uri Avnery:

“No one asked the Arab Palestinians whether to accept or reject anything. If they had been asked, they would probably have rejected partition, since—in their view—it gave a large part of their historical homeland to foreigners. The governments of the Arab states rejected partition, but they certainly did not represent the Palestinian Arabs, who were at the time still under British rule (as were we).”

Who Rejected What

In the eight months which followed the passing of Resolution 181, about 450 Palestinian villages were razed to the ground by Israeli forces. Up to 770 thousand people—including about twenty thousand Jews expelled by Arab militias from Hebron, Jerusalem, Jenin, and Gaza—were evicted in a matter of days and then forcibly denied return. Some of them fled out of fear, often after witnessing the tragic fate of their relatives and friends and the “organized seizure” of their properties. A case in point is the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the towns of Lydda and Ramle in July 1948, which accounted for one-tenth of the overall Arab-Palestinian exodus. Most of the fifty to seventy thousand Palestinians that were expelled from the two cities did so under an official expulsion order signed by then-commander of the Harel Brigade Yitzhak Rabin: “The inhabitants of Lydda,” Rabin clarified, “must be expelled quickly without attention to age”. Several hundred of them died during the forced exodus from exhaustion and dehydration.

A number of recent studies, including Shay Hazkani’s Dear Palestine, have provided a wealth of primary sources that have exposed statements by Israel’s founder David Ben-Gurion and Israel’s first agricultural minister Aharon Zisling, saying, “We must wipe them [Palestinian villages] out” and “forgive instances of rape” against Palestinian women. On the other hand, local Arab leaders and commanders explicitly warned that “houses and villages emptied by their [Arab-Palestinian] inhabitants in violation of these orders would be subject to demolition and destruction”.

Over the next seventy years, a plethora of observers and scholars would link the beginning of the Palestinian refugee problem, and more generally the Israeli­Arab-Palestinian conflict, to “the Arab rejection” of the 1947’s UN partition for Palestine. While on the surface this claim may appear to make sense, the reality of who rejected what in the 1940s is more complicated than that.

From the perspective of the Arab Palestinians, who at the turn of the century constituted about 90 percent of the population, 1947/8 did not mark the beginning of the struggle, but coincided instead with the final chapter of a war that started with the implementation of a number of rejectionist policies and strategies against Palestinians.

Periodization is of course always arbitrary. However, it is historically accurate to claim that the year that more than any other ignited the basic components of the conflict is 1907. That year, the eighth Zionist Congress created a “Palestine Office” (the Agricultural Colonization Department) in Jaffa, under the direction of Arthur Ruppin, whose main objective, in Ruppin’s words, was “the creation of a Jewish milieu and of a closed Jewish economy, in which producers, consumers and middlemen shall all be Jewish”. Indeed, “rejectionism” featured very prominently in Ruppin’s mindset.

The goal of a “closed Jewish economy” was partially implemented from 1904 on by the leaders of the second and third waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine through policies like the kibbush ha’avoda (conquest of work) and the practice of avodah ivrit (Jewish work, or the idea that only Jewish workers must work Jewish lands).

While both were dictated by the need to offer greater job opportunities to the new immigrants, they resulted in the creation of a system of exclusion that blocked at its inception, primarily on an ideological level, any potential integration with the local Arab population.

Some researchers have emphasized that the Arab population likewise tended to avoid hiring Zionist Jews. This, however, takes no account of the fact that Arabs had only a marginal interest in employing a minority of new immigrants who had much more limited agricultural experience and did not speak the language used by the native inhabitants. Their avoidance of Jewish workers was not part of an organized political campaign.

It should also be noted that the “system of exclusion” and the two parallel social and economic structures that it triggered affected other crucial issues such as that of the land and its resources. For instance, the Jewish National Fund (KKL) was established with the task of buying land in Palestine (and succeeded in purchasing nine-tenth of the total land owned by Zionist buyers).

The KKL’s areas were managed in a discriminatory way in relation to the Arab population. KKL farmers who were found employing non-Jewish workers were subject to fines and/or expulsion. Such policies were indeed alarming, especially considering their intended purpose, which the future first president of the State of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, outlined in a letter to his wife in 1907: “If our Jewish capitalists, say even only the Zionist capitalists, were to invest their capital in Palestine, if only in part, there is no doubt that the lifeline of Palestine—all the coastal strip—would be in Jewish hands within twenty-five years.”

Rejectionist policies had an immensely disruptive effect on intercommunal relations in Palestine. A plethora of primary sources from local actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries confirm that before the implementation of these policies and approaches, relations between different communities were much less confrontational.

For instance, an unsigned editorial published in the daily Arab-Palestinian journal Filastīn on April 29, 1914 contended, “Until ten years ago, the Jews constituted a native fraternal Ottoman element. They lived and mixed freely in harmony with other elements and entered into working relationships, lived in the same and sent their children to the same schools.”

These words, despite their apologetic tones, were not far from the truth.

Scholar and author Yaacov Yehoshua wrote in his memoir, Childhood in Old Jerusalem, published in 1965, that in Jerusalem “there were joint compounds of Jews and Muslims. We were like one family […] Our children played with their [Muslim] children in the yard, and if children from the neighborhood hurt us the Muslim children who lived in our compound protected us. They were our allies.” In the same period, almost 80 percent of the inhabitants of Jerusalem lived in mixed neighborhoods and quarters.

All this should not suggest that interreligious and/or confessional conflicts did not exist. They have been documented as far back as the Middle Ages. Yet, their nature and scope are hardly comparable to those of more recent times. On top of this, they do not reflect the actual history of most of the region’s past.

A Reciprocal Exchange of Refugees?

If the Palestinian refugee question has little to do with “Arab rejectionism,” the same can be said regarding the attempt to tie Palestinian refugees to the expulsion of Jewish communities from some Arab countries. The dominant narrative espouses that at the same time that 750 thousand Palestinians “fled” what is today Israel, an almost equal number—800 thousand Jews living in Arab countries—faced “mass displacement”. Therefore, Palestinians should then accept that there was a “population exchange” between “Arab and Jewish refugees”, and renounce their demands for return and/or compensation.

Indeed, thousands of Jews in Arab countries suffered discrimination, oppression, threats, and various forms of violence. The most well-known example is the Farhud—a 1941 pogrom against Jews in which over 180 Jews were brutally killed in Baghdad. According to Hayyim J Cohen, it “was the only [such event] known to the Jews of Iraq, at least during their last hundred years of life there”. Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with Cohen’s words, Palestinians were not responsible for what happened in Baghdad or elsewhere in the Middle East. They may be Arab, but they were and are not the same people as Iraqis.

Jews who suffered discrimination and brutality in certain Arab countries have legitimate claims; all forms of violence are equally unacceptable and must be acknowledged and condemned. At the same time, it must be noted that, contrary to Palestinian refugees, many of whom were expelled and/or fled in fear, a large percentage of Jews left out of a desire to join their “Eretz Yisrael” (Land of Israel).

One figure that is often used to justify the alleged moral responsibility of Palestinians for the conditions of Jews in Arab countries is Hajj Amin Al-Husayni, the “Grand Mufti of Jerusalem”.

Al-Husayni was a supporter of Prime Minister Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani in Iraq, who sought to establish stronger ties with Nazi Germany and Italy. It was in the aftermath of the collapse of Al-Gaylani’s governments that the riots in Baghdad erupted, which led to the Farhud.

In 1941, Al-Husayni made his way first to Italy and then to Germany. Two years later, he participated in the formation of the Handschar, a Nazi division created in collaboration with SS commander Heinrich Himmler, which fought the communist partisans in Yugoslavia and committed various crimes against the local population, including many Jews. Given his alleged Islamic credentials, he was tasked with recruiting Bosnian and Serbian Muslims, who, along with some Catholic Croatian volunteers, formed the core of the unit.

There were no Palestinians enlisted in the Handschar; by contrast, about 12 thousand Arab Palestinians joined the British army to fight the Axis powers in 1939.

Due to his collusion with the Nazi regime, Al-Husayni is often used as an example of why the Palestinian people were supposedly responsible for their own tragic destiny. Yet, as recent studies have shown, he was not a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and was imposed on them by the British authorities to fulfil specific strategic objectives.

The Issue of “Absorption”

When many Palestinians were forced to flee to neighboring Arab countries during and after 1947/8, a meaningful percentage of them were prohibited (until very recently) from getting citizenship and were banned from certain professions. The suffering of the Palestinian refugees has been—and in some cases still is—exploited by the leadership of those countries for political gain.

Yet, a comparison between Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon or Syria, and the maabarot—that is, the refugee absorption camps in Israel in the 1950s— is largely misleading. The reason why the last ma’abara was closed in 1963 is partially connected to the establishment of a number of development towns in Israel. Even more important, however, is the fact that many new immigrants were absorbed—in many cases following a painful and violent process—by giving them emptied Palestinian houses. Any person who has visited Ein Hod, Musrara, Qira, and hundreds of other former Palestinian villages, quarters, or cities, is familiar with the thousands of houses that are still perfectly intact. Most (if not all) are today inhabited by the families of “olim” (immigrants). Palestinian refugees, on the other hand, did not have emptied houses ready to host them: this was hardly a minor detail.

It should therefore not be surprising that, in light of the above-mentioned considerations, many Israeli officials have rejected the term “refugee”. As Knesset speaker Yisrael Yeshayahu noted in 1975, “We are not refugees. [Some of us] came to this country before the state was born. We had messianic aspirations.”

Former Knesset member Ran Cohen went a step further by saying: “I have this to say: I am not a refugee. I came at the behest of Zionism, due to the pull that this land exerts, and due to the idea of redemption. Nobody is going to define me as a refugee.”

Palestinians are the only refugees who do not fall under the UNHCR and instead have their own agency (UNRWA). The reason for this and the related (and largely irrelevant) difference between “derivative refugees” and “descendent of refugee” is rooted in the full recognition of the heavy price paid by Palestinians for the decisions taken by the “international community” in the 1940s.

The Present’s Past

To be aware of all of this is not meant to downplay the claims of any of the current inhabitants of this “Land of Aching Hearts”. It is instead a way to acknowledge the many scars which lie beneath this conflict, and to understand the deeper reasoning of what Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, a hardliner of his time, wrote back in July 1921: “Today the Jews are a minority in Palestine. In twenty years’ time, they could easily be a vast majority. If we were the Arabs, we wouldn’t accept it either.”

One century after Jabotinsky’s words, it is becoming increasingly common to hear analysts and scholars claiming that Israel will be soon forced to choose between two options: “the consolidation of a one-state reality, which would then force it to become an apartheid state, or grant Palestinians full citizenship”. These and other similar claims, however, ignore or downplay a third scenario that appears far more realistic: Israel will annex Area C of the West Bank (while further sealing off the Gaza Strip) and will offer the Palestinians “autonomy on steroids”. Such a scenario, proposed by Israel’s current Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, does not require any war or the removal of most of the population residing in the area: the relatively few Palestinians that in the coming decades will still be able to reside in Area C will get the option of receiving Israeli citizenship.

Fostering a rights-based resolution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not sufficient and will not change this scenario. Redefining Palestinians’ self-determination and shifting the focus away from statehood is indeed a risky gamble. In Palestinian businessman Sam Bahour’s words, the moment in which the struggle becomes “a purely civil rights one, the game is over— even if the struggle for full civil rights lasts another one hundred years”. Ultimately, and even more so in light of history, no one should feel entitled to tell Palestinians what they can or should do with their right and quest for self-determination.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is the most water-scarce region in the world and is expected to be the most sensitive to ongoing climate change. This is especially true for Egypt, considered a global climate change hotspot that is on track to warm by as much as 4-8°C by 2100 (although predictions vary). This will be felt especially in the Western Desert, Upper Egypt, and the Red Sea coast. North Africa, including Egypt, is being squeezed from both north and south by encroaching salt water and desert, respectively, and freshwater loss. Additional freshwater loss driven by overuse and exacerbated by an unpredictable climate demands serious attention.

As the keystone of the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus, water management must be the focus of mitigation and adaptation strategies adopted by MENA societies to ensure their survival and a sustainable future. We focus here specifically on the impact of climate change on water, and its domestic and agricultural use, within the context of changing human demographics and the urban-rural disconnect that is rapidly developing in MENA. The WEF Nexus model is offered as a tool for policymakers to address the complex systems of human-environment relations more easily. Special emphasis has been placed on issues that require immediate attention, with a spotlight on Egypt. It is hoped that this information can serve as a partial roadmap for the COP27 meeting set to be held here in November 2022.

Shrinking Living Space

Ninety percent of the population of North Africa is concentrated in less than 10 percent of the land area, crowding around Mediterranean coastal areas and both the valley and delta of the Nile River. In addition to the impacts of temperature and precipitation change, this occupied zone is being squeezed from north and south by two advancing fronts. From the north, progressive sea level rise along the Mediterranean coast is expected to promote shoreline retreat of 0.48-0.85

meters per year and major subsidence (the gradual sinking) of the Nile Delta by 2100. Natural dunes along part of the shoreline are likely to buffer the impacts of sea level rise, but engineered structures designed to protect coastal beaches and human occupancy are costly, hard to maintain, and unlikely to keep pace.

Although portions of the Nile Delta are under imminent flooding threat from sea level rise, most of the area is also in danger of sinking and erosion. Saltwater intrusion is reducing freshwater reserves of coastal dune and delta aquifers, but its rate and intensity are being pushed along by over-pumping of groundwater and the expansion of agriculture into lands of marginal suitability. There is an urgent need for mitigation and adaptive management plans to meet the challenge of sea level rise. These plans should emphasize nature-based solutions that can be rapidly implemented.

Expansion of the Sahara Desert from the south also poses a major threat to the sustainability of North African populations and agriculture. The Sahara has expanded southward significantly (8-10 percent) since the mid-19^th century. Most emphasis has been placed on the 100-km movement southward of the desert boundary, while movement of the northern boundary has received less attention. Rather than an advancing front, northern expansion occurs throughout the southern occupied region and is associated with loss of natural vegetation and unsustainable agriculture practices, including over-extraction of groundwater from aquifers without active recharge.

With these forces pushing in from north and south, preserving water resources in the region is obviously critical to the survival of communities here. Moreover, it is the key to the maintenance of the entire WEF Nexus.

The Value of a WEF Nexus Approach

The WEF Nexus is a robust approach for quantifying the three main sustainability controls of water, energy, and food. Human society is interlinked with the Nexus, which responds to external forces of climate change, disasters, and human demographics as well as being an important tool to develop and implement sustainability policy. Recognizing the importance of human interactions, water specialists and ecologists Raul Muñoz Castillo and Thomas Crisman envisioned the Nexus as three spokes of a wheel (water, energy, and food) with health as the hub and economics as the rim. Subsequent work in Puerto Rico and ten Small Island Developing States (SIDS) found that natural resources and human communities are extremely resilient in the face of disasters and long-term change, while infrastructure and governance sectors are woefully inadequate to adjust rapidly to change. The current WEF Nexus concept incorporates the private sector, governance, and economics as the ultimate controlling factors for sustainability.

Water is the critical factor controlling both agriculture and energy as well as all linkages within the WEF Nexus. With the exception of Egypt, the MENA region overall has relatively low dependence on freshwater for power generation, but relies heavily on energy to extract groundwater and desalinate seawater. Current and projected deficiencies in both water and food in the MENA region and their compounded interactions pose a vexing problem: how will the region increase agricultural sustainability without deteriorating the environment and water reserves?

In the face of decreasing water availability, mitigation and adaptation to short- and long-term conditions are the only means by which MENA countries can hope to meet the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. Failure in any component of the WEF Nexus will affect human health and security.

Chasing Water

Predicting rainfall in the MENA region is even more difficult than predicting temperature (and models vary), but climate change will certainly have an impact. Although significant reductions are predicted for most of the region, precipitation north of the 25 degree latitude is expected to decline significantly by 2050, while areas to the south should experience significantly higher values associated with monsoon seasons. Models for coastal areas, however, show the greatest disparity. Some studies forecast significantly reduced precipitation for Mediterranean coastal areas by 2050, while others suggest significantly elevated values.

Evapotranspiration—the evaporation of water from surfaces and plant leaves— will increase with higher temperatures, leading to lower water availability overall. Most MENA countries lack surface freshwater and have traditionally relied on rainfall and groundwater to meet their needs. MENA governments have allocated most funding to large-scale water projects (desalination, dams, inter-basin transfer, extraction of fossil groundwater, importing virtual water) with little attention to water conservation and adaptation to changing conditions. Freshwater springs, the only surface water in Saudi Arabia, have declined from forty-six to fifteen in the past thirty years, largely associated with the over-extraction of fossil groundwater for irrigation (predominantly of wheat). As is happening rapidly in coastal MENA countries, Saudi Arabia is abandoning diminishing groundwater resources in favor of more energy intensive desalination.

Overall, the region lost 66 percent of its water reserves between 1960 and 2009 and is projected to lose an additional 50 percent by 2050—a trend attributed more to changing human demands than supply. The inverse relationship between population and water resources in Egypt has resulted in a progressive decline in per capita water availability. By itself this would eventually lead to total water insecurity, but the timing accelerates greatly when climate change and human use factors are considered.

Urban-Rural Disconnect

People are concentrating in urban areas as agricultural output becomes more unpredictable, and this has disrupted supply chains of food to urban areas. This urban-rural disconnect is further exacerbated by a loss of farmland to urban sprawl and an overall decreased availability of water for domestic use from groundwater sources, (70 percent of which are disproportionately allocated for irrigation, leaving 20 percent for industry and only 10 percent for urban populations). Aging urban infrastructure is unable to meet the demand for services, often leading to social insecurity and associated political upheaval. As these problems evolve, policies to address them must stress nature-based solutions over artificially engineered structures, which have tended to fail.

Nature-Based Solutions for Water Treatment and Wastewater Management

Green infrastructure—especially constructed wetlands—is a cost effective, quick to implement, and efficient alternative to engineered options for treating both drinking water and wastewater globally. Egypt has constructed wetlands for waste treatment with sites serving as public parks and treated water used for agriculture. Mechanisms for disseminating this experience broadly throughout the region are critically needed to meet demands from rapidly expanding urban populations.

Water Reuse

The time of assuming that water is a free commodity is over. The distance between rural water sources and urban consumers is widening to a point that urban areas must be considered a separate biome that recycles its own resources to maximize multiple sector services. Egypt is spearheading the separation of gray water (bathing, laundry, kitchen uses) from black water (toilets) at residential units and using the former for vertical and rooftop gardens, public parks, and urban agriculture. This should be expanded.

Human Health and Water Borne Diseases

The hub of the WEF Nexus is health, and the increased incidence of Neglected Tropical Diseases or NTDs has been linked to climate change in the MENA region. Schistosomiasis and Dengue are of particular concern given their water associated vectors. Humans will be forced to rely on water sources of poor-quality during times of drought and climate change, thus exposing them to these diseases. The situation is especially dire in Egypt and Yemen as water sources are reduced to small, often contaminated pools.

New MENA Cities

The development of new cities is in vogue throughout the region. Rawabi, Palestine has progressed slowly, in part due to limited access to freshwater. The Al-Madina Al-Zarqa project in Oman ended before completion, but China is building Duqm for that country as an industrial city. The greatest attention, however, is on the New Administrative Capital (NAC) in Egypt and on Neom, Saudi Arabia. As with the projects in Palestine and Oman, whether these cities will develop into urban biomes with a sustainable WEF Nexus is not clear. The NAC is located in the desert east of Cairo, which lengthens its distance to water, energy, and food. Much of the infrastructure is based on advanced engineering, but use of treated wastewater to create a green river through the city is touted as green infrastructure. This feature will lose water to the atmosphere that could be used for urban agriculture and nature-based solutions to climate change. Neom is also being built in the desert but is striving for net zero energy via rooftop solar units and solar-powered desalination plants. More data on the WEF Nexus is critically needed for a proper assessment of the sustainability of these new cities.

Transboundary Issues and Dams

Rivers in the Middle East are rare, and most cross international borders. The oldest hydropower dams are located far from urban populations (Mosul, Aswan) and become relatively shallow and inefficient over time due to reservoir infilling. The recently completed Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in the Ethiopian highlands is deep with a large volume of water retained, which leads to concerns about flow impacts downstream in Sudan and especially Egypt. In addition, the efficiency of its power transmission to population centers in Egypt should this happen in the future is likely reduced by distance and issues with infrastructure maintenance. Elsewhere in MENA, Turkey controls both water and electric energy resources for Syria and Iraq, Israel and Jordan are negotiating trading energy for water, while both resources in Palestine are totally controlled by Israel. These are each areas that are likely to grow more contentious as resources dwindle, and must be addressed.

As a dependent of water, and a determinant of the region’s food security, agriculture faces a number of its own challenges which should also be addressed at this year’s UN climate summit.

Rescuing Agriculture

Agriculture is the largest employer in many MENA nations, but its dependency on rainfall (70 percent) accentuates its fragility in the face of climate change.

Historically, Yemen was the breadbasket of the region due to its highly efficient rainwater capture through elaborate terraced agriculture. Sadly, a shift to inefficient irrigation using groundwater in the latter half of the 20^th century resulted in Yemen becoming a major food importer rather than exporter. Also dependent on groundwater irrigation in the last twenty years, Saudi Arabia has gone from the sixth largest wheat exporter globally to an importer to support its needs, as irreplaceable aquifers became totally depleted. A similar situation is apparent in Jordan. Wheat production is threatened throughout the Middle East because of depleted water reserves. Accelerating water and food gaps exacerbate each other in vicious cycles with economic, social, and political ramifications. Moving forward, these will be the critical issues to consider:

Loss of Farmland

In addition to desertification—as well as sea level loss and subsidence of the Nile Delta in the case of Egypt—urban sprawl has reduced farmland significantly in both Egypt and Jordan. To meet local food demands, agriculture is expanding into marginally productive lands with poor soils and undependable water resources.

Saline Agriculture

Decreasing water availability and increasing salinity has made wheat unsuitable for most of the MENA. It is time to adapt agriculture to current and projected changes in water resources by introducing new crops and growing techniques. Egypt has successfully introduced quinoa as a commercial crop for high salinity soils in the Nile Delta, and the UAE is investigating four forage grass cultivars that can be irrigated with saline water. Salicornia, a halophyte growing in coastal wetlands, also shows great promise as an export and bioenergy crop.

Water Conservation and Community Economic Development

The High Atlas Foundation of Morocco (High Atlas Foundation | For sustainable prosperity in Morocco) has an extremely successful program of planting trees throughout the kingdom to promote water conservation, carbon sequestration, and community empowerment through project ownership and economic development. Geoengineering of the Sahara and Sahel can have significant positive effects on regional climate by strengthening the vegetation component in the land-atmosphere feedback. There is a critical need to support community-based programs similar to HAF throughout MENA. The key to a sustainable WEF Nexus is at the community level.

Fostering Nexus Resilience

As studies in the Caribbean have demonstrated, even with relatively abundant water resources, failures in infrastructure, governance, and the private sector can prevent otherwise resilient communities from reaching WEF Nexus sustainability. The basis of policies that take a WEF Nexus approach must be data rich, multi-disciplinary, and recognize that one model does not fit all nations. Most importantly, there must be close linkages among science, policy, and all stakeholders (community and private sector) to develop and implement policy. According to Mohamed ElFetyany of the National Water Research Center in Egypt, not linking Egyptian policy decisions to trade priorities and water security is hindering water management and suggested that water footprints be considered as a means to bridge this gap.

Finally, Nexus resilience—the ability of the environment to adjust to human use, climate change, and disasters—will depend upon: improving resilience in WEF across scales, sectors, and disciplines; developing tools and indicators to measure that resilience; bridging the implementation gap associated with governance complexity; and integrating resilience and Nexus thinking into policy. Following this approach should support adaptive management and be the key to Nexus sustainability.

The governments of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have long released ambitious economic and developmental “visions” that detail their goals for the future. While GCC states exhibited impressive growth trajectories throughout the late 20th century and early 2000s, it is difficult to credit past visions alone for rapid socioeconomic advancements. However, they could prove beneficial in the long run as the Gulf eases off its hydrocarbon dependency and further opens itself up to the world.

The abundant availability of hydrocarbon resources has so far served as the primary fuel behind regional development trends. Proceeds from the oil and gas sector continue to constitute the majority—in many cases at least 70 percent— of public sector revenues, despite long-standing economic diversification efforts to reduce the region’s dependency on hydrocarbon resources. This dependency increases vulnerabilities. When oil prices plunged to historic lows in 2020, GCC governments were in crisis mode. As oil prices rebounded in 2021, Gulf officials focused on how to best support economic recoveries.

A confluence of economic tailwinds and headwinds await Gulf policymakers in 2022. On the one hand, oil prices are staying higher for longer, offering sustained fiscal relief to regional economies battered by the 2020 oil price slide. According to U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts, Brent crude oil averaged $70.89 per barrel in 2021, up from $41.69 in 2020, and will increase to a slightly higher price of $74.95 throughout 2022. On the other hand, international momentum behind climate change-related initiatives and the widespread adoption of environmental, social, and governance criteria in global investments threaten the comparative advantages of hydrocarbon-rich Gulf economies.

As the strictest COVID-19-related travel measures began to fade, GCC countries started opening their borders to much-needed businesspeople and tourists.

Dubai commenced Expo 2020 in October 2021, after a one-year delay, and Qatar is finalizing preparations to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup in November and December. However, new COVID-19 variants, such as Omicron, pose major obstacles to hosting international commercial and sporting events or attracting global tourists.

Fairly or not, GCC vision documents will serve as a benchmark for whether regional governments can adapt their economies to a rapidly evolving world. Existing and future visions can offer regional governments a development roadmap for the post-coronavirus era, but these documents also provide a means for measurement and, ultimately, accountability.

Visions Worth Watching

The vision guiding development trends in Saudi Arabia is a key space to watch. Saudi Vision 2030, often considered the brainchild of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, has generated substantially more excitement since its launch in 2016 than the visions of neighboring countries. The Public Investment Fund, which functions as the kingdom’s investment catalyst, lies at the heart of Vision 2030. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund not only wields growing authority, but also oversees an expansive domestic and international mandate.

The sheer scale of Saudi Arabia’s envisioned transformation can be gleaned from the vision’s three broad pillars: a thriving economy, a vibrant society, and an ambitious nation. The potential impact associated with progress in these domains is enormous. With an estimated population of 34.8 million people, of which the majority are Saudi citizens, Saudi Arabia’s demographics dwarf those of neighboring states. The total population of the remaining GCC states stood at 23.8 million in 2020, according to the World Bank. Moreover, Saudi Arabia accounted for 49.8 percent of the nominal gross domestic product of all six GCC countries in 2020.

The Emiratis view the developments in Saudi Vision 2030 with a mixture of encouragement and consternation. Publicly, Emirati officials describe Saudi Arabia’s modern development trajectory as a net positive for the region, citing the benefits of healthy competition. Privately, many worry that economic transformations in Saudi Arabia threaten to disrupt key sectors and industries in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—from trade and logistics to tourism and entertainment. The UAE possesses economic visions and strategies, too; however, these plans are decentralized among the country’s emirates, reflecting a federal structure that affords substantial economic autonomy to emirate-level governments. For example, the Abu Dhabi Economic Vision exists alongside the Dubai Industrial Strategy 2030.

UAE officials are embarking on longer-term planning, with some initiatives spanning the next fifty years. In September 2021, the UAE government announced the “Projects of the 50” scheme to accelerate the country’s development over the next five decades. In January 2019, Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, announced a fifty-year charter for the emirate. The charter contains nine articles intended to enhance Dubai’s socioeconomic environment. These various future-oriented plans constitute a multifaceted strategy by the UAE to retain its competitive economic edge over neighboring states.

Qatar and Kuwait can exert substantial influence at the margins of the Gulf region’s broader economy, and within niche sectors and industries. Yet, even the most successful vision implementation programs in these smaller GCC countries are unlikely to transform the broader region. The Qatar National Vision 2030 aims to create “an advanced country…capable of sustaining its own development and providing for a high standard of living for all its people for generations to come”. Qatar has invested heavily in creating a world-class education sector and high-tech logistics hubs. Kuwait Vision 2035 seeks to “restore the regional leadership role of Kuwait as a financial and commercial hub,” while also bolstering the country’s private sector. However, the weaker economic foundations of the northern Gulf countries of Iraq and Iran pose a significant challenge to Kuwait’s future development.

Government officials in Oman and Bahrain are preoccupied with avoiding future economic crises and mitigating risks associated with shocks, given significant fiscal constraints in both countries. Oman Vision 2040, which Sultan Haitham Bin Tariq oversaw before assuming the throne, mentions “Moving Forward with Confidence” as its tagline—an appropriate sentiment after the passing of longtime ruler Sultan Qaboos Bin Said and the emergence of the coronavirus in early 2020.

Bahrain Economic Vision 2030 focuses on sustainability and is closely associated with the influential Economic Development Board. Since the vision’s launch in 2008, the Bahraini government has undertaken a series of fiscal adjustment programs to shore up its finances. Growing levels of government debt remain a concern: Bahrain’s general government gross debt as a percentage of gross domestic product is forecasted to reach 139.6 percent in 2026, up from 123.3 percent in 2021.

Competitive Friction Between Saudi Arabia and the UAE

The GCC’s two largest economies—Saudi Arabia and the UAE—are jockeying to become the region’s partner of choice for international businesspeople, residents, and tourists. Throughout 2021, Saudi Arabia and the UAE unveiled major legal reforms to help attract foreign talent and businesses. In early 2021, the UAE established an official pathway to citizenship for a narrow group of nominated expatriates. Saudi Arabia began a similar citizenship program in November 2021. Just weeks after Dubai launched its delayed Expo 2020 (in October of last year), Saudi Arabia revealed that it had submitted an official request to host Expo 2030.

Some of the emerging economic policies and initiatives signal major shifts in the region’s commercial environment. In December 2021, the UAE announced a 4.5-day work week for state employees and switched the country’s weekend to Saturday and Sunday. Earlier in 2021, the Saudi government announced that, to secure government contracts, foreign firms would be required to establish a regional headquarters in the country by January 1, 2024.

As regional governments continue to promote non-oil segments of their economies, development trajectories are bound to overlap. This competitive overlap is especially apparent in the aviation and tourism industries. In June 2021, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman announced plans to launch a second national airline under the umbrella of the Public Investment Fund. Any new airline would face fierce competition from Qatar Airways and the Dubai­based Emirates—two established carriers with global brand recognition.

Saudi Arabia likewise aspires to become a global tourism hub through the creation of cruise companies, new luxury tourism resorts on the Red Sea, and other entertainment and cultural offerings. Domestic tourism will play a critical role in the early development of Saudi Arabia’s tourism sector; however, longer-term growth in this emerging sector will invariably compete with international tourism sectors in neighboring states like the UAE, Bahrain, and Oman.

Envisioning the Future

The economic development lifespans of GCC states will not end with a whimper in 2030 or 2040, when most of the region’s current visions conclude. Rather, GCC visions will become increasingly complex, as each incorporates a steady stream of new sub-strategies and associated initiatives. Saudi officials, for example, launched the Saudi and Middle East Green Initiatives as well as a new National Investment Strategy over the course of 2021. GCC government officials will continue to race ahead with plans for the latter half of the century. Moreover, the UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia have pledged to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 or 2060.

Policies that focus on livability, sustainability, and climate change are in vogue across the globe. On the one hand, economic policymakers in the Gulf are eager to embrace these trends. Livable cities attract greater numbers of skilled expatriate residents, sustainable development processes pave the way for long-term growth, and greater concern for the environment addresses water scarcity and other climate change-related issues in the Gulf. On the other hand, the persistent reliance upon proceeds from the oil and gas sector for public sector revenues reflects a crude contradiction between developmental ambitions and underlying realities. Despite genuine excitement around the prospects for renewable energy in GCC states, it is unclear whether cleaner and greener energy can generate sufficient government revenues in a direct sense, or at least stimulate economic activity that yields new revenues indirectly through taxes and other fees.

Given the complexity of developmental challenges facing the region, governments will be tempted to adjust targets and unveil many more initiatives. Some new visions for development will be laudable, while others will seek to obscure the minimal progress achieved by previous vision plans. The extraordinary disruptions inflicted by the emergence of the coronavirus in 2020 offered a justifiable excuse for a rethink of economic policy objectives and a recalibration of the means for achieving these goals. The remainder of this decade must entail steady progress on implementation. Examples of demonstrable success—rather than a preponderance of new dreams—will be the soundest foundation upon which GCC economies can venture into the coming decades.

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Saudi Struggle for Iraq. By Katherine Harvey. C. Hurst (Publishers) Limited, London, 2021. 320 pp.

After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the spring of 2003 that culminated in Shiite Islamists coming to power in Iraq, Iraq’s relations with the Arab World became strained. The fallout took place during the height of Shiite-Sunni tension in the region, and was assumed to have pushed Iraq further onto Iran’s side. The country that stood out in its persistent refusal to engage with Iraq for most of the past eighteen years was Saudi Arabia.

Although Saudi Arabia severed its relations with Iraq in 1990 in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, the monarchy seemed to have preferred keeping a weak Saddam over empowering the Shiites of Iraq, and by extension Iran. For this reason, the royal family voiced a strong objection to the 2003 war with the conviction that a Shiite-ruled country could disturb the balance of power in the region in favor of Iran, which would exploit the political vacuum in Iraq to advance its decreed expansionist agenda in the Gulf region and beyond.

Additionally, in the views of the Saudis and Sunni Arabs in general, Shiite political ascension in Iraq would constitute an unprecedented anomaly in the history of the Arab World: none of the twenty-two Arab states comprising the League of Arab States is ruled or has been ruled by Shiites for centuries. Indeed, Shiites comprise an average of only 11 percent of Arab Muslims and an average of 17 percent of the entire Muslim population worldwide. Even the only two Arab states in the Arab World with a Shiite majority, Iraq and Bahrain, both have been ruled by Sunni minorities since their inception in the early and late 20th century respectively. The concern for the Saudis was that U.S. involvement in a Saddam-ousted Iraq could lead to a Shiite takeover. Their demographic majority could mean that elections would naturally turn out in their favor. That worry materialized in the January 2005 elections when the Iraqi Shiites competed under one electoral list and won the majority of votes, propelling them to power that they have held onto ever since. Suddenly, the Saudis felt they had a new political reality on their northwestern borders to contend with. The obvious policy choices for them were either to accept the new Shiite regime in Iraq or undermine it.

Over the subsequent few years, they trod both directions but worked more to subvert the Iraqi Shiite-led government than to accept it. That policy proved counterproductive to Saudi interests, not only because their efforts to overturn events in Iraq failed, but their refusal to establish an early presence in Iraq, by default, gave way to the interference of Iran. Judged by this outcome many observers and analysts of the region now think that that policy was decisively erroneous.

In her book A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Saudi Struggle for Iraq, Katherine Harvey discusses at length the Iraqi-Saudi relationship post the 2003 Iraq war and concludes that King Abdullah Al-Saud’s refusal to engage with Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki helped push Iraq further into Iran’s embrace. She invokes American sociologist Robert Merton’s popular notion of “self-fulfilling prophecy” to explain the consequences of the Saudi policy toward Iraq. By creating an enemy-image of Shiite-led Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Riyadh helped make an unnecessary adversary of Iraq while the latter started reciprocating with similar attitudes in later years.

The Faults in Saudi-Iraqi Relations

The long-standing animosity between Shiism and Wahhabism, the Islamic Sunni subsect embraced by most Saudis including the royal family, dates back to the mid 18th century. Wahhabi scholars went to the extent of calling Shiites heretical. This tension was further inflamed by the 1979 revolution in Iran and the subsequent establishment of Shiite clerical rule that called for exporting Shiite revolutionary fervor beyond Iran’s borders. That call resonated profoundly with Shiite Islamists of southern Iraq, and was readily heeded by the Iraqi Al-Dawa Islamic Party (founded in the late 1950s by the late Mohammed Baqir Al-Sadr, a Shiite intellectual and political thought leader) which supported a form of Islamic rule that challenged the secular nationalism of Saddam’s Baath party at the time.

Those developments and traveling ideologies prompted an eight-year war between Iraq and Iran in 1980 in which Iraq invaded the latter to prevent the export of the Iranian Revolution’s ideas to the country. In the later years of the war, Saudi Arabia would come to the aid of Iraq when Iranian forces advanced to the depths of Iraqi cities and towns. Ever since, Saudi Arabia and Iran have been locked in a regional conflict amounting to a cold war fought via regional co-religionist proxies.

The 1980s also witnessed the growth of Shiite opposition to Saddam Hussein in the south of Iraq. Facing persecution by the regime, Shiite Islamic leaders scurried to Iran where they consolidated their presence, formed militias, and received training, finance, and organizational support from the Iranian Quds Force, the subsidiary of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in charge of foreign operations.

Iranians tried to mold the Iraqi Shiite leaders in their image, and even force them to pledge allegiance to their form of rule. This pressure caused a schism within the top ranks of Al-Dawa party. Party chiefs such as Ibrahim Al-Jaafari and Nouri Al-Maliki did not yield to Iranian coercion and consequently left Iran to settle somewhere else. Later statements by Al-Maliki and others underscored the tension between the Iraqis and Iranians during those formative years. Although Baqir Al-Sadr, the founding father of contemporary Iraq’s Shiite political thought, was sympathetic to the Iranian revolution and a student of Khomeini’s himself, his vision of Islamic rule in Iraq differed from that of his mentor. He rather envisioned a political system whereby governance would be dictated by the collective wish of Muslims (Wilayat Al-Umma) as opposed to the Iranian version, Wilayat Al-Faqih, which vests most powers in the highest jurists.

The split within Al-Dawa gave birth to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). SCIRI subsequently formed the military wing, Badr brigade, which operated under the command of Quds forces in launching attacks on Iraqi territories and siding with Iran during the war. After the fall of Saddam, both groups, Dawa and SCIRI, returned to Iraq to form the United Alliance (UIA) alongside other internal Shiite groups. UIA, in various reincarnations, has dominated the government ever since, with the first three prime ministers hailing from the original Dawa branch while SCIRI controls key parts of the security forces and other critical posts.

Mirroring Back the Role of Enemy

The nuances of Iraqi Shiite politics and their implications are the subject of Harvey’s book. The book makes its central point in the notion that the Iraqi-Iranian alliance was not an inevitable outcome. Rather, the absence of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arabs in Iraq in the face of grave political and security challenges created a convenient space which the Iranians exploited to advance their agenda in an Arab country and beyond. King Abdullah’s fixation on the Shiite-Sunni divide and the trauma left by the Iraq–Iran war made him resistant to engaging with Iraq’s Shiites. Consequently, by painting Iraqi Shiites in an enemy image, the king inadvertently converted them to a real enemy. In other words, Iraqi Shiites did not start off as natural adversaries of the kingdom but, by being treated as such, they eventually mirrored that image and started acting on it.

Al-Maliki’s attitude and behavior, for instance, radically shifted after the 2010 elections. During his first term, Al-Maliki approached the Saudi issue from a position of confidence: he was vetted and supported by the Americans; his victory over the Iran-backed militias of Muqtada Al-Sadr in the 2008 Battle of Basra, and his overall non-sectarian approach to governance, were cases in point. In the period between 2006 and 2010, he may have genuinely wanted to balance Iran’s influence with that of Sunni Arabs, Saudis being key.

Leading up to the 2010 elections, Al-Maliki saw that Sunni Iraqis would not join his newly formed political bloc and King Abdullah was not sparing any efforts to deprive him of a second term by supporting his rival Ayad Allawi. When Al-Maliki lost the elections, he was faced with the choice of conceding to Allawi or pursuing another path in order to retain power. That second path entailed he would have to lean on Iran to secure a second term. It also meant returning to the all-Shiite bloc he had tried to split from in an attempt to chart his own course as amply explained throughout the book.

The 2010 elections’ ultimate outcome implied that Al-Maliki now had to concede more to Iran’s demands; he would lose the reason to be sect-neutral and he would fight to remain politically viable. All of that deprived him of the independence he had enjoyed during his first term. Moreover, 2010-2011 saw the withdrawal of the U.S. forces (his backers), the resurgence of Sunni attacks, and the war in neighboring Syria during which he perceived the Saudi stand on removing Al-Assad to imply that he would be toppled as well. He began acting with obvious paranoia: arresting Sunnis on suspicion, conspiring to remove key Sunni political stakeholders, and cracking down on Sunni protesters in Hawija in 2013. Al-Al-Maliki’s animosity toward Saudi Arabia became more salient in 2013-2014 leading up to ISIS’s incursion in mid-2014, in which Iran was seen as leading the first efforts to combat ISIS whereas Saudi Arabia was explicitly accused by Al-Maliki of having somehow supported it.

The idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy, then, addresses exactly this point. The concept was first coined by Merton in 1948, who described it as a form of cognitive bias where an individual lives up to an erroneous image drawn about them by another, leading to an unnecessary hostility between the two. Applying psycho-social observation to international relations, Harvey explains how Saudi Arabia missed an opportunity with far-reaching consequences by abstaining from leading an early engagement with Iraqi Shiites and the post-2003 Shiite-dominant government of Iraq by needlessly portraying them as the enemy.

The author bases her argument mainly on the premise that Iraqi Shiites are different from those of Iran, and that the diversity of their religious and political thought could have produced a more favorable outcome. Harvey highlights three points of distinction that separate Iraqi Shiites from the Shiites of Iran. First, the Shiites of Iraq are ethnically Arab; thus, they share this identity with the rest of the Sunni Arab World. She points to statements made by several Iraqi Shiite leaders, among them Al-Maliki and Al-Hakim asserting their Arab identity in hopes that their words would find a resonance among their fellow Arab statesmen.

Second, Iraqi Shiite Islamists did not necessarily seek to duplicate Iran’s political model in Iraq, as evidenced by the 2005 constitution. The Iraqi constitution espouses a classical democracy whereas Iran’s constitution declares it an Islamic state where public affairs are regulated by Islamic laws under the guidance of the jurists. And third, the first three Shiite prime ministers are known to have refused to capitulate to Iran in prior years. Additionally, she points out that the estrangement that ensued between Iraq and Saudi Arabia was not for the lack of efforts on the part of the Iraqis, nor was it based on an initial desire to let Iran have unrivaled influence in their country. Rather, Shiites became alarmed and reversed course only after seeing King Abdullah undermine their rule in the period leading to 2010 elections.

“The Logic of Enmity”

Harvey anchors her analysis of the Iraqi-Saudi dynamic on theoretical concepts rooted in the international relations’ schools of realism and constructivism as well as cognitive and political psychology. She refers to Stephen Walt’s factors undergirding state alliance such as aggregate power, geographic proximity, offensive capability, and intention to explain how the Saudi king perceived Iran’s threat. Also, her research points her to the work of the constructivists Alexander Wendt and Michael Barnett on the critical role identity plays in how threats are perceived among states. In this sense, Iran—and by extension Iraq—was singled out as the “other” when ascribing political identities to countries in the region.

Therefore, in her final analysis, all three critical factors of threat perception aligned to alarm the king: a different identity, greater power, and aggressive intention. But in mistakenly lumping Iraq and Iran into one political camp based on sect alone, the king ignored other identity characteristics that Iraq shares with Sunni Arabs such as ethnicity, tribal ties, culture, and language while projecting sectarian identity as the sole defining political feature. Consequently, by placing Iraq in an enemy image, he would interpret all its moves and actions as hostile, forcing Iraq to ultimately mirror back that image.

What Harvey describes as the “logic of enmity” surrounding the Iraq-Saudi relations during the ten-years of King Abdullah’s rule was further compounded by the way foreign policy decisions were made in Saudi Arabia. In this regard, she alludes to the three classifications of foreign-policy-making by Margaret Hermann, namely: the predominant actor, single coherent group, and fragmented multiple-actor, and singles out the predominant type to describe King Abdullah’s style of conducting foreign policy. It seems as though King Abdullah was notorious for concentrating foreign policy decision-making in his own office, and he especially monopolized Saudi-Iraq policy and rejected all opposing views from within the upper echelon of the royal family as well as from foreign allies such as the Americans and other Sunni Arab leaders, who were in favor of opening to Iraq.

Still, Harvey does not overlook personal relations as another determining variable of foreign policy in the region, where local customs sometimes prioritize personal ties and trust over deliberated policy decisions. She highlights a particular incident that took place between King Abdullah and Prime Minister Al-Maliki in 2006 which appeared to have created bad blood between the two leaders for their entire reigns. The incident revolves around a visit by Al-Maliki to Saudi Arabia upon assuming his post as the first constitutionally elected Shiite prime minister of Iraq after Saddam Hussein. King Abdullah, in what appeared to have been a gesture of goodwill at the time, offered Al-Maliki a lavish reception only to backtrack and reverse course drastically afterwards.

It was speculated that the reason for this decision was that Al-Maliki failed to fulfill promises he had made to the king during his visit. Even though the author, despite noticeable efforts, was not able to pinpoint the nature of those failed promises nor why they were so consequential in sealing the fate of Iraqi-Saudi relations for at least a decade, the incident testifies to the fragile grounds on which those relations stood. It underscores the skepticism harbored by the king toward normalizing relations with the Shiite regime, rendering any wrong move by the Iraqis grave enough to break them. After that incident, the king resorted to his old notion of calling Al-Maliki and his government “untrusted Iranian agents”.

Could It Have Been Any Different?

The question left unanswered by Harvey is: had it not been for King Adbullah’s intransigence on one side, and Al-Maliki’s novelty on the other, could matters between the two countries have been different? Other political events suggest that when the Saudis interfered in other troubled countries in the region, they often lacked the strategy, power, and networks to have any meaningful impact. On the other hand, had the Iraqis and Saudis actually engaged with one another, to what extent would the former have benefited from a Saudi presence against Iran and would have Saudi engagement been sufficient to neutralize it—even if Iraqis were indeed serious about re-engaging with Sunni Arabs?

Iraq’s political landscape is too complex to explain or predict what might have been. It remains true that an early engagement by Saudi Arabia and other key Arab states like Egypt would have been positive for Iraq’s overall trajectory, at least symbolically. Regardless of whether this missed opportunity would have shaped events differently or not, engagement would have at least provided Iraq with other options.

Besides its recounting and analysis of the Saudi-Iraqi relations, the book provides detailed accounts of the most critical events, policies, and decisions that shaped post-Saddam Iraq. Complex events are summarized and presented in little over 250 pages. Harvey details the role and positions of key political parties and actors internally and externally influencing the political landscape and disentangled some of the complexities and ambiguities surrounding Iraq after Saddam Hussein, especially around the issue of Shiite politics. In this sense, the book serves as a quick reference for researchers on Iraq’s history after the fall of the autocratic leader.

By providing these details, the author attempts to offer ample context in which post-Saddam Iraqi politics played out and to which the Saudis and other Sunni Arabs were apparently oblivious. The curious question is whether this oblivion was deliberate or not; this, the book does not answer, pointing out the ambiguities and silence surrounding foreign-policy-making in Saudi Arabia. Even after King Abdullah’s death in 2015, Saudi officials would balk on providing useful answers. The speculation around broken promises by Al-Maliki to the king may not be given much credence in Western analysis but, in the local context, it could be quite consequential. Personal politics is rooted in the very nature of tribal norms and customs of the Arab gulf monarchies and sheikhdoms. But it is not all personal; the speed in which that overture broke down between King Abdullah and Al-Maliki highlights the magnitude of suspicion the Saudis had toward Shiites ruling in Iraq and their hesitation to readily accept it, where the burden of proof also fell on the Iraqis to demonstrate to the Saudis that they were indeed different.

In the world of politics, identity politics can be put aside to allow for interests to rule and shape relations. This was not the case in the Iraqi-Saudi relationship. The current Saudi king and his active crown prince may be trying to reverse some of the damage done but it might be too late in post-ISIS Iraq, where Iran seems to have cemented its presence. However, the ongoing efforts remain worthwhile, especially in the context of rising discontent over unruly militias supported by Iran. It is important to note that even though the book is heavy on blaming the Saudi side, Iraqi Shiites had their own share of missteps that allowed Iran to interfere.

Although Saudi Arabia might have correctly prophesied that Iran and Iraq would find partners in one another, the kingdom did not strive enough to change that prophecy. However, that opportunity still exists.