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  • The Tribal Dynamics of Old Play Out Again in the Middle East;

    The Forward
    January 4, 2008



    The Tribal Dynamics of Old Play Out Again in the Middle East;
    The strategic Interest

    Yossi Alpher, a former senior adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak
    and former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, is
    co-editor of the bitterlemons family of online publications.


    States are falling apart along sectarian lines.

    The system of Middle East states as we know it today was largely
    imposed upon the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire by England and
    France, the victorious European powers of World War I. Judging by the
    current state of affairs, they did not do a very good job.

    Five out of the Arab League's 22 members Iraq, Sudan, Somalia,
    Lebanon and the Palestinians are in a state of collapse or acute
    fragmentation. The region exports varieties

    of Islamist extremism and terrorism around the world. And by and
    large its natural wealth is not applied to the urgent task of
    coherent state-building and modernization.

    The broadly sectarian nature of Middle East life was apparently
    better accommodated by the Ottoman Empire, which made elaborate
    allowances for tribal and religious autonomy. No wonder Israelis and
    Arabs sometimes greet Turkish officials with a wistful and only
    slightly tongue-incheek, we miss Ottoman rule.

    Nor should it surprise us that, in economic terms, the most
    successful countries in the Middle East today are the Gulf emirates,
    which are essentially tribal city-states. Dubai and Qatar may be
    undemocratic and have huge expatriate populations of laborers, but
    they are also prosperous, peaceful and thoroughly globalized. The
    traveler to the Arab side of the Gulf from Kuwait in the north via
    Bahrain and Qatar to the seven United Arab Emirate statelets cannot
    but be struck by the individual personality of each state, emerging
    as it did from a separate and unique Arab tribal system.

    In contrast, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon and the Palestinians are
    falling apart along tribal, clan or sectarian lines. Sunnis, Shi'ites
    and Christians are separating from one another, as are devout
    Islamists from secularized Muslims. Where Israel once confronted
    Palestinian and Lebanese neighbors, it now borders on Hamas and Fatah
    in separate parts of the Palestinian territories and a
    semi-autonomous Shi'ite entity in southern Lebanon that is allied
    with non-Arab Iran.

    On Israel's border to the east there is Jordan, which originated in
    an alliance between an exile Hejazi tribe, the Hashemites, and local
    Bedouin tribes and ethnic minorities. And to the northeast there is
    Syria, which is ruled by an Alawite minority that behaves very much
    like a tribe, or even a mafia, despite its pretense of championing
    Greater Syria.

    Of all Israel's neighbors, only Egypt has the characteristics of a
    coherent nation-state. Its dominance over the Arab world throughout
    most of the modern era can be explained precisely by the fact that
    Egypt, with its 7,000-year history, long ago outgrew any tribal
    origins.

    Like the black African countries whose progress is stymied by
    European-imposed, conflicting tribal lines, problematic Arab states
    like Iraq, Lebanon and Sudan may not disappear tomorrow. But the
    dynamic of their behavior is in many ways best understood with
    reference to pre- European times, when their separate ethnic
    components either did not exist

    as political entities, as in the case of South Sudan, or were
    recognized as distinct and autonomous regions, as in the case of the
    Maronites of Mount Lebanon, who maintained their integrity precisely
    through ancient ties to Europe. Not surprisingly, the only
    significant American success thus far in occupied Iraq emerged when
    American forces began dealing with the rebellious Sunnis of Anbar
    province as individual tribes with specific interests.

    This reality explains the interest generated recently by the
    unearthing of a proposal for partitioning the Middle East along
    ethnic-tribal lines drawn up in 1918 by T. E. Lawrence.

    Like his superiors back in London, Lawrence of Arabia apparently
    couldn't properly sort out British colonial interests, as opposed to
    those of local Arabs. Nor did he realize in drawing his map in 1918
    that there were few, if any, Armenians left alive in the state he
    assigned them on the northeast corner of the Mediterranean. Still,
    his map makes more sense in terms of Arab sectarian concerns of the
    day than the state system the British and French soon produced.

    Vanity Fair magazine just commissioned Dennis Ross and three other
    veteran Middle East experts to carry out a similar exercise. It
    produced 17 ethnic divisions, including severa huge, diverse tribal
    areas that dominate the region geographically; a united Kurdistan
    that spans parts of four countries; and a northern Gulf crescent
    embodying the region's Arab Shi'ites, who are also currently split
    among four countries, including Iran.

    Here and there, some aspects of Israel's mindset and behavior can at
    times also best be understood as tribal in its clashes with and
    attitudes toward its neighbors. The tit-for-tat, eye-for-an-eye
    concept of deterrence and the settlers' creeping land grab in the
    West Bank all seem to reflect triba behavior more than rational
    analyses of sophisticated national interests.

    At the same time, it is precisely the reluctance of some Arabs and
    Iranians to deal with Israel as an ancient tribe with roots in the
    region that has emerged as a modern state insisting instead that it
    is a foreign import representing a foreign religion that explains an
    important dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

    Finally, tribalism is an important backdrop to the current dominance
    over the Middle East region by Turkey, Iran and Israel. All three are
    ancient peoples who, compared to most of their Arab neighbors and
    following very diverse historic paths, long ago outgrew tribal
    behavior.

    True, it is almost certainly too late to repartition the Arab Middle
    East along tribal lines; nor would most of the region's ethnic groups
    have it so. Yet a look at the increasingly tribal nature of Middle
    East life remains very useful for understanding how alive the ethnic
    dynamics of old still are.
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