Munich (Special to Informed Comment) – July 3, 2023, marked the tenth anniversary of the military coup that removed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi from power, paving the way for the establishment of an autocratic regime led by the retired military officer Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. The overthrow of Morsi sent the Muslim Brotherhood, the sociopolitical organization that supported him, into what many consider its most severe crisis since it was founded in 1928 by the Egyptian teacher and imam Hassan al-Banna. Morsi had been elected president in June 2012 in the freest Egyptian elections up to date. The first experience of political power for the Brotherhood would last only a bit longer than a year, with the July 2013 coup forcing the members of the Brotherhood into hiding, exile, or, as in Morsi’s case, imprisonment. Morsi died in prison in June 2019 due to maltreatment.

In their collective work “The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013-22,” Abdelrahman Ayyash, Amr ElAfifi, and Noha Ezzat present a historical overview of the Brotherhood before examining its trajectory during the last decade. Ayyash is a fellow at Century International, the US think tank that published the book. Meanwhile, ElAfifi is a PhD candidate at Syracuse University and Ezzat is an independent writer and researcher.

“Broken Bonds” greatly relies upon multiple interviews with former and current members of the Brotherhood.  Overall, the authors see the Brotherhood as finding itself at the lowest point of its almost centennial history, and yet, as a resilient organization that will most likely bounce back thanks to the adaptability it has always shown in the face of crisis.

The Brotherhood’s relationship with the Egyptian state has historically been a complex one. Repressed by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s, it managed to establish a solid presence in universities and syndicates in the 1970s when President Anwar Sadat initiated a limited political opening. Under Sadat’s successor Hosni Mubarak, the Brotherhood enjoyed a tacit non-aggression pact during the 1980s while it spread its conservative values among Egyptian society.

This tacit understanding collapsed in the early 1990s when Mubarak’s regime restricted the Brotherhood’s influence among university students and syndicated workers. In the context of Egypt’s neoliberal turn, the Brotherhood came to play a larger role in providing services and basic commodities to the most disfavored sectors of society. The Brotherhood expanded its membership in the 2000s, but its political role was limited to participating in protests allowed by the Mubarak regime, such as demonstrations against Israeli violence in Palestine or the US invasion of Iraq.

For an organization that had traditionally been repressed or, at best, tolerated, by the Egyptian state, its assumption of state power in June 2012 — although with the shadow of the army always looming over — was a profound change. The authors describe the Brotherhood’s decision to run for the Egyptian presidency as driven by two competing objectives. On the one hand, it sought to avoid prosecution at the hands of a new regime by controlling state power itself while showing an image of moderation. On the other hand, the Brotherhood wanted to prevent more radical Islamist groups and figures, such as Salafi preacher and presidential candidate Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, from gaining support among Brotherhood sympathizers. This, however, necessitated stressing the Brotherhood’s conservatism.

The Brotherhood’s simultaneous pursuit of these incompatible goals “led to contradictory policies and mixed messages to the public.”[1] Morsi’s foreign policy was also confusing, with the president’s frequent changes of course transforming “the Brotherhood’s tactics for seeking allies into a series of trials and errors.”[2] If the short period in power had been an agitated time for the Brotherhood, the July 2013 coup sent the organization into disarray, with the leaders that had avoided capture scattered in Egypt and exile, mainly in Qatar, Sudan, Turkey, and Malaysia.

Only three members of the Brotherhood’s Guiding Bureau remained in Egypt without having been imprisoned or gone into hiding — a small fraction considering the Guiding Bureau had twenty members at that point. These three members, who had all joined the Bureau after 2011 and were thus newcomers to the higher echelons of the Brotherhood, decided to create the High Administrative Committee (HAC) in 2014 to lead the Brotherhood from within Egypt. Mohamed Kamal emerged as the main figure of the HAC, which sought to include younger members of the Brotherhood in the new leadership structure.

Abdelrahman Ayyash, Amr ElAfifi, and Noha Ezzat, The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013-22. Click here

The HAC also adopted an increasingly confrontational stance toward the Egyptian government, accelerated after a slim majority of the HAC approved plans to carry out limited violent attacks against the new Egyptian regime. The interviews with rank-and-file Brotherhood members conducted by the authors allow us to better understand the changes taking place after the Brotherhood lost power. An interviewee rhetorically asks: “What were we supposed to do, just let people, especially women, get beaten or arrested off the streets?”.[3]

The HAC’s escalation resulted in new crackdowns against the Brotherhood. Moreover, Kamal and his partners would soon find out that “changing a movement as vast as the Brotherhood is not an easy task.”[4] The historical leadership of the Brotherhood in Egyptian prisons and exile saw with concern their decreasing power over the Brotherhood’s actions, which was being directed by leaders with limited experience that had attracted numerous youth revolutionaries.

Mahmoud Ezzat, the Brotherhood’s acting general guide after the imprisonment of the general guide Mohammed Badie in August 2013, had gone into hiding and little was known about him. In May 2015, however, Ezzat issued a statement ordering the dissolution of the HAC and the creation of a new HAC that would be subordinated to the Brotherhood’s leadership in exile. The HAC contested Ezzat’s decision, but the acting general guide and the historical leadership in exile commanded most of the Brotherhood’s financial resources. They proceeded to cut funding to those regional offices in Egypt that supported the HAC and progressively imposed themselves. Kamal, who had co-founded the first HAC and become its leader, was killed by the Egyptian security forces in October 2016.

The Kamal-Ezzat split was followed by another period of internal tensions after the arrest of Ezzat in August 2020. This new conflict would show that “the historical leadership was far from united”, pitting two of its main figures against each other.[5] Mahmoud Hussein, a member of the Guidance Bureau who happened to be out of Egypt at the time of the July 2013 coup, had gained a dominating position over the communications between the Brotherhood in Egypt and the leadership in exile. The new acting general guide after Ezzat’s detention, Ibrahim Munir, accused Hussein of blocking messages sent from prison by the general guide Mohammed Badie to the leadership in exile.

Munir removed Hussein from his positions of responsibility in 2020, but the internal victory of the acting general guide was not consolidated until 2022. As the authors note, in contrast to the clash between Kemal and Ezzat, “the Hussein-versus-Munir split was not based on conflicting ideas and worldviews. Rather, it appeared to be about the power of controlling the organization.”[6]

Despite the death of Ibrahim Munir in November 2022, the Brotherhood seemed to have returned to relative stability quickly thereafter. The internal conflicts had left profound scars on the organization, though. The authors document the case of numerous members of the Brotherhood that decided to abandon the group. Some of them mentioned that the Brotherhood was no longer loyal to the ideals of its founder Hassan al-Banna, while others expressed their disenchantment over the Kamal-Ezzat split.

It is not only the Brotherhood that is undergoing a long crisis but Egypt itself. Al-Sisi’s period in power has been dominated by sham elections and continuous repression on the political front, and vanity projects and unmanageable amounts of debt on the economic front. Al-Sisi has continuously presented the Brotherhood as “an omnipresent nemesis to justify the state’s continued repression of Egyptian society,” writes Abdullah Al-Arian, an associate professor at Georgetown University.[7] Nevertheless, the Brotherhood will continue to be popular in Egypt, argue the authors of Broken Bonds, because the reasons behind the organization’s popularity “are intrinsic in the state’s failures in dealing with society’s problems.”[8]

If we are to highlight a shortcoming of the book, this would probably be its limited attention to how the international dynamics of Middle Eastern politics affected the Brotherhood’s fate. Whereas Qatar and Turkey accommodated members of the Brotherhood after the 2013 coup, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates backed al-Sisi’s anti-democratic repression of the Islamist group. As Matteo Colombo from the Clingendael Institute details, a key factor in the Brotherhood’s current crisis is the “increasingly repressive regional political environment supported by the power of the Saudi and Emirate states.”[9]

Ayyash, ElAfifi, and Ezzat’s Broken Bonds is an impressive piece of research and analysis. There are two main reasons for this. First, the authors succeed in making intelligible the labyrinthic internal politics of the Brotherhood to those who might only have a general understanding of Egyptian politics and history. Second, thanks to their access to senior leaders and rank-and-file members of the Brotherhood, the authors show a deep understanding of the organization that is both top-down and bottom-up. Broken Bonds constitutes a work that cannot be ignored to comprehend the convulsed trajectory of the Muslim Brotherhood in the last decade.

[1] Abdelrahman Ayyash, Amr ElAfifi, and Noha Ezzat, Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013-22 (Washington, DC: The Century Foundation, 2023), p. 80.

[2] Ibid., p. 83.

[3] Ibid., p. 127.

[4] Ibid., p. 104.

[5] Ayyash, ElAfifi, and Ezzat, Broken Bonds, p. 109.

[6] Ibid., p. 112.

[7] Abdullah Al-Arian, “The Lasting Significance of Egypt’s Rabaa Massacre,” Middle East Report Online, August 23, 2022, https://merip.org/2022/08/the-lasting-significance-of-egypts-rabaa-massacre/.

[8] Ayyash, ElAfifi, and Ezzat, Broken Bonds, p. 157.

[9] Matteo Colombo, “Lost in Transition: The Muslim Brotherhood in 2022,” CRU Policy Brief (The Hague: Clingendael Institute, July 2022), p. 8. Retrieved from https://www.clingendael.org/publication/lost-transition-muslim-brotherhood-2022.

Medical marijuana is permitted in Israel, though people complain about the fewness of dispensaries. Recreational marijuana is forbidden. Marijuana is illegal in Israel not because of Jewish or Islamic law but because of the British colonial heritage. It is Western Victorian prudery.

Haaretz reports that MK David Amsalem, of the far right wing and racist Likud Party, ridiculed Abbas for changing his position: “You are trampling on Islam. They gave you a few dimes, promised you a few jobs and suddenly Islam permits it (cannabis).”

Amsalem, like most Israeli politicians, clearly knows nothing about Islamic law or Islamic history. In fact, the use of marijuana was widespread in the premodern Muslim world. If the United Arab List in the end balks at legalizing marijuana, it will be because of modern fundamentalism, not because of Islamic tradition.

The great tradition of medieval Muslim medicine valued marijuana. Avicenna in his classic Canon recommended it as an analgesic for headaches, and the great physician al-Razi (Rhazes in the Latin west) prescribed marijuana as a treatment for “ear problems, dandruff, flatulence as well as epilepsy,” according to Maziyar Ghiabi and his colleagues.

Avicenna’s Canon was central to Renaissance science in its Latin translation and its influence lingered in some medical schools in Europe and Russia into the nineteenth century.

Ghiyabi et al. also note that some groups of Muslims, especially the itinerant holy men called Qalandars, regularly incorporated marijuana into their spiritual practices, in the same way that some American Indians used peyote in their religious lives. In my research on Islam in premodern India, I found that marijuana or bhang was used by major Sufi orders such as the Suhrawardis. That is, there are major Muslim spiritual traditions of recreational use of marijuana.

The medieval Egyptian historian Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) said that marijuana or hashish had first been brought to Egypt in 1230 or 1231 by a Sufi or Muslim mystic, and that it became wildly popular. He said he knew of no fatwa or considered religious legal opinion against it in his own time. Hashish came to be grown all over Egypt and even in parts of Cairo. The Mamluk government tried to set a minor fine for its cultivation, but apparently no one paid any attention to it. By 1412 it was widely used, and the upper classes took pride in consuming it, without there being any stigma attached to it. It continued to be grown after the Ottomans took Egypt in 1517. In medieval and early modern Egypt, recreational marijuana was a normal part of the life of Muslims.

It was only in the early 19th century in Egypt that the mercantilist, modernizing government of Albanian military man Mehmet Ali (Muhammad Ali) Pasha, who had become the Ottoman viceroy, tried to ban marijuana on the grounds that it reduced workers’ productivity and made them lazy.

So, yes, anti-marijuana attitudes are in part a reflection of modernist concerns and have nothing to do with medieval Muslim practice. Fundamentalist Muslim legislation against marijuana is largely a modern phenomenon.

The Qur’an does not mention marijuana or hashish. It does discourage alcohol, though since the Muslim scripture does not specify any punishment for its use, many Muslim jurists over the centuries declined to punish its use.

Some Muslim thinkers wanted to forbid marijuana on analogy to alcohol, since both are intoxicants and both affect moral judgment. This analogy, however, was rejected by most jurists, as Maziar Ghiabi and his colleagues point out.

Some clerics did rule against the use of marijuana as an intoxicant. But as Ghiabi et al. note, Islamic law permits believers to do what they urgently need to do (darura). If you are thirsting to death in the desert and the only drink available is wine, then it is permitted to drink it. Likewise, even some medieval thinkers admitted that if someone had an urgent medical need for marijuana,, that would be permitted.

Contemporary Muslim jurisprudence notes that there are two substances in marijuana, CBD and THC. It is the THC that gives you the high. Legal thinkers urge that marijuana high in CBD and low in THC be used for pain killing, but say that if there is a medical need that can only be met (e.g. nausea from chemotherapy) by marijuana high in THC, that would be permissible.

So the joke is on David Amsalem, who just spoke out of ignorance of the finer points of Islamic law and of the actual history of the Muslim world. If Mansour Abbas and his party, which is influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, do end up supporting the legalization of marijuana, they would be in the long tradition of Islamic medicine going back to Avicenna. And note that al-Maqrizi said there was no fatwa at all against marijuana use in the 1200s to the 1400s, which was ubiquitous in medieval and early modern Egypt, so the great Muslim jurists of that era appear not to have even attempted to forbid it.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

i24 How Israel is Getting High (Medical Cannabis Revolution)

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt announced their boycott on the small peninsula on June 5, 2017.

Secretary of state Mike Pompeo has pushed for an end to the isolation of Qatar because it has destroyed the Gulf Cooperation Council, an alliance of six Sunni Gulf oil monarchies formed in 1982 to block Iran. The Trump administration has attempted to craft an alliance of Israel and the GCC states against Iran.

With the diplomatic efforts of Jared Kushner, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel last summer. This step has made it easier for Israeli submarines to ply the oil Gulf, and opened the way for closer Israeli technological and presumably signals-intelligence cooperation with Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates — all with an eye to deterring Iran.

h/t Wikimedia.

Qatar has been paying Iran $122 million a year for use of its air space, since Qatar Airways could not fly north over Bahrain or west over Saudi Arabia. Having to fly east before turning for Europe has also hurt Qatar Airways profits. Qatar also imported food from Iran during the first year of the blockade. The dependence of Doha on Iran meant that the Gulf Cooperation Council could not take a united hard line against the ayatollahs in Iran.

Likewise, even if it wanted to, Qatar was not in a position to normalize relations with Israel (though it has correct relations with that country anyway).

Although Jared Kushner is claiming credit for the breakthrough, behind the scenes the Saudis are saying that they took the step because they did not want the Qatar situation to be ongoing as the Biden administration took power. Barak Ravid reports at Axios that the Saudis wanted to “clean the table” in advance of Biden’s inauguration.

Biden and his prospective team have been deeply critical of Saudi Arabia over the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, over the kingdom’s horrible human rights record domestically, and over the war that Riyadh is pursuing against Yemen, which has produced the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

King Salman seems intent on mollifying the Biden team, and ending the boycott of Qatar is a relatively painless step. Now, when Biden officials meet with the Qatari ambassador, they won’t hear a litany of complaints against the Saudis. It is a relatively small thing, but Saudi Arabia is in big trouble with Washington and the king may think any little bit will help.

King Salman personally sent a letter of invitation to Sheikh Tamim of Qatar to attend Tuesday’s summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council. It will be the first time in 3 years that the emir has attended.

This thaw may also suggest a diminution of the power of crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who helped engineer the blockade in the first place. Likewise, it suggests that Saudi Arabia is now overruling the United Arab Emirates, where crown prince and de facto ruler Mohammed Bin Zayed had been even more committed to isolating Qatar than Bin Salman.

The attack on Qatar was the last battle of the Arab Spring. In 2011-13, the youth revolts in the Arab world were supported by Qatar, and as the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood rose to prominence (taking the presidency in Egypt in 2012), Qatar, long a backer of the Brotherhood, provided them aid.

Saudi Arabia and especially Bin Zayed deeply oppose the Muslim Brotherhood, seeing the fundamentalist, populist party as inherently revolutionary and republican with a small ‘r,’ i.e., they are like the Baptists in the southern colonies who joined George Washington to fight the British crown. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have given billions to the military junta of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt to root out the Brotherhood, after al-Sisi overthrew its elected government in 2013. The UAE has also backed military strong man Khalifa Hiftar in Libya against the more fundamentalist government in Tripoli.

Since Turkey’s president Tayyip Erdogan is also a backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, there has been a cold war for the past nearly a decade between the UAE-Saudi Arabia axis, which supports enlightened secular dictatorship as the model for the region, and the Turkey-Qatar entente, which supports a democratic sort of government in which Muslim fundamentalists can compete for power, just as the Christian Democrats compete for seats in the German parliament. The Middle East is basically Frederick the Great versus the Berlin Republic.

Since the Iranian government is basically the Shiite version of the Muslim Brotherhood, the UAE and Saudi Arabia want to isolate and roll it back, too. It isn’t part of the Turkey-Qatar entente, but they are considered “soft” on Iran by Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

One of the Quartet’s demands was the shuttering of the Al Jazeera satellite news channel, which is funded by the Qatari government but has substantial editorial independence. Al Jazeera is pro-democracy and is willing to interview Muslim Brotherhood figures and not simply demonize them. This editorial line, of presenting “all sides of a story,” drives the UAE and Saudi Arabia crazy.

One of the sad things that has happened to Arab culture in the past decade is that the Saudis and the UAE have bought up many the newspapers/ news sites in the region, and the junta in Egypt has ramped up censorship, so that independent news reporting is very rare. Al Jazeera is thus one of the last independent voices, and the 2017 boycott was intended in part to close it down so as to give the Saudis and UAE full spectrum dominance in the region’s media.

The agreement to end the blockade on Qatar will not heal the rift entirely. The Gulf Cooperation Council was in part a security pact. How can the Qataris ever trust the Saudis and the UAE to have their backs? Some proposed a unified electrical grid throughout the Arab littoral of the Gulf. But any such system would open Qatar to being left in the dark if the campaign was renewed. That is, cooperation and vulnerability go together, and Qatar can’t cooperate too closely with people that tried once to destroy it lest it become highly vulnerable.

I also don’t expect Qatar’s correct relations with Iran to change, whatever hopes Mr. Kushner may have in that regard.

The boycott was imposed in June, 2017, with the active encouragement of Donald Trump. Only in the fall of 2017 did Trump back off and begin making up with Qatar. The blockading Quartet countries nevertheless kept the pressure on, preventing Qatar from importing food through Saudi Arabia or from using their air space. They also plotted to destabilize the Qatari currency and trumped up charges against the country of backing terrorism (which is ridiculous).

Back in 2017, the blockading Quartet may have plotted the overthrow and death of the reigning Emir, Sheikh Tamim b. Hamad Al Thani. Ironically, Kushner may have been in on the plot. The Turkish parliament halted any such plans by voting to send hundreds of Troops to Qatar as a signal that the powerful Turkish military would not put up with such a regime change.

Likewise, the US secretary of defense, James Mattis, and the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, worked behind the scenes to protect Qatar. The small state hosts the al-Udeid US Air Force Base, with some 12,000 military personnel, from which US sorties are flown against ISIL in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Qatar is also a major natural gas exporter, in which ExxonMobil, of which Tillerson was the CEO before joining the Trump administration, was well aware and he hoped for an increased share for his old company of this valuable resource.

It should be remembered that Kushner has only partially helped fix what he and Trump broke.

Qatar survived, and has now had a victory of sorts. The major credit likely goes to the incoming Biden administration. We’re seeing signs that Biden’s determination to fix some of the dysfunctions of US Middle East policy is already having an effect, two weeks before he even takes office.

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Bonus video:

Al Jazeera English: “Saudi Arabia, Qatar ‘agree to open airspace, land and sea border’”

A column by Melanie Phillips in last week’s issue of the Jewish Chronicle has been causing dismay both inside and outside Britain’s Jewish community – so much so that on Tuesday the paper’s editor issued an apology “to any reader who is angered or upset by the piece”. He also promised two columns from other writers making counter-arguments, one of which is already online.

The column at the centre of the storm is headed “Don’t fall for bogus claims of ‘Islamophobia’.” Phillips appears to be arguing that Islamophobia doesn’t really exist – that it’s part of an Islamist conspiracy to silence critics.

The term can certainly be misused in that way but the essence of Islamophobia is fear, hostility and rejection directed against Muslims as people. Intentionally or not, denying the reality of Islamophobia helps to legitimise prejudice and discrimination.

Phillips, however, adopts a meme that is especially popular among the American far right and claims the concept of Islamophobia “was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood to mimic antisemitism”. There’s also a competing meme in the US that the Islamists invented “Islamophobia” to mimic the way gay rights activists used “homophobia” to silence critics, though Phillips doesn’t seem to be aware of that one.

In fact, the word “Islamophobia” been around for more than a century. Its first recorded use was in French – as islamophobie – in 1910. It appeared in a book, La politique musulmane dans l’Afrique Occidentale Française by Alain Quellien, describing the attitude of French colonial administrators towards the culture of the countries they were governing.

According to Robin Richardson, in a brief history of the word, it appears to have been first used in English in 1985 by Edward Said who linked it to antisemitism, saying that “hostility to Islam in the modern Christian west has historically gone hand in hand” with antisemitism and “has stemmed from the same source and been nourished at the same stream”.

Its next recorded use was in February 1991 by the American journal Insight in connection with the Soviet Union’s policies. “Islamophobia,” it said, “also accounts for Moscow’s reluctance to relinquish its position in Afghanistan, despite the estimated $300 million a month it takes to keep the Kabul regime going.”

Its first known use in Britain came a few months later when a book review in the Independent newspaper said that Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel, The Satanic Verses was regarded by some as “a deliberate, mercenary act of Islamophobia”.

The term gained wider currency following a report by the Runnymede Trust in 1997, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, which looked at attitudes towards Muslims living in Britain. The report aimed “to counter Islamophobic assumptions that Islam is a single monolithic system, without internal development, diversity and dialogue” and “to draw attention to the principal dangers which Islamophobia creates or exacerbates for Muslim communities, and therefore for the well-being of society as a whole”.

• For discussion about the definition of Islamophobia, and use and abuse of the term, see this chapter from my book, Arabs Without God.

Via Al-Bab.com

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Novara Media: “The one thing I never get asked to talk about….”

Such a move would give justification to targeting and discriminating against American Muslims, whilst potentially inspiring other Western nations to do the same. Yet the order, which would involve sanctions against the group, would also promote further violence and crackdowns against both factions supporting political Islam and even non-fundamentalist groups, in the name of MENA ‘security’.

Even though critics of the Brotherhood try to present it as a secretive worldwide Muslim conspiracy, each countries’ faction largely operates independently, and it is a decentralized organisation, with limited active communication among the branches. It had also partly become synonymous with democracy during the Arab Spring uprisings after seeking power via the ballot box and given that its Egyptian branch won elections in Egypt and a distant affiliate, the Renaissance Party (al-Nahda) won a round in Tunisia.

Yet Trump, evidently more tolerant of despotism and the ‘strongman’ approach, is focused on appeasing both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and securing stronger investment ties with them. Both have also spent much money lobbying the White House and both view the Muslim Brotherhood as a populist and revolutionary threat to their conservative absolute monarchies.

Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who has cracked-down on the Muslim Brotherhood and is a close ally of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, also urged Trump to target the group in a visit on April 9, which evidently influenced the US President’s decision.

Both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, aside from Riyadh backing Yemen’s branch al-Islah for tactical purposes in its war there, oppose the Muslim Brotherhood.

That many branches of the Muslim Brotherhood are interested in competing as parties in parliamentary systems poses a severe challenge to the authoritarian status quo in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have cracked down hard on Muslim Brothers in their realms. Abroad, the Emirates’ Mohammed Bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, and Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman for the most part prefer to back anti-Brotherhood dictators.

The UAE, the most vehemently anti-Brotherhood state, claims to promote a ‘pro-stability’, ‘anti-extremist’ narrative to justify supporting autocratic regimes across the region, and adopts a highly interventionist foreign policy.

Khalifa Haftar, leader of the self-proclaimed Libyan National Army who enjoys extensive military and material Emirati support, has used the supposed threat of Muslim fundamentalism as an excuse to launch aggressive military campaigns in Libya. Having previously accused the UN-backed Government of National Accord in Tripoli of hosting ‘Muslim Brotherhood militias’, Haftar launched a campaign to seize the Libyan capital. To a lesser extent, Haftar receives Saudi Arabia’s backing, yet is still the UAE’s man in Libya.

Yet as Haftar opposes any Libyan democratic transition, his empowerment in Libya could instead grant him the excuse to carry out further abuses and install a despotic regime in the country. Haftar’s supposed targeting of the Muslim Brotherhood serves as a perfect justification for his campaign to forcibly capture Libya, which would enjoy continued support from Trump. Trump had already given Haftar his consent to fight ‘terrorism’ in Libya during a phone call in April, showing this pro-stability narrative was already swaying the President. Even if Haftar cannot completely seize power in Libya, his supposed fight against Muslim fundamentalists creates further instability in Libya, while dismantling the country’s long-sought peaceful democratic process.

Additionally, as if Egypt’s Sisi did not need further Western impunity to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood and other opponents, Trump’s declaration will further embolden him to attack Muslim Brotherhood figures and continue to use this as a pretext to target non-Islamist reformists. After all, Sisi uses the Muslim Brotherhood as a bogeyman to repress civil society and arrest any regime critic, and Trump’s anti-Brotherhood agenda would allow the crushing of any reform in Egypt.

It would justify targeting Brotherhood in other parts of the region too. The popular revolution in the Sudan spearheaded by the left and middle classes, has opened up its politics, long dominated by a military sometimes allied with the Sudanese branch of the Brotherhood. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are evidently trying to empower a reactionary military regime as a way of permanently sidelining the Muslim religious Right. Significantly, Trump’s administration would conceivably turn a blind eye to a new military junta in the Sudan, which would foil the aspirations of a public yearning for new freedoms after overthrowing 30-year-long autocratic ruler Omar Bashir. After all, Trump has not shown any sign of supporting Sudan’s transition so far.

The US administration could therefore allow and support furthermore Emirati and Saudi crackdowns on democratic transitions across the region wherever a tendency supporting political Islam exists, to prevent an alleged Muslim Brotherhood empowerment.

As the Brotherhood is a loose-knit organisation, Trump’s designation could allow the targeting of any non-Muslim Brotherhood party the UAE and Saudi Arabia may dislike. The US itself could also move to sanction any such movement.

Even beyond the Middle East, including in Europe, Trump’s decision could embolden politicians and governments to adopt more anti-Muslim monitoring policies, allowing them to increase authoritarianism and surveillance of civil society in general. The UAE, which has listed 83 Islamic organisations worldwide as terrorist organisations, would also have increased freedom to monitor and interfere in Islamic groups worldwide, under the pretext of combating the Muslim Brotherhood.

Trump’s decision to pursue a ban on the Muslim Brotherhood is for the benefit of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. If he can pass it, it could guarantee a further increase of authoritarianism in the region, allowing Saudi Arabia and the UAE to undermine regional democratic transitions, all with Trump’s consent.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Newsy: “US may name Muslim Brotherhood terrorists”

In early September 2017, a piece of paper with a potent message targeted against women, held by a group of Hezbollah fighters in Juroud Arsal, Eastern Lebanon, went viral.

The message, which celebrates “every woman who is not using her own photo as a profile picture on Facebook,” emerged as pitched battles raged between Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia and the Syrian Sunni al-Nusra Front (officially a former Al Qaeda affiliate) in the area straddling the Syrian-Lebanese border.

This came on the heels of a widely-circulated video of Sami Khadra, a renowned Shiite Lebanese cleric, asking women to replace their photos on Facebook, considered inappropriate and profane, with images of “trees” and Quranic verses.

The video came under attack by social media users and women’s rights activists, igniting a storm of sarcastic comments, but also some support.

One woman retorted, “you put a tree” while another woman posted a photo of herself next to trees saying “I tried looking for a photo with lots of trees.” One man, however, said that the cleric’s words “are beautiful and represent true Islamic thinking.”

Badia Hani Fahs, a writer for the Lebanese An-nahar newspaper and daughter of the renowned late anti-Hezbollah Shiite cleric Hani Fahs, lashed out in a Facebook post at Sami Khadra’s remarks:

“Use a tree instead of your photo…A piece of wood, a table…Use an image of a monkey, a female dog or a jennet [female donkey]…May Allah curse their empty turbans!”

Lebanese journalist and filmmaker Diana Moukalled mocked the picture of Hezbollah fighters in a tweet, poking fun at their claims of liberating women from “takfiris” (Arabic for those who call others infidels) while aping their conduct.

“From Juroud Arsal a call for women not to post their photos on Facebook…[It is laughable that] these are the same people claiming to be saving us women from takfiris who take women as sabaya (women captured during war).”

Fighters in the heat of a raging battle with time to consider women’s social media habits seemed so far-fetched and ironic that critics drew comparisons with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and other extremist groups. Many others derided the Shiite group’s alliance with the Syrian regime that has long boasted its secularity.

Controlling women through targeted messaging

In Idlib province, a painted sign reading “The Woman is Awra” made its rounds in 2015.

“Awra” refers to the parts of a woman’s body that must be covered under Islamic law. The sign, produced by a group affiliated with the al-Nusra Front, implies that all of a woman’s body must be covered. Raseef22 translated it as ‘“Women Must be Covered to the Nails”.

“A Woman is Awra” followed by “Idlib Religious Mission and Endowment.” Source: Raseef22.

Both ISIS and al-Nusra impose austere dress codes on women based on a rigid interpretation of Sharia law. Proponents claim the code is intended to “protect” women as “jewels” and “hidden pearls.”

This claim, however, is considered an outright human rights violation by all major human rights organizations as well as Article 1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In June 2017, independent Syrian news outlet Enab Baladi commented:

Despite the spread of a large number of civil society organizations dedicated to supporting the role of women and bolstering their participation and position in society in opposition areas, women’s role in the Syrian workplace has not registered a notable advance, but has actually seen a relative decline.

Groups such as Hezbollah, al-Nusra, and ISIS, all stakeholders in the current Syrian war, have consistently promoted discriminatory views against women. These groups promote policies that treat women as inferiors and restrict their basic rights including movement, dress and the use of social media.

Failing to comply carries grave consequences, the mildest being social and religious shaming while the harshest amounts to whipping and fines.
Women’s rights activists struggle to stay hopeful

In 2015, breath-taking videos showed elated Syrian women ripping off Islamic garments after escaping persecution under ISIS, a public outpouring of ecstasy that captured the world’s attention:

While some Syrian women celebrated liberation from ISIS-controlled areas, the emergence of new messages targeted at women sparks pessimism among women and women’s rights activists concerned about their futures under any of the warring groups.

Five years ago, four Syrian women dressed in bridal gowns staged a peaceful march in the heart of Damascus to demand wider freedoms and an end to military operations. Yet today, many Syrian women still grapple with authorities to secure their most basic human rights.

As Liesl Gerntholtz, women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch put it:

“Extremist groups like ISIS and al-Nusra are undermining the freedoms that Syria’s women and girls enjoyed, which were a longtime strength of Syrian society. […] What kind of victory do these groups promise for women and girls who are watching their rights slip away.”

Any hope kindled by early pro-democracy protests has dwindled, making it difficult to ameliorate the situation for Syrian women. Political parties whose agendas neglect women’s rights have seized control of the indefinite future.

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Via Global Voices Online

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Joy for Syrian refugee family as daughter graduates – BBC News

LONDON – Fifty years after the Six Days War, the Middle East remains a region in seemingly perpetual crisis. So it is no surprise that, when addressing the region, politicians, diplomats, and the donor and humanitarian community typically focus on the here and now. Yet, if we are ever to break the modern Middle East’s cycle of crises, we must not lose sight of the future. And, already, four trends are brewing a new set of problems for the coming decade.

The first trend affects the Levant. The post-Ottoman order that emerged a century ago – an order based on secular Arab nationalism – has already crumbled. The two states that gave weight to this system, Iraq and Syria, have lost their central authority, and will remain politically fragmented and socially polarized for at least a generation.
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In Lebanon, sectarianism remains the defining characteristic of politics. Jordan has reached its refugee-saturation point, and continued inflows are placing limited resources under ever-greater pressure. As for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is no new initiative or circumstance on the political horizon that could break the deadlock.

The Middle East is certain to face the continued movement of large numbers of people, first to the region’s calmer areas and, in many cases, beyond – primarily to Europe. The region is also likely to face intensifying contests over national identities as well, and perhaps even the redrawing of borders – processes that will trigger further confrontations.

The second major trend affects North Africa. The region’s most populous states – Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco – will maintain the social and political orders that have become entrenched over the last six decades of their post-colonial history. The ruling structures in these countries enjoy broad popular consent, as well as support from influential institutions, such as labor and farmers’ unions. They also have effective levers of coercion that serve as backstops for relative stability.

But none of this guarantees smooth sailing for these governments. On the contrary, they are poised to confront a massive youth bulge, with more than 100 million people under the age of 30 entering the domestic job market in North Africa between now and 2025. And the vast majority of these young people, products of failed educational systems, will be wholly unqualified for most jobs offering a chance of social mobility.

The sectors best equipped to absorb these young Arabs are tourism, construction, and agriculture. But a flourishing tourism sector is not in the cards – not least because of the resurgence of militant Islamism, which will leave North Africa exposed to the risk of terror attacks for years to come.

Moreover, a declining share of the European food market and diminished investments in real estate undermine the capacity of agriculture and construction to absorb young workers. The likely consequences of North Africa’s youth bulge are thus renewed social unrest and potentially sizeable migration flows to Europe.

The Gulf used to provide a regional safety valve. For more than a half-century, Gulf countries absorbed millions of workers, primarily from their Arab neighbors’ lower middle classes. The Gulf was also the main source of investment capital, not to mention tens of billions of dollars in remittances, to the rest of the region. And many Arab countries viewed it as the lender of last resort.

But – and herein lies the third key trend – the Gulf economies are now undergoing an upgrade, ascending various industrial value chains. This reduces their dependence on low-skill foreign workers. In the coming years, the Gulf countries can be expected to import fewer workers from the rest of the Arab world, and to export less capital to it.

The Gulf might even become increasingly destabilized. Several Gulf powers and Iran are engaged in a partly sectarian proxy war in Yemen – one that will not end anytime soon. And now, several Sunni powers are forcefully trying to compel one of their own, Qatar, to abandon a regional strategy it has pursued for decades. The pressures being generated across the Arabian Peninsula could produce further political shocks.

That is all the more likely, given mounting domestic pressure for reform from a technologically savvy and globally engaged young citizenry. Reforming centuries-old social and political structures will be as difficult as it is necessary.

The fourth trend affects the entire Arab world, as well as Iran and Turkey: the social role of religion is becoming increasingly contested. The wars and crises of the last six years have reversed much of the progress that political Islam had made in the decade before the so-called Arab Spring uprisings erupted in 2011. With radicalism becoming increasingly entrenched, on the one hand, and young Muslims putting forward enlightened understandings of their religion, on the other, a battle for the soul of Islam is raging.

The problems implied by these four trends will be impossible for leaders, inside or outside the Arab world, to address all at once, especially at a time of rising populism and nativism across the West. But action can and should be taken. The key is to focus on socioeconomic issues, rather than geopolitics.

The West must not succumb to illusions about redrawing borders or shaping new countries; such efforts will yield only disaster. One highly promising option would be to create a full-on Marshall Plan for the Arab world. But, in this era of austerity, many Western countries lack the resources, much less public support, for such an effort – most of the Arab world today couldn’t make the most of it in any case.
The Year Ahead 2017 Cover Image

What leaders – both within and outside the region – can do is pursue large-scale and intelligent investments in primary and secondary education, small and medium-size businesses (which form the backbone of Arab economies), and renewable energy sources (which could underpin the upgrading of regional value chains).

Pursuing this agenda won’t stem the dissolution of the modern Arab state in the Levant. It won’t generate workable social contracts in North Africa. And it certainly won’t reconcile the sacred with the secular. But, by attempting to address young people’s socioeconomic frustrations, it can mitigate many of the longer-term consequences of these trends.

Tarek Osman is the author of Islamism: What It Means for the Middle East and the World and Egypt on the Brink.

Licensed from Project Syndicate

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France 24 English: “War in Syria: On the frontline in Raqqa”

SINGAPORE (IPS) – Turkey’s parliament is this week fast tracking the dispatch of up to 3,000 troops to Qatar, home to the country’s military base in the Middle East. Certain to stiffen Qatar’s resolve to resist Saudi and UAE-led pressure to force it to change policies, the Turkish move comes amid hints that the kingdom and its allies may seek to undermine the rule of Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.

The stakes for both sides of the Gulf divide could not be higher. Saudi Arabia and the UAE cannot afford to fail in their effort to force Qatar’s hand after leading several Arab and non-Arab states in a rupture of diplomatic relations and declaring an economic boycott that also targets Qatar’s food supplies. By the same token, Qatar cannot afford a cave-in to Saudi and UAE demands that would humiliate the country and effectively turn it in to a Saudi vassal.

The dispatch of Turkish troops as well as Turkish and Iranian offers to help Qatar offset the impact of the boycott by ensuring that its food and water needs are met positions the Gulf crisis and Saudi Arabia’s proxy war with the Islamic republic as a political rather than a sectarian battle. Sunni Turkey and Shiite Iran countering of the Saudi-UAE campaign undermines the kingdom’s effort to project its rivalry with Iran as both a sectarian conflict and a power struggle.

The dispatch of troops and the emergence of a pro-Qatari alliance opposed to that of Saudi Arabia also eases pressure on non-Arab Muslim states to take sides. By raising the stakes, Turkey and Iran could potentially contribute to efforts to find a political solution to the crisis.

The move to quickly dispatch troops to Qatar came a day after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the Saudi-UAE effort to isolate sanctions and cripple it with sanctions. Mr. Erdogan warned that the moves would fail to solve problems and said he would do what he could to end the crisis.

Kuwait is already attempting to bridge the gap between the Gulf states and Qatar while the United States and Germany have called for a political solution. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was scheduled to visit Ankara to discuss ways of resolving the Gulf crisis.

That may prove to be easier said than done. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are bent on avoiding a repeat of 2014 when Qatar failed to respond to the withdrawal of the Saudi, Emirati and Bahraini ambassadors from Doha by caving in to their demands that it halts its support for Islamists and militants. The three countries were forced to return their ambassadors after an absence of nine months with little to show for their action.

Leaders of Saudi Arabia and the UAE have moreover put their credibility on the line by not only breaking off diplomatic relations but also imposing a harsh boycott. The UAE, apparently concerned that the boycott, and particularly the targeting of food supplies, could spark domestic criticism, made expressions of sympathy with Qatar a criminal offense punishable with up to 15 years in prison and/or a fine of at least US$ 136,000. Up to 40 percent of Qatar’s approximately $1 billion in food exports a year were trucked to Qatar from Saudi Arabia until this week’s eruption of the crisis.

Also raising the stakes is the fact that a Qatar capable of resisting Saudi and UAE pressure would effectively contribute to a Muslim bloc in the Middle East that stands for everything Saudi Arabia and the UAE are seeking to defeat.

Inevitably, closer Qatari ties with Turkey as well as Iran, with which the Gulf state shares the world’s largest gas field, would become a fixture of Middle Eastern geopolitics. Iran is already helping Qatar not only with food but also by allowing Qatar Airways flights to Asia to cross Iranian airspace in their bid to circumvent Saudi, UAE and Bahrain airspace that has been closed to them.

Beyond demonstrating that Qatar is not alone in its fight, the dispatch of Turkish troops would also seek to dissuade Saudi Arabia and the UAE from intervening directly in the Gulf state.

Turkey and Qatar have long pursued similar policies. Both countries supported the 2011 popular Arab revolts.

By contrast, Saudi Arabia and the UAE went to great length to thwart their success., including helping engineer the military coup that in 2013 toppled Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim brother and Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president. Saudi and UAE troops also helped Bahrain brutally squash its 2011 popular uprising.

Turkey and Qatar moreover both support the Muslim Brotherhood, rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and Islamist groups in divided Libya. The UAE and Saudi Arabia alongside Egypt back the internationally recognized Tobruk-based Libyan government that joined them in breaking off relations with Qatar.

Turkey set up a military base in Qatar with some 150 troops, its first in the Middle East, as part of an agreement signed in 2014. Turkish officials have since said Turkey’s presence would be increased to some 3,000 troops.

Turkey’s move to expedite the dispatch of additional troops to Qatar came as UAE state minister for foreign affairs Anwar Gargash said that one “cannot rule out further measures. We hope that cooler heads will prevail, that wiser heads will prevail and we will not get to that.”

Accusing Qatar of being “the main champion of extremism and terrorism in the region,” Mr. Gargash insisted that “this is not about regime change — this is about change of policy, change of approach.”

Egyptian, Emirati and Saudi newspapers, none of which are known to be truly independent, reported in recent days that domestic opposition to Qatari emir sheikh Tamim was mounting.

“We have long been silent about the irrational practices of the regime in Qatar,” Sheikh Saud bin Nasser Al-Thani, a little known member of the ruling family which is believed to account for up to 20 percent of Qatar’s citizens, told Egypt’s Youm7 newspaper.

The newspaper reported that opponents of Sheikh Tamim would form a London-based opposition paper headed by Sheikh Abdelaziz Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, an uncle of the emir and former oil and finance minister, who was accused of involvement in a failed effort in 2011 by Qatari military officers to overthrow Sheikh Tamim’s father and predecessor, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.

Abu Dhabi’s The National newspaper reported that the party would advocate a Qatari policy in line with Saudi and UAE demands, including curbing the activities of Sheikh Hamad’s wife, Sheikha Mozah Al-Misnad, who heads Qatar Foundation; freezing Qatar’s relations with Iran, ending Qatari support for Islamists in Libya and Egypt, and expelling Islamist leaders from the Gulf state.

“On behalf of the Qatari people, we offer the highest apology to the people of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, Yemen and other countries that have been abused and harmed by the Qatari regime. We inform you that the Qatari people do not approve of the national policies that seek to shatter the Arab unity,” Sheikh Saud said in a statement carried by Egypt Today.

“Qataris are questioning whether this is going to end up in seeing a change in leadership itself in Qatar,” added Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, a prominent liberal intellectual, art collector and businessman who is a member of the ruling family of the UAE emirate of Sharjah.

Earlier, Salman al-Ansari, the head of the Saudi American Public Relation Affairs Committee (SAPRAC), a Washington-based lobby, warned Sheikh Tamim that he could meet the same fate as Mr. Morsi, the toppled Egyptian president.

The Arab press reports notwithstanding, there is little by which to gauge possible support for opposition to Sheikh Tamim among the military or the public in Qatar, which like others in the region controls its media but has not imposed the kind of draconic penalties on freedom of expression introduced this week in the UAE.

Whatever the case, Qatar and Turkey hope that a substantial presence of Turkish troops rather than the fact that Qatar also hosts 10,000 US troops on the largest US military facility in the Middle East, would complicate, if not dampen, any plans to force Sheikh Tamim’s exit.

Said Mr. Al Qassemi: “The Qataris should not count on that base as being a guarantee or sort of American protection when it comes to conflict with Saudi Arabia. I think the Americans would choose to side with Saudi Arabia over any other country in the region.”

*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
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The statements and views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of IPS.

Licensed from Inter Press Service

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Wochit Politics: “Gulf Crisis Deepens As Arab Powers Draw Up Qatari Blacklist”

MADRID – US President Donald Trump has put on the back burner an executive order that would designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group. He should leave it there permanently. Inclusive governments that are seen to represent the overwhelmingly devout Muslim societies of the Arab world are a vital antidote to global jihadism.

To be sure, the Muslim Brotherhood has not always fully embodied democratic values. In Egypt, for example, President Mohamed Morsi’s government treated democracy as a winner-take-all proposition – and was ousted after little more than a year.

But addressing such shortcomings by ostracizing legitimate religious-political options merely reinforces jihadist recruiters’ argument that violence is the only way to secure reform. That’s what happened when Abdel Fattah el-Sisi – Morsi’s successor after the 2013 coup d’état – adopted a zero-sum approach to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Where Islamist parties have been given space for political action, they have shown a capacity to take advantage of it, often advocating political participation as a superior alternative to violence. And, indeed, Islamist parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood, are engaged in legitimate political activities in several countries – activities that have often driven them to moderate their views.

Politics, unlike religion, is a realm not of eternal truths, but of rational calculations. To govern effectively, one must build alliances and coalitions, including with secular and liberal parties. Given this, political engagement naturally tends to pull parties toward moderation, a phenomenon we have seen time and again in the Arab world.

In Morocco, when the Justice and Development Party (PJD) entered politics in 1997, “Islamization” was at the heart of its electoral platform. Likewise, Tunisia’s Ennahda (Renaissance) party was originally shaped by the legacy of the Iranian revolution and the thinking of radical Islamist critics of Western values, such as Sayyid Qutb, a leading Muslim Brotherhood theorist in the 1950s.

But both the PJD and Ennahda – which came to power in their respective countries in 2011 – have for years been edging toward moderation, even secularization. They have deemphasized some of their radical principles to accommodate key tenets of secular democracy, such as cultural pluralism and freedom of expression.

In 2003, in response to a terror attack in Casablanca, the PJD created a clear division between the political party and the religious movement that created it, and unconditionally renounced violence. Unlike a jihadist group, which would have happily taken credit for such an attack, the PJD wanted to make it clear that it neither inspired nor condoned such actions. In 2015, Ennahda, too, separated the movement that promotes religious values from the party that adheres to the secular logic of the political game.

Critics who argue that these parties were merely maneuvering tactically are not entirely wrong. But such tactical moves can lead to strategic and even ideological shifts. Indeed, once separated from the constraints of religious dogma, the political branches of both parties distanced themselves from their fundamentalist Islamist roots.

Involvement in politics also had a moderating impact on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. While Morsi was president, he respected Egypt’s peace agreement with Israel and even played a key role in brokering a ceasefire in the 2012 conflict between Israel and Hamas. Those decisions demonstrated his resolve to uphold Egypt’s role as a force for regional stability, which implied refusing to allow his ideology to drive him toward a radical foreign policy.

Algeria’s Islamists took a slightly different route, moderating their politics after their defeat in the devastating civil war of the 1990s. While the memory of that civil war is now fading, the example of the conflicts in Syria and Libya – together with the political engagement of Islamist parties, such as the Movement for the Society of Peace – is enough to drive most young Algerians away from jihadism.

Just as political participation can encourage moderation, political exclusion can reinforce radicalism. Consider the case of Hamas, which is not a global jihadist movement, but rather a nationalist Islamist organization whose iron-fisted rule in Gaza brooks no dissent.

One might argue that the international community’s refusal to recognize Hamas’s victory when it came to power in an election in 2006 stymied the movement’s potential for moderation. After all, in contrast to global jihadist groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, Hamas has often flirted, however obliquely, with a more conciliatory approach toward Israel.

Even without political recognition, Hamas has reportedly decided to publish a new charter without the rampant anti-Semitism found in the current one. There is also reason to believe that Hamas would accept a two-state solution, and declare its independence from the Muslim Brotherhood, in order to facilitate its reconciliation with Egypt and other leading Arab states.

If Hamas does prove itself to be moving toward greater political pragmatism, it should be encouraged. In particular, Israel should treat Gaza as if it were an independent state and promote its stability. This means ending Israel’s blockade – which has served only to fuel more extremism and war – and granting Gazans control over their own seaport for trade and travel.

Creating space for benign expressions of Islam in the public sphere is essential to defeat global jihadism. Only when the war against jihadism shifts from the battlefield to the political arena can Arab societies move toward a more secure and prosperous future.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister, is Vice President of the Toledo International Center for Peace. He is the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.

Licensed from Project Syndicate

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

AfricaNews: “Egypt: El-Sisi visits Trump, requests Muslim Brotherhood be declared a terrorist group”