This is the website of Dr Emilie J. Rutledge who, with almost two decades’ worth of experience in managing, designing and delivering university-level economics courses, is currently Head of the Economics Department at The Open University.
erutledge.com
Dr Emilie J. Rutledge
Emilie has published over 20 peer-reviewed papers and is the author of “Monetary Union in the Gulf.” Her current research focus is on employability, the feasibility of universal basic incomes and, the oil-rich Arabian Gulf’s economic diversification and labour market reform strategies. On an ad hoc basis, Emilie provides consultancy on developing interactive university courses, alongside analytical insight on the political-economy of the Arabian Gulf.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia are now in blatant competition with one another. Competition is healthy, many will contend and this can be true but, if and when the times are more difficult such competition could become cut throat.
According to Abuamer and Nassar (2023), “soft power acquisition can also be used to explain how Gulf states approach sports.” Soft power, as Nye (2004) set out explain how some states acquire influence in non-confrontational ways and that sports investments can be explained by intra-Gulf rivalries, where competition rather than cooperation between Gulf states is arguably a key driver.
Competing for football glory; especially in the English Premier LeagueSaudi Arabia owns Newcastle United F.C.The Emirate of Dubai sponsors Arsenal F.C.The Emirate of Abu Dhabi both own and sponsor Manchester City F.C.
In 2018, The Economist explained the following in a piece with the following bi-line “An oasis for the tax-averse beckons in the Middle East”
More than 100 countries have signed up to the Common Reporting Standard (CRS), which requires them to swap information on account-holders that may be relevant for tax purposes. But the enterprising and tax-shy can still exploit loopholes in the system. A popular one is to procure residence in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), set up a company there and use the tax residence that comes with it to block the flow of information to tax authorities elsewhere. … Under the CRS (which is managed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), banks must share information with the country where an account-holder is tax-resident. If the account holder is an entity, then the bank must look through it to the “controlling person” and report on that individual. In the UAE, since both the individual and the company have local tax residence, neither need fear having any information passed on to other countries, regardless of whether their money is held in a bank account, a trust or an investment fund.
Add to this that the UAE is largely tax-free and is likely to have to remain ‘mostly’ tax-free to retain its advantage over Saudi Arabia.
The Arabian peninsular seeks to become a default holiday destination
Its not just Dubai anymore.
Destination DohaDrift by Dhow; the Gulf’s once ubiquitous sail boats whose name may have come from the Persian for “small ship” (dawah) or from the Swahili for “vessel” (daw)
No longer just for pilgrimsLots to see, e.g., the UNESCO Al-Hijr monuments that date back to Nabataean civilizationTablet magazine in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (Photo: Andrea Bruce)
And while it is no longer ‘just’ Dubai, it, Abu Dhabi and most other of the seven Emirates are all vying for tourists. It is said that the UAE will soon have a number of casinos. As it stands, and as I wrote recently, the UAE is the Middle East’s most popular destination be it as a conference location, convention centre or indeed holiday destination (Rutledge, 2023; 2024).
Some 21.5 m tourists visited in 2019 (UNWTO, 2023), a striking number considering that there are only around one million Emirati citizens (see: Arabian Gulf data). The meteoric growth in visitors is largely due to a proactive government strategy of infrastructural investment and destination brand-building (see, e.g., Chen and Dwyer, 2018). As Thani and Heenan (2017) state, in order to attract tourists the UAE has undergone some, “eye-catching transformations.” Notable amongst the cultural zones and theme park hubs are the world’s tallest structure (Burj Khalifa), biggest mall (The Dubai Mall), only seven-star hotel (The Burj Al Arab) and a satellite branch of France’s Louvre museum (Wippel, 2023). State controlled oil rent has facilitated the creation of two of the world’s largest airlines and airport hubs—Emirates and Etihad (DXB and AUH). In terms of marketing the UAE as an “escape to the sun” location, London’s English Premier League football club Arsenal, wear Emirates shirts and play home games at “Emirates stadium;” Manchester City wear Etihad shirts and play their home games at “ Etihad stadium” (Millington et al., 2021).
Chen, N., & Dwyer, L. (2018). Residents’ Place Satisfaction and Place Attachment on Destination Brand-Building Behaviors: Conceptual and Empirical Differentiation. Journal of Travel Research, 57(8), 1,026–1,041. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287517729760
Millington, S., Steadman, C., Roberts, G., & Medway, D. (2021). The tale of three cities: Place branding, scalar complexity and football. In D. Medway, G. Warnaby, & J. Byrom (Eds.), A Research Agenda for Place Branding (pp. 131–149). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781839102851.00017
Rutledge, E. J. (2023). The tour guide role in the United Arab Emirates: Emiratisation, satisfaction and retention. Tourism and hospitality research, 23(4), 610–623. https://doi.org/10.1177/14673584221122488
Rutledge, E. J. (2024). The tour guide profession: An attractive option for UAE nationals majoring in tourism? Tourism and hospitality research, 0(online first), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/14673584241278451
Thani, S., & Heenan, T. (2017). The UAE: A Disneyland in the desert. In H. Almuhrzi, H. Alriyami, & N. Scott (Eds.), Tourism in the Arab World: An Industry Perspective (pp. 104–117). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315624525
Wippel, S. (Ed.) (2023). Branding the Middle East: Communication Strategies and Image Building from Qom to Casablanca. De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110741100
Qatar has over the past three decades mediated several high-profile conflicts that have brought it unparalleled attention. It’s been said that this is remarkable given the commonly accepted assumption that small states, particularly from the Global South, are inherently limited in their power to act as third parties during conflict (Barakat, 2024). Qatar’s rise as a mediator didn’t happen overnight. According Wirtschafter (2024), Qatar started to play a regionally important role in the years after the the launch of Al Jazeera, “which gave the small Gulf state an outsized influence” .
Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. Qatar is winning praise for its diplomacy skills. Vyacheslav Prokofyev/AP
Qatar’s strategic importance is further reinforced by its hosting of Al Udeid Air Base, the largest U.S. military installation in the region, and the presence of six major U.S. universities at Doha’s Education City.
A car sticker supports Qatar’s relationship with Turkey, which has deepened as a result of the blockade. Naseem Zeitoon/Reuters
“Al Jazeera helped create Qatar’s maverick image but also repeatedly got it into hot water. During the Iraq War, President George W. Bush, in a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, reportedly contemplated bombing the Doha headquarters of the broadcaster, which was airing video of the fighting in the Iraqi city of Fallujah that the Pentagon said was misleading. The White House dismissed the report at the time, and the British government denied it.”
In a 2023 article for the Wall Street Journal (Said et al., 2023), it was revealed that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) “has pulled away from his former mentor [U.A.E. President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan; MBZ] as they compete to dominate the Gulf, where U.S. power has waned.” The rift, it is said, reflects a competition for geopolitical and economic power in the Middle East and global oil markets. The two royals — photoed together above — who spent almost a decade climbing to the top of the Arab world, are now feuding over who calls the shots.”
The two countries are also increasingly economic competitors. As part of MBS’s plans to end Saudi Arabia’s economic reliance on oil, he is pushing companies to move their regional headquarters to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, from U.A.E.’s Dubai, a more cosmopolitan city favored by Westerners. He’s also launching plans to set up tech centers, draw more tourists and develop logistical hubs that would rival the U.A.E.’s position as the Middle East’s center of commerce . In March, he announced a second national airline that would compete with Dubai’s highly ranked Emirates.
Said et al. (2020) site Gulf officials as saying that MBZ has, “chafed at being eclipsed by a Saudi royal who U.A.E. officials believe has made some serious missteps.” Moreover, in the realm of soft power, “the Saudi purchase in 2021 of Newcastle, England’s soccer club and investment in global superstar players took place just as Manchester City—owned by a prominent member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family—became a title winning powerhouse.”
The Saudis and Emiratis have called themselves the closest of allies, but they have had a sometimes tense relationship since even before the U.A.E. gained independence from Britain in 1971. The U.A.E.’s founding father, Sheikh Zayed al Nahyan, bristled at Saudi domination of the Arabian peninsula, and then-Saudi King Faisal refused to recognize his Persian Gulf neighbor for years, seeking leverage in various territorial disputes. In 2009, the U.A.E. scuttled plans for a common Gulf central bank over its proposed location in Riyadh. To this day, there are territorial disputes over oil-rich land between the two countries.
The rift bubbled to the surface in October last year when OPEC, the 13-nation oil-production group that has allied with Russia , decided to slash oil output; the UAE went along with the cut, but in private told U.S. officials and the media that Saudi Arabia had forced it to join the decision. Emirati frustrations reached the point where they told U.S. officials they were ready to pull out of OPEC, according to Gulf and U.S. officials. U.S. officials said they took it as a sign of Emirati anger, not a real threat. At OPEC’s last meeting, in June, the Emiratis were allowed a modest increase in their production baseline, and their energy minister emerged holding hands with his Saudi counterpart.
As Iskandar (2024) writes, “in December 2022, MBS expressed his frustrations openly, accusing UAE officials of betrayal. It is said that the Saudi de facto ruler threatened punitive measures “worse than what it did to Qatar” (regarding the Qatar boycott, see: Al-Ansari, 2021). Saudi–UAE discord has been described as a mostly “quiet conflict” as these two dominant GCC countries vie for regional dominance and engage in geoeconomic competition. Rivalry has become more pronounced latterly as both anticipate a future less dependent on oil revenues and more focused on diversified economic growth” (see, e.g., Morgan, 2020; Reisinezhad & Bushehri, 2024).
The increasing activism in Saudi and Emirati regional policies is no longer based on money and diplomacy alone, as it used to be, but also on military means. They have intervened in Bahrain in 2011, in Libya in 2011, in Iraq and Syria against ‘Daesh’ — the now very much weakened Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) — and in Yemen since March 2015 (Ragab, 2017, p. 37). Both countries are also said to be involved with the armed conflict that is ongoing in Sudan (see, e.g., Bissada, 2024; Gallopin, 2020; Mohammad, 2023; Pilling, England, & Schipani, 2023; Prendergast & Lake, 2024; Walsh, Koettl, & Schmitt, 2023).
Worth (2020), in a highly informative, longform profile piece on MBZ, writes that:
On Sept. 11, 2001, M.B.Z. was in northern Scotland, enjoying the last morning of a weeklong rabbit-hunting excursion with his friend King Abdullah II of Jordan. He said his goodbyes and boarded a private plane to London, arriving just after lunch. He hadn’t even left the plane when an Egyptian member of his entourage came running out from the terminal and climbed onboard, according to an official who was present. “New York is burning!” the man shouted. M.B.Z. had heard nothing of the day’s events, and when he did he was furious. “What are you saying?” he asked the man. “New York is the center of the world — look how vulnerable we are.” M.B.Z. tried to reach his father, but was unable to get through. He did manage to get Clarke, who was then working on counterterrorism in the White House. It was the only call Clarke took that morning from outside the government. “Carte blanche — just tell me what to do,” he recalled M.B.Z. telling him.
By the time M.B.Z. arrived back in Abu Dhabi, later that day, he knew that two Emiratis were among the 19 hijackers. The Sept. 11 attacks were a life-changing moment for M.B.Z., unmasking both the depth of the Islamist menace and the Arab world’s state of denial about it. That October, M.B.Z. told me, he listened in amazement as an Arab head of state, meeting with his father on a visit to Abu Dhabi, dismissed the attacks as an inside job involving the C.I.A. or the Mossad. After the head of state left, Zayed turned to M.B.Z., who had been there for the meeting, and asked what he thought. “Dad,” M.B.Z. recalled telling his father, “we have evidence.” That fall, the Emirati security services arrested about 200 Emiratis and about 1,600 foreigners who were planning to go to Afghanistan and join Al Qaeda, including three or four who were committed to becoming suicide bombers.
That same autumn, M.B.Z. had another conversation with his father that would affect the way he thought about political Islam. The encounter began, M.B.Z. told me, when he entered his father’s office with a momentous piece of news: The Americans were sending troops to Afghanistan. Zayed said he wanted Emirati troops to join them. M.B.Z., who was commanding the armed forces by this time, was not prepared for this. Taking an active role in the American campaign would raise sensitive issues, given that some were calling it a war against Islam. Sensing his son’s unease at the prospect of committing troops, Zayed said: “Tell me, do you think I’m doing this for Bush?” M.B.Z. said yes. “That’s 5 percent of it,” Zayed said. “Do you think I’m doing this to keep bin Laden away?” M.B.Z. nodded. “That’s another 5 percent.” M.B.Z., a little baffled, asked his father to explain. “You’ve read the Quran and the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet,” Zayed said. “And you like them?” Of course, his son replied. Zayed then said: “Mohammed, do you think this guy bin Laden running around Afghanistan is doing what the Prophet wanted us to do?” Not at all, M.B.Z. said. His father then told him emphatically: “You’re right. Our religion is being hijacked.” M.B.Z. didn’t have to add that there was another reason to fight Al Qaeda — it was a threat to their own family’s authority.
In 1996, Osama bin Laden, the then head al-Qaeda issued his first fatwā, which declared war against the United States and demanded the expulsion of all American soldiers from the Arabian peninsula. In a second fatwā (1998), Osama bin Laden outlined his objections to American foreign policy with respect to Israel, as well as the continued presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War (see: Maps of the Arabian peninsular). Osama bin Laden maintained that Muslims are obliged to attack American targets until the aggressive policies of the U.S. against Muslims were reversed. As of 1999, Bin Laden was residing in Afghanistan.
The aircraft hijackers in the September 11 attacks were 19 men affiliated with al-Qaeda. They came from four countries; 15 of them were citizens of Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Egypt, and one from Lebanon.
In the aftermath of the “Arab Spring” Worth (2020) continues:
M.B.Z. had already hatched an immensely ambitious plan to reshape the region’s future. He would soon enlist as an ally Mohammed bin Salman, the young Saudi crown prince known as M.B.S., who in many ways is M.B.Z.’s protégé. Together, they helped the Egyptian military depose that country’s elected Islamist president in 2013. In Libya in 2015, M.B.Z. stepped into the civil war, defying a United Nations embargo and American diplomats. He fought the Shabab militia in Somalia, leveraging his country’s commercial ports to become a power broker in the Horn of Africa. He joined the Saudi war in Yemen to battle the Iran-backed Houthi militia. All of this was aimed at thwarting what he saw as a looming Islamist menace.
M.B.Z. makes little distinction among Islamist groups, insisting that they all share the same goal: some version of a caliphate with the Quran in place of a constitution. He seems to believe that the Middle East’s only choices are a more repressive order or a total catastrophe. It is a Hobbesian forecast, and doubtless a self-serving one. But the experience of the past few years has led some veteran observers to respect M.B.Z.’s intuitions about the dangers of political Islam writ large. “I was sceptical at first,” says Brett McGurk, a former United States official who spent years working in the Middle East for three administrations and knows M.B.Z. well. “It seemed extreme. But I’ve come to the conclusion that he was often more right than wrong.”
M.B.Z. has put many of his resources into what could be called a counter jihad, and they are formidable. Despite his country’s small size (there are fewer than a million Emirati citizens), he oversees more than $1.3 trillion in sovereign wealth funds, and commands a military that is better equipped and trained than any in the region apart from Israel. On the domestic front, he has cracked down hard on the Brotherhood and built a hypermodern surveillance state where everyone is monitored.
Hubbard reviewed by Ghattas
In a review of Ben Hubbard’s 2020 book, MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman, Ghattas writes in the New Statesman magazine (2020) that:
MBS’s grandiose reform plans are now under intense pressure. His ambition, laid out in Vision 2030 – a programme to lessen the country’s reliance on oil and bring about a more “vibrant” society – was the only reason the young prince became a darling of the West soon after he was catapulted on to the world stage in 2015. He did not deliver on his promise that by 2020 the kingdom would be able to live without oil. There are no revelations in MBS but Hubbard, Beirut bureau chief for the New York Times, who has spent more than a dozen years reporting from the region, delivers a compelling tale for a wide audience – more reportage than narrative, more anecdotes than deep analysis. In doing so, he provides non-experts with an accessible biography that does not stray into sensationalism but helps make sense of all the recent headlines around the impulsive, and one could argue, dangerous, young prince. MBS did not give an interview for the book and Hubbard is upfront about the gaps that remain in our understanding of a man who until just a few years ago did not seem destined to be more than one among thousands of princes in the House of Saud. As he writes:
Much still remains unclear about how MBS spent his twenties, largely because he did so little that drew attention at the time and because so much effort would later go into retroactively polishing his reputation. But what is clear is everything MBS did not do before he burst on to the scene in 2015. He never ran a company that made a mark. He never acquired military experience. He never studied at a foreign university. He never mastered, or even become functional in, a foreign language. He never spent significant time in the United States, Europe, or elsewhere in the West. And yet, this man, though still only crown prince, launched a devastating war in Yemen in 2015, played a high-risk gambit in the global oil market and chatted away on WhatsApp with another inexperienced princeling, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, discussing policies with consequences that reverberate around the world, including the stand-off with Iran.
MBS seemed to revel in the role of disrupter. In 2017 he went on a crusade against corruption, rounding up dozens if not hundreds of princes, businessmen and others in the Ritz Carlton hotel, stripping them of their fortunes and provoking an economic earthquake in the kingdom. But while there was indeed mass corruption in Saudi Arabia, Hubbard argues that it was in an environment “created by the royal family” and those princes who were still on MBS’s good side could continue to profit. Just like MBS himself, who appeared not to see the contradiction between what he preached and his own spending habits, buying a $300m house, a super-yacht and, reportedly, Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Salvator Mundi for $450m. The prince’s excesses and rough edges were dismissed by those he charmed, from Silicon Valley to Washington, DC. He dangled the prospect of huge deals and investment opportunities in the kingdom, of cities rising in the desert where “scientists could modify the human genome to make people smarter and stronger. Mechanical dinosaurs could populate a Jurassic Park-like attraction… A beach would feature glow-in-the-dark sand.”
Here, finally, was a young man with vision who could bring the kingdom into the 21st c. And in many ways, MBS did go where no other royal had gone. He defanged the religious police and brought music, cinema and theatre to the austere kingdom where they had been deemed a sin for centuries. He understood this was essential to defuse the time bomb of a very young and very bored, frustrated population. He also reversed the ban on women driving – while jailing the women who had campaigned for the right to drive lest anyone get any ideas about the power of activism in an absolute monarchy.
In an interesting profile piece on MBS, Pelham (2022) writes:
At first glance the 36-year-old prince looks like the ruler many young Saudis had been waiting for, closer in age to his people than any previous king – 70 per cent of the Saudi population is under 30. The millennial autocrat is said to be fanatical about the video game “Call of Duty”: he blasts through the inertia and privileges of the mosque and royal court as though he were fighting virtual opponents on screen. His restless impatience and disdain for convention have helped him push through reforms that many thought wouldn’t happen for generations. The most visible transformation of Saudi Arabia is the presence of women in public where once they were either absent or closely guarded by their husband or father. There are other changes, too. Previously, the kingdom offered few diversions besides praying at the mosque; today you can watch Justin Bieber in concert, sing karaoke or go to a Formula 1 race. A few months ago I even went to a rave in a hotel. Saudis and foreigners danced barefoot on the sand until dawn, a couple kissed, women stripped down to tank tops and fruit juice laced with alcohol was served at an open bar. But embracing Western consumer culture doesn’t mean embracing Western democratic values: it can as easily support a distinctively modern, surveillance state. On my recent trips to Saudi Arabia, people from all levels of society seemed terrified about being overheard voicing disrespect or criticism, something I’d never seen there before. “I’ve survived four kings,” said a veteran analyst who refused to speculate about why much of Jeddah, the country’s second-largest city, is being bulldozed: “Let me survive a fifth.”
In another very in-depth profile piece on MBS, Wood (2022) writes:
Even MBS’s critics concede that he has roused the country from an economic and social slumber. In 2016, he unveiled a plan, known as Vision 2030, to convert Saudi Arabia from—allow me to be blunt—one of the world’s weirdest countries into a place that could plausibly be called normal. It is now open to visitors and investment, and lets its citizens partake in ordinary acts of recreation and even certain vices. The crown prince has legalized cinemas and concerts, and invited notably raw hip-hop artists to perform. He has allowed women to drive and to dress as freely as they can in dens of sin like Dubai and Bahrain. He has curtailed the role of reactionary clergy and all but abolished the religious police.
Before the meetings, I asked one of MBS’s advisers if there were any questions I could ask his boss that he himself could not. “None,” he answered, without pausing—“and that is what makes him different from every crown prince who has come before him.” I was told he derives energy from being challenged. At the outset of both conversations, MBS said he was saddened that the pandemic precluded giving us hugs. He apologized that we all had to wear masks. (Each meeting was attended by multiple, mainly silent princes wearing identical white robes and masks, leaving us unsure, to this day, who exactly was present.)
The crown prince left his tunic unbuttoned at the collar, in a casual style now favored by young Saudi men, and he gave relaxed, non-psychopathic answers to questions about his personal habits. He tries to limit his Twitter use. He eats breakfast every day with his kids. For fun, he watches TV, avoiding shows, like House of Cards, that remind him of work. Instead, he said without apparent irony, he prefers to watch series that help him escape the reality of his job, such as Game of Thrones.
Vision 2030 made modernisation easier to observe now than it would have been just a few years ago. Until October 2019, tourist visas to Saudi Arabia did not exist. Then the Saudis realised that to attract crowds to the concerts they had legalised, they’d need to let in visitors. Overnight, a visa to Saudi Arabia went from one of the hardest in the world to get to one of the easiest. In minutes I had one valid for a whole year.
Yet after spending hours in MBS’s company, and in the company of his allies and enemies, I was convinced that neutering the clergy was not just symbolic. He was fighting them avidly, and personally. “The kings have historically stayed away from religion,” Bernard Haykel, a scholar of Islamic law at Princeton and an acquaintance of MBS’s, told me. Outsourcing theology and religious law to the big beards was both an expedient and a necessity, because no ruler had any training in religious law, or indeed a beard of any significant size. By contrast, MBS has a law degree from King Saud University and flaunts his knowledge and dominance over the clerics. “He’s probably the only leader in the Arab world who knows anything about Islamic epistemology and jurisprudence,” Haykel told me.
That being said, the conservatism in Saudi society has not gone away, rather in many instances, it has just undergone a “costume change;” as Wood (2022) continues:
These lingering manifestations of intolerance illustrate what MBS’s critics say is his ultimate error: Even a crown prince can’t change a culture by fiat.
Belated realisation of this error might be behind the grandest and most improbable of his projects. If existing cities resist your orders, just build a new one programmed to do your bidding from the start. In October 2017, MBS decreed a city in a mostly uninhabited area on the Gulf of Aqaba, adjacent to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the southwestern edge of Jordan, and the Israeli resort town Eilat. The city is called Neom, from a violent collision between the Greek word neos (“new”) and the Arabic mustaqbal (“future”).
At present, little exists but an encampment for the employees of the Neom project (see: “On the giga-scale”), a small area of tract housing. Regular buses take them to shop in the nearest city, Tabuk, which is itself a city only by the standards of the vacant, rock-strewn desert nearby. (If you recall the early scenes of Lawrence of Arabia, when a lonely camel-borne Peter O’Toole sings “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” to the echoes of a sandstone canyon, then you know the spot.) The ambitions for this settlement are vast. Neom’s administrators say they expect it to attract billions of dollars in investment and millions of residents, both Saudi and foreign, within 10 to 20 years. Dubai grew at a similar pace in the 1990s and 2000s. MBS said Neom is “not a copy of anything elsewhere,” not a xerox of Dubai. But it has more in common with the great globalised mainstream than with anything in the history of a country that, until recently, was remarkably successful at walling off its traditional culture from the blandishments of modernity.
This is how the profile piece, penned by Robert F. Worth in 2020, on MBZ ends; it is telling indeed:
One morning in June, I got a taxi from my hotel to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, M.B.Z.’s madly ambitious, billion-dollar monument to “art and civilization.” It was unbearably hot and humid out, and as we drove past the corniche — a beautifully landscaped mile-long stretch of waterfront — I didn’t see a single human being. As we crossed the bridge onto Saadiyat Island, I could see the museum looming in the distance like a vast metallic tortoise. Its steel dome, which is as heavy as the Eiffel Tower, is a weave of strands designed to act like a palm grove, allowing tiny shards of sunlight onto the grounds below. … Inside, I goggled alongside the tourists at classic works of Western art sitting alongside Chinese and Indian and Arab masterpieces. The museum’s guiding concept reflects the U.A.E.’s own multicultural ethos, a mash-up of global high culture. It has been derided by some critics, including many in France, as a lavish purchase of a European brand for the benefit of a global leisure class. But M.B.Z.’s main goal for the museum, one of his advisers told me, was to educate the local population, not attract tourists.
As I strolled past a Roman sculpture, a group of Emirati schoolchildren in green shirts trickled in and sat on the floor around me. After a few minutes of sketching, their teachers led them toward the Universal Religions gallery, the museum’s centrepiece. I followed behind and listened as one of the teachers led a Q. and A. “You all know about the Quran,” he said. “But who can tell me what the Christian holy book is?” Several children shouted the answer. “Very good! What about the Jewish holy book? And for Hindus?” More high-pitched answers. At last came the clincher. “Sheikh Zayed wanted this to be a universal museum, and he had the idea to put all the holy books in one place, so people could see what their religions had in common, and perhaps that way they’d be a bit nicer to each other.” As the children got up and filed into the next room, it struck me that the teacher’s lecture contained a revealing false note. Sheikh Zayed wasn’t the one who conjured up this museum, with its grand ambition to smash Islamic certainties and turn Bedouins into citizens of the world. M.B.Z. was hiding in his father’s shadow, absent and omnipotent at the same time.
More generally, all Arabian Gulf countries adopted monarchy as a political system, what emerged was a tribal dynastic monarchy in that the extended families were included as part of an extended royal family. Indeed, this characteristic distinguishes these monarchies of the Gulf region from the majority of other monarchical systems that have existed internationally. Wright (2020, p. 352) points out that, “the pattern of including members of the ruling family as ministers in the cabinet was an important indicator of the distribution of power and authority.” According to Al-Rasheed (2020, p. 337), “the long-term prospects of the contradictory strategy of reform and repression are bleak” as this will result in a spiral of “violence and retaliation, alienating the youth that the regime supposedly wants to empower.”
Further reading
Surveillance / internet control
In 2017, the Saudi government urged citizens to report subversive comments spotted on social media via a phone app which was promptly denounced by Saudi dissidents and U.S.-based Human Rights Watch as “Orwellian” (Reuters, 2017). As reported by Mazzetti and Hubbard (2019) , MBS had authorised “a secret campaign to silence dissenters—which “included the surveillance, kidnapping, detention and torture of Saudi citizens” — see too: Bing and Schectman (2019b) and Deibert (2023).
Over the last five years, the UK has sold over £75 million ($103mn) worth of spyware, wiretaps, and telecom interception equipment to spy on dissidents, to over 17 countries including Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain. Further, in 2020 alone, the UK has authorised £1.88 billion ($2.6bn) worth of arms sales to the Saudi-led coalition in war-torn Yemen (TNT World, 2021).
In 2023, social media users were arrested or fined for their online posts (Freedom House, 2023). Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are amongst the most connected countries in the world, this gives the country a particularly high score for this component of their Internet Freedom score — masking, to an extent, quite how poorly they sources in other regards. In terms of internet access in Saudi Arabia, users “face extensive censorship and surveillance, which limits their ability to access diverse content or speak freely online” (Freedom House, 2023). While internet access is widespread and most social media and communications platforms are available, authorities routinely block websites, remove content, and deliberately manipulate online information to positively portray the government and its policies. Criticism of the government is not tolerated and the threat of harassment or prosecution under broadly worded laws forces many Saudi social media users to self-censor. “The regime relies on extensive surveillance, the criminalisation of dissent, appeals to sectarianism and ethnicity, and public spending supported by oil revenues to maintain power. In 2020, Saudi authorities “requested that platforms such as Netflix and YouTube remove online content deemed “inappropriate,” and threatened legal action should the platforms not comply with the requests” (Freedom House, 2023). It was established that the government has recruited Saudi-based Wikipedia administrators to deliberately manipulate information on pages related to the country (Freedom House, 2023). Regarding the UAE. internet freedom is significantly restricted. Online censorship is rampant, and the online media environment lacks diversity. Government surveillance of online activists and journalists is pervasive and has forced internet users to extensively self-censor. Authorities and government supporters continue to use increasingly sophisticated technology to spread disinformation that advances pro-UAE domestic and international narratives on social media.
Leading efforts to pre-emptively stifle possible threats to regime security have been Saudi Arabia and the UAE. These two countries have been mobilising cutting-edge surveillance technology and foreign expertise to suppress dissent within their borders and amongst their citizens abroad (Bing & Schectman, 2019a, 2019b; Uniacke, 2021, p. 980). Uniacke (2021) argues that most of the Gulf monarchies seek to depoliticise and de-civilise online debate through promoting regime-friendly narratives that expose, criticise, crowd-out, delegitimise and ultimately deter political dissidents.” “Saudi security officials sought to galvanise regime supporters into policing the online space, adding an extra layer of surveillance capability to their already muscular communications interception technology. The public prosecutor reminded social media informants – otherwise known as ‘electronic flies’ – that the Kingdom’s laws saw terrorism as ‘endangering national unity . . . and harming the state’s reputation or status … by such an interpretation, voicing political opposition beyond the parameters of acceptable debate set by the regime is ultimately equated with extremism and terrorism” Uniacke (2021, pp. 979-980). Simultaneously, they aim to ‘de-civilise’ civil society, encouraging intolerance for pluralistic political arguments beyond the state narrative to engineer an online quasi-debate with clearly defined political and cultural limitations to easily identify dissenters and buttress regime security (Uniacke, 2021, p. 980).
As Uniacke (2021, p. 981) argues, the forming of a specific, thematically defined ‘free’ space for online debate has become a function of digital authoritarianism in itself. … Exacerbating this online opinion engineering is the coercive potential of commercial big data, easily repurposed for political intelligence on citizens’ opinions and habits by authoritarian and democratic governments alike.
Indeed, the Saudi and Emirati regimes show a demonstrable intolerance for any dissenting political narratives that may be considered expressions of freedom, an independent civil society or reform even within the prevailing system that contradicts the national ‘Vision.’ Instead, they are attempting, with varying degrees of execution of success, to galvanise the citizenry to perform economically while simultaneously suppressing politically-minded civil society. … “if adult citizens take on new jobs, responsibilities, and lifestyles willingly, then ruling elites do not have to undertake painful structural reforms – and risk their own necks, politically, to make them do so” (Uniacke, 2021, p. 985).The Saudi regime’s instrumentalisation of the online public sphere relies on leveraging artificial ‘public opinion’ by both mechanical and organisational means in order to galvanize organic reactions that directly or indirectly promote regime policy. The debate is intentionally stripped of its civil dimension; intolerance for pluralism and an atmosphere of ‘fear and loathing’ prevail by way in an interactive process of coercion, drawing citizens into the parameters of regime-friendly debate and thus depoliticising their engagement with the online space (see too: Pan & Siegel, 2020).
References
Al-Ansari, M. M. H. (2021). The Unbridgeable Gulf: Applying Bennett’s Model of Analysis to the 2017 Gulf Crisis. Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern studies, 23(3), 502–515. https://doi.org/10.1080/19448953.2021.1888252
Deibert, R. J. (2023). The Autocrat in Your iPhone: How Mercenary Spyware Threatens Democracy. Foreign Affairs, 102(1), 72–88. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/autocrat-in-your-iphone-mercenary-spyware-ronald-deibert
Pan, J., & Siegel, A. A. (2020). How Saudi Crackdowns Fail to Silence Online Dissent. The American political science review, 114(1), 109–125. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055419000650
Ragab, E. (2017). Beyond Money and Diplomacy: Regional Policies of Saudi Arabia and UAE after the Arab Spring. The International Spectator, 52(2), 37–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/03932729.2017.1309101
Uniacke, R. (2021). Authoritarianism in the information age: state branding, depoliticizing and ‘de-civilizing’ of online civil society in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 48(5), 979–999. https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2020.1737916
Wright, S. (2020). Political absolutism in the Gulf monarchies. In M. Kamrava (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Persian Gulf Politics (pp. 346–356). Taylor & Francis Group.
As Kamrava (2012) wrote, across the Arabian Gulf “an authoritarian retrenchment and narrowing of political space has emerged.” This reassertion of the state’s dictatorial authority has, of course, taken different forms across the region depending on the state’s overall societal posture. In Qatar, for example, where anti-state sentiments are conspicuous in their absence, there have not been any discernible changes in the domestic political environment. In the UAE, however, the space provided to civil society organisations has been steadily narrowed by the state since the beginning of the regional unrest. In Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, repression was notably more draconian still.
Abouzzohour (2021) ponders what are the implications of the fact that no monarch was overthrown during or since the Arab Spring. Various experts have linked the latter to monarchs’ legitimacy, external support, and resource wealth. She suggests that while there is no consensus view, “it is clear that monarchs have repeatedly and successfully contained different types of opposition threats for decades prior to the Arab Spring and continue to do so 10 years later.”
The “Arab Spring”The Economist (2020). Expand map.
Ten years on from the “Arab Spring” The Economist (2020) write:
“What kind of repression do you imagine it takes for a young man to do this?” So asked Leila Bouazizi after her brother, Muhammad, set himself on fire ten years ago. Local officials in Tunisia had confiscated his fruit cart, ostensibly because he did not have a permit but really because they wanted to extort money from him. It was the final indignity for the young man. “How do you expect me to make a living?” he shouted before dousing himself with petrol in front of the governor’s office. His actions would resonate across the region, where millions of others had reached breaking-point, too. Their rage against oppressive leaders and corrupt states came bursting forth as the Arab spring. Uprisings toppled the dictators of four countries—Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen. For a moment it seemed as if democracy had arrived in the Arab world at last. … Only one of those democratic experiments yielded a durable result—fittingly, in Bouazizi’s Tunisia. Egypt’s failed miserably, ending in a military coup. Libya, Yemen and, worst of all, Syria descended into bloody civil wars that drew in foreign powers. The Arab spring turned to bitter winter so quickly that many people now despair of the region. Much has changed there since, but not for the better. The Arab world’s despots are far from secure. With oil prices low, even petro-potentates can no longer afford to buy their subjects off with fat subsidies and cushy government jobs. Many leaders have grown more paranoid and oppressive. Muhammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia locks up his own relatives. Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has stifled the press and crushed civil society. One lesson autocrats learned from the Arab spring is that any flicker of dissent must be snuffed out fast, lest it spread.
The London-based magazine concludes that, “The region is less free than it was in 2010—and perhaps [now even] more angry.”
Dubai epitomises the Gulf’s property market. It did suffer a massive correction back in 2009 (Collinson, 2009), the Emirate needed to borrow several billion from Abu Dhabi (Davidson, 2009) but, that debt has been repaid and today the sector is once again booming (Maccioni, 2024).
The following was penned by Davidson in 2009; at the tail-end of the 2003–2008 period in the Emirate of Dubai (UAE) which was described by Bertrand (2012) as “the world’s most massive real estate bubble.”
Glitzy Dubai, long considered the new Monte Carlo or the Las Vegas of the Middle East, has suffered one of the worst crash landings of this global recession. Dubai might be considered a bellwether of the global credit crunch. Until recently touted as a beacon of progress in an otherwise unstable region, the tiny emirate’s seemingly innovative economic and political model is now unravelling, with no end in sight to the uninterrupted stream of bad news. Construction has ground to a shuddering halt, unemployment is rising, sovereign debt is exposed, lawsuits are being prepared, and the population is decreasing, as those who moved to Dubai in search of a better life have either lost their jobs or are cutting their losses and leaving. To make matters worse, as the city empties itself out, traffic thins, and cars and credit cards are abandoned at the airport, the embattled authorities have embroiled themselves in fresh controversies by introducing protectionist policies for their citizens and a new media law that forbids criticism of the economy, and earning Dubai an anti-Semitic branding in the sports world by denying a visa to an Israeli athlete. With investor confidence in tatters and debt repayments looming, its humiliated rulers have had little choice but to turn to their wealthier neighbors. But although help has finally arrived, it is by no means the lifeline that the emirate really needs, and Dubai’s future hangs in the balance.
Only time will tell for history is history (unendingly so). The digitisation of everything is as good as it is bad. One’s predictions and forecasts, with hindsight and internet indexing, can come to be seen as having been too hubristic (one could counter that they were just thinking and writing in a heuristic fashion).
In the same year as Davidson wrote the above, Lewis (2009) said the following. “A six-year boom that turned sand dunes into a glittering metropolis, creating the world’s tallest building, its biggest shopping mall and, some say, a shrine to unbridled capitalism, is grinding to a halt.” And that, “half of all the UAE’s construction projects, totalling £400 billion, have either been put on hold or cancelled, leaving a trail of half-built towers on the outskirts of the city stretching into the desert.”
Red hot (once more)
In a recent piece for the London-based Financial Times, it was said that if you want to “escape the global gloom, just take a flight from its epicentre, London, to any leading capital of the Gulf” Sharma (2022). “Dubai is enjoying yet another real estate boom. Regional rivals like Riyadh are racing to be the next Dubai, funnelling oil profits into property mega-projects.” Sharma also suggests that many of the Gulf leaders do “recognise that a boom built on high oil and property prices is unlikely to endure, but that age-old problem can wait.”
In 2023 The Economist wrote that while Dubai’s property market has much to recommend it (low taxes and a large pool of renters), some wonder if the sector, “the backbone of Dubai’s economy, is again becoming a bubble.” The Emirate has already endured two real estate crashes this century: “an abrupt one during the financial crisis in 2008, when property values fell by half, and a slower one from 2014 to 2020, when they slid by 35 per cent.”
Hanieh, A. (2018). Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East. Cambridge University Press.
Renaud, B. (2012). Real Estate Bubble and Financial Crisis in Dubai: Dynamics and Policy Responses. Journal of real estate literature, 20(1), 51–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/10835547.2012.12090313
Oil continues to influence global economics and politics like no other finite natural resource. In the 2024 US presidential election, the strategic commodity will be an important domestic issue.
As the biggest producer and consumer of oil on the planet, the US has a particularly strong relationship with the black stuff. And the candidates know it.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden has attempted to reduce dependence on fossil fuels with his green energy policy and other legislation. Yet at the same time he has overseen an increase in domestic oil production and promised motorists he will keep petrol prices low.
It’s an important promise in the US, a country whose love affair with cars is well known. Out-of-town shopping malls, long highways and a lack of government investment in public transportation have fuelled car dependency, with many cities being designed around huge road systems.
So it is perhaps unsurprising that pump prices are a significant factor influencing voters. Research has even shown that gasoline prices have an “outsized effect” on inflation expectations and consumer sentiment. As fuel prices go up, confidence in the economy goes down.
And while many European and Asian countries have shifted towards alternative energy sources, the US has not reduced its dependence on fossil fuels when it comes to transport. Electric models make up only 8% of vehicles sold in the US, compared to 21% in Europe and 29% in China.
Any rise in gasoline prices ahead of the US summer “driving season” – when holidays and better weather encourage more road travel and gasoline consumption is estimated to be 400,000 barrels per day higher than other times – would be a serious concern for the Democratic party.
Yet it’s also true that whoever is in the White House actually has limited ability to influence gasoline prices. Around 50% of the pump price is the cost of crude oil, the price of which is set by international markets.
And despite producing enough oil domestically to cover its consumption, the US continues to trade its oil around the world. Back in 2015, Congress voted to lift restrictions on US crude oil exports that had been in place for four decades, allowing US companies to sell their oil to the highest international bidder.
To complicate things further, some US refineries can only deal with a certain type of crude oil, which has to be imported. Neither international events or foreign production decisions are under the control of a US president.
Indeed, oil price spikes caused by political crises in other oil producing regions illustrate how continued dependence on oil itself, whether domestically produced or imported, leaves the US exposed to global market shocks which could in turn influence electoral outcomes.
After Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and production cuts from countries such as Saudi Arabia in 2023, the Republican party used a rise in gasoline prices to attack Biden’s environmental policies which had reduced domestic oil drilling and ended drilling leases in the Arctic.
Big oil, little oil
So while the US president has little say over the price of fuel that voters pay, domestic oil and gas regulations have a role to play, as oil producers make up a significant body of influence in the US.
Aside from the big firms backing Trump, the structure of the US oil industry is unique among oil producing states in that it is dominated by a very large number of small independent producers who earn money from the extraction and sale of oil from their land.
Some campaigners have blamed Biden for price rises at the pump
In most oil-producing countries, subsurface oil is owned by the state. But in the US, the mineral rights are owned by the private landowner who can earn royalties by allowing oil companies to drill on their land. In 2019, there were 12.5 million royalty owners in the US. Operating alongside them are some 9,000 independent fossil fuel companies which produce around 83% of the country’s oil and account for 3% of GDP and 4 million jobs.
Those companies drilling on state-owned land pay a royalty rate to the government, which up until recently was as low as 12.5% of the subsequent sales revenue. Biden’s decision to raise the rate to 16.67% did not go down well with oil producers.
Surging US oil production may help with the Democrats’ re-election bid, but rising gasoline prices will not – even though their levels depend on much more than Biden’s energy policies. Instead, it may be that the international economics of oil markets drive voters’ decisions – and determine who wins and who loses in November 2024.
It looks like an image from science fiction: a 262m-tall lighthouse-style tower rising from the centre of hundreds of concentric circles of shining panels. But, if all goes to plan, these ambitious design renderings will become science fact, as the fourth development phase of Dubai’s colossal $14bn solar power park.
VirtualRealitySheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai, at the MBR Solar Park (24 November 2020)That’s 10,943,945,000 pounds sterling (£).
Images @ Dubai Electricity and Water Authority
In the fossil fuel-rich Gulf, however, the Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum Solar Park, as it is known — which was begun in 2013 and is largely up and running — remains an outlier. Overall, the region’s renewable energy investments have lagged behind China, the US and Europe.
In its 2024 report on energy investment, published this month, the International Energy Agency said the broader Middle East, including countries such as Iran and Iraq, was allocating just 20 cents to renewable energy investment for every dollar spent on fossil fuels — or one-tenth of the global average. The IEA added that, of the $175bn the region was expected to invest in energy projects this year, just 15 per cent would go to clean energy.
The oil and gas reserves sitting below the Gulf states have previously discouraged any rapid development of renewables. “The Gulf countries are blessed with a vast amount of resources of oil and gas,” notes Aisha al-Sarihi, research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. “That has made access to energy very affordable … and eliminated the need for alternatives.”
Electricity was previously powered by oil in large part. But downward pressure on oil prices from increased US shale oil triggered a shift in the mid-2010s, making gas and renewables more viable as more oil supplies were reserved for export, says Karen Young, chair of the Economics and Energy Program Advisory Council at the Washington, DC-based Middle East Institute.
During that period there was a “ramping-up of the kind of fiscal-side reforms on spending”, says Young, and the “beginning of talking about reduction of subsidies of gasoline, of electricity prices, water prices”.
Even as the wealthy Gulf nations have become more aware of the need to decouple their economies from oil, the United Arab Emirates’ hosting of the COP28 climate meeting last year encapsulated the paradoxes that surround the Gulf states’ role in the energy transition.
On the one hand, the Dubai COP ensured that producer countries were at the centre of the negotiations, with oil-rich emirate Abu Dhabi — the UAE’s capital and centre of political power — wanting to expand fossil fuel production. On the other, Dubai, for the first time, secured a deal to transition away from fossil fuels, and the UAE set aside $30bn for a “catalytic climate investment fund”.
Although the transition from fossil fuels in many industries could theoretically reduce demand for crude oil, the Gulf states do not view this as an existential threat to their revenues.
“The producers in the Gulf see a different scenario — and particularly a lifeline through petrochemicals — [in which] there will be sustained demand for their product for at least the next 20 years,” says Young.
The Gulf states “believe they will be the last man standing because they will sell the lowest carbon intensity fuel in the future”, adds al-Sarihi, on the basis that compared with other sources of oil, those in the region require the least amount of energy to extract.
However, at the same time, economics and strategic interests are galvanising petrodollar-financed renewable energy investments by the Gulf. This spending is led by the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which are actively working to diversify their economies and reduce their dependence on fossil fuels.
The Gulf states have a “dual approach” to the energy transition, according to al-Sarihi. “One is to continue with the fossil fuel industry and … invest in clean energy technologies and other resources like hydrogen,” she says.
“The Gulf states are taking advantage of the international arena when it comes to the energy transition,” adds al-Sarihi. “They use it as a platform to exert their energy diplomacy and influence in a way that makes the energy transition serve their interest … they try to secure a market for their energy supplies. They are now pivoting to Asia because it is becoming the centre of demand for energy.”
But the autocratic states are not investing very widely across the energy transition, points out Robin Mills, Dubai-based chief executive of consultancy Qamar Energy. There has been scant movement towards decarbonising in transport or industrial sectors, for example. “The real investments have been around the power sector — solar and nuclear,” Mills says.
For example, the UAE’s Barakah nuclear plant will meet up to a quarter of the country’s electricity needs by the time all four of its reactors are fully operational. And, in Saudi Arabia, while just 0.2 per cent of the electricity was generated by renewables in 2022, according to US government statistics, solar power plants have been built, including the 1.5GW capacity Sudair.
The Gulf states are also investing in clean power in other countries, from central Asia to central Africa. Young highlights Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy investment vehicle, and Saudi’s national champion ACWA Power as “two of the most important power developers in emerging markets in the world”.
“They’re competing and partnering with the biggest infrastructure investors in the world, she observes. “They’re doing this in ways that I think have enormous soft power, political influence.”
Given the collapse of the Netanyahu Government over the Wye peace agreement, it is time to question whether the entire process begun in Oslo in 1993 is the right instrument for bringing peace between Palestinians and Israelis. It is my view that the peace process has in fact put off the real reconciliation that must occur if the hundred-year war between Zionism and the Palestinian people is to end. Oslo set the stage for separation, but real peace can come only with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state.
This is not easy to imagine. The Zionist-Israeli official narrative and the Palestinian one are irreconcilable. Israelis say they waged a war of liberation and so achieved independence; Palestinians say their society was destroyed, most of the population evicted. And, in fact, this irreconcilability was already quite obvious to several generations of early Zionist leaders and thinkers, as of course it was to all Palestinians.
“We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.”
“Zionism was not blind to the presence of Arabs in Palestine,” writes the distinguished Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell in his recent book, “The Founding Myths of Israel.” “Even Zionist figures who had never visited the country knew that it was not devoid of inhabitants. At the same time, neither the Zionist movement abroad nor the pioneers who were beginning to settle the country could frame a policy toward the Palestinian national movement. The real reason for this was not a lack of understanding of the problem but a clear recognition of the insurmountable contradiction between the basic objectives of the two sides. If Zionist intellectuals and leaders ignored the Arab dilemma, it was chiefly because they knew that this problem had no solution within the Zionist way of thinking.”
David Ben-Gurion, for instance, was always clear. “There is no example in history,” he said in 1944, “of a people saying we agree to renounce our country, let another people come and settle here and outnumber us.” Another Zionist leader, Berl Katznelson, likewise had no illusions that the opposition between Zionist and Palestinian aims could be surmounted. And binationalists like Martin Buber, Judah Magnes and Hannah Arendt were fully aware of what the clash would be like, if it came to fruition, as of course it did.
Vastly outnumbering the Jews, Palestinian Arabs during the period after the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate always refused anything that would compromise their dominance. It’s unfair to berate the Palestinians retrospectively for not accepting partition in 1947. Until 1948, Jews held only about 7 per cent of the land. Why, the Arabs said when the partition resolution was proposed, should we concede 55 per cent of Palestine to the Jews, who were a minority in Palestine? Neither the Balfour Declaration nor the mandate ever specifically conceded that Palestinians had political, as opposed to civil and religious, rights in Palestine. The idea of inequality between Jews and Arabs was therefore built into British, and subsequently Israeli and United States, policy from the start.
The conflict appears intractable because it is a contest over the same land by two peoples who always believed they had valid title to it and who hoped that the other side would in time give up or go away. One side won the war, the other lost, but the contest is as alive as ever. We Palestinians ask why a Jew born in Warsaw or New York has the right to settle here (according to Israel’s Law of Return), whereas we, the people who lived here for centuries, cannot. After 1967, the conflict between us was exacerbated. Years of military occupation have created in the weaker party anger, humiliation and hostility.
To its discredit, Oslo did little to change the situation. Arafat and his dwindling number of supporters were turned into enforcers of Israeli security, while Palestinians were made to endure the humiliation of dreadful and non-contiguous “homelands” that make up about 10 per cent of the West Bank and 60 per cent of Gaza. Oslo required us to forget and renounce our history of loss, dispossessed by the very people who taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past. Thus we are the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees.
Israel’s raison d’etre as a state has always been that there should be a separate country, a refuge, exclusively for Jews. Oslo itself was based on the principle of separation between Jews and others, as Yitzhak Rabin tirelessly repeated. Yet over the past 50 years, especially since Israeli settlements were first implanted on the occupied territories in 1967, the lives of Jews have become more and more enmeshed with those of non-Jews.
The effort to separate has occurred simultaneously and paradoxically with the effort to take more and more land, which has in turn meant that Israel has acquired more and more Palestinians. In Israel proper, Palestinians number about one million, almost 20 per cent of the population. Among Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which is where settlements are the thickest, there are almost 2.5 million Palestinians. Israel has built an entire system of “bypassing” roads, designed to go around Palestinian towns and villages, connecting settlements and avoiding Arabs. But so tiny is the land area of historical Palestine, so closely intertwined are Israelis and Palestinians, despite their inequality and antipathy, that clean separation simply won’t, can’t really, occur or work. It is estimated that by 2010 there will be demographic parity. What then?
Clearly, a system of privileging Israeli Jews will satisfy neither those who want an entirely homogenous Jewish state nor those who live there but are not Jewish. For the former, Palestinians are an obstacle to be disposed of somehow; for the latter, being Palestinian in a Jewish polity means forever chafing at inferior status. But Israeli Palestinians don’t want to move; they say they are already in their country and refuse any talk of joining a separate Palestinian state, should one come into being. Meanwhile, the impoverishing conditions imposed on Arafat are making it difficult for him to subdue the highly politicized inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank. These Palestinians have aspirations for self-determination that, contrary to Israeli calculations, show no sign of withering away. It is also evident that as an Arab people — and, given the despondently cold peace treaties between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan, this fact is important — Palestinians want at all costs to preserve their Arab identity as part of the surrounding Arab and Islamic world.
For all this, the problem is that Palestinian self-determination in a separate state is unworkable, just as unworkable as the principle of separation between a demographically mixed, irreversibly connected Arab population without sovereignty and a Jewish population with it. The question, I believe, is not how to devise means for persisting in trying to separate them but to see whether it is possible for them to live together as fairly and peacefully as possible.
What exists now is a disheartening, not to say, bloody, impasse. Zionists in and outside Israel will not give up on their wish for a separate Jewish state; Palestinians want the same thing for themselves, despite having accepted much less from Oslo. Yet in both instances, the idea of a state for “ourselves” simply flies in the face of the facts: short of ethnic cleansing or “mass transfer,” as in 1948, there is no way for Israel to get rid of the Palestinians or for Palestinians to wish Israelis away. Neither side has a viable military option against the other, which, I am sorry to say, is why both opted for a peace that so patently tries to accomplish what war couldn’t.
The more that current patterns of Israeli settlement and Palestinian confinement and resistance persist, the less likely it is that there will be real security for either side. It was always patently absurd for Netanyahu’s obsession with security to be couched only in terms of Palestinian compliance with his demands. On the one hand, he and Ariel Sharon crowded Palestinians more and more with their shrill urgings to the settlers to grab what they could. On the other hand, Netanyahu expected such methods to bludgeon Palestinians into accepting everything Israel did, with no reciprocal Israeli measures.
Arafat, backed by Washington, is daily more repressive. Improbably citing the 1936 British Emergency Defense Regulations against Palestinians, he has recently decreed, for example, that it is a crime not only to incite violence, racial and religious strife but also to criticize the peace process. There is no Palestinian constitution or basic law: Arafat simply refuses to accept limitations on his power in light of American and Israeli support for him. Who actually thinks all this can bring Israel security and permanent Palestinian submission?
Violence, hatred and intolerance are bred out of injustice, poverty and a thwarted sense of political fulfillment. Last fall, hundreds of acres of Palestinian land were expropriated by the Israeli Army from the village of Umm al-Fahm, which isn’t in the West Bank but inside Israel. This drove home the fact that, even as Israeli citizens, Palestinians are treated as inferior, as basically a sort of underclass existing in a condition of apartheid.
At the same time, because Israel does not have a constitution either, and because the ultra-Orthodox parties are acquiring more and more political power, there are Israeli Jewish groups and individuals who have begun to organize around the notion of a full secular democracy for all Israeli citizens. The charismatic Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the Knesset, has also been speaking about enlarging the concept of citizenship as a way to get beyond ethnic and religious criteria that now make Israel in effect an undemocratic state for 20 per cent of its population.
In the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, the situation is deeply unstable and exploitative. Protected by the army, Israeli settlers (almost 350,000 of them) live as extraterritorial, privileged people with rights that resident Palestinians do not have. (For example, West Bank Palestinians cannot go to Jerusalem and in 70 per cent of the territory are still subject to Israeli military law, with their land available for confiscation.) Israel controls Palestinian water resources and security, as well as exits and entrances. Even the new Gaza airport is under Israeli security control. You don’t need to be an expert to see that this is a prescription for extending, not limiting, conflict. Here the truth must be faced, not avoided or denied.
There are Israeli Jews today who speak candidly about “post-Zionism,” insofar as after 50 years of Israeli history, classic Zionism has neither provided a solution to the Palestinian presence nor an exclusively Jewish presence. I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen. There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such.
This does not mean a diminishing of Jewish life as Jewish life or a surrendering of Palestinian Arab aspirations and political existence. On the contrary, it means self-determination for both peoples. But it does mean being willing to soften, lessen and finally give up special status for one people at the expense of the other. The Law of Return for Jews and the right of return for Palestinian refugees have to be considered and trimmed together. Both the notions of Greater Israel as the land of the Jewish people given to them by God and of Palestine as an Arab land that cannot be alienated from the Arab homeland need to be reduced in scale and exclusivity.
Interestingly, the millennia-long history of Palestine provides at least two precedents for thinking in such secular and modest terms. First, Palestine is and has always been a land of many histories; it is a radical simplification to think of it as principally or exclusively Jewish or Arab. While the Jewish presence is longstanding, it is by no means the main one. Other tenants have included Canaanites, Moabites, Jebusites and Philistines in ancient times, and Romans, Ottomans, Byzantines and Crusaders in the modern ages. Palestine is multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious. There is as little historical justification for homogeneity as there is for notions of national or ethnic and religious purity today.
Second, during the interwar period, a small but important group of Jewish thinkers (Judah Magnes, Buber, Arendt and others) argued and agitated for a binational state. The logic of Zionism naturally overwhelmed their efforts, but the idea is alive today here and there among Jewish and Arab individuals frustrated with the evident insufficiencies and depredations of the present. The essence of their vision is coexistence and sharing in ways that require an innovative, daring and theoretical willingness to get beyond the arid stalemate of assertion and rejection. Once the initial acknowledgment of the other as an equal is made, I believe the way forward becomes not only possible but also attractive.
The initial step, however, is a very difficult one to take. Israeli Jews are insulated from the Palestinian reality; most of them say that it does not really concern them. I remember the first time I drove from Ramallah into Israel, thinking it was like going straight from Bangladesh into Southern California. Yet reality is never that neat.
My generation of Palestinians, still reeling from the shock of losing everything in 1948, find it nearly impossible to accept that their homes and farms were taken over by another people. I see no way of evading the fact that in 1948 one people displaced another, thereby committing a grave injustice. Reading Palestinian and Jewish history together not only gives the tragedies of the Holocaust and of what subsequently happened to the Palestinians their full force but also reveals how in the course of interrelated Israeli and Palestinian life since 1948, one people, the Palestinians, has borne a disproportional share of the pain and loss.
Religious and right-wing Israelis and their supporters have no problem with such a formulation. Yes, they say, we won, but that’s how it should be. This land is the land of Israel, not of anyone else. I heard those words from an Israeli soldier guarding a bulldozer that was destroying a West Bank Palestinian’s field (its owner helplessly watching) to expand a bypass road.
But they are not the only Israelis. For others, who want peace as a result of reconciliation, there is dissatisfaction with the religious parties’ increasing hold on Israeli life and Oslo’s unfairness and frustrations. Many such Israelis demonstrate against their Government’s Palestinian land expropriations and house demolitions. So you sense a healthy willingness to look elsewhere for peace than in land-grabbing and suicide bombs.
For some Palestinians, because they are the weaker party, the losers, giving up on a full restoration of Arab Palestine is giving up on their own history. Most others, however, especially my children’s generation, are skeptical of their elders and look more unconventionally toward the future, beyond conflict and unending loss. Obviously, the establishments in both communities are too tied to present “pragmatic” currents of thought and political formations to venture anything more risky, but a few others (Palestinian and Israeli) have begun to formulate radical alternatives to the status quo. They refuse to accept the limitations of Oslo, what one Israeli scholar has called “peace without Palestinians,” while others tell me that the real struggle is over equal rights for Arabs and Jews, not a separate, necessarily dependent and weak Palestinian entity.
The beginning is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle for coexistence. In a modern state, all its members are citizens by virtue of their presence and the sharing of rights and responsibilities. Citizenship therefore entitles an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Arab to the same privileges and resources. A constitution and a bill of rights thus become necessary for getting beyond Square 1 of the conflict because each group would have the same right to self-determination; that is, the right to practice communal life in its own (Jewish or Palestinian) way, perhaps in federated cantons, with a joint capital in Jerusalem, equal access to land and inalienable secular and juridical rights. Neither side should be held hostage to religious extremists.
Yet feelings of persecution, suffering and victimhood are so ingrained that it is nearly impossible to undertake political initiatives that hold Jews and Arabs to the same general principles of civil equality while avoiding the pitfall of us-versus-them. Palestinian intellectuals need to express their case directly to Israelis, in public forums, universities and the media. The challenge is both to and within civil society, which has long been subordinate to a nationalism that has developed into an obstacle to reconciliation. Moreover, the degradation of discourse — symbolised by Arafat and Netanyahu trading charges while Palestinian rights are compromised by exaggerated “security” concerns — impedes any wider, more generous perspective from emerging.
The alternatives are unpleasantly simple: either the war continues (along with the onerous cost of the current peace process) or a way out, based on peace and equality (as in South Africa after apartheid) is actively sought, despite the many obstacles. Once we grant that Palestinians and Israelis are there to stay, then the decent conclusion has to be the need for peaceful coexistence and genuine reconciliation. Real self-determination.
Unfortunately, injustice and belligerence don’t diminish by themselves: they have to be attacked by all concerned.
