Oil, weapons and regimes

Sometimes it appears that the relationship between India and Pakistan is similar to the relationship between Israel and the Arab nations (barring Palestine, which does not fully exist as a nation) around it. This is misleading.

Despite the recurring official animosity between India and Pakistan, until recently, and to some extent even today, people of India and Pakistan often avowed a great desire for rapport and cooperation. Tensions between these two South Asian countries were mostly attributed to governmental and political-institutional factors. Indians and Pakistanis, it was claimed (and is still claimed in secular circles), want to live together in peace, united by aspects of Punjabi, Sindhi and Hindustani cultures and sharing a history going back millennia.

The situation of Israel and its Arab neighbours is almost entirely the opposite. Though some changes have occurred, the most recent being the open rapprochement between UAE and Israel brokered by USA this year, there has been mutual animosity and a popular rhetoric of reciprocal rejection both in Israel and in Arab nations. Many ordinary Arabs and ordinary Israelis feel – wrongly, to my mind – that they have nothing to share with one another.

Some of it, as in the Indian subcontinent, is due to a selective reading of history on both sides, but much of it is because of the fact that Israel, though drawing upon historical Jewish presence in the region, is nevertheless a Western entity as a modern state, drawing sustenance heavily from European history.

Despite the brave peace activism of human rights and progressive groups in all these countries, it is openly claimed in the region that ‘ordinary’ Arabs will not accept and trust the ‘Jews’ of Israel, and vice versa. As such, it is surprising that, unlike the case of India-Pakistan, there is also a decades-long history of covert cooperation between Israeli and Arab governmental bodies, and this has steadily increased over the years.

Fraternal Enemies: Israel and the Gulf Monarchies by Clive Jones and Yoel Guzansky (Hurst Publishers) is a very useful study of this tacit relationship, existing under the surface of a populist, political rhetoric of suspicion and rejection on both sides. Despite the Khartoum Declaration of 1967 by the Arab League, ‘institutional’ relations between Israel and Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Bahrain, have continued and indeed been reinforced over past several decades. Why and how has this happened?

Jones and Guzansky suggest this development not as “a formal alliance but rather a manifestation of a tacit security regime,” informed by mutual (US-supported) interest in the “containment” of Iran, which obviously also involves a network of mutual arms-sale.

In recent years, as they note, with the Gulf monarchies moving visibly closer to Israel, US arm sales to the Middle East has increased 103 percent, and also come to include advanced weapon systems of the sort that, in the past, was available for sale only to Israel in that region. This is an enlightening study of the conundrum of how these two blocs, whose people are encouraged to stay unforgiving, have worked out various tacit governmental alliances. However, being an academic book – it contains a 100-page reference alone – Fraternal Enemies does not speculate on other reasons for this conundrum, apart from the obvious one of US-influenced regime security in the light of mutual suspicions of Iran.

I think there is a need to look at three other factors, one (arms sale) alluded in the book, and the other two largely left out of its scope. Even suspicion of Iran can be bracketed within one of these factors, a matter the authors seem aware of but do not develop, for it would then have resulted in a more speculative book.

It is significant, for instance, that the two Arab nations dismantled (Iraq and Libya) and one almost dismantled (Syria) in recent years share an essential feature with Iran: despite being ruled by once populist and increasingly tyrannical dictators, all these countries are anti-monarchical. Mostly, their systems had risen, like in Iran, by deposing monarchs and associated Western corporate networks. The Arab Gulf states with tacit or, now, more visible dealings with Israel are mostly entrenched monarchies.

Add to this the factors of oil and arms: the two biggest industries in the world. Again, Iran (with the rise of its Shia Islamist autocracy) and the recently dismantled countries sold oil and bought arms along routes that did not necessarily go through Western, especially American, corporations.

These three factors – (1) monarchies with monopolised routes of (2) oil sale and (3) arms purchase – are central to understanding the tacit security regimes in the Gulf involving Israel. Suspicion of Iran may be seen as the cause or the consequence, depending on which end of this ‘trinocular’ you decide to use.

The rise of Sunni Islamist radicalism – some would say its escape from the religious laboratories of Saudi Arabia – complicated this matter, and has made the Arab Gulf countries and Israel collaborate more obviously. Relations between nations are good, but only if they are democratically open too. Because, even though the Palestinians have been forgotten, and governments and corporations seem to have ‘tacit security regimes’ in place, the aspirations for democracy and self-rule – which led to the fall of monarchies in Iraq (1958) and Iran (1979) and also, in grossly perverted forms, the rise of Islamism in its various Shia and Sunni editions – have not died out anywhere in the Gulf.

It is difficult to see the tacit security regimes so extensively studied by Jones and Guzansky as separate from the activities of governments in the Gulf that, in different ways, deny their own peoples truly democratic options – a denial enabled by the cultivation of xenophobic populism among the masses and covert cooperation among the elites and governing institutions.

Is this cynical play of people against people, while the respective states and monarchies cooperate with global corporations, the best way to meet legitimate democratic aspirations? Do the ‘free’ Western democracies – especially powerful USA – really think this is a solution? Or are we just heading for worse trouble in the future? These questions still need to be asked.

(Tabish Khair is an Indian novelist, poet, journalist and scholar, now based in Denmark)