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Al-Ahram Weekly 16 - 22 March 2000 Issue No. 473 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 16 - 22 March 2000 Issue No. 473
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles A user-friendly Middle East
By Sami Elrazaz *Even veteran Middle East observers can be caught off guard by developments in this seemingly dormant region. At the end of last year, for instance, Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times, upgraded his peace barometer from an almost totally pessimistic forecast about the prospects of a peace deal between Israel and Syria to one of guarded optimism -- all in the span of just one week ("Frozen in Damascus," 5 December 1999 and "Unfrozen in Damascus," 12 December 1999). At the time, he was forced to acknowledge he had no idea the peace process was moving that fast on the Israeli-Syrian track.
Preoccupied mainly with globalisation of late, however, Friedman seems to have lost his grasp of the basics -- Middle East 101, as it were. Admittedly, both articles contain several true and illuminating insights about the present realignment of forces in the Middle East, particularly the domestic situation in Syria. It is always informing to read Mr Friedman on the interaction between domestic and global factors, which transforms whole regions and countries. Yet he seemed so overwhelmed by the details of Israel's security and Syria's sclerosis that he lost his usually good vision of the region as a whole.
In both articles, he based his arguments on statements from a single Middle East pundit -- Stephen Cohen, of the Centre for Middle East Peace. In the second article, Friedman borrowed a trendy Cohen metaphor to the effect that Egypt is in charge of hardware in the conflict (tanks and planes), while Syria possesses the software: the existential struggle against Zionism and the maintenance of a rejection front. Implicitly, the argument boils down to a simple statement: with the hardware neutralised, uninstalling the software would ensure a rosy future for a stable and peaceful Middle East.
Wrong.
A faulty metaphor can only lead to a wrong diagnosis. Being the fan of information technology he is, Mr Friedman should have seen that the problem with the Middle East is not one of hard/software. The problem is the obsolete operating system: the region is run (or rather frozen) by a crashed dysfunctional operating system. According to the same imagery, it is a DOS Middle East. What the region needs is Windows 2000 for the new century, or millennium.
The hardware is there, and will always be. It could well be activated by setting up a different operating system, or even by reconfiguring the old one. The software can never be uninstalled from a frozen operating system. There will always be orphaned files hiding in the labyrinthine hardware of this region, threatening to take over and run their course unassisted.
Although it is possible to reformat a computer's hard disks, you cannot reformat a whole region, especially a complex and mercurial one like the Middle East, deleting everything from its memory and hardware and installing a brand new ready-made operating system. The new system has to be customised to ensure its compatibility with the hard/software -- to make sure it is Middle East-compliant.
Rather than looking into what such a system would be like, it is better to think of what it should not be. First and foremost, it should not be a purely Israeli-dominated system. That would doom it before it could start. By definition, it has to be a regional, multilateral system, compatible with the prerequisites of the emerging global order, so as to enable windows of peace to cascade in a belligerent region.
The new operating system should not express the existing imbalance of power, but rather a balance of interests. It should not reflect Israel's superior military might. For more than half a century, Israel has been much stronger than all the Arab countries combined, not only in terms of firepower and state-of-the-art weaponry, but in manpower as well: professional military historians acknowledge that in every Arab-Israeli war, Israel has been able to deploy more ground troops than all its Arab adversaries combined.
While the Arab military threat to Israel is a politically motivated myth, the fact remains that for over 50 years, Israel's military prowess has not been able to buy it peace, not to integrate it in the region. If war is the proverbial extension of politics, then the limitations of the Israeli war machine are quite obvious: it can only make war. It is not qualified to make peace, nor to dictate its terms. It has defended Israel's existence, but it cannot impose that existence on the neighbours. Here, politics take over.
Furthermore, the new operating system should not be ideology-driven. Rather, it should seek to achieve some sort of ideological disarmament. This applies to Zionism as well as to pan-Arabism and political Islam. Every side has to shed its tight ideological garb, and don a new, customised, wide-ranging approach to regional peace. Nobody should even think of persuading ordinary Arabs to discard their nationalistic or politicised religious fervour if Israel insists on maintaining its ultra-nationalistic religious character. The ideological compromise should be a two-way street.
Finally, the new system should not be a replica of the older one on the domestic fronts of the many actors. You cannot aspire to normalise regional relations without a state of normalcy within each and every country in the region. The new system should seek to promote the tenets of the emerging world order: democratisation, protection of human rights, good governance, civil society, etc. Software applications should be devised within the new operating system to monitor and promote such principles, signalling an "error" message when one of them is missing.
The older operating system of the region crashed under the pressure from the devastating global strategic developments of the last decade, especially the demise of the Cold War international systems. The new one should not be held hostage to the mechanisms of a bygone world. Nor should we resort to obsolete theoretical tools to understand the new reality of the Middle East, which is still a part of the world system, albeit a unique part.
Simply put, devise a sound operating system and both the hardware and software will run smoothly. It is too dangerous to leave a place like the Middle East running with a dead operating system.
* The writer is a former journalist and writer currently working as a translator in the UN Secretariat. The views expressed in the article are his own and do not in any way reflect the organisation's position.
