It has long been a proposition in
international political theory that democracies will not engage in
warfare with each other. The belief is based on both history and the
idea that populations free to choose their leaders won't perceive a
significant threat from a competing democracy and thus won't accept
the risks and costs of such a conflict.
The current hostilities between Israel
and the Hamas political leadership in Gaza within the context of the
“Arab Spring” revolutions may provide an interesting test of this
proposition. The Hamas regime in Gaza, while elected by the
residents of that forlorn coastal enclave, cannot in any way be
considered a democratic form of governance. The fundamental question
however, involves other Arab nations that are in political
transition. The case of Egypt is particularly important. As the
Egyptian revolution progressed and the autocratic regime of Hosni
Mubarak was deposed, Western governments and observers engaged in
“cautious optimism” that the eventual result would be a
democratic system which it was hoped would provide more stability to
the region. A panel is struggling to create a new constitution and
elections were held to elect a civilian executive and legislature
from competing political parties. But elections themselves do not
create a functioning democracy and the Egyptian experiment is still
a work in progress. The governing majority and the executive branch
are controlled by the Freedom and Justice Party which is the
political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization,
which claims to have abandoned violence in pursuit of religious
objectives but which has a dubious history in this regard. The
administration and the constitutional panel are under increasing
pressure from fundamentalists to govern from an Islamic perspective
including a legal system based on Sharia (Koranic) law.
The incompatibility of religious
governance with individual freedoms basic to a democracy presents
particular problems for the future of Egypt. Should this
contradiction be resolved however, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict,
especially as regards the situation in Gaza, presents the issue of
democratic regime conflict. Can a truly democratic nation support a
non-democratic entity in a conflict against another democracy? The
Hamas regime in Gaza which is an off shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood,
has been engaged in military hostilities with Israel since Hamas'
formation in 1987. Its founding charter denies Israel's right to
exist. It has been identified as a terrorist organization by the
European Union and the United States. It exists as a competitor to
the more moderate and more democratic Fatah party which controls the
Palestinian Authority and which governs the larger Palestinian
territory in the West Bank.
Egypt's president Mohammed Morsi has
expressed specific support for Hamas during the recent conflict,
condemning Israel's response to the barrage of rocket attacks by
Hamas on Israeli territory while ignoring those attacks. The
Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Qandil visited Gaza in support of
their operations against Israel. The Egyptian government is not
acting beyond the approval of the Egyptian populace. Anti-Israeli
demonstrations have replaced the anti-Mubarak demonstrations of the
previous year and a majority of Egyptians support the abandonment of
the historic Egypt/Israeli peace treaty in place since 1978.
It is this popular sentiment, not only
in Egypt but across the Islamic Middle East, unleashed by the
overthrow of the autocratic regimes, that casts a shadow over
transitions to democracy in the region. It is certainly not
necessary for the maintenance of a democratic system to be neutral
towards the state of Israel. The Prime Minister of the more
democratic state of Turkey has used inflammatory rhetoric in
condemning Israel as a “terrorist state” engaged in “ethnic
cleansing”. However the same Islamic fervor that underlies
popular animosity to not only Israel's policies but also to the very
existence of that nation, as implied by support of Hamas, will be the
on going obstacle in creating societies which protect basic human
rights. The energizing of these Islamist factions over the
Gaza/Israeli conflict will place future political outcomes more in
doubt.
Thus while the transition towards
democracy and the direction of Egyptian foreign policy may change the
assumptions regarding conflict between democracies, this is more a
subject of academic interest and the more important issue is the
validity of Egypt's transition to true democracy itself, which in
turn offers insights to the struggle of revolutionaries in Syria to
oust the dictator Bashar Assad.
Al Qaida terrorists and other Sunni
Muslim extremists are among the militias fighting the Syrian military
and will be part of the competition for political power after the
inevitable downfall of the Assad regime. Recently it was reported
that “ Several extremist Islamist groups fighting in Syria have
said they reject the new Syrian opposition coalition, which was
formed under the guidance of the United States, Turkey and Gulf Arab
countries. The development underscored worries about the rising
influence of religious fundamentalism amid the chaos of the bloody
civil war in Syria.”
Both the recent conflict in Gaza and
the continuing chaos in Syria have enormous importance to the future
of the region and to U.S. interests. President Obama sent Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton to Cairo to take part in the multilateral
attempt to negotiate a cease fire between Hamas and Israel while he
was attending the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in
Cambodia. A tenuous cease fire has been announced although the
possibility of an Israeli ground invasion in response to future Hamas
intransigence remains a possibility.
It is not in the interests of either
side to allow that to happen. Hamas and its supporting militant
groups would be defeated. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) would
suffer casualties but the civilian population in the densely
populated 141 square mile territory would suffer the most. This
would bring more outrage against Israel from regional governments and
harsh disapproval from most Western governments. It would also
further weaken the standing of the more moderate Fatah led
Palestinian Authority among the Palestinian population as a whole and
among the regional governments.
Thus the Israeli/Palestinian struggle
which has been going on since the creation of the Jewish state in
1948 will be an important factor in the political development of the
regional Arab nations now freed from their former autocratic systems.
Opposition to Israel and support for the Palestinians is largely
based on ethnic and religious identification. As such it embodies a
level of personal prejudice and hatred which is unlikely to diminish.
As long as the issue of Palestinian statehood remains unsettled the
domestic pressures on Arab leaders, especially by religious
fundamentalists and extremists will manifest itself in competition
for political power in national governments. Islamists actually
gaining control of governments or even forcing compromises among more
moderate political leaders will not allow the full development of
democratic systems and will foster continued regional instability and
conflict. The U.S., as the major supporter of Israel's ability to
defend itself, will have no friends in the Middle East and
cooperative relationships as with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and
Turkey will suffer.
The U.S. cannot impose a “two state
solution” on Israel and the Palestinians but even as this has been
accepted as the only viable outcome to end the decades old conflict,
the negotiating process which is the only way forward has largely
been abandoned as a strategy by both parties. The Palestinian
Authority instead seeks a path to statehood through the United
Nations. Israel has placed unrealistic territorial obstacles in the
way of substantive negotiations and the Palestinians are not a single
national entity which is necessary for negotiations. Hamas clings to
the delusion that Israel must be militarily defeated or accept a
“right of return” for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and
their descendents who were forced to leave Israel during the 1948
war. This is essentially a demand that the Jewish state negotiate
itself out of existence. A national unity government created by
elections or compromise between the Gaza based Hamas and the West
Bank based Fatah has to be created in order to move forward.
Regional governments, especially Egypt should be encouraged to engage
Hamas and Fatah in pursuit of this fundamental issue. Blind support
of the implacable Hamas will never lead to a solution. This is where
the Obama Administration should focus its diplomatic attention while
at the same time convincing Israel to put together realistic
negotiating principles as a next step.
Thus the unresolved Israeli/Palestinian
issue will continue to impede democratic progress in the new regional
governments. In Egypt, warning signs in addition to Islamist support
of Hamas have appeared. President Morsi has “issued constitutional
amendments granting himself far-reaching powers and ordering the
retrial of leaders of Hosni Mubarak's regime for the killing of
protestors in last year's uprising”.
Morsi is essentially governing by
decree, in the absence of a constitution and has rejected the
authority of an independent judiciary to review the legitimacy of
the constitutional panel, and the upper and lower houses of
parliament, all of which are currently in the hands of Islamist
majorities. This is a dangerous precedent, and appears to be a
further concession to the Islamist factions to whom Morsi was
pandering with his hostile rhetoric in support of the Hamas regime in
Gaza. Taken together they indicate a strong anti-democratic impulse
yet remains in Egyptian political culture.
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