Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (3 page)

The largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel is also in Iran, which still has kosher butchers, Jewish schools, synagogues, and a first-rate hospital favored by many of the ayatollahs. In Tehran, I have attended a Hebrew class for children as well as a Catholic service at which wine was served—with government permission, in a country that otherwise outlaws alcohol—as part of communion. Iran’s parliament has five especially reserved (and proportionate) seats for Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians.

Because of the region’s diversity, rivalries and backstabbing can become bitter and intense. Middle East nations can also be miserly with each other.

On a 1981 trip to Libya, I covered Yasser Arafat’s quest for financial aid. In a bizarre scene, Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi escorted a fatigues-clad Arafat through the opening of a new People’s Store in Tripoli, showing off French fashions, German toys, Italian appliances, and Japanese electronics. At a rooftop ceremony afterward, the two men prayed, shared dates and goat’s milk, then exchanged gifts. Arafat gave Qaddafi an exquisite antique camel saddle. Qaddafi presented the Palestinian leader, who was still in exile, with a set of Samsonite luggage.

“That’s all he’s likely to get from Qaddafi,” complained one of Arafat’s aides as we watched from the sidelines. “Qaddafi has promised us millions but never delivered a single cent.”

More than two decades later, several Arab governments that had pledged billions to help rebuild Iraq had failed to pay up several years after making their commitments—even though Iraq’s instability was affecting them all.

Opening up political systems may spark further friction, at least in the short term, as the balance of power shifts both within countries and between them. People long excluded will now want their say too. Indeed, whatever the rhetoric, the greatest tension in the region may not be between Arabs and Israelis. Sunnis, who long monopolized power, are particularly apprehensive about the growing leverage of Shiites, Islam’s so-called second sect. In an interview in 2004, Jordan’s King Abdullah warned me about the danger of an emerging “Shiite arc,” or crescent, stretching from Iran through Iraq into Syria and Lebanon—the kind of domino theory that once scared the West about communism.
¹⁶
The phrase set off a firestorm; it is still used to describe the region’s growing sectarian split.

The Middle East has already gone through enormous change.

In the twentieth century, three pivotal events redefined the region. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which dominated the Middle East for five centuries, redrew the map and gave birth to modern states after World War I. The creation of Israel in 1948 changed the region’s political dynamics and spawned the world’s longest conflict. And the 1979 Iranian revolution introduced Islam as an alternative political idiom. All three had spillover worldwide.

By coincidence, I first landed in the Middle East on October 6, 1973, arriving in Beirut during the chaotic outbreak of the fourth modern Middle East war. The Arabs had just launched a surprise attack on Israel. “Egyptian troops have crossed the Suez Canal,” an American tourist leaned over and whispered to me.

Oil was then only $3.12 per barrel—yes, barrel, not gallon—and the sheikhdoms of the Arabian Peninsula were considered poor developing countries. In Saudi Arabia, schools for girls had only been around for nine years and a single-channel television service for seven; both had been introduced over serious objections by conservative clergy. The strict Saudi version of Islam did not tolerate the human image in art or literature, much less on the small screen.

Iran was then one of two pillars of United States policy in the region. Some 40,000 Americans—military trainers and government advisers, businessmen, Peace Corps volunteers and tourists—passed through each year. It was spy heaven for the Central Intelligence Agency, which trained and worked closely with its Iranian counterpart. In Tehran in 1973, I stayed at the high-rise Hilton, which had just hosted a pageant of exotic and scantily clad beauties competing for the Miss Iran title.

Lebanon was the region’s playground, a cosmopolitan tourist haven of Mediterranean beaches and scenic ski slopes with decadent nighttime pleasures, casinos, and nightclubs. And Washington still had diplomatic relations with Baghdad, which was ruled by the Baath Party of an up-and-coming politician named Saddam Hussein.

During more than thirty years of living in and traveling to the region, I’ve witnessed extraordinary transformations of all kinds. I’ve covered Middle East wars as well as the first phase of peace between Egypt and Israel. In the 1970s, I covered the Shah of Iran as well as the revolution that ousted him. I covered Yasser Arafat as the world’s most notorious terrorist in the 1980s, as a signatory to a Palestinian-Israeli peace accord on the White House south lawn in the 1990s, and as the obstacle to a final peace in the 2000s. I covered Saddam Hussein’s war with Iran in the 1980s, and with Kuwait in the 1990s, and then flew into Baghdad weeks after he was ousted in 2003. Along the way, I’ve talked to thousands of people—on the streets and in palaces, in the bunkers of war zones and the tranquility of religious sites, on university campuses as well as in banks, shops, and factories, in newspaper offices and Internet cafes, in shantytown slums and luxurious villas, in the corridors of power and the back-alley hideouts of extremist cells.

For this book, I wandered across the region again to write about the crises of change that have begun to redefine the Middle East in the twenty-first century. There are many fine books about the Arab-Israeli conflict, Islamic extremism, the Iraq war, and Iran’s turmoil. I deliberately set out to look through a different prism. This is a book about disparate experiments with empowerment in the world’s most troubled region. My goal was to probe deep inside societies of the Middle East for the emerging ideas and players that are changing the political environment in ways that will unfold for decades to come.

The trauma of the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war—and other turmoil that almost certainly lies ahead—makes understanding the Middle East even more important. The central flaw behind the American intervention in Iraq was ignorance of the country and its people. Policy was ill informed. The U.S. decision to go to war was often based on wishful thinking and armchair projections at great distance.

“The United States didn’t have relations with Iraq for well over a decade, so there were very few U.S. officials who had any direct experience of the country,” reflected Charles Duelfer, who served for seven years as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq and returned after the war for the United States to write the final report on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

“The analysts who were making judgments, making assessments, didn’t have a tactile feel for Iraq,” he said. “Many of them had never even met a real Iraqi. Their reality came from a computer screen. Some policy makers made decisions not knowing—or caring—how catastrophically ignorant they were about Iraq. They had no concept of the ground truth of Iraqi politics and society. They had only a cartoonist’s understanding of Saddam. They did not know what made Iraq Iraq.”

The United States and its allies cannot afford to make that kind of mistake again. The Iraq war has carried costs—in lives, resources, and both human and political relationships—that are still incalculable.

This book reflects the voices in the region, not the pundits from afar. It covers the full spectrum of politics, not just the new democrats or heroes of change. I tracked down the heads of militant Palestinian and Lebanese movements as well as the inspiring activists of Egypt and Morocco and the reformers risking their lives in Syria and Iran. Some countries, like Saudi Arabia, I left out because the system has prevailed and the voices of change are not yet noisy enough. I also did not include Israel because it teems with political diversity and open debate. I deliberately selected a variety of countries experiencing the dynamic tension of change and used each to reflect a different slice of it.

Not all of the new actors will succeed. Some may only nudge the door ajar for those who follow. And others will be totally unacceptable to the West, creating tensions and diversions for both sides along the path of change.

I have seen up close how volatile the period ahead will be. When I started out on this latest journey, the region was full of dreams. As I finished it, serious shadows loomed in many places. I chose the title of this book from a lament by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Islamic world’s great twentieth-century modernizer, who molded today’s Turkey from the ruins of the old Ottoman Empire. “Neither sentiment nor illusion must influence our policy. Away with dreams and shadows!” he said. “They have cost us dear in the past.”
¹⁷

The Middle East will, unquestionably, continue to spur anxiety, threaten security, and drain resources. Yet even as the war in Iraq steadily escalated and the United States was increasingly discredited on democracy promotion, the majority of the people in the Middle East still wanted the kind of political change that has swept the rest of the world over the past quarter century.

What is most inspiring is not the dreams the outside world has for the people of the Middle East. It is instead the aspirations and goals they have genuinely set for themselves.

The Conundrum

O
n January 25, 2006, the Palestinians became the first Arabs to peacefully and democratically reject the status quo. They took their uprising to the ballot box. It started out as quite a party.

I woke up on Election Day to horn-tooting and deafening loudspeakers. Caravans of battered cars, pickup trucks and taxis were driving through the rocky hills of the West Bank, blaring party slogans, get-out-to-vote appeals, and even hip-hop campaign ditties for their candidates. Big party flags billowed from car rooftops, little banners on suction cups flapped from the back. One procession would fade into the distance, and another would soon roar noisily down the street.

Eleven parties were running. It was a raucous morning.

“I truly believe things will never be the same again,” Nader Said, a political sociologist and pollster at Birzeit University, told me almost giddily as he organized staff to run exit polls at voting sites. “These elections are a real threshold for the Palestinians. Even those who were hesitant or who refused to participate before are being brought into the game.”

The pollsters, however, seriously underestimated the scope of change in store—and the direction.

The Palestinian election was a dicey experiment for the Middle East. Over the previous century, big political change had more often been determined by bloody purges, coups d’état, revolutions or civil wars. Autocratic monarchies and one-party rule have long been the norm; real opposition is not tolerated. While most countries did conduct elections, most were a sham. Opening them up—fairly—to all who wanted to run was a rarity. The few earlier attempts had been manipulated, sabotaged, or aborted.

When fifty-four parties competed in Algeria to replace one-party rule in 1992, the military launched a coup on the eve of the final vote because it feared the projected winners. The election was abandoned. After a serious opposition party emerged in Jordan in 1989 and won a large chunk of parliamentary seats, the government redistricted to disperse its constituency for the next election. After Egypt’s president faced real opposition in a popular vote for the first time in 2005, his leading opponent was arrested.

The Palestinians also reflected the central conundrum of change in the Middle East—that perilous condition when both the status quo and the available alternatives are problematic, but delaying change could make the situation even worse. For just that reason, most key players—among Palestinians, Israel, the international community, and especially the United States—decided that long-delayed democratic elections should go forward. It was, however, the most thoroughly monitored election ever held in the Middle East.

The Palestinians are among the smaller Arab communities, but they are the savviest politically. They have the highest education rates in the Arab world. They have long interacted with worldly ideas and experienced diversity in the hub of the three great monotheistic religions. And in an ironic twist they have been exposed to Israel’s democracy.

About 2.4 million Palestinians live in the fertile West Bank, an area the size of Delaware positioned between Israel and Jordan. Another 1.4 million reside in the tiny but teeming Gaza Strip, which is less than 140 square miles, or twice the size of Washington, D.C., and is squished between Israel’s southern border and giant Egypt. More than half of the Palestinians, somewhere between four to six million, are scattered among twenty-two Arab nations and the six inhabited continents. Without a state for almost six decades, the Palestinian political experience has been unique among the Arabs.

Yet the Palestinians have defined the Arab agenda since 1948. And on election eve, politicians throughout the Middle East knew that the outcome would have disproportionate impact regionwide.

“We are the wound in the Arab world,” added Said, the pollster, as he toyed with the yellow and light green magic markers on his desk.

“And everyone watches what happens to us.”

The pattern of change globally—communism’s demise in Eastern Europe, the end of Latin America’s military dictatorships, and apartheid’s collapse in Africa—has a common denominator: Change begins with breaking the monopoly of an autocratic leader, party, government, or ideology. It can take decades. Once accomplished, it is still only the starting point.

In the Middle East, the Palestinians were the first to reach that stage—on their own steam.

I watched the election for a new government in Ramallah, the embryonic Palestinian capital and a bustling city of some 60,000 in the West Bank, or biblical Judea. It is the first city across the border from Israel, about ten miles slightly north of Jerusalem, in the middle niche of the peanut-shaped West Bank. Palestinians often say that the road to peace is not through Damascus or Baghdad but through Ramallah.

Ramallah is the most liberal and cosmopolitan Palestinian city. It launched its own international film festival in 2004. You can browse downtown at the Miami Beach Arcade, shop at Cowboy 2000 Jeans, and get coiffed at Just 4 U Hair, Face and Nails. Among the dining options are Mickey Mouse Subs, Angelo’s Pizzeria, the Titanic Coffee Shop, the Pollo-Loco Mexican restaurant, and a Chinese take-out. Its basketball teams—both men and women—have competed regionally; the poster shop downtown features a blowup of American basketball star Allen Iverson in the window. Ramallah is known for its poets and writers, artists and musicians. It is also home to the leading Palestinian university, Birzeit.

In Arabic, the city’s name—
ram allah
—means “God’s hill.” Allah is the Arabic word for God—not an Islamic God, but the same monotheistic God worshipped by Muslims, Christians, and Jews. In Ramallah’s case, the reference was originally Christian. The city was founded by tribes of Christian Arabs in the sixteenth century. To this day, about fifteen percent of all Palestinians worldwide are Christian.

Many families in Ramallah can trace their ancestors to the eight original Christian clans.
¹
The mayor’s job in Ramallah is still reserved for a Christian.

“It’s not
exactly
a law. It’s a custom,” explained Janet Michael, Ramallah’s first female mayor and a Greek Orthodox who descends from a founding clan, when I dropped by her office in City Hall. Michael, a graying former school headmistress, had been selected by the city council two weeks earlier. She had even won the votes of the three city council members from an Islamist party, she told me, pointedly.

Ramallah was redefined after the birth of Israel in 1948, when refugees flooded into what was then Jordan and transformed the city’s quaint pastoral life. Its numbers more than doubled, even as many Christians fled to the United States and Europe. Squalid refugee camps grew up on its outskirts. Ramallah was quickly converted from a prosperous Christian town of some 6,000 into a burgeoning community of Muslims who had abandoned or lost almost everything.

The city was transformed again a generation later after Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war. Jewish settlements grew up quickly near Ramallah, sometimes built on confiscated Palestinian land with Palestinian labor. The city became economically dependent on Israel and paid Israeli taxes.

Yet Ramallah’s early identity has not disappeared. Many Christian customs have endured despite big demographic shifts. The Quaker Friends School, opened in 1869, is still the choice of elites, both Muslim and Christian; many prominent politicians and intellectuals are among its alums. The Sabbath is still observed on Sunday, not Friday, the Muslim Sabbath; church bells from several denominations echo through Ramallah’s hills. And on Election Day, exactly one month after Christmas, an artificial Christmas tree decorated with miniature gift boxes, gold bulbs, and a star of Bethlehem—named for a city that is less than fifteen miles down the road, as the crow flies—was still up in the lobby of the Best Eastern Hotel.

“We won’t take it down until the end of January. That’s the tradition,” the reception clerk told me.

Ramallah, originally an agricultural center, is still surrounded by gently tiered hills of olive groves, citrus orchards, and vineyards. “God’s hill” refers more to the area’s fertility and scenic beauty than its history.

For there is certainly nothing more sacred in Ramallah than politics.

The Palestinian campaign was quite intense, right down to a competitive new election chic. Parties distributed thousands of baseball caps, in party colors, inscribed with party slogans. Packs of campaign workers handing out party literature on downtown streets looked like rival teams who had showed up to play ball. Others produced pageant-like sashes and headbands with campaign logos. An Islamic party organized children wearing green sashes—printed with the Muslim creed, “There is no deity but God and Mohammed is his messenger”—and accompanied by drummers to parade through West Bank towns. Ramallah, a city of creamy stone buildings and dirty streets, was plastered with candidates’ faces on utility poles, shops, fences, billboards, traffic intersections, even monuments. The Third Way, a group of independents trying to carve out a new middle ground, rolled huge ads down the sides of buildings, top floor to bottom, and made downtown Manara Square look like a modest version of Times Square. And the array of posters, placards, and banners was constantly changing. Overnight, one long row of a candidate’s picture would be covered by another contestant’s face until, in the brief three-week campaign, posters were layers thick. It was as if political parties calculated that each poster might produce another vote, so whoever put up the most would triumph.

Or perhaps the Palestinians were making up for lost time.

Ramallah is also home to the Muqata, which means “something separated.” It is an imposing compound of white stone buildings that has the commanding presence of a fortress. Britain built the Muqata in 1920, during its mandate of Palestine, as a prison. After the British left in 1948, Jordan turned the Muqata into a military base. When Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war, it was converted back again into a prison and a center for occupation troops.

In 1994, the Muqata became the West Bank headquarters for the first Palestinian government. It was Yasser Arafat’s domain.

For almost a half century, Palestinian politics was dominated by one man—and one party. In the mid-1950s, as a young engineer working in Kuwait, Arafat gave up a lucrative job and his beloved two-tone pink Thunderbird convertible to establish a new Palestinian political movement. Arafat’s creation was Fatah. It translates from Arabic as “victory” or “conquest,” but it is also the backward acronym for Harakat al-Tahrir al-Falistiniya, or the Palestine Liberation Movement.
²
In a macabre twist, the acronym spelled forward is
hataf,
or “death.”

The first conflict among Fatah’s founding members—mostly engineers and teachers trained in Egypt, when Arafat was president of the Union of Palestine Students at Cairo University—was over leadership. They decided against a single leader, opting for collective power. A fifteen-member central committee was the ultimate authority and was supposed to vote on all major decisions.
*

But Arafat—a surprisingly short man with a potbelly, a perpetual three-day stubble, bulbous lips, and a cunning charisma—quickly developed a chokehold over Fatah. It became his personal political tool.

Over the next five decades, Arafat did pretty much what he pleased—and, shrewdly, used the others as his advisers, emissaries, shields, and decoys for the party’s darker activities. Among them was cofounder Abu Iyad, the nom de guerre of the portly intelligence chief with bushy black eyebrows who created Black September, the notorious network that carried out the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of eleven Israeli athletes and other dirty deeds. Arafat usually wanted to be one step removed from the airplane hijackings, bombings, and assassinations that killed hundreds of Israelis—and far more Palestinians in Israeli counterstrikes. He preferred to put himself above it all as the father of the Palestinian people, not the executioner of its youth or the master terrorist.

I encountered Arafat many times during the years I lived in Lebanon. I got an anecdotal glimpse of his hold over Fatah’s leadership during an anniversary rally on New Year’s Eve 1981. Fatah had no fireworks, but it had plenty of weapons. Arafat’s fighters fired round after noisy round of flares, tracers, automatic rifles, and even antiaircraft guns into Beirut’s night sky to celebrate. Most of Fatah’s central committee, including Abu Iyad, had gathered in an underground bunker behind the dais; it was one of many in a subterranean network under Beirut built by the PLO to hide its fighters and arsenal. I tagged along with one of Arafat’s advisers to get inside. The bunker was almost bourgeois—paneled walls, modern chrome furniture, shag carpeting. The thick stink of many cigarettes permeated the poorly ventilated room.

The centerpiece of the evening was Arafat’s long speech exhorting Palestinian fighters on to victory against Israel and promising refugees that they would soon go home. Alternately waving his fist and a rifle in the air, Arafat appealed,

As Arafat spoke, not one member of the central committee bothered to leave the bunker for the outdoor rally just a few steps away. They all stayed behind, smoking and talking among themselves.