Informed Comment

Christopher Anzalone writes in a guest column for Informed Comment:

On August 31, on the evening before new U.S.-backed Israeli-Palestinian National Authority (PNA) peace talks were set to begin, a drive-by shooting near the West Bank city of Hebron killed four Israeli settlers traveling on the highway near the settlement of Kiryat Arba. The attack was roundly condemned by Israeli, U.S., and PNA officials including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and PNA president Mahmoud Abbas. Senior Lebanon-based HAMAS spokesman Osama Hamdan denied that the movement had planned attacks aimed at sabotaging the new round of negotiations. Despite his denial, HAMAS’ military wing, the Brigades of the Martyr ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam (hereafter the Qassam Brigades), issued an official statement claiming responsibility for the attack the same day. Its senior Gaza-based spokesman Abu ‘Ubayda also claimed responsibility. A day later, Israeli settlers near Hebron threw rocks at Palestinian civilians and attempted to light a Palestinian-owned field on fire in retaliation for the attack.

After years of U.S. and Israeli attempts to sideline and even ignore HAMAS, the premier Palestinian Islamist movement once again showed that it could play the role of spoiler in ongoing Israeli-PNA peace negotiations. In its rhetoric following the Hebron attack and a subsequent shooting attack near the West Bank city of Ramallah, HAMAS military wing clearly relished this role and vowed to continue on the “path of resistance” against the ongoing Israeli military occupation and blockading of the Palestinian Territories. The group also faces internal pressures from small but disproportionately influential transnational jihadi-takfiri groups operating in the Gaza Strip, pressures that may also be influencing HAMAS’ decision to launch a new military campaign.

In its statement about the August 31 attack, the Qassam Brigades said that it claimed “full responsibility for this heroic operation” that targeted the “Zionist usurpers of the beloved land of Palestine.” The attack was launched, the statement said, in retaliation for ongoing Israeli persecution of the Palestinian people through arbitrary and targeted arrests, military strikes, assassinations of Palestinian leaders, and the “Judaizing” of the contested city of Jerusalem. HAMAS’ attack was a “natural response” to the “crimes of the Zionist occupation.” In a dig at its chief political rival, Abbas’ Fatah party, which it accuses of selling out Palestinian rights in the pursuit of political power and money, the HAMAS statement said that “the heroes of the Qassam Brigades are at the helm of the resistance struggle in every field.” HAMAS has continued to criticize Fatah for serving as a “collaborator” with Israel in a series of articles published by its official media organs.

HAMAS spokesman Abu ‘Ubayda reiterated that the attack near Hebron was, “a natural response to the crimes of the occupation that affect our people in the occupied West Bank, a natural response to the Zionists who have targeted mosques and shrines.” He claimed that the attack’s “first message” was that “resistance to the occupation remains a viable option” and said that the Qassam Brigades “can strike at the time and place of our choice.” Finally, he said that the attack was not an isolated event but was launched in the context of an ongoing military campaign.

True to Abu ‘Ubayda’s word, the Qassam Brigades carried out a second shooting attack a day later around 11 p.m. on September 1 near the Israeli settlement of Kochav Hashachar located outside of the West Bank city of Ramallah, wounding two Israelis. In its official statement, the HAMAS military wing announced that the second attack was part of a new military campaign, which it dubbed the “Torrent of Fire” campaign. For several days, a flashy piece of graphic art of a camouflaged Qassam Brigades’ fighter surrounded by flames was featured prominently as the introductory screen to the military wing’s web site. The second attack was aimed, the statement said, at humbling the “arrogance of the occupation” and in retaliation for its “crimes.” The Qassam Brigades’ promised its “courageous people in Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, and the diaspora” that “this attack will not be the last, with the Zionists in a panic, we will strike them where they least expect it.”

The Qassam Brigades’ decision to launch its new military campaign in the West Bank was a significant and clear-cut challenge to the authority of the Fatah-dominated PNA and, more precisely, the personal authority of Abbas. PNA security forces have reportedly arrested suspects in the second attack, though its officials had on September 4 been ambiguous as to whether or not anyone had been taken into custody. On September 3, HAMAS spokesman Abu ‘Ubayda held a press conference in Gaza City and demanded that Fatah’s security forces and affiliated militias stop their “vicious campaign of kidnappings carried out against innocent Palestinians” in the West Bank. An official HAMAS statement ominously warned Fatah to “learn from what happened in Gaza” before “it is too late,” referring to the brief but brutal war between HAMAS and Fatah over control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, a civil conflict that Fatah lost.

HAMAS faces internal pressures in the Gaza Strip that may have also influenced its recent decision to launch a new campaign of “military resistance.” The steady growth of small transnational jihadi-takfiri groups in Gaza presents HAMAS with a new set of potential challengers for “Islamic” political legitimacy and the mantle of armed resistance. Small jihadi-takfiri groups such as Jund Ansar Allah, Jama‘at al-Tawhid wa’l Jihad (Group of Absolute Monotheism and Struggle), and Ansar al-Sunna in Bayt al-Maqdis (Palestine, literally “Jerusalem”) continue to sporadically launch mortar shells and primitive homemade rockets into Israel, despite HAMAS prohibitions and attempts to halt such independent attacks. The Israeli military has retaliated for these attacks by targeting HAMAS positions and offices in Gaza. In their media and official statements, the small Gaza-based jihadi-takfiri groups have blasted HAMAS for “violently suppressing the mujahideen (warriors of faith)” and “abandoning the path of struggle (jihad) and resistance.” HAMAS’ defense of its record as a “religious-nationalist resistance” movement coupled with its military wing’s statements on its ongoing “Torrent of Fire” campaign raise the possibility that the movement’s decision to launch a new military campaign is, at least in part, a case of outbidding in which the movement is attempting to ward off criticisms of “selling out.”

The recent HAMAS attacks were, in effect, carried out in Abbas’ “backyard,” bolstering the continued questioning of the limits of his authority in the Palestinian social and political milieu as well as the legitimacy of the new negotiations to truly result in a “final status” peace agreement. The attacks also raised questions about the viability of, for all intents and purposes, completely ignoring HAMAS, which is, with Fatah, one of the two largest Palestinian socio-political factions. Although Fatah certainly commands a significant level of support among the Palestinian public, it is a serious mistake to discount the significant amount of support that HAMAS also enjoys, despite growing criticisms from its misgovernance in Gaza. HAMAS’ power and influence is nowhere more clear than it its ability to potentially act as spoiler in peace negotiations. Far from being an irrational, blindly ideological actor, HAMAS has historically made decisions on the basis of political pragmatism and calculation. In the latest round of negotiations, in which HAMAS has effectively been ignored, the movement has little incentive to serve as anything but a spoiler.

Christopher Anzalone is a doctoral student in the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University.

Matthew Carr writes in a guest column for Informed Comment:

Until this year, Spain appeared to be relatively indifferent to the Islamophobic politics that have become so endemic throughout Europe. In a few short months however, the signs are that Spain is moving rapidly away from a relatively laissez faire approach to immigration toward the more coercive assimilationist model being pursued elsewhere in the continent – a model that is primarily concerned with the country’s one million Muslim immigrants. In April a Madrid secondary school prohibited a Muslim teenager from attending school in a hijab and ignited Spain’s first ‘headscarf controversy’. Since then that the debate on what Muslim women should be wearing has become a burning national issue. Following various prohibitions by local town councils on the burqa and niqab, a proposal to introduce a national ban on full face and body covering was narrowly defeated in the Spanish Congress in July.

This less than emphatic rejection may prove to be only temporary, as rightwing politicians issue increasingly strident warnings that ‘immigrants’ must conform to Spain’s constitutional and cultural values or leave. In July the Socialist town council of Lleida closed a local mosque, claiming that the number of worshippers had ‘exceeded its allowed capacity’ in another indication of the changing landscape.

Debates about Muslim female dress codes and Islamisation may well be a convenient distraction from an economic crisis that has produced the highest unemployment in Europe. But these developments also echo older tendencies in the country of the Reconquista and St James the Moorslayer. Four hundred years ago, Spain expelled some 350,000 Muslims known as Moriscos or ‘little Moors’ from Spanish territory in what was then the largest forced population transfer in European history, even larger than the expulsion of the Jews in 1492.

The Moriscos were all nominal Christians who were forcibly converted to Catholicism at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Following their conversion, Spain’s rulers demanded the complete eradication of their Islamic religious and cultural traditions. Public or private bathing, dances, the speaking of Arabic, circumcision and Muslim burial rites, even eating couscous were regarded as deviant acts and punished with fines, imprisonment and even execution.

Then, as now, these demands often focussed obsessively on female dress codes, but for very different reasons. In sixteenth century Spain female emancipation was not a high priority. The Muslim veil or almalafa was regarded by the Church as a potential cover for illicit sexual liaisons and an expression of religious deviance, and women who wore it were liable to be fined or flogged.

Tolerance was not considered a virtue in sixteenth century Spain, and the repression of the Moriscos was intended to hasten the disappearance of a minority that Spain’s rulers regarded as alien, inferior and a potential fifth column. These efforts were spearheaded by the Inquisition, which pried obsessively into the public and private lives of the Moriscos to ensure their conformity. These efforts were not entirely unsuccessful. Many Moriscos did become ‘good and faithful Christians’. Others engaged in covert and sometimes violent resistance that confirmed the worst suspicions and prejudices of their Christian enemies. In the last decades of the sixteenth century leading Spain’s rulers concluded that assimilation was impossible and considered drastic solutions to the ‘Morisco question’ that included mass castration, physical extermination, and physical expulsion.

In 1582 Philip II accepted expulsion in principle, but it was not until 1609 that the final decision to expel the Moriscos was taken by his son. This decision followed a series of Spanish military reversals and a severe economic crisis, which some Spaniards saw as an expression of divine disfavour at the continued presence of Morisco infidels and heretics in Christian lands. Expulsion was seen as an act of religious purification and a sacrificial ‘burnt offering’ that would transform Spain’s fortunes and remove a niggling problem that had obsessed its rulers for decades.

At first sight there may seem little in common between the ruthless destruction of Moorish Spain and the contemporary debates about secularism and tolerance that underpin Europe’s ‘ Muslim problem’. But bigotry and intolerance do not always require purple robes and autos da fe. Every age produces its own rationalisations for persecution.

Such episodes are often accompanied by an aggrieved and self-righteous sense of victimhood, in which powerful majorities depict even the weakest and most marginalised ‘out-groups’ as collectively incompatible, alien and dangerous. Once these depictions are taken for granted then even the most radical solutions may seem reasonable and even unavoidable.

All these elements were present in the expulsion of the Moriscos. Four hundred years later, as politicians and demagogues on both sides of the Atlantic subject Muslims to a new inquisitorial gaze, this painful chapter in Spanish history is a salutary reminder of what can happen when powerful societies embark on the road to forced assimilation in an attempt to ensure that ‘they’ become like ‘us’.

Matthew Carr is author of Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain

(the UK edition is here).

James Zogby writes in a guest column for Informed Comment

After decades spent trying to better explain the Arab World to other Americans, all too often I have found myself running up against the same mythologies and half-truths that, year after year, stubbornly maintain an alarming ability to shape thinking about the region.

One of the reasons I wrote “Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us and Why It Matters” was to challenge these myths head on. Unlike so many other books or articles that have been written about this region, “Arab Voices” is neither a retelling(or an interpretation) of history, nor is it a collection of personal anecdotes. These approaches can be useful, and there are excellent examples that have made real contributions to our understanding. But they are also susceptible to bias or to what I call “bad science” – as in the case of writers with a penchant for elevating an observation or a conversation into a generalized conclusion (the musings of Tom Friedman comes to mind).

My starting point is hard data, derived from more that a decade of polling Zogby International has conducted across the Middle East. Where I use personal anecdotes, it is to “put flesh on the bones” of the numbers in order to help tell the stories of those Arabs whose realities we must understand.

I love polling (and not merely because my brother John is the business). Polling opens a window and lets in voices we seldom hear. When we ask 4,000 Arabs from Morocco to the United Arab Emirates to tell us their attitudes toward the United States, to identify their most important political concerns, their attitudes toward women in the workplace, or what programs they watch on television – and when we organize their responses by country, and then by age or gender or class, and then listen to what they are saying – we are able pierce through the fog of myth and learn.

And learning is important, because for too long our understanding of this region and its peoples have been clouded by distorted stereotypes and myths. They have dominated our thinking and, in some cases, have shaped our policies. I look at each of these myths in “Arab Voices” and then contrast the assumptions and misperceptions behind them with polling data that reveal what Arabs really think.

The five myths I examine are:

1) Are Arabs all the same and can they, therefore, be reduced to a “type”(as in “all Arabs are this or that”)? Reading the broad generalizations and crude caricatures of Arabs found in Raphael Patai’s “Arab Mind” (used as a training manual by the U.S. military in Iraq) or Tom Friedman’s “Mid East Rules to Live By” might lead one to think so. But our polling reveals a very different view. What we find when we survey public opinion is a rich and varied landscape across the Arab World that defies stereotype. Not only are there diverse sub-cultures and unique histories that give texture to life, making Egyptians different than Saudis or Lebanese. There are also generational differences. For example, younger Arabs (who are 60% of the population of this region) are caught up with globalization and change. They share different concerns and aspire to different goals than their parents. They are more open to gender equality and are less tied to tradition.

2) Are Arabs so diverse that they do not constitute a world at all? That’s what “The Economist” would have us believe. In a special 2009 issue of this magazine, the editors described the region as “a big amorphous thing and arguably not a thing at all”. Once again, our polling reveals quite the opposite. Across the region, Arabs do identify as “Arabs” and they describe themselves as tied to one another by a common language (and the common history that implies) and shared political concerns, with majorities of all generations and in all countries demonstrating a strong attachment to Palestine and the fate of the Iraqi people.

3) Are Arabs all angry, hating us, “our values” and “our way of life”? In a recent poll, we found this view to be shared by a plurality of Americans. But our work in the Arab World, finds quite the opposite to be true. Arabs like the American people, and they not only respect our education and our advances in science and technology, they also like our values of “freedom and democracy”. What they don’t like are our policies toward them, which lead them to believe that we don’t like them. As one Arab businessman said to me, “we feel like jilted lovers”.

4) Are Arabs are driven by religious fanaticism? Arabs are, like many in the West, “people of faith”, with their values shaped by their religious traditions. But mosque attendance rates across the Middle East are about the same as church attendance rates here in the U.S. And when we ask Arabs what programs they prefer to watch on TV, the list is as varied as those favored by American viewers. In Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia (the largest countries covered in our polls) the top rated programs are movies and soap operas. Religious programs are near the bottom of the list. And when we ask Arabs to list their most important concerns, not surprisingly, the top two are the quality of their work and their families.

So in contrast to the mythic notion that “Arabs go to bed at night hating America and wake up hating Israel and spend their days either watching news or listening to preachers who fuel that anger”, the reality is that “Arabs go to bed each night thinking about their jobs and wake up each day thinking about their kids and spend each day thinking about how to improve the quality of their lives”.

5) Lastly there is the myth that Arabs reject reform and will not change, unless the West pushes them. This has been a fundamental tenet of the neo-conservatives. Derived from the writings of Bernard Lewis, this myth provided one of the rationales for the Iraq war – the idea being that we would destroy the “old regime” giving birth to “the new Middle East”.

What our polling shows, however, is that Arabs do want reform, but the reform they want is theirs, not ours. Their top domestic priorities are: better jobs, improved health care and expanded educational opportunities (sound familiar?). Our findings further demonstrate that most Arabs do not want us meddling in their internal affairs, but they would welcome our assistance in helping their societies build capacity to provide services and improve the quality of their lives.

When we look at the Arab World more closely and listen to Arabs more carefully, we learn that this region and its people are not as they have been imagined by Hollywood or projected by political ideologues with an axe to grind. They can not be reduced to the mythic stereotypes that have so warped our understanding and contributed to distorting our policies. With this realization will come the ability to engage productively with the people of this region which has become so critical to our national interests.

James Zogby is founder and president of the Arab American Institute and author of Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us, and Why it Matters