The great burst of online activism that has accompanied (and in some case catalysed) the unprecedented grassroots mobilisation in the Middle East, has allowed the world to watch a remarkable vindication of the youth of the Arab world, and the justice of their cause.
Seeing so many of the people I know and respect suddenly find political voice on a global stage- whilst addressing local injustices- has been something truly beautiful to behold; filling me and many others who care deeply about the Middle East with an optimism that shatters the defeatist narrative that has so long plagued this part of the world. Democracy, human rights, personal freedom and the opening up of opportunities have been the universal thread running through many of the events and accompanying debates that have seen the world transformed, since a brave and frustrated market trader named Mohamed Bouazizi decided to say Khalas, and tear down the status quo that has held back the region for so long, through a shocking- and still troubling- act of self-sacrifice. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have allowed people around the world to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with protestors in Cairo, Ramallah, and Damascus.
What I want to call attention to, however, is one of the more ugly elements of the Ancien Régime that still persists, and is now being given voice on those very same platforms. It is something that the Arab world in no way has a monopoly over, but is something that nonetheless threatens to corrupt and irrationalise the great transformative potential that is being shown right now. It is the conspiracy theory; and more particularly, it is the anti-Israeli conspiracy theory.
This week we have seen Bashar Assad- surely, by any account, an enemy of the moderate majority of Arabs who wish to exercise their voices and claim back their societies- continue to claim that the protestors who lay down their lives across Syria are ‘Zionist agents.’ Simultaneously, many of the people that I respect who are peacefully struggling to end Israel’s unjust, illegal and unsustainable occupation of Palestine, have reflexively blamed Israel for the brutal murder of Vittorio Arrigoni, a brave ISM activist based in Gaza. In the latter case, the knee-jerk supposition that Israel’s intelligence services were implicated in the murder flies in the face of the fact that a Gazan Salafist faction had issued a ransom note upon kidnapping Vittorio- not to mention that Hamas have already arrested two Salafist subjects, who have said that the kidnapping was ‘a natural outcome of the policy of the government carried out against the Salafi.’
Is Israel capable of such an act? Yes, of course. Is there a motive (however slight) for them carrying it out? Again, yes there is. Does this automatically mean that Israeli is responsible? No, of course it doesn’t. A far more likely narrative for the tragic events that took place this week is that a Salafist militant group operating in Gaza known as Tawhid and Jihad kidnapped Vittorio, holding him as ransom so that they could have several of their leaders released from Gaza’s prisons, following a Hamas crack-down on local Salafist factions. They targeted Vittorio because he was not a Muslim, was not a Palestinian nor an Arab, but instead a citizen of Italy- in their own words an ‘infidel state’, ‘spreading corruption’ in Gaza.
Of course, the arrest this week of two youths in connection to the murder of the Fogel family last month in the illegal settlement of Itamar is itself connected to this very same issue. A great many people in the Arab world believed- and still believe- that the murder was an Israeli covert operation. Regardless of how you feel about Israel’s illegal settlement project, the right of Palestinians to resist it, or even the legitimacy of the act itself (which in my view is absolutely unjustifiable); it seems preposterous to suggest that the Israeli government ordered it.
I will not spend too much time discussing the Itamar murders- nor the upsurge in Salafist activity in Gaza recently (save to say that an excellent report on the Salafist phenomenon has been published by the International Crisis Group recently) Instead, it is important to focus on two things. First of all, the need for the Arab world generally, and the Palestinians more specifically (and understandably) to lay the blame for every calamity at Israel’s door. The second, far more important issue, is to what extent this ugly hangover from the Arab world of old can be allowed to corrupt the surge of progressive and democratic political action throughout the region.
Arabs have good reason to look for Israel’s hand in the region’s misdeeds. The Jewish Agency’s grenade attack in Baghdad in 1950; The Suez fiasco of 1956; the spying rings that were uncovered in Cairo and Damascus, and the covert assassinations around the world- not to mention the persistent cultivation of a network of informers in the Occupied Territories- indeed, there is no shortage of evidence to show that Israel is prepared to use underhand tactics in order to further its aims.
Equally, however, the Arab and Muslim world has shown a capability to kidnap and execute westerners. The moderate arm of Palestinian resistance has itself embraced dark tactics, such as suicide attacks, civilian kidnappings and operations on foreign soil. On the basis of historical precedent alone, anyone concerned with finding the truth, rather than simply fuelling a conspiracy, would do well to look at the facts rather than be governed by counter-intuitive prejudice.
The ‘Israel-card’ has been a very convenient weapon for the autocratic regimes in the Middle East for quite some time; and Israel has of course done its fair share to help the likes of Assad and his father before him, using illegal and immoral force to quell resistance, and of course periodically perpetrating audacious and deadly conspiracies, such as that which we saw in Dubai last year, or the botched attempt at assassinating Khaled Mishal in Amman in 1997.
What cannot be allowed however, in this new moment for the Middle East, is for this fundamentally anachronistic reflex to be carried over into the new political horizon. All over the Middle East, societies are sick of their leaders refusing to take responsibility. Accountability and solidarity have been the two most important words that have appeared throughout this Arab Spring. Leaders need to be accountable to their people, and the people need to be accountable to each other. Those that carry out acts such as those discussed, and then hide within the cloak of an illogical conspiracy theory, are no better than Bashar Assad calling thousands of brave Syrian patriots ‘Zionist spies.’ Solidarity is important, because those that fight for their rights in Palestine- or indeed Egypt, Syria or anywhere within the Middle East- should feel no sense of common cause with people who kill children or hang peace activists. If Israel is the enemy, then so too are these people. I have heard those that I respect remark ‘Palestinians could never have done this; it must have been Israelis.’ Such a comment betrays the same sort of racist reductionism that allows many Israelis to dehumanise those that they keep under occupation. The fight for Palestinian rights has managed to catch the imagination and solidarity of people around the world. Believe me when I tell you that this sort of cowardly lack of responsibility- lack of sense of right and wrong, just and unjust- could very well reverse this welcome trend.
‘With power comes responsibility’, so the cliché goes. If the brave young citizens of the Arab world who have upturned the status quo want to actually change their reality, rather than just the names and faces of their leaders, they would do well to think about what that really means. Being a victim is unjust, demoralising and tragic. But it can also, morally- in a very strange way- be oddly easy. To truly triumph over injustice, you need to step up and be better- and more honest- than those that have oppressed you. Only then, will a cycle be broken, a region transformed, and an occupation ended.
