As the foreign policy community begins a reevaluation of conventional wisdom about the Middle East, an obvious consequence in the aftermath of events in Egypt, one of the many questions that will get revisited is how to incubate a Palestinian state. It would be a pity if that track escaped the same needed consideration, or proceeded without an eye towards the pressing lessons emerging, even as the riots continue to simmer and the dominoes continue to teeter.
If the chaos sweeping the Arab and Muslim world has shown us one thing, it’s that Arab regimes in the Middle East come and go. If it’s shown us two things, it’s that regimes in the Middle East come and go, and that when they go, there had better be healthy liberal, secular democratic opposition groups ready to enter the vacuum. Otherwise the result is what we’re seeing now in Egypt, where the choices are between hostile political Islamists on the one hand and, on the other, a reshuffled version of the same regime that’s been ruling the country for decades.
One lesson that needs learning, then, is that an Arab state without an organized middle class is not only doomed to failure, but ALSO that the most organized oppositional forces sweeping the Middle East are basically one-man-one-vote-one-time Islamism. It’s not enough to have a middle class, and one can’t wave a magic wand or sprinkle fairy dust to make it happen. A middle class needs time to develop, to breath, and to become a recognizable political bloc with recognizable political interests channeled through recognizable political parties.
And that’s exactly what Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is attempting to accomplish in the West Bank. His economic initiatives, coupled with his institution-building programs, should not just be viewed as ways to increase the average Palestinian’s standard of living. More than that, they’re attempts to ground a future state in something like a civil society, the ultimate goal being to prevent a political vacuum from engulfing a future Palestinian government.
The Prime Minister knows that Hamas is ready to fill that vacuum and, having seen the creeping theocracy that is the Gaza Strip, he knows what the consequences would be if the Iran-backed terrorist organization ever succeeded.
The trick for the rest of us, of course, is to ensure that the process is allowed to play out – for the Palestinians and in Egypt – and that Fayyad’s efforts are allowed to become robust.
Economic peace should be allowed to take hold – and deeply encouraged – before political imperatives, lest still-fragile Palestinian institutions get overwhelmed and crumble.
And if we have learned a third thing from events this week – and more on this soon – it is that peace in the Middle East must be between institutions and societies, not simply with Arab political figures, whose future is far too uncertain across the Arab world for us, or our friends in Israel, to bet the farm on their survival.
