By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I went to synagogue on Saturday not far from the Syrian border in Antakya, Turkey. It’s been on my mind ever since.
Antakya is home to a tiny Jewish community, which still gathers for
holidays at the little Sephardic synagogue. It is also famous for its
mosaic of mosques and Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian and Protestant
churches. How could it be that I could go to synagogue in Turkey on
Saturday while on Friday, just across the Orontes River in Syria, I had
visited with Sunni Free Syrian Army rebels embroiled in a civil war in
which Syrian Alawites and Sunnis are killing each other on the basis of
their ID cards, Kurds are creating their own enclave, Christians are
hiding and the Jews are long gone?
What is this telling us? For me, it raises the question of whether there
are just three governing options in the Middle East today: Iron
Empires, Iron Fists or Iron Domes?
The reason that majorities and minorities co-existed relatively
harmoniously for some 400 years when the Arab world was ruled by the
Turkish Ottomans from Istanbul was because the Sunni Ottomans, with
their Iron Empire, monopolized politics. While there were exceptions,
generally speaking the Ottomans and their local representatives were in
charge in cities like Damascus, Antakya and Baghdad. Minorities, like Alawites, Shiites, Christians and Jews, though second-class citizens,
did not have to worry that they’d be harmed if they did not rule. The
Ottomans had a live-and-let-live mentality toward their subjects.
When Britain and France carved up the Ottoman Empire in the Arab East,
they forged the various Ottoman provinces into states — with names like
Iraq, Jordan and Syria — that did not correspond to the ethnographic
map. So Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Christians, Druze, Turkmen, Kurds and
Jews found themselves trapped together inside national boundaries that
were drawn to suit the interests of the British and French. Those
colonial powers kept everyone in check. But once they withdrew, and
these countries became independent, the contests for power began, and
minorities were exposed. Finally, in the late 1960s and 1970s, we saw
the emergence of a class of Arab dictators and monarchs who perfected
Iron Fists (and multiple intelligence agencies) to decisively seize
power for their sect or tribe — and they ruled over all the other
communities by force.
In Syria, under the Assad family’s iron fist, the Alawite minority came
to rule over a Sunni majority, and in Iraq, under Saddam’s iron fist, a
Sunni minority came to rule over a Shiite majority. But these countries
never tried to build real “citizens” who could share and peacefully
rotate in power. So what you are seeing today in the Arab awakening
countries — Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen — is what
happens when there is no Iron Empire and the people rise up against the
iron-fisted dictators. You are seeing ongoing contests for power — until
and unless someone can forge a social contract for how communities can
share power.
Israelis have responded to the collapse of Arab iron fists around them —
including the rise of militias with missiles in Lebanon and Gaza — with
a third model. It is the wall Israel built around itself to seal off
the West Bank coupled with its Iron Dome antimissile system. The two
have been phenomenally successful — but at a price. The wall plus the
dome are enabling Israel’s leaders to abdicate their responsibility for
thinking creatively about a resolution of its own majority-minority
problem with the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
I am stunned at what I see here politically. On the right, in the Likud Party, the old leadership that was at least connected with the world,
spoke English and respected Israel’s Supreme Court, is being swept aside
in the latest primary by a rising group of far-right settler-activists
who are convinced — thanks, in part, to the wall and dome — that
Palestinians are no threat anymore and that no one can roll back the
350,000 Jews living in the West Bank. The far-right group running Israel
today is so arrogant, and so indifferent to U.S. concerns, that it
announced plans to build a huge block of settlements in the heart of the
West Bank — in retaliation for the U.N. vote giving Palestinians
observer status — even though the U.S. did everything possible to block
that vote and the settlements would sever any possibility of a
contiguous Palestinian state.
Meanwhile, with a few exceptions, the dome and wall have so insulated
the Israeli left and center from the effects of the Israeli occupation
that their main candidates for the Jan. 22 elections — including those
from Yitzhak Rabin’s old Labor Party — are not even offering peace ideas
but simply conceding the right’s dominance on that issue and focusing
on bringing down housing prices and school class sizes. One settler
leader told me the biggest problem in the West Bank today is “traffic
jams.”
I am glad that the wall and the Iron Dome are sheltering Israelis from
enemies who wish to do them ill, but I fear the wall and the Iron Dome
are also blinding them from truths they still badly need to face.
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