|
|
|
CIAO DATE: 12/5/2006
Islamist Movements in the Arab World and the 2006 Lebanon War
Amr Hamzawy, Dina Bishara
November 2006
Introduction
The 2006 Lebanon war has had a profound effect on Islamist movements that have chosen to compete as legal parties in the political systems of their countries, testing their relationship with the ruling regimes as well as their respect for pluralism and tolerance.
Groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Islamic Action Front (IAF) in Jordan, the Justice and Development Party in Morocco, and al-Wefaq (Concordance) Islamic Society in Bahrain have taken a strongly pro-Hizbollah stand smeared with an outpouring of anti-Israeli and anti-American rhetoric toward the Lebanon war 2006.1 This comes at a cost. In some cases the new episode of the Arab-Israeli conflict has risen to the top of the Islamist opposition’s agenda, temporarily displacing calls for domestic political and economic reform. In other cases it has become entangled with that agenda, seemingly resulting in growing tensions between Islamists and ruling regimes.
The war in Lebanon, mounted by Israel in July 2006 after the kidnapping and killing of Israeli soldiers by Hizbollah and halted by a cease-fire in August, made it necessary for Islamist movements to act in accordance with their ideological reading of the Arab-Israeli conflict as an existential struggle between Muslims and Jews. It also required them to appear responsive to anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment widespread among their broad popular bases. The disproportionate Israeli response to Hizbollah’s initial provocation, especially the high toll of Lebanese civilian casualties, and the American refusal to push for an immediate cessation of hostilities outraged Arabs and returned to the forefront the narrative of a grand American-Israeli conspiracy to dominate the Middle East.
In the past few years, despite the invasion of Iraq and the persistent violence in the occupied Palestinian territories, the Arab street had increasingly devoted less attention to regional issues and U.S. policies. The domestic reform dynamism in countries such as Bahrain, Egypt, Lebanon, and Morocco itself had caught the popular imagination and led to the devaluation of the conflicts in Iraq and Palestine to second-ranking matters. In other countries, primarily in Jordan, opposition parties, from issues of domestic political reform.
Some Islamist opposition leaders who between 2003 and 2006 had become much more pragmatic and cautious again adopted deeply populist positions on the Arab-Israeli conflict and U.S. policy in the Middle East. In countries where ruling regimes have a vested interest in maintaining peaceful relations with Israel and the United States, the Islamists advocated policies antithetical to the offi cial line. They cast their disagreement with the regimes as the principled resistance of steadfastly Islamist movements against rulers submissive to Western demands. In their opposition, however, Islamists crossed dangerous lines, polarizing their societies further and jeopardizing cooperation with regimes on significant political reforms.
The intensity and sustainability of the Islamist reaction to regional crises depend on how close the specific movement is geographically to the crisis in question and on how close the movement’s historical ties to the Arab-Israeli conflict are. Throughout the five weeks of the Lebanon war the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Jordanian IAF were the most engaged among the region’s Islamic movements. The Muslim Brotherhood gradually stepped up its criticism of the Egyptian government, Israel, and the United States. The Lebanon war coincided with a period of tense relations between the IAF and the Jordanian regime. The IAF’s unusually harsh rhetoric toward the Jordanian government’s offi cial position has only exacerbated these tensions. Despite the immediate popular gains for both movements, they have created an environment in which they will have a harder time functioning politically.
