Tag Archive for: Middle East

Will US–Iran tensions disrupt the global oil market?

The global oil market has largely shrugged off the sabre-rattling in the Middle East as the United States seeks to halt Iran’s oil exports. The oil price actually fell by 2% following the Trump administration’s announcement that it would end all exemptions to the US sanctions on Iranian oil purchases, suggesting that the market was more impressed by a rise in US oil stocks than by the threat of conflict in the Middle East.

That threat is not remote: in late April, a senior Iranian naval official warned that Iran would block the Strait of Hormuz if it were prevented from exporting oil. The 20-kilometre-wide strait is the waterway through which 20% of globally traded oil is shipped, including most of Asia’s supplies.

The US has sent an aircraft carrier and a bomber taskforce to the region, although it’s not clear whether the move is intended to ensure clear passage through the strait or to counter other unspecified threats by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The oil market remains unruffled; the more worrying topic continues to be the trade conflict between the US and China and the negative impact it could have on demand for oil.

Yet, oil market analysts warn that troubles are mounting. US energy expert Amy Myers Jaffe of the Council for Foreign Relations is concerned that the US is relying too much on the ability of its own rising oil production to fill any gaps in global supply. ‘There is no question that rising US oil production has emboldened US policy regarding oil sanctions’, she says.

Until 2006, the US was the world’s biggest oil importer, buying around 12 million barrels a day. According to the US Energy Information Administration, net imports are now down to zero, as a result of huge growth in domestic supplies of oil and liquids from fracking technology. The US is increasingly important in export markets.

Jaffe says that while US production will continue to rise, the market remains vulnerable to supply disruptions.

‘The administration should take care not to impose too many complex sanctions in the oil market at once because surprise events such as hurricanes, accidents at major oil fields, or geopolitical strife can create sudden disruptions in oil supplies and leave markets more vulnerable to price spikes’, she warns.

Iran was the second largest OPEC supplier after Saudi Arabia, exporting almost 3 million barrels per day (bpd) at its peak. Exports were still at 2.8 million bpd until April last year when US sanctions were imposed. They dropped to a little more than 1 million bpd by the end of last year, but have since recovered to around 1.7 million. China, India, South Korea, Japan and Turkey were all able to buy Iranian oil under the US sanction waivers, which have now been terminated.

India, Japan and South Korea have said they will abide by the sanctions. China and Turkey have indicated they will resist, but to what extent isn’t clear. China has in the past sought to get around the US sanctions by using barter, although the arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer in Canada, following US charges that she was instrumental in breaking Iranian sanctions, highlights the risks.

Analysts believe the tougher sanctions could reduce Iranian exports by at least another million barrels.

There are other supply concerns. Venezuela’s oil production, which averaged around 2 million bpd until late 2017, had dropped to 1.2 million by February and is now down to 800,000. The fall reflects both the impact of US sanctions and the dysfunction of Venezuelan infrastructure.

Libya’s production of around 1.2 million bpd is also at risk as the nation edges closer to a renewed full-scale civil war.

The International Energy Agency’s latest analysis shows there’s little slack in the global oil market. It estimates that global consumption was 99.5 million bpd in the first quarter of this year, while total supply was 99.6 million bpd.

The US is pressuring Saudi Arabia to lift output to help offset the loss of Iranian supply, but it’s not yet clear whether it will do so. OPEC (of which Iran is a leading member) has been curbing supply in an effort to support prices. Saudi Arabia has cut its output by more than required under the OPEC agreement.

The IEA says there’s sufficient production capacity to meet global demand even allowing for the sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, although a large part of that capacity is in OPEC and is idled under its production cuts.

The IEA, which represents oil consumer interests in the advanced nations, is warning OPEC nations against allowing prices to rise too high, arguing that the global economy remains fragile.

Oil prices have responded to the tightness in supply this year. The international oil price benchmark, Brent crude, has risen from US$50 a barrel at the end of last year, when a global downturn was feared, to US$71 a barrel.

The price is still far below the levels above US$100 a barrel maintained between 2011 and 2014, which included the impact of the first round of sanctions on Iranian oil imposed by the Obama administration.

Those sanctions also led Iran to threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz. Threats have been made several times, though with less seriousness, since then. Jaffe doubts that Iran could actually achieve closure for long in the face of US military resistance, and other analysts note that even if it did, Saudi Arabia could redirect much of the production it sends through the strait through pipelines.

Oil markets were not disturbed by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the US’s achievement of self-sufficiency since then has somewhat weakened oil’s traditional geopolitical significance. The shocks to the global economy delivered by the Arab oil embargo in 1972 and the Iranian revolution in 1978 are now old history.

However, oil remains the biggest commodity market by far, with annual sales of around US$2 trillion, which is about 10 times the sales of next-ranked iron ore. With global supplies tight, the world economy still has a lot riding on good sense prevailing in the intensifying conflict between the Trump administration and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The structure of a diplomatic revolution

It has been nearly 60 years since the philosopher and historian Thomas Kuhn wrote his influential book The structure of scientific revolutions. Kuhn’s thesis was simple but heretical: breakthroughs in science occur not through the gradual accumulation of small changes to existing thinking, but rather from the sudden emergence of radical ideas that cause existing models to be replaced with something fundamentally different. As was the case when astronomers determined that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa, these ‘paradigm shifts’ usher in an entirely new model that becomes the basis for ‘normal’ scientific study and experimentation until it, too, is replaced.

I mention Kuhn because his idea is as relevant for social science as it is for natural science. The example I have in mind is the contemporary Middle East, where the current paradigm between Israel and its neighbours has prevailed for more than half a century.

Nearly everything said and written about the issue reflects the outcome of the June 1967 Six-Day War, which left Israel in control of territories that had previously belonged to Jordan (East Jerusalem and the West Bank), Egypt (the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza) and Syria (the Golan Heights). Since then, the ‘normal’ diplomatic model (enshrined in UN Security Council resolution 242 and subsequent resolutions) has assumed that Israel would trade this territory in exchange for security and peace.

For some time, the paradigm appeared to have validity. Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt, allowing the two countries to sign a peace treaty that has endured to this day. Years later, Israel and Jordan normalised their relationship. Negotiations between Syria and Israel came close to succeeding, but failed in the end, largely because Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad (the father of current Syrian President Bashar al-Assad), was unwilling to sign on to a compromise.

It is no longer possible to imagine peace talks, much less agreements, between Assad’s government and that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli government long ago annexed the Golan Heights, and now Assad’s government increasingly depends on Israel’s archenemy, Iran, for its survival, and instead of negotiations, we see Israel attacking Iranian forces and equipment on Syrian territory.

Diplomatic progress between Israel and the Palestinians is equally difficult to imagine. This wasn’t always the case. Negotiations came close several times to establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel under terms that both sides could accept. But at the last minute, Palestinian leaders baulked, fearing that agreeing to less than what they had historically claimed to be Palestine would leave them politically vulnerable to hardliners who believed that compromise was unnecessary because time and world opinion were on the Palestinians’ side.

This was a historic error. What was on offer in the past is no longer. Israeli politics has shifted decisively rightward. Jewish settlements on the West Bank have grown dramatically in terms of both area and population. Netanyahu explicitly promised during the recent election campaign to begin annexation of the West Bank. US President Donald Trump, whose administration moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and reversed nearly 40 years of US policy by recognising Israel’s authority over the Golan Heights, may well support further Israeli annexation.

Much of the world has grown weary of the conflict. Quite a few Arab governments, worried about Iran or internal threats more than Israel, are prepared to work with Israel quietly, and in some cases openly. Splits within the Palestinian leadership are exacerbating persistent divisions on what to ask of Israel and what to accept.

The Trump administration may well unveil a peace initiative in this context. But its proposal is unlikely to deal with the territorial, political and refugee issues that are central to the creation of a Palestinian state. A Trump plan is more likely to focus on offering economic incentives to Palestinians in an effort to encourage them to compromise. It is unlikely to succeed.

The most likely future is thus one of drift. Palestinians will continue to have limited autonomy in parts of the West Bank and Gaza. At some point (one we have neared, if not reached), the potential for a viable Palestinian state will cease to exist.

All of this poses a risk to Israel as well. There is an unresolvable tension between Israel remaining a Jewish state and a democratic one if it continues to exercise political control over millions of Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens. Avoiding this choice and maintaining the status quo will frustrate Palestinians and increasingly isolate Israel in the region and the world (especially if annexation occurs).

Some will argue that this assessment is too bleak. I hope they are right. But even if they are, the benefits of progress between Israelis and Palestinians will not spread. Closely associated with the territory-for-peace paradigm was the belief that, by ushering in peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours, an Israeli–Palestinian settlement would enable the region to flourish. But resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict will not end the civil war in Syria or the slaughter in Yemen, curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions, restrain Saudi Arabia’s leaders, or ameliorate the repression and corruption that are commonplace throughout the region.

So even if the Israeli–Palestinian conflict were to end, the Middle East’s problems would not. And there is no reason to predict the Israeli–Palestinian conflict will end. It is time for a paradigm shift in how we think about the Middle East, not because a better diplomatic model has presented itself (it has not), but because the current paradigm is increasingly at odds with reality.

What Israel’s politics mean for the Middle East

In December 2018, former Israel Defense Forces chief Benny Gantz established Hosen L’Yisrael (Israel Resilience Party) and rocked the Israeli political landscape when many started seeing him as a viable replacement for Benjamin Netanyahu. Gantz agreed to run a joint candidate list with the Yesh Atid Party under an alliance called ‘Kahol Lavan’ (‘Blue and White’, the colours of the Israeli flag). Yesh Atid (which translates as ‘There Is a Future’) was formed in 2012 by the former journalist Yair Lapid, who served as finance minister in a Netanyahu government.

Gantz, dubbed the ‘Teflon General’ by some, brought with him two other former military chiefs of staff: Gabi Ashkenazi, who, like Gantz, was a Netanyahu appointee; and Moshe Aylon, who had served as Netanyahu’s defence minister.

Netanyahu took the Gantz–Lapid threat seriously because, in 1999, three other former military leaders, Ehud Barak, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak and Yitzhak Mordechai, came close to toppling him. Lipkin-Shahak was Gantz’s mentor. Again, Netanyahu faced three security people, which challenged his campaign message that only he could protect Israel.

Initially, Gantz and Lapid’s platform focused on the need to address many of Israel’s social problems, including a crumbling health system, traffic-choked roads and an affordable-housing crisis that has locked many young Israelis out of the real-estate market. Because Netanyahu’s campaign emphasised security, annexation of the settlements on the West Bank and his close relationship with Donald Trump, Kahol Lavan struggled, leading it to rely on Gantz’s security credentials. Those credentials proved insufficient and southern Israel voted overwhelming for Netanyahu and the Likud Party.

On the Palestine issue, Gantz and Lapid were extremely cautious. Gantz emphasised his military role— particularly the fact that he led the IDF during the 2014 Gaza War—suggesting that if negotiations were to take place, he too would negotiate from a position of strength. No reference was made to a two-state solution; instead, the Kahol Lavan platform called for a regional summit to help facilitate a separation of Israelis and Palestinians, while stressing that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Israel.

Netanyahu’s campaign featured three key themes: security, economics and international diplomacy, laced with claims of a ‘witch hunt’ against him by the liberal left. In 2015, Netanyahu focused on Iran; he also stoked fears of a third Palestinian intifada and warned Israelis of the needed to vote because left-wing NGOs were taking Arab voters to the polls ‘in droves’.

Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, has argued that Israelis voted for Netanyahu because the ‘economy is excellent, our foreign relations were never better, and we’re secure. We’ve got a guy in politics for 40 years. We know him, the world knows him—even our enemies know him.’

None of those claims hold up to close scrutiny. The gap between rich and poor has increased and, oddly, many of Likud’s core supporters are affected by the growing disparity. The health and transportation systems are failing, and rockets continue to rain from Gaza. But facts weren’t important in this election. It was yet another example of Israelis opting to kick the key issues of security, peace and economic vitality down the road.

Israelis have been able to avoid taking tough decisions about their future for several reasons. Palestinians are divided. Fatah, the PLO and the Palestinian Authority don’t reflect the views of ordinary Palestinians, many of whom reject the armed struggle. Nor do many feel connected to the political elite. Just like many other peoples around the world, Palestinians know what they don’t want but can’t agree on what they do want.

With Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) on the throne and President Donald Trump in the White House, the Israelis are under no pressure to change course. MbS is concerned with two things: making sure that the House of Saud survives its profligacy and waste, and challenging an expansive Iran, which is in firm control of Iraq, has enormous influence in Syria and Lebanon, and is investing in Yemen. MbS is arguably looking to Israel to help him counter Iran, which is why the Palestinian cause hardly matters to him. He reportedly told the heads of US-based Jewish groups, ‘It is about time the Palestinians take the proposals and agree to come to the negotiations table or shut up and stop complaining.’

Trump is committed to his own survival, which means making sure that his supporters—including people like casino magnate and mega-donor Sheldon Adelson—are happy. Playing the Israel card pleases his base.

For years, the Palestinian cause has suffered from poor leadership and deep division, preventing Palestinians from asserting what they want. In April 2018, the Palestine National Council met a few weeks after an attempt to assassinate Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah as he entered Gaza. No representatives from Hamas, the Islamic Jihad Movement or the Popular Front attended the meeting, primarily because they want to cement the power of Palestinian President Abu Mazen. That highlights the ongoing rift between Palestinians living in the West Bank and those in Gaza.

The 2019 election was a referendum on the way Netanyahu is running Israel, and the Israeli electorate showed that it doesn’t care about the corruption allegations or his authoritarian, populist politics. In fact, the outcome showed that they liked his style: Likud won even more seats than it did in 2015. With such a mandate, it’s unlikely that Netanyahu will change his attitude or policies. He will lead Israel further down the illiberal democracy path and ensure that key security issues are left unresolved. Gantz and his followers are unlikely to challenge his security agenda.

Israel doubles down on illiberal democracy

It’s Bibi again. Having unapologetically allied with a racist, Jewish-supremacist party, Benjamin Netanyahu has secured a fourth consecutive term as Israel’s prime minister. The Union of Right Wing Parties says Netanyahu promised it both the education and the justice ministries, and who are we to doubt it? Along with Netanyahu’s other right-wing allies, the URWP is already backing a new law that would protect the prime minister from being indicted on pending corruption charges.

Israel’s parliamentary election has consolidated the country’s position within a growing bloc of illiberal democracies around the world. Once again, Netanyahu has won by mobilising the people against the very state institutions that he’s supposed to uphold and defend. In this election cycle, he shamelessly lambasted the judicial system and the police for doing their jobs. He attacked the media for uncovering improper behaviour by his family and cronies. He pilloried public intellectuals for refusing to acknowledge his greatness. And he depicted the old Zionist ‘left’ as traitors.

As for the Arab parties, they lost around 25% of their seats, owing partly to voter abstention. With Netanyahu having pushed through a ‘nation-state law’ declaring the pursuit of ‘national self-determination’ in Israel ‘unique to the Jewish people’, Israel’s Arab citizens apparently are through lending credibility to a sham democracy. Throughout the campaign, they were treated as political lepers by practically every segment of the Israeli body politic.

The Israeli left, in particular, has been exposed as a bankrupt political project. In fact, Netanyahu’s Israel has swung so far right that the term ‘leftist’ itself is now a smear. Both his party’s main challenger, the centrist Blue and White alliance, and the Labor Party have run away from the label. And both not only lacked the courage to stand up to Netanyahu’s maligning of Israeli Arabs as enemies of the state, but also refused even to consider forming a parliamentary alliance with Arab parties. On the Arab question, liberal Zionists have acceded to Netanyahu’s project of making Israel into a one-race, one-party state.

All told, the election amounts to a monumental indictment of Israel’s democracy. In a campaign dominated by personal smears and disinformation, not one substantive issue was debated seriously. It was as if the consequences of Netanyahu’s cruel neoliberal policies—a weakened welfare state and squeezed middle classes—didn’t matter at all. Nor was there any discussion of the unproductive Orthodox community’s dependence on state subsidies, which have grown substantially under Netanyahu.

And then there’s the elephant in the room: the Palestinian question. Fearing the loss of conservative votes, the left and centre parties didn’t make a single convincing statement—let alone offer a policy program—to address the greatest existential and moral challenge facing the country. Yes, candidates on the left paid lip service to the problem, and Benny Gantz, the colourless leader of Blue and White, muttered something about the need for a ‘diplomatic move’ with respect to the occupied territories, but that was it.

Meanwhile, Gantz and those on the left said almost nothing when Netanyahu boasted that he could get US President Donald Trump to greenlight a partial Israeli annexation of the West Bank. And they were equally nonresponsive when Netanyahu took credit for the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

In fact, US–Israeli relations were another key issue that went almost unmentioned in the election campaign. Never mind that Netanyahu’s alliance with Trump and American evangelicals has cost Israel the support of a growing portion of the US Democratic Party establishment, or that his blank cheque to the Israeli Orthodox community has alienated America’s predominantly liberal Jewish community. After Beto O’Rourke, a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, warned that Netanyahu is a ‘racist’ who is damaging America’s special alliance with Israel, Israelis responded by extending that racist’s grip on power.

Throughout the campaign, Netanyahu touted his foreign-policy record. In addition to cosying up to illiberal Eastern European governments and Brazil’s new right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, he claims to have bolstered Israel’s economic clout in Asia, made diplomatic breakthroughs in Africa, and forged covert partnerships with neighbouring Arab countries, not least Saudi Arabia.

And here, too, Netanyahu’s opponents dropped the ball. They could have pointed out that his goal in brokering new partnerships is to head off international opposition to his planned annexation of Palestinian territory. Instead of using Israel’s diplomatic relationships to work towards an acceptable solution to its primary existential challenge, he has exploited them for his own chauvinist agenda.

Sadly, the election leaves no doubt about what awaits Israel in the coming years. A cabal of Netanyahu cronies and family members, racist messianic settlers, and Orthodox parties with opportunistic designs on the state budget will drag Israel towards a new single-state reality that will resemble apartheid South Africa.

If there is any consolation, it is that the Israeli left and centre—from Meretz and Labor to the Arab parties and Blue and White—still collectively represent almost half of the electorate. A bold leader who is willing to fight for Israel’s soul could prevail, but only by unapologetically allying with Israeli Arabs. That is not just the best electoral strategy. It is also the right thing to do.

Nationality law and the Israeli election

Does Israel belong to all of its citizens or to the Jewish people alone? As the Israeli election scheduled for 9 April draws near, this question has once again attracted a lot of attention. Israel has always struggled with the contradictory pulls of presenting itself as a modern nation-state that belongs to all Israeli citizens regardless of race or religion and of cleaving to the very powerful Zionist idea of a homeland of the Jewish people regardless of where they live.

This dilemma has been exacerbated by the continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967. According to Israeli projections, soon there will be as many Arabs as Jews in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. As the prospect of a two-state solution has receded, the spectre of a bi-national state with equal rights for all citizens has begun to haunt the Zionist right. The nationality law passed by the Knesset in July 2018 by a vote of 62 to 55, which declares Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people, was a pre-emptive measure to rule out that option.

The legislation may be consistent with the original Zionist idea, but it has grave implications for Israel’s claim to be a state of all its people, including the Palestinian Arabs who constitute one-fifth of its population. It’s claimed that more than 65 laws have been passed since Israel’s establishment that restrict the rights of Palestinian citizens in all fields, including housing and employment. However, this is the most blatant attempt to legally delineate the Palestinian inhabitants of Israel as second-class citizens.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the passage of the law as ‘a pivotal moment in the annals of Zionism and the State of Israel. We enshrined in law the basic principle of our existence.’ In contrast, Ayman Odeh, the head of the Joint Arab List group of parties at the time, declared that by passing the bill the Knesset had approved a ‘law of Jewish supremacy and told us that we will always be second-class citizens’.

The debate surrounding the law became more heated when Israel’s elections committee, made up of members of the outgoing parliament, voted 17 to 10 to bar the joint Arab party Raam-Balad from participating in the election, a decision later overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court. Signalling his support to the election committee’s decision, Netanyahu tweeted that ‘Those who support terrorism will not be in the Israeli Knesset!’

Recently, Netanyahu re-emphasised his commitment to the nationality law in response to a comment posted on social media by Israeli TV personality Rotem Sela. In a strongly worded statement, Sela declared: ‘When the hell will someone in this government broadcast to the public that Israel is a country for all its citizens. And every person was born equal. Arabs, too, God help us, are human beings.’

Netayahu’s response on Instagram read, ‘Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the Nation-State Law that we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People—and them alone.’ In the same posting, he wrote that the upcoming elections are crucial for Israel’s future. Playing to his ultra-nationalist base, he argued that, ‘It’s either a strong right-wing government led by me, or Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz’s left-wing government with the support of the Arab parties. Lapid and Gantz have no other way to form a government, and a government like this will undermine the security of the state and citizens.’ The statement clearly implied that the loyalty of Israel’s Arab citizens is suspect and therefore they should never be accepted as part of a coalition governing a Jewish nation-state.

In a remarkable instance of the head of state refuting the head of government, Israel’s president Reuven Rivlin, while not mentioning the prime minister’s remarks directly, criticised what he said were recent ‘entirely unacceptable remarks about the Arab citizens of Israel … There are no first-class citizens, and there are no second-class voters. We are all equal in the voting booth.’

Netanyahu seems to be taking a calculated risk by escalating his anti-Arab rhetoric. The strategy may backfire, as it could energise Arabs to vote in larger numbers and tilt the balance against the Likud-led coalition, thus bringing the opposition to power possibly with the help of Arab parties turning Netanyahu’s warnings into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Considering the narrow margin by which the Knesset passed the nationality law, the election could act as a referendum on the character of the Israeli state. The Israeli electorate will be passing judgement not only on Netanyahu’s fitness to govern the country in light of the corruption charges levelled against him, but more importantly on the issue of whether Israel is a state of all its citizens or that of the Jewish people alone.

Australia can do more to support women’s participation in Middle Eastern militaries

A recent event in the United Arab Emirates sparked both merriment and scorn globally when every award at the Gender Balance Index 2018 was handed to a man. UAE Vice President Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who presented the awards, may have surprised some observers with this tone-deaf action; he is better known for his more successful gender initiatives, including increasing female representation in diplomatic roles, law and the judiciary.

Kinder commentators said that even the Gender Balance Index fiasco was a step in the right direction, noting that one of the awards was for instituting maternity leave for female UAE soldiers. But is this genuine progress that we should be applauding, or lip service to silence irritating (and largely Western) sniping? And what does it matter to Australia?

The UAE has arguably the most advanced military in the Middle East bar Israel, and Australia can immodestly claim significant credit for that through a combination of long-term government support and a slew of ex-ADF personnel who have worked to professionalise the UAE Armed Forces from the inside. Australia has provided equipment, training and other forms of support to the armed forces of nearly every country in the Middle East at some point, and women, peace and security (WPS) is coming up more and more frequently as an engagement topic.

While our contributions may be small in the scheme of things, Australian support (and equipment) does come with the cachet of high-end professionalism and potentially a sympathetic ear from a member of the Five Eyes community. Australia also gets to burnish its credentials as a champion of WPS. But barriers of language, culture and distance make follow-up difficult, along with a certain level of fatalism that accompanies just about any effort in a region littered with the failures of Western intervention.

One of the greatest challenges is trying to confirm what has actually occurred after the headline statements. Data beyond what governments want released is limited to say the least, especially in English. An internet search will turn up scores of favourable puff pieces, mainly from Arab media or Western sources uncritically repeating them. In 2018, both Saudi Arabia and Qatar announced that they were opening the doors for female volunteers to join their armed forces (although in Saudi Arabia’s case this would still require a male guardian’s permission). There’s little word yet on any further developments, from what types of roles will be open to women, to how many have chosen (or been allowed) to join up. Oman’s public commitments to gender balance in the armed forces seem limited to the Royal Cavalry’s all-female marching band, which doesn’t help dispel the feeling that these announcements are mere window-dressing.

Things in the more progressive Jordanian Armed Forces (JAF) appear better, but again the critiques are limited. The JAF apparently intends to triple its percentage of women over the next five years. That sounds impressive, but the increase is from 1% to 3%, and the options for women will still be limited (and frankly puzzling to a Western audience; a woman in the JAF can become fully trained in midwifery). Unlike many of its far richer neighbours, Jordan has some pressing incentives to meet international norms. It is heavily dependent on external aid and is a sizeable contributor of peacekeepers to the UN.

The question we have to ask ourselves is whether our contributions are helping or hindering. By congratulating the JAF on its female engagement team are we respecting genuine progress in a culturally sensitive situation, or glossing over the doubling in child bride rates among the refugees they are supposed to be protecting? Even the UAE, which opened the Gulf region’s first military college for women in 1991, still requires adult women to seek permission from their guardians before joining. Do we applaud or sigh?

The answer, of course, is that it’s more complex than a simple binary choice. Women in the armed forces of nearly any country face a daunting situation, made harder by complex cultural and societal expectations. Successes should certainly be lauded, but Australia needs to think carefully about what it does next. Rather than simply repeating the latest platitude, Australia should be asking for hard data and honest discussions. There needs to be transparency and accountability, and a cleverer and more nuanced approach to capacity-building efforts that adds to a long-term strategy.

Australia is by no means the only country seeking to support women and gender issues in the Middle East, and should work closely with like-minded countries like the US, UK and Canada to coordinate and align our activities. Most importantly, we should all be sending the same message about ensuring that the countries of the Middle East make some real progress after the press release has been issued. Perhaps then we’ll see a few more awards being handed to women.

The Trumping of the Middle East

US President Donald Trump may be mercurial, but he does have a doctrine. As his speech in September at the United Nations General Assembly again confirmed, Trump rejects multilateral institutions and liberal values in favour of the nation-state and power politics. But understanding the ‘Trump doctrine’—with its support for abandoning America’s longstanding role as a global arbiter—does not make it any less disruptive, especially for the already unstable Middle East.

It is no surprise that the Middle East has been particularly vulnerable to the unsettling effects of the Trump doctrine. After all, the timid policies of Trump’s immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, significantly exacerbated the region’s dysfunction, opening the way for Trump to introduce what can only be described as mayhem.

For starters, the Obama administration utterly failed to make progress in resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—a failure Trump promised to correct with the ‘deal of the century’. Instead, Trump has unilaterally recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, moving the US embassy there, and ended financial support to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which supports more than five million registered Palestinian refugees. One must be extraordinarily ignorant to believe Trump’s claims that these actions amount to taking two of the thorniest issues in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict ‘off the table’.

Making matters worse, by abandoning efforts to overthrow Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, the Obama administration opened the door for Russia to move into the region. Under Trump, in a sinister reversal of America’s Cold War victory, the Middle East has become Russia’s playground.

Egypt, a close US ally, has signed huge arms deals with Russia, which is also providing four nuclear-power reactors to the country. The bilateral relationship has been deepened through close military cooperation in Libya—a country that, totally ignored by the United States, has become a vital strategic link in Russia’s penetration of the Western sphere of influence, exemplified by the Kremlin’s efforts to build a naval base there.

Saudi Arabia, which has long benefited from America’s security umbrella, has also purchased nuclear-power reactors and advanced S-400 missiles from Russia. And Bahrain, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates are pursuing arms deals with Russia.

Turkey, a key NATO ally, is also moving into Russia’s strategic orbit. When it comes to his country’s faltering economy and democratic backsliding, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has much to answer for. But the Trump administration’s decision in August to double US tariffs on steel and aluminium as punishment for Turkey’s refusal to release an American cleric arrested for alleged ‘subversive activities’ undoubtedly contributed to the lira’s collapse. In fact, the Trump administration has offered no indication that it cares whether Turkey remains a US ally at all.

Even Israel, which Trump has done so much to appease, is drifting towards Russia, on which it depends to help it prevent Iran from gaining a foothold in Syria. With the Trump administration offering nothing resembling an effective Syria policy, much less a strategy for reining in Iran’s drive to secure a land corridor to Lebanon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now makes regular pilgrimages to Moscow to plead Israel’s case.

The dangers raised by Trump’s policies towards Iran cannot be overstated. Withdrawing the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the most important nuclear non-proliferation agreement in a quarter-century, and imposing a strict sanctions regime on Iran have failed to derail the latter’s bellicose strategy for achieving regional primacy, exemplified by its activities in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. These policies have also undermined America’s own global standing, including by widening the rift between the US and its European allies, all of which support the JCPOA.

Now, Syria is at risk of becoming the site of a major war between Israel, which is already conducting military drills, and the alliance of Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah. Such a war, if it comes, could also engulf Lebanon. In all the turmoil, Israel could even end up clashing with Russia.

Consider the recent downing of a Russian military plane by Syrian anti-aircraft fire. Because the accident—which killed all 15 people aboard the plane—occurred amid an Israeli attack on Iranian installations, Russia’s military, already fed up with the Israeli air force’s supposed impudence, blamed Israeli jets for putting the Russian plane in the line of fire. Now, Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be planning to send missiles to Syria to help counteract the Israeli air force’s dominance of that country’s air space.

But Syria is far from the only country that is in danger. Trump’s policy of emboldening Iran’s rivals—Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia—could also trigger escalations in the conflicts in Bahrain, Lebanon and Yemen, not to mention Gaza.

Instead of promoting a diplomatic settlement to end the colossal humanitarian tragedy in Yemen, Trump is providing Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with all the weapons he needs to prosecute a war that his country seems incapable of winning. That is on top of Trump’s abandonment of Obama’s calls for democratic reform—a gift to both the House of Saud and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Under Trump, the US has established itself as a deeply disruptive force not just in the Middle East, but throughout the world. Instead of resolving conflicts, Trump’s administration exacerbates them, in the illusory belief that supporting autocrats and punishing adversaries with sanctions, tariffs and the withdrawal of aid will facilitate negotiations later.

But, as the Arab Spring showed, there is a limit to the capacity of the Middle East’s autocracies to stifle the ambitions and frustrations of its burgeoning young population. When that capacity is depleted and the region is plunged into chaos, the Trump doctrine will have nothing to offer, because, in a sense, it will have achieved its goal.

The regional factors bringing Turkey and Iran together

US President Donald Trump’s policy of putting economic pressure on Iran to force regime change by inciting a domestic revolt seems to be failing. There is little doubt that renewed sanctions have hurt Iran economically, as witnessed above all by the precipitate fall of the Iranian currency in their wake. However, economic pressure has not led to a revolt against the regime and the currency has stabilised after the initial shock. Indeed, the American action may have consolidated support behind the regime, which can now deflect criticism of its economic performance on to the imposition of American sanctions.

In this context, Iran’s relations with Turkey provide a very interesting case study. Both Tehran and Ankara have regional ambitions that have sometimes led to friction between them, as was the case over Syria until recently. However, economic complementarities and congruence of strategic interests have helped to keep their relationship on a relatively even keel.

When the Trump administration announced that it was going to reimpose sanctions on Iran, Turkey made it clear that it wouldn’t follow American diktats but would comply only with sanctions imposed by the UN. Economic interdependence provides part of the explanation for the Turkish stand. Bilateral trade between Iran and Turkey isn’t limited to oil and gas. The volume of trade between the two neighbours stood at US$11.7 billion at the end of 2017, up from US$9.7 billion in 2016, and both countries have committed to eventually raising the level to US$30 billion.

However, it’s not just oil and trade that determine Turkish–Iranian relations; there’s also a convergence of political objectives. Turkish and Iranian strategic interests coincide on Kurdish secessionism, which threatens the territorial integrity of both countries. That’s why Iran didn’t oppose Turkish incursions into Syria to prevent the creation of a Kurdish enclave abutting its borders, even when the two countries supported opposite sides during the civil war. Now that Turkey is reconciled to Iran’s ally Bashar al-Assad remaining in power in Syria, the major political disagreement between Ankara and Tehran has lost its importance.

Iran’s support to Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the time of the failed coup in July 2016 greatly helped in patching up differences. The Iranian foreign minister stayed up all night as the coup was unfolding to monitor the Turkish situation and telephoned his Turkish counterpart five times to express Iran’s support for the government, thus strengthening personal bonds between the leaders of the two countries.

There’s also an increasing conjunction of interests between the two countries vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia. Tehran has been engaged for years in a fierce competition with Riyadh over primacy in the Gulf and over their respective roles in the wider Middle East. Syria had been the primary battleground for their rivalry since 2011. Now that the Syrian civil war is almost over, Yemen has become the major arena of conflict between them. Saudi Arabia and its ally the United Arab Emirates are engaged in open warfare with the Houthis who are in control of the Yemeni capital and are supported by Iran. The Saudi–UAE aerial bombardments have ravaged an already desperately poor country, killing thousands of civilians. An estimated eight million people are on the verge of starvation.

Ankara has increasingly come to see Riyadh as its primary antagonist in the competition for influence in the Sunni countries of the Middle East. It finds Tehran a useful ally in tying down Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf, thus making it easier for Turkey to emerge as the preeminent Sunni power in the rest of the region.

Saudi Arabia’s imposition of an economic blockade on Qatar further strained relations between the two countries. Turkey has a military base in Qatar, which it reinforced following the imposition of the blockade, and the emir sent a contingent of Qatari troops to provide security to the Turkish president at the time of the coup in 2016. Turkey reciprocated in 2017 by flying in essential commodities to Qatar in tandem with Iran in order to render the Saudi blockade redundant. The convergence of interests on Qatar between Tehran and Ankara arises from the primary reason for the Saudi blockade: Qatar’s cordial relations with neighbouring Iran, with which it shares the world’s largest gas field.

Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has greatly infuriated the Turkish government, especially the president, who has taken it as a personal insult. Erdoğan has asked for the extradition of Khashoggi’s murderers to Turkey to stand trial and has clearly implicated Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in the crime, without naming him directly. Turkish–Saudi relations are currently at the lowest point in their history. This has worked to Iran’s advantage and has further cemented relations between Tehran and Ankara.

Turkey and Iran are thus moving towards a joint front against Saudi Arabia and its allies, whose numbers are dwindling as the Gulf Cooperation Council unravels. The United States would be wise to take this configuration of forces into account while formulating its future policy on the Middle East.

The inconvenient truth about Saudi Arabia

The 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth highlights former US vice president Al Gore’s efforts to alert his fellow Americans to the perils of global warming. What made the truth inconvenient is that avoiding catastrophic climate change would require people to live differently and, in some cases, give up what they love (such as gas-guzzling cars).

For nearly two months, we have all been living with another inconvenient truth—ever since Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist working for the Washington Post and living in the United States, disappeared after entering Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul.

A large part of the truth is undeniable: Khashoggi was murdered by individuals with close ties to the Saudi government and its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (widely known as MbS). Weeks of official Saudi denials and lies only reinforced the conclusion—now also the reported judgement of the CIA—that the murder was premeditated and approved at the top. MbS’s direct role may not be 100% proven, but most observers familiar with Saudi Arabia harbour little doubt. This is not a system that tolerates much freelancing.

What makes the truth inconvenient is Saudi Arabia’s strategic importance. The kingdom still accounts for over 10% of global oil output. Its sovereign wealth fund sits on an estimated US$500 billion. Saudi Arabia is the most influential Sunni Arab country, occupying a special role within the Muslim world, owing to its role as the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites. It is central to any policy of confronting Iran.

Moreover, MbS, for all his faults, is something of a reformer, understanding that his country must open up and diversify if it is to thrive and the royal family is to survive. He is also popular at home, especially with younger Saudis, who constitute the bulk of the population.

The problem is that the faults of the young and impulsive crown prince are many. In addition to his role in the murder of Khashoggi, he recklessly ordered the Saudi attack on Yemen that triggered his country’s equivalent of the US war in Vietnam—a strategic and humanitarian catastrophe. He kidnapped the Lebanese prime minister, did all he could to undermine Qatar, arrested wealthy Saudis who refused to embrace his consolidation of power, froze diplomatic relations with Canada over a critical tweet, and imprisoned political activists, including women seeking greater rights.

The Saudi strategy for dealing with the outcry over Khashoggi’s murder is clear: hunker down and weather the storm. MbS and his inner circle are calculating that the world’s outrage will fade, given their country’s importance. He has good reason to believe that other Sunni Arab states will stand by him, given the subsidies he provides.

Israel, too, has indicated support for MbS, because of his willingness to move in the direction of normalising relations and, more important, the two countries’ shared interest in countering Iranian influence in the region. And US President Donald Trump’s administration is standing by its man, so far refusing to acknowledge his role in Khashoggi’s murder and resisting calls for sanctions against Saudi Arabia.

What, then, should be done? Former US secretary of state James A. Baker recently drew a parallel to US policy towards China in 1989, at the time of the massacre of protesting students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. George H.W. Bush’s administration (of which I was a part) worked hard to thread the needle: introducing sanctions to convey displeasure with the Chinese government, but limiting the punishment and keeping lines of communication open, given China’s importance.

Would a similar policy towards Saudi Arabia prove viable?

Ideally, the US and European governments would let it be known that they would be more open to working with Saudi Arabia if the power of the crown prince were reduced. There should also be limits on US arms sales and intelligence support, which, fortunately, the US Congress is likely to impose.

But more important than any sanction would be ratcheting up public and private pressure on MbS regarding what is needed and what needs to be avoided. What is needed is a concerted push to end the Yemen conflict. What needs to be avoided is exploitation of the Trump administration’s anti-Iran animus to provoke an armed confrontation that would force others to overcome their qualms and side with Saudi Arabia.

A war with Iran would be costly and dangerous. MbS should be made to understand that the US will be a strategic partner for Saudi Arabia only if he acts with greater restraint in Yemen and elsewhere and with greater respect for US interests.

Consultations should also be held with China and Russia. Unlike the US, both have working relationships with Saudi Arabia and Iran, which gives both a stake in preventing such a war from starting and shutting it down quickly if it does.

All too often in the Middle East, a bad situation becomes a worse situation. MbS has created a bad situation. The aim should be to establish sufficient limits so that it does not become worse.

From the bookshelf: ‘Rise and kill first: the secret history of Israel’s targeted assassinations’

Ronen Bergman has written an extraordinary book which is at once morally confronting and gripping in its narrative.

Without the formal assistance of Israel’s intelligence community, including Mossad, Bergman has produced a comprehensive account of Israel’s deployment of targeted killings from the establishment of the state in the 1940s to the present day. While official endorsement of Bergman’s project was withheld, a great many Israelis from the fields of politics and government, security services and the military, academia and the legal fraternity have clearly made their views known to the author. And the author is accomplished: he is a contributor to the New York Times Magazine and a senior correspondent for Israel’s largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth.

Among Bergman’s books is The secret war with Iran, which has served him well by contributing useful detail in Rise and kill first. There’s no doubt that a global policy of assassinations is controversial. Any program of extrajudicial killings is an invitation to peril. When the state becomes prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner with minimal scrutiny and a near absence of legal sanctions, appalling consequences can arise. Mistakes can and will be made. Innocent people will suffer.

But then again, every security challenge for the state of Israel can prove existential. Bergman sums up the situation this way:

Because of Israel’s tiny dimensions, the attempts by the Arab states to destroy it even before it was established, their continued threats to do so, and the perpetual menace of Arab terrorism, the country evolved a highly effective military and, arguably, the best intelligence community in the world. They, in turn, have developed the most robust, streamlined assassination machine in history.

Bergman argues that two Israeli legal systems have developed in parallel: a recognisable criminal justice system for the citizenry, and one for the security and defence entities.

The latter system has allowed, with a nod and a wink from the government, highly problematic acts of assassination, with no parliamentary or public scrutiny, resulting in the loss of many innocent lives.

On the other hand, the assassination weapon, based on intelligence that is ‘nothing less than exquisite’—to quote the former head of the NSA and the CIA, General Michael Hayden—is what made Israel’s war on terror the most effective ever waged by a Western country. On numerous occasions, it was targeted killing that saved Israel from very grave crises.

Israel has established protocols for employing targeted assassinations as a weapon of state. Prime ministerial approval is required in most cases, but some Israeli prime ministers are more adventurous than others; while some are hard-headed, but nonetheless cautious, much depends on the personality of the Israeli leader. Many, such as Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, spent earlier careers in uniform. Prime ministers such as Ariel Sharon actually exhibited far more aggression in certain cases than either the security services or military.

And sometimes the security services get it wrong, as with the killing in Norway which was supposedly linked to Black September’s wanton murder of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972. On another occasion, PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s brother, Dr Fathi Arafat, was targeted by mistake while en route to Cairo over the Mediterranean. A tragedy was only narrowly avoided, for the younger Arafat was very different from his brother.

He was a physician and the founder of the Palestinian Red Crescent. On the plane with him were thirty wounded Palestinian children, some of them victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Fathi Arafat was escorting them to Cairo for medical treatment.

Bergman’s book is compelling. The author draws his readers in by developing an absorbing, cascading account of a policy of Israeli assassinations from the calling to account of Nazi war criminals in post-war Europe through to the elimination of Iranian scientists working on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons program. Bergman has assembled his substantial trove of intelligence material and his book unfolds from early targeting of German scientists working on an Egyptian missile effort through to successful intervention in Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons initiative.

There are convincing successes, carried out by various arms of the Israeli security services and the military. And, as previously mentioned, there are humiliating mistakes such as the identification of the Mossad unit—some of whom were using false Australian passports— which assassinated a senior Hamas arms trafficker in his hotel room in Dubai in 2010. Even Mossad can become complacent to the point of being sloppy.

The background to Rise and kill first is the constantly shifting strategic pattern in the Middle East, through recurring wars to the emergence of major new players, such as Iran, characterised by the unwavering hostility towards Israel of Tehran and its client militias, best evidenced by Hezbollah. The foreground is the appalling atrocities inflicted on Israel and its citizens by terrorists, some of which are too sickening to record.

‘Rise and kill first’ is originally a Talmudic verse from Babylonian times and there is a Biblical injunction in terms of the imperatives for Israeli security. The quest for security remains an overwhelming priority for the Israeli state. The question which Israeli leaders must constantly address is whether the policy of targeted assassinations fits readily or well into an overarching strategy. Or has this instrument merely become a tactical weapon for eliminating threats, however real, that diverts effort away from working on a broader foreign policy and national security canvas?

As Bergman points out, after 9/11 the United States embraced targeted assassinations as policy, so this book identifies consequences well beyond the state of Israel. It is one of many reasons that Rise and kill first is essential and revealing reading.