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Middle East News on Dec. 28, 2018
Friday, December 28, 2018
VietPress USA : News source: www.reddit.com
Hey real Israelis on reddit— What do you think of Fauda?
Is it good? Entertaining? Realistic? Strengths? Weaknesses? Write your mini review here!
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Hi all - I’m heading to Tel Aviv for my third time on business and wanted some recommendations for food, bars and hot spots to visit after work. Maybe even a live show(into metal, but down for any live music). I’m staying about 5 mins from Jaffa. Looking for stuff outside of the usual business dinner that I go on.
I will be there January 5th - 11th
Thanks!
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before moving back to study in Israel. I've never read a full book in Hebrew from beginning to end, but I think this will be a good place to start. Rest in peace, Amos ...
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By James M. Dorsey
A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Stitcher, TuneIn and Tumblr.
Two developments, the pending return of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to the Arab fold and protests in Sudan, Jordan and Tunisia, send contradictory messages of where the Middle East and North Africa are headed.
Conservative monarchies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that for much of the past decade have gone to great lengths to reverse the achievements of the 2011 Arab popular revolts that toppled the autocratic leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen and sparked mass protests in a swath of land stretching from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Gulf have heralded the pending lifting of Syria’s suspended membership of the Arab League as symbolizing the definitive death of the Arab spring.
A number of recent contacts, including a visit to Damascus by embattled Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, the first by an Arab leader since the eruption of the Syrian civil war; a meeting in Cairo of Syrian and Egyptian intelligence chiefs, and the refurbishing of the shuttered UAE embassy in the Syrian capital, are widely seen as precursors for Syria’s return.
In a twist of irony, Messrs. Al-Bashir and Al-Assad have both been accused of war crimes. The International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Al-Bashir that has largely been ignored by Middle Eastern and African nations.
Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who overthrew Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first and only democratically elected leader, in a UAE-Saudi-backed military coup in 2013, drove home autocrats’ seeming victory with the appearance in a court of the country’s two toppled leaders, Hosni Mubarak and Mr. Morsi.
In a demonstration of Mr. Al-Sisi’s supremacy, Mr. Mubarak was required to testify against Mr. Morsi in a case involving a 2011 jail break.
There is little doubt that Middle Eastern and North African autocracy has the winds at its back, in part because many in the region have been taken aback by the brutality of the counterrevolution that has sparked civil war, military intervention and harsh repression.
Nonetheless, multiple protests in recent years across the region in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Mauritania and Sudan as well as online protests in various countries, including Saudi Arabia, suggest that grievances underlying the 2011 and subsequent protests remain widespread. This is true for countries like Egypt where the achievements of the 2011 protests have been reversed as well as Tunisia, the one country that succeeded in pursuing political transition.
A recent survey conducted by Zogby Research Services (ZRS) concluded that only one in five Tunisians and Egyptians believed that their country was moving in the “right direction,” while 69% of Tunisians and 55% of Egyptians said their countries were moving in the “wrong direction.”
When asked whether respondents felt they were better or worse off than they had been five years ago, only 21% of Tunisians and 20% of Egyptians said “better off,” while 59% of Tunisians and 64% of Egyptians claimed they were “worse off.”
The survey seemed to confirm the notion that the key to long-term stability in the Middle East and North Africa lies in resolving the region’s ticking time bomb: unemployment and particularly youth unemployment.
The Zogby survey showed that employment, corruption, nepotism, an improved educational system and political reform were priorities for Egyptians and Tunisians. “The bottom line: the need to create jobs and reform governance so as to create greater confidence and opportunities for citizens are the challenges faced by the leaderships in both Tunisia and Egypt,” said James J. Zogby, the founder of ZRS.
Official youth unemployment rates across the Middle East hover around 30 percent and 20-25 percent in North Africa with real rates believed to be far higher.
Neither Arab autocrats nor democratic Tunisia have so far been able to deliver. Yet, the outcome of the battle between greater political liberalism and autocracy in the Middle East is likely to be won in the sphere of economics rather than politics.
Arab autocrats as well as Tunisian leaders have since 2011 been long on promising economic reform that would create jobs and enhance career perspectives and short on delivery. A failure to tackle corruption, the enhanced role of the state in countries like Egypt where the military supported by the UAE and Saudi Arabia plays an ever-greater role in the economy, and depressed oil prices, have stymied growth in the region.
As a result, economics rather than politics will also seal the ultimate fate of the Arab spring, a code word for the crisis of confidence in the system and in leadership that has helped autocrats in the Middle East and North Africa retain or regain power and has fuelled populism, nationalism and the rise of the far right across the globe.
In a rare and furtive recognition of Middle Eastern and North African realities by the Trump administration, the US embassy in Riyadh tweeted in early December a video with Arabic subtitles promoting peaceful protest as a path to "positive social and political changes," but quickly deleted it when questioned about it by Middle East Eye.
The video argued that "even in oppressive, authoritarian conditions, protesters can tailor their campaigns to succeed." It featured archival photos of celebrated protest movements, asserting that research showed that between 1900 and 2006, non-violent protests had been twice as effective as violent ones.
Mr. Al-Assad’s return to the Arab fold may constitute one more setback for forces of change in the Middle East and North Africa but is a long way from symbolizing their demise. For that to happen, the region’s autocrats have to make good on their promises by implementing painful structural reforms that inevitably will challenge vested interests. So far, there is little indication of that happening.
Which means that a warning earlier this year by Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that “public dissatisfaction, bubbling up in several countries, is a reminder that even more urgent action is needed” remains as valid today as when she first issued it.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored volume, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa as well as Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa and just published China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom
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By James M. Dorsey
A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Stitcher, TuneIn and Tumblr.
As far as Gulf leaders are concerned, President Donald J. Trump demonstrated with his announced US troop withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan that his insistence that the “world is a dangerous place” has never been truer.
The troop withdrawals coupled with Mr. Trump’s praising of Saudi Arabia’s alleged willingness to foot the reconstruction bill in Syria, moves that emphasized his lack of geopolitical interest in the Middle East, leave primarily standing as a common interest between the United States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates only Iran and a shaky Afghan peace process.
If former US president Barak Obama’s seeming unwillingness to whole heartedly support embattled Arab leaders during the 2011 Arab popular revolts that toppled the heads of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, was at the root of at times reckless greater assertiveness displayed since then by the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Mr. Trump’s moves literally threaten to leave them hanging in the air.
A similar conclusion can be drawn for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who appears to have successfully persuaded Mr. Trump to postpone publication of his Israeli-Palestinian peace plan until after Israel’s April 9 early elections because it portends to be less favourable to Israel than expected.
Despite Mr. Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the plan reportedly sees the city as the capital of both the Jewish and a Palestinian state.
The troop withdrawals and the peace plan confirm Middle Eastern leaders’, particularly those in the Gulf, worst fears: they are left without a reliable ally that will unconditionally protect their interests and they have no one to turn to who could fully replace the United States as their unquestioned protector.
The resignation of US defense secretary Jim Mattis deepens the crisis for Gulf leaders. “Mattis’ departure means the loss of a key interlocutor at the Department of Defense, the Cabinet-level agency with which the Gulf countries deal most. It also means losing a senior figure who views Middle Eastern strategic realities in terms very similar to their own. The fact that Mattis resigned over policy disagreements with the president does not bode well for future trends in Washington from a Gulf Arab perspective,” said Middle East scholar Hussein Ibish.
Mr. Trump has proven to be unreliable. His granting of waivers to Iran’s major oil buyers as well as for Indian investment in the Iranian port of Chabahar, viewed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE as a threat to their geopolitical and economic interests, was the writing on the wall despite the harsh sanctions imposed on Iran by the president. Syria and Afghanistan cement the fact that Mr. Trump is both unpredictable and unreliable.
The world’s other three major powers, Europe, Russia and China, have at best aspects of what the United States has to offer but lack the ability and/or interest to fully replace the United States as the Gulf leaders’ protector in the way that Mr. Trump seemed to do at the outset of his presidency.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE already have fundamental differences over Iran with the three powers who oppose US sanctions and want to salvage the 2015 international agreement that curbed the Islamic republic’s nuclear program. Similarly, the three world powers have refused to back the 18-month old Saudi-UAE-led economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar and call for a speedy resolution of the crisis.
Russia, moreover, is keen to sell weaponry to the Gulf, who are among the world’s biggest buyers, exploit vacuums created by US policy, and capitalize as a non-OPEC producer in enabling Gulf efforts to manipulate production and world oil prices but is not eager to inherit the US defense umbrella for the region.
Said Russia and energy expert Li-Chen Sim: “The Gulf is not a key focus of Russian foreign policy… I don’t see the Russians taking any advantage of the problems between the Saudis and the Americans to play a larger security role.” Ms. Sim was referring to US Congressional blaming of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and condemnation of Saudi conduct of the war in Yemen.
By the same token, China has neither the ability nor the appetite to replace the United States in the Gulf. On the contrary, China has preferred to benefit from US regional protection, prompting US assertions that the Chinese were free-riders. As is evident across Eurasia in projects related to China’s infrastructure and energy-driven Belt and Road initiative, Chinese support does not come without strings. The same is true for Europe.
China’s brutal crackdown on Turkic Muslims that is expanding to other Muslim groups in the country, moreover, represents a potential black swan in China-Gulf relations.
The impact of Saudi and UAE uncertainty with no one world power available to cater to all their needs is reflected in apparent efforts to rebuild bridges with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad whose ouster they sought for much of the Syrian civil war.
A recent visit to Damascus by embattled Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, the first by an Arab leader since the civil war erupted in 2011, was widely seen as the beginning of a thaw in Syrian-Arab relations.
Ali Mamlouk, the head of Syrian air force intelligence and a close associate of Mr. Al-Assad, met in Cairo days later with Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel.
The UAE is, according to unconfirmed reports, refurbishing its embassy in Damascus that has been empty since Gulf states broke off relations with Syria early on in the civil war.
Adding to Gulf leaders’ uncertainty, Mr. Trump left many guessing when he this week thanked Saudi Arabia on Twitter for agreeing to “to spend the necessary money needed to help rebuild Syria, instead of the United States.”
With Saudi Arabia refraining from comment, it was not clear what Mr. Trump was referring to. Saudi Arabia transferred in October in the immediate wake of the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi US$100 million to the US to help stabilise parts of Syria.
The vacuum created by Mr. Trump risks fuelling greater Gulf assertiveness with potentially messy consequences.
A close associate of Tunisian president Beji Caid Essebsi asserted earlier this year that the UAE had offered Tunisia financial assistance if Mr. Essebsi followed the example of Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, who imposed a brutal autocracy after staging in 2013 a military coup to topple Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s only democratically elected president.
Saudi Arabia this month pledged US$830 million in aid for Tunisia following Prince Mohammed’s controversial visit last month as part of a tour designed to demonstrate that his position remained strong despite Mr. Khashoggi’s killing.
Mr. Trump described the world as a dangerous place in shrugging off allegations that Prince Mohammed may have been responsible for the killing. Gulf leaders are likely to share that perception in response to the president’s seeming unwillingness to fully take their interests into account.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored volume, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa as well as Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa and just published China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom
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