Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2011 13:24:05 +0100
Arab revolts - past and present
Arabs have historically revolted every decade against rulers and the west
has counter-revolted most attempts.
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Joseph Massad Last Modified: 18 Nov 2011 10:45
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New York, New York - The current popular challenges to the Western-sponsored
Arab dictatorships are hardly a new occurrence in modern Arab history. We
have seen such uprisings against European colonialism in the region since
its advent in Algeria in 1830 and in Egypt in 1882. Revolts in Syria in the
1920s against French rule and especially in Palestine from 1936 to 1939
against British colonial rule and Zionist settler-colonialism were massive
by global standards. Indeed the Palestinian Revolt would inspire others in
the colonised world and would remain an inspiration to Arabs for the rest of
the century and beyond. Anti-colonial resistance which also opposed the
colonially-installed Arab regimes continued in Jordan, in Egypt, in Bahrain,
Iraq, North and South Yemen, Oman, Morocco, and Sudan. The massive
anti-colonial revolt in Algeria would finally bring about independence in
1962 from French settler colonialism. The liberation of Algeria meant that
one of the two European settler-colonies in the Arab world was down, and
only one remained: Palestine. On the territorial colonial front, much of the
Arabian Gulf remained occupied by the British until the 1960s and early
1970s, and awaited liberation.
After the 1967 War
Amidst the dominant melancholia that struck the Arab world following the
1967 defeat by Israel's simultaneous invasions of three Arab countries and
the occupation of their territories and the entirety of Palestine, the
Palestinian revolutionary guerrillas' challenge to Israel's colonial power
at the Battle of Karamah in March 1968 brought renewed hope to tens of
millions of Arabs and renewed concern for the Arab neo-colonial
dictatorships (Arafat's much exaggerated role of his exploits during the
battle notwithstanding). The Palestinian revolution was inspirational to
many but it also coincided with revolutionary efforts not only around the
Third World generally but also in Arab countries as well, which in turn, had
inspired the Palestinians.
The best revolutionary anti-colonial news in the Arab world after the June
1967 defeat would come from the Arabian Peninsula. It was in November 1967
that the South Yemeni revolutionaries delivered an ignominious defeat to the
British and liberated their country from the yoke of colonial Britain, which
had ruled Aden since 1838. The South Yemenis would soon found the People's
Democratic Republic of Yemen, which would last for 22 years before its
ultimate dissolution by North Yemen and its Saudi allies.
In neighbouring Oman, the on-going struggle to liberate the country entered
a new stage of guerrilla warfare under the leadership of the People's Front
for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), which came
together in September 1968 as a result of the unification of a number of
Omani guerrilla groups fighting the British-supported Sultan Said bin
Taymur. The PFLOAG had liberated territory in Dhofar from which it continued
to launch its attacks to liberate the rest of the country. Indeed national
liberation movements were active across the Gulf, and not least in Bahrain
where an on-going national liberation struggle, a workers' movement,
students and women's activism, all coalesced against British colonial rule
and their local servants.
Repression
But the US-British-Saudi-Israeli alliance was determined to crush all the
revolutionary groups that it could defeat and co-opt those that it could not
crush. The effort started in the Gulf. Bahrain, which had been the hotbed of
workers and anti-colonial unrest for decades, continued its struggle against
British domination and the Bahraini ruling family allied with British
colonialism. But as the British were forced out of South Yemen and the
threat to their Omani client continued afoot, they transferred their
military command to Bahrain, a step that was followed by massive British
capital investment in the country (as well as in Dubai). These developments
expectedly brought more repression against the Bahraini people and their
national liberation movement. Indeed, it was in this context that the Shah
of Iran laid territorial claims to Bahrain and threatened to annex it to
Iran as its "fourteenth province." His territorial ambitions would only be
tempered by his Western allies and the United Nations in 1970, after which
the Shah would give up on his claims in return for massive Iranian capital
investment in the emerging small Arab states of the Gulf, including the
United Arab Emirates. The West thanked the Shah for his magnanimity and
continued to reward him diplomatically and politically.
On the Jordanian front, King Hussein's army would reverse the Palestinian
guerrillas' triumphs and defeat them in a massive onslaught in September
1970. The PLO guerrillas would finally be expelled from the country
completely in July 1971. However, the PLO guerrillas continued to have a
strong base in Lebanon from which they continued to operate against Israel
and the Arab dictatorships.
In Sudan, the communist party continued to get stronger in the late 1960s,
until the 1969 coup by Ja'far al-Numeiri, who initially could not fully
marginalise the communists and waited until he strengthened his regime in
1971 to do so. An attempted coup against his authoritarian rule failed. In
its wake, he rounded up thousands of communists and executed all the party's
major leaders, destroying the largest communist party in the Arab world. The
Numeiri dictatorship would continue until 1985 and soon the democratic
struggle against him would fail bringing in the Saudi-supported candidate
Omar al-Bashir who seized power in 1989 continuing in Numeiri's footsteps.
Only the PFLOAG kept advancing in the early seventies, which required a
massive effort on the part of the US-British-Saudi-Israeli alliance to
defeat it. The Shah of Iran and the Jordanian King were subcontracted for
the effort. They dispatched military contingents to Oman, and, abetted by
British advisors, were finally able to defeat the guerrillas and safeguard
the throne for Sultan Qabus, the son of Sultan Said, who overthrew his
father in a palace coup in 1970 organised by the British. With the final
defeat of the Omani revolutionaries in 1976, the PLO remained the only
revolutionary group that survived the onslaught alongside a poor and weak
South Yemen, which would finally be swallowed up by the Saudi-supported
North Yemen in 1990.
Co-Optation
Saudi and other Gulf money poured into the coffers of the PLO to make sure
that Palestinian revolutionism, which was partially crushed in Jordan, would
never turn its guns against another Arab regime again. Indeed, Gulf money
would transform the PLO into a liberation group that was funded by the most
reactionary regimes in the Third World. Arafat's road to Oslo began after
the 1973 war and the massive funding he would begin to receive from all
oil-rich Arab dictatorships, from Gaddafi to Saddam Hussein and all the Gulf
monarchies. It was this domestication of the PLO that impelled Arab regimes
to recognise it in 1974 as the sole legitimate representative of the
Palestinian people and the main reason why they supported its recognition by
the UN that same year. Indeed, Arafat's reactionary alliance with Arab
dictators was such that some PLO intelligence apparatuses began to share
intelligence on Arab dissidents with Arab dictators, including the PLO
intelligence apparatus led by Abu Za'im who surrendered Saudi dissident
Nasir Sa'id in December 1979 to Saudi intelligence based on the request of
the Saudi ambassador to Lebanon. Said was never heard from again and is
believed to have been killed by the Saudi authorities. On the diplomatic and
solidarity front, while the Polisario front declared the independence of the
Western Sahara in 1976, Arafat refused to recognise the state out of respect
for his alliance with King Hassan II.
The New Uprisings
As the Palestinian revolutionary groups were the only ones not fully
domesticated, as far as the US and other imperial powers were concerned,
though they had become sufficiently domesticated from the perspective of the
Arab regimes, the new challenge would come from the Palestinian people
themselves who revolted in 1987 against their Israeli occupiers. It was this
second Palestinian major revolt in half a century, which many now see as
inspirational to the present uprisings across the Arab world, which had to
be crushed. The Israelis tried their best to crush it but failed. The PLO
took it over quickly lest a new Palestinian leadership supplant the PLO's
own authority to represent the Palestinians. As the PLO took over the
intifada, efforts were made by the Israelis and the Americans to finally
co-opt the PLO and neutralise its potential as a spoiler of US and Israeli
policy in the region. It was in this context that Oslo was signed and the
PLO was fully transformed from a threat to Arab dictatorships, their US
imperial sponsor, and the Israeli occupation, into an agent of all three,
under the guise of the Palestinian Authority, which would help enforce the
Israeli occupation in an unholy alliance with Gulf dictators and the United
States. From then on, PLO/PA guns will only target the Palestinian people.
The US-British-Saudi-Israeli alliance in the region today is following the
same strategies they followed in late 1960s and early 1970s and continuing
the strategy they followed with the PLO in the early 1990s. They are
crushing those uprisings they can crush and are co-opting those they cannot.
The efforts to fully co-opt the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings have made
great strides over the last few months, though they have not been successful
in silencing or demobilising the populations. On the other side, Bahrain's
uprising was the first to be crushed with the efforts to crush the Yemenis
continuing afoot without respite. It was in Libya and in Syria where the
axis fully hijacked the revolts and took them over completely. While
Syrians, like Libyans before them, continue their valiant uprising against
their brutal regime demanding democracy and social justice, their quest is
already doomed unless they are able to dislodge the US-British-Saudi-Qatari
axis that has fully taken over their struggle - which is very unlikely.
The Palestinians
This brings us to the Palestinian scene. The Palestinian uprising or
intifada of 1987 was the first unarmed massive civilian revolt to take place
in decades. It was in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the first
US invasion of the Gulf that the United States decided to co-opt the
Palestinian uprising by giving political and financial benefits to a PLO
class of bureaucrats who would proceed to sell out the Palestinian struggle.
Thus Arafat neutralised the uprising at Oslo in 1993 and went on to wine and
dine with Israel's and America's leaders while his people remained under
occupation.
But If the Palestinians were a source of concern to the Arab regimes after
1968 lest they help other Arabs revolt against their dictatorships, today,
it is the Palestinian Authority (PA) that is worried that the Arab uprisings
may influence West Bank Palestinians to revolt against the PA, which
continues its intensive security collaboration with the Israeli occupation
and its US sponsor. Indeed, while the Israelis failed in the late 1970s in
their effort to create a political body of Palestinian collaborators through
their infamous Village Leagues, the PA became, not the new "Urban Leagues"
that many Palestinians dubbed it, but a veritable National League of
collaborators serving the Israeli occupation. The PA's recent bid for
statehood and recognition at the UN and at UNESCO is an attempt to resolve
the current stasis of its non-existent "peace process" and the dogged
negotiations with the Israelis before the Palestinians revolt against it,
especially given the dwindling dividends to the beneficiaries of the Oslo
arrangement.
The PA indeed has two routes before it in the face of the collapse of the
so-called "peace process": dissolve itself and cease to play the role of
enforcer of the occupation; or continue to collaborate by entrenching itself
further through recognition by international institutions to preserve its
power and the benefits to its members. It has chosen the second option under
the guise of supporting Palestinian national independence. How successful it
is going to be in its entrenchment bid remains to be seen, though its
success or failure will be calamitous for the Palestinian people who will
not get any independence from Israeli settler colonialism as long as the PA
is at the helm.
As I have argued before, the Israeli-PA-US disagreement is about the terms
and territorial size of the disconnected Bantustans that the PA will be
given and the nature and amount of repressive power and weapons its police
force would have to use against the Palestinian people, while ascertaining
that such weapons would never have a chance of being used against Israel.
If Israel shows some flexibility on those, then the disconnected Bantustans
will be quickly recognised as a "sovereign Palestinian state" and not a
single illegal Jewish colonial settler will have to give up the stolen lands
of the Palestinians and return to Brooklyn, to name a common place of origin
for many Jewish colonial settlers. It is this arrangement that the PA is
trying to sell to Israel and the US. Without it, the PA is threatening that
West Bankers may very well revolt against it, which would be bad for Israel
and the US. So far, neither the US nor Israel is buying it.
The Struggle Continues
As for the larger Arab context, those who call what has unfolded in the last
year in the Arab World as an Arab "awakening" are not only ignorant of the
history of the last century, but also deploy Orientalist arguments in their
depiction of Arabs as a quiescent people who put up with dictatorship for
decades and are finally waking up from their torpor. Across the Arab world,
Arabs have revolted against colonial and local tyranny every decade since
World War I. It has been the European colonial powers and their American
heir who have stood in their way every step of the way and allied themselves
with local dictators and their families (and in many cases handpicking such
dictators and putting them on the throne).
The US-European sponsorship of the on-going counterrevolutions across the
Arab world today is a continuation of a time-honoured imperial tradition,
but so is continued Arab resistance to imperialism and domestic tyranny. The
uprisings that started in Tunisia in December 2010 continue afoot despite
major setbacks to all of them. This is not to say that things have not
changed and are not changing significantly, it is to say, however, that many
of the changes are reversible and that the counterrevolution has already
reversed a significant amount and is working hard to reverse more. Vigilance
is mandatory on the part of those struggling for democratic change and
social justice, especially in these times of upheaval and massive imperial
mobilisation. Some of the battles may have been lost but the Arab peoples'
war against imperialism and for democracy and social justice continues
across the Arab world.
Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and
Intellectual History at Columbia University. He is author of several books
including: The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (Routledge, 2006) and
Desiring Arabs (Chicago University Press, 2007), and Colonial Effects
(Colomibia University Press, 2011).
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