Syria’s state capture: the rising influence of Mrs Assad | Financial Times: “Her name, in particular, has become shorthand for an era of financial consolidation by the presidential couple and their inner circle. As one Syrian businessman says: “All of Syria is now Asma’s.””
I highly recommend this Classic Lemon Meringue Pie.
Khalil Gibran on youth. “In his youth, he felt doomed to insignificance, dwarfed by a universe that seemed immense and remote. But as he matured, he learned to live with “the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great” — to inhabit that elemental aloneness with a sense of boundless belonging to the universe and every other aloneness in it.”
Q&A: Noam Chomsky on Palestine, Israel and the state of the world | Al Jazeera “If you want to talk about long-term outcomes, you can’t just talk about one state and two state. You have to talk about what’s happening, ‘Greater Israel’.”
Tunisia’s Kais Saied Balks at IMF Bailout - New Lines Magazine
The consequences of a default would be catastrophic. The country’s 2023 budget, which the Bouden administration passed, only balances on the assumption of the IMF deal going through. Budget allocations for everything from health care to education to sanitation would dry up. Foreign currency reserves, already low, would disappear; without them the government cannot buy subsidized goods or pay public salaries.
Tunisia: Chaima Issa, the first female political prisoner under Kais Saied’s regime
Monia Ben Hamadi, reporting for Le Monde, on political activist Shaimaa Ben Aissa:
Sitting on a chair placed against the wall facing the judge’s office and surrounded by her lawyers, the 43-year-old activist refused to be intimidated. “This is Tunisia? This is the Tunisia where we studied, you and me? This is the Tunisia we dreamed of?” she said at the end of a long tirade filmed discreetly, part of which was broadcast on social media.
“She made everyone cry. Even the judge had tears in his eyes,” said Dalila Ben Mbarek Msaddek, one of her lawyers. “Just as he was going to issue the detention warrant, we all stood up. I told him: ‘You have just detained seven men, at least let Chaima free.'” But there was nothing to be done, the judge had made his decision: the activist would spend the night in prison. “She was downcast, she took her head in her hands, eyes downcast,” the lawyer described the scene.
The Markaz Review, Sophia Al-Maria: The Gaze of the Sci-fi Wahabi
Built on the retreating sands of reality and increasingly submerged in the unreal, the Gulf has become a place where individuals are forced to fracture their lives into multi-dimensional zones of illusion and reality. Squeezed by the intense hyper-pressurized conditions of life in the Gulf, by puberty young girls have stepped into their black abayas already diamond-cut: multifaceted and many-faced. Worn veterans of poly-existence, they effortlessly navigate the complicated culturally specific binary code of public and private, truths and lies, me and you.
An Expensive Bribe for a Syrian ID - New Lines Magazine
From an anonymous essay on a devastated Syria:
I hadn’t been to Syria in years, and what I now saw left me wondering how people were getting by and managing their affairs, given the inflation and corruption and lack of opportunity to make an honest — or even a decent — living. This was a country in postwar freefall, where the victor had no virtue and the victim was all but forgotten; a country still fractured, a people condemned to live at the mercy of the elements, the earthquakes and the occasional Assad and Russian airstrikes that continue up north, or to live in the shadow of international sanctions that cripple the parts of the country that are firmly in Assad’s grip. In the absence of something like a Marshall Plan to rebuild what has been destroyed (mostly by the Assad regime and the Russians), what seems to keep Syrians hopeful is some patched-together idea of moving forward to something that resembles the past, but worse.
How Sanctions Hurt Iran’s Protesters | Foreign Affairs
Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, writing in Foreign Affairs:
Given that economic restrictions will remain the centerpiece of Western policy toward Iran, activists inside and outside the country must help craft more sophisticated sanctions policies, with the goal of restoring the political power of the Iranian people. The United States and the European Union should retool their current restrictions, which make it hard for Iranians to receive remittances, make it very difficult for Western businesses to hire Iranian freelancers, and make it nearly impossible for anyone other than Iran’s richest citizens to store their money abroad. Opening new financial channels while keeping others closed would allow Western policymakers to move beyond the failed paradigm of maximum pressure and instead adopt a kind of calibrated pressure. In doing so, they would account for the important connections between the economic resources available to households and the political power of ordinary people.
My former boss Jean-Marie Guéhenno has a thoughtful op-ed on Macron’s new foreign policy principle - the ambition that France should be a “puissance d’équilibres” which might be translated as “power of equilibriums” or “balancing power”. The concept is vague (when is Macron not vague and trying to have his cake and eat it too?) but suggests the idea that France should play a balancing role in great-power competition. And this conservative, almost passive view is what is being criticized here:
Je crains cependant qu’en généralisant le concept d’équilibre et en en faisant un principe d’action nous ne reprenions une tendance ancienne de notre diplomatie qui ne nous a pas servis dans le passé. C’est la vision conservatrice d’un monde où la priorité est de préserver les équilibres du moment, quels qu’ils soient, vision inspirée par la conviction que tout changement est par nature dangereux.
. . .
S’il est une certitude dans notre monde incertain, c’est que nous sommes au début de changements profonds, non à leur conclusion. La France n’a certainement pas les moyens de les arrêter, et dans un monde qui bouge, la seule chance de peser sur les événements est de les accompagner en se fixant quelques objectifs essentiels. Le monde est en déséquilibre(s), et ces déséquilibres sont porteurs de risques mais aussi d’opportunités : une diplomatie dynamique devrait plutôt chercher à les anticiper pour s’y adapter qu’avoir la prétention de les arrêter afin de créer un nouvel et illusoire « équilibre ».
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Faces an Existential Crisis - New Lines Magazine
Abdelrahman Ayyash, who has just published a new book on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, on the pathology of the group now underground and in exile:
MB members are adrift in various countries of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Conflicts large and miniscule reveal the same deep pathologies that have precipitated an existential crisis of identity, legitimacy and membership for the MB as a whole. The organization’s vision has shrunk from a grand dream of Islamic governance to power struggles over the millions of dollars in the MB’s treasury and matters as trivial as who put the eggplant in the maqlouba.
Also see this interview with Ayyash at Century International.
Tarek Megeresi, in a policy brief for ECFR that neatly summarizes the sad situation in Tunisia:
Saied’s rule is inflicting deep damage on Tunisia’s social stability, economic prospects, and democratic freedoms and culture. He appears unable to set strategy or take decisions that measure up to the crisis the country is undergoing. The president is exacerbating matters by focusing his attention on silencing critics and eroding democratic freedoms, and he is failing to rise to the occasion on the international stage by providing confidence in his leadership.
Perpetual Protest and the Failure of the post-2003 Iraqi State - MERIP
From the conclusion of this fine piece by Fanar Haddad:
The prospect of perpetual protest, both elite-driven and popular, alongside persistent state failure is a damning indictment of the post-2003 state-building enterprise. It recalls former Finance Minister Ali Allawi’s summation of the Iraqi state in his lengthy resignation letter of 2022. He describes a state that exists in form but not in substance, one that is capable of recreating itself despite its numerous contradictions. It is these contradictions, underpinning the hybridity, the opacity and the dysfunction of the system, that paradoxically lend it resilience:
All the calls for reform are stymied by the political framework of this country… It has allowed for the state’s capture by outside interest groups. Unlike human beings, states do not die in a definitive way. They could linger on as zombie states . . . the machinery of government continues, it is true, and the trappings of state power persist, but there is no substance to the form.
Red Alert: Who will protect the Palestinians?
David Kretzmer and Limor Yehuda, writing in Just Security, on the Huwara “pogrom”.
It seems that all of Israel’s law enforcement agencies, its army, its attorney-general and many ministers in the ruling coalition are against this, but Ben Gvir may slowly get his way because Netanyahu still needs him.
Who Cares if Palestinians Are Dead or Alive? – Haaretz.com
Gideon Levy:
A family is informed that their son has fallen in battle. Another family, from the same community, is informed that their son has been wounded and captured, and is now lying in the enemy’s hospital beyond the border. For over a month, this family has tried to visit their son, while the other family grieves over the death of its loved one, whose place of burial is unknown. Ultimately, the anticipated permit arrives and the mother travels to visit her wounded son. As soon as she enters his hospital room, her world collapses: The young man in the bed is not her son. He is the son of her neighbors who was believed to have died. The 40 days of ritual mourning have elapsed in any case.
This is what happened in recent weeks at Aqabat Jabr refugee camp, located on the outskirts of Jericho. Tayer Aweidat was declared dead; Alaa Aweidat was said to have been wounded. When the mother, Nawal, came to Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital to visit her son, after a month of trying to obtain a permit, she was astonished to find a wounded man who was not her son. Since then, she and her family have been beside themselves. They want to know only one thing: What happened to their son?
The state actually replied: “The relevant person is apparently no longer alive and his body is being kept at the National Center of Forensic Medicine. … That ends our involvement,” wrote attorney Matanya Rosin, a deputy in the State Prosecutor’s Office, High Court of Justice department. The attorney was resolute: The son is “apparently” dead and that was “the end of our involvement.” That’s enough information for you subhumans, continue living with your doubts and don’t dare bother us again. The attorney also informed the family, with the humanity that so characterizes our enlightened country, that the family can go to the forensic institute to identify what is supposedly the body of their son.
Is China forging an alternative Middle Eastern order?
Marc Lynch reviews Dawn Murphy’s China’s Rise in the Global South.
The end of the Moroccan “model”: How Islamists lost despite winning
Shadi Hamid, writing for Brookings:
Today, the PJD, despite its success or perhaps because of it, is one of the region’s weakest Islamist parties (at least in electoral terms). Before the Arab Spring, it lost on purpose. After the Arab Spring, it lost by winning. This means that, for the time being, the monarchy has succeeded not only in neutralizing the country’s largest political party but rendered it irrelevant. The PJD was a useful buffer because it could provide the illusion of democratic progress without the substance. What happens, though, when the illusion is revealed for what it is?
This is a serviceable account of the PJD’s rise and fall since the late 2000s, but overall it focuses too much on the constraints the party faced in its strategy of cooptation/competition with the palace (in which, as Hamid writes, it could never win, just steadily attempt to make gains to constrain the room for maneuver of palace) and not enough on the context.
For instance, the PJD’s setbacks cannot only be ascribed to its relationship with the palace, but also several other important contextual factors. One is the changing regional geopolitical configuration and especially the anti-Islamist authoritarian counter-revolution led by two key Arab allies of Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates after the 2013 coup in Egypt and more or less supported by its two key Western allies, France and the US. Another is the PJD’s own internal challenges, ranging from rivalry from other Islamist movements (especially Adl Wa al-Ihsan, numerically the largest Islamist movement in the country and the most engaged on Palestine, and the Salafi movement, which was particularly energized over the Syrian uprising) to the diminishing returns it could offer to its cadres and electoral base despite the opportunities to hold elected office and posts in the civil service. Finally, the piece ignores a clever electoral strategy in the last election by parties close to the palace such as the RNI that both appealed to the PJD’s sociological base (on non-religious grounds), revived traditional networks of support among local notables and of course benefited from vast amounts of funding and the tacit support of the interior ministry.
In short, Hamid is too reductionist here in viewing the PJD’s fate as driven mostly by its relationship with the palace, as vitally important as that is, and by being forced to renounce its ideological agenda on Palestine or religion in the public sphere. I’d argue it is just as important to understand the sociological gambit of the PJD as a representative of social classes (mostly lower middle class) that saw it as a vehicle for greater representation, cultural influence and economic access in a highly closed and elitist system. In authoritarian states that have semi-competitive political arenas like Morocco, the paradox is that the “democratic” components of politics has both real and fake aspects. They are dynamic and can be influenced by multiple factors – to reduce things to the palace and the rest is ultimately misleading.
The Death of Syria’s Mystery Woman - New Lines Magazine
Fascinating story on a quietist and quietly influential religious movement in Syria, by Laila Alrefaai and Obayda Amer in Newlines:
The Qubaysiyat have been a secretive, at times underground, revivalist Islamic movement. The group has focused on promoting conservative religious education alongside the secular curriculum taught throughout Syria’s public school system. At first, it did so through underground cells, teaching “lessons” in private homes. But since the early 2000s, when Bashar al-Assad came to power and loosened the country’s restrictions on private schools and colleges, educational institutions run or influenced by the Qubaysiyat have become ubiquitous in Syria, often recognizable by their female teachers, who wear distinctive navy veils. The movement remains largely unknown to the broader world, yet it is believed to boast tens of thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of disciples within Syria, as well as in franchises across the Middle East and even as far afield as Europe and the Americas. At the center of it all has been the towering figure of al-Qubaysi, a woman as influential within the group as she has been mysterious.
Support Civil Society in Tunisia | Newsweek
Former US Ambassador to Tunisia Gordon Gray.