Republished with permission from the Financial Review. First published March 2, 2023.
Some 40 years ago, my wife, Jenny, was in Souk Hamidiyeh in Damascus, standing beside a stall selling women’s underwear. Syrian women dressed in conservative black were inspecting garments featuring lace, feathers, devices that play Jingle Bells, and canaries in the most improbable places. How was this contrast possible, she asked the stall owner. “Ah,” he replied. “When foreigners look, they only see the mountain. Syrians see the volcano underneath.”
That advice resonated with me while I spent 37 years with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, serving in five Middle East posts (including two years with the UN in 1997-98, based in Gaza and Jerusalem) and two postings in Malaysia following the Islamic politics of its Malay community.
My career as a diplomat was followed by a further 12 years as an academic at the Australian National University and for part of that period as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments. For six years, I was also a non-executive director of Centamin, an Australian gold mining company operating mainly in Egypt.
The Arab Middle East was more than a career path and an adventure. In many respects, it was my life. I was a Middle East tragic. I was there to work. But I believed that understanding Arab history and Arab cultures, and acquiring familiarity with key actors and events of the recent past, especially as seen through Arab eyes, were key to working effectively in the region.
I preferred to focus on the human qualities of the region – its humour, warmth and resilience – rather than its conflict-ridden, popular imagery. But that approach had its risks. The professional challenge for me was not to deny the memories, mythologies and lived experiences of the Arab world, with all their poetic power, but to measure the dosage.
I tried to be a man without a story, free of tribal delusions. I also appreciated the complexities, factual and moral, and the ironies of working in and on the Arab world. I knew there was no Fabulon to help iron out its stubborn wrinkles.
That sometimes made it harder seeing policy choices being made in response to instincts, emotions and predispositions, without sufficient knowledge and understanding of the region and its issues. But even as an aging Middle East warhorse turned out to pasture, I came to accept three realities about working on the region.
First, Middle East policy is not a morality play. Upholding our values protects our interests. But expediency, whether political or alliance-related, sometimes shapes decisions. The logic of strategy – and diplomacy – is not always consistent with the logic of politics.
On issues ranging from Suez to Iraq, the greater the strategic import of a particular decision, the more likely it is to be based primarily on political judgments, visceral emotions and inclinations. Australia is not alone in that respect.
Second, it pays to be wary of assumptions based on one’s own values and expectations, including in regard to political legitimacy, in dealing with the region. Beware, especially, of narratives from urbane, English-speaking interlocutors, both Arab and Israeli, that suit, by chance or by design, our own political leanings and values – while all but erasing the voices and views that do not fit into such narratives.
We have a professional, intellectual and moral duty to grapple with the complexity of Arab society. We must accept that views, interests, and values within Arab societies are more than likely to differ from our own. Any apparent synchronicity of views should be cause for cautious investigation as well as celebration.
In the Arab world, moreover, perceptions of our intent will be shaped, if not driven, by demons of history (real and imagined), personalities, and collective memories and narratives. Nor, since the region itself is far from static, do those factors shaping perceptions remain constant.
Third, I have learnt that in the Middle East problems linger, and become more complex, if not increasingly intractable. Whether it be responding to Mongols advancing from Baghdad to Aleppo in the 13th century, or seeking ways of persuading or applying pressure to the behaviour of recalcitrant regimes in the modern era – the decisions we have to live with, and the region has to live with, are usually, and probably have always been, policy choices between bad and much worse.
Be kind to policy advisers
The Middle East is diabolically complex. And it succeeds, perhaps uniquely, in being both personally enriching, and a potential policy and career graveyard, for those who choose to enter it.
It is fine to be a commentator on the bridge of the Middle East Titanic, alternating between expressing hope and smelling ice.
It is rewarding, as an academic, to present students with the complexity and the moral quandaries of Middle East issues, and to encourage them to reflect on their own values in debating them.
But presenting, as an official, arguments in favour of one policy option over another is a professional responsibility which tests one’s values, intellectual honesty, and often one’s endurance.
My memoirs describe a pivotal moment in my career, when I fought, in 1996, to defend an established Australian approach to the question of Palestinian self-determination and statehood. I was trumped by prime minister John Howard in an unbecoming, shouting match with his staff, in the middle of the Zionist Federation of Australia biennial conference dinner.
Such moments aside, however, the key challenges are mostly systemic and intellectually demanding. How does one interpret the national interest on issues arising in the Middle East; what values do you believe governments should be seeking to uphold or defend? And in the grey space between policy advice and political decision-making, how do you explain the reasons why, to busy ministers short of time and under pressure?
Two areas have posed particular problems for me. On the analytical side, I support Arab advocates of reform. But having witnessed the alternatives, I have never believed justice, including social progress, can be delivered in the absence of order.
The processes of removing systems and building durable, decent alternatives are very different. Both processes involve enormous uncertainties and risks, to our interests as well as to those of the countries concerned.
However, I recognise that the capacity of Arab societies to meet the challenges ahead, while growing, will depend on achieving hitherto unknown levels of accountability, and freedom, including freedom to criticise their governments.
Of course, there are costs and risks, but if the greatest asset of the Arab world – the potential of Arab youth – is to be realised, then human rights values, including the right to dissent, need to have a part in decisions taken by Arab governments. They cannot be dismissed as inauthentic, destabilising, or tools of western subversion.
On the policy side, I still struggle with the conundrums of western engagement with the region. Is it acceptable, in the pursuit of policy objectives that are determined by governments, but that are patently unrealistic, to see the aggravation of human suffering – in concrete terms, malnutrition, the absence of shelter for children, or the spread of cholera because of a lack of clean water?
I believe that in foreign policy our credibility matters. And when increasing the vulnerability of children is accepted as a legitimate instrument of policy, western rhetoric about values is hollow indeed.
Can we afford to demonstrate inconsistency in the application of our values, notably where Israeli behaviour contrary to international law is concerned, and yet urge others to respect those values elsewhere? Are there higher values than consistency? It is an argument to be made, case by case, if at all.
But no western government should abide policy goals – in Syria, Iran or Palestine – that are pursued through collective punishment.
So where to from here?
Much has changed in Arab societies in the past five decades, under the cumulative influence of education, literacy, nutrition, internet connectivity, and access to technologies enabling new forms of both mobilisation and repression.
Arab societies are now exposed to external models of business practice, gender empowerment and other values unknown to the region a generation ago. The search for a post-oil economic future for most Arab countries – amidst a demographic explosion, environmental and health challenges – is far removed from the issues confronting someone who began his career in the Arab world during the Cold War, and the oil boom of the early 1970s.
The challenges facing the region are now driven primarily by the countries of the region themselves. The options available to governments, non-state actors, and diasporas are no longer limited by the strategic competition between outside parties.
In most of the contemporary Middle East – with the possible exception of the IMF – it makes next to no difference, on the ground, what outsiders think or say. From an outsider’s perspective, and for progressive elements in the region, that is a mixed blessing.
There will continue to be a surfeit of adversity across the Middle East, including ongoing population displacements, wasted opportunities and economic malaise.
Disequilibrium will be manifest in multiple areas. Power struggles; income disparities; malnutrition; the corrosive effects of violence and corruption; drug trafficking, especially of Captagon, and unbalanced economic growth will all shape the regional outlook.
Even as they seek to participate, in some cases, in the glitz and glamour of global celebrity culture, the rulers of the region will probably be even more fierce in their behaviour than before. They will do so, in part because the defenders of privilege and predictability have found repression works – for them.
Governments will struggle to find a sustainable balance between satisfying the expectations and sometimes contradictory demands of their political audiences, and meeting the imperatives of national survival in a globalised security environment.
For many individuals and groups, the violence of terrorism will not appear much different to the violence which they will experience at the hands of those who act, supposedly against terrorists, or in pursuit of development projects, in the name of their government.
Some Arab governments may be unable to satisfy even the most basic human needs for dignity. Even the resource-rich Arab states are not immune from domestic pressures, including the questions posed by an educated younger generation, or the effects of discord in countries around them. Ultimately, the futures of rich and poor in the Arab world are intertwined.
It is too soon to know or to predict what the next wave of Arab political events might entail when, in due course, hope emerges for an alternative. The mobilisation of a decade ago has been submerged for now, in most all cases, by arguments that freedom is more likely to produce chaos and division, rather than bread and social justice.
But the ice is thinning, especially among the marginalised urban communities, an increasingly alienated Arab middle class in non-oil exporting countries on the brink of impoverishment, and the rural poor.
From an outsider’s perspective, the way forward demands a process, embedded in transparent, inclusive institutions, of establishing a new and broadly accepted paradigm of Arab modernity in support of which the energy, creativity and resources of leaders, state and society can be directed.
Bukra fil mishmish, (tomorrow there will be apricots) my sceptical Arab friends would say. But it took the Titanic a long time to sink, at least in the film
Israel and Palestine
It pains me deeply that the two-state approach in which the US, courageous Israelis and Palestinians, and Arab countries invested for 30 years is beyond salvation. Even in the land of miracles, there is nothing credible to replace it.
To misappropriate Bob Dylan, it looks like it’s dying, and it’s hardly been born.
The only chance of security for both Israelis and Palestinians now rests in achieving a just settlement, within a single state, that treats Israelis and Palestinians as equals. But the prospects of a start being made in that direction by either Palestinians or Israelis look remote. Neither side is prepared emotionally, or organised politically and ideologically, for such a shift.
In addition, there are the vested interests of all sides (including western and Arab governments, as well as Israel and the Palestinian Authority) in maintaining the convenient fiction that a two-state solution is possible.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently spoke of preserving a horizon of hope. But to their victims, meanwhile, deportations, arming civilians, house demolitions and collective punishments are criminal acts of revenge, not deterrence. And acts of terrorism, by whoever commits them, will produce more violence, not a will to compromise.
In the absence of genuine political engagement between Israelis and Palestinians, we are moving to a future best filmed by Quentin Tarantino.
Rather than a two-state solution, I would not rule out a de facto two and a half state outcome for the coming decade: a state, in effect, functioning for the ultra-nationalist and religious Jews; a state functioning for the remainder of the Jews in Israel, and the 1948-era Palestinians, in a divided country; and a semi-state for the remaining Palestinians – which will struggle, with external support, to maintain at least the symbols and service delivery of statehood, but which will lack genuine sovereignty.
Some might argue that future has already arrived.
The modern Arab world has no way to stop the drivers of change, which are generational and societal as well as political, that led to the uprisings beginning a decade ago. We must recognise that our interests are affected by those changes, and respond accordingly.
At risk, for Australia, in this decade is the outlook for securing respect for those values we believe to be of universal relevance, which underpin our identity, and which serve our interests.
Our engagement with the Arab world must be based on a deep appreciation of its changing social, political, and cultural dynamics. DFAT, other government agencies, universities, businesspeople and parliamentarians need to be equipped for that purpose.
We should both speak, and act, according to our values – our identity – because it is in our interests for the international system to be strengthened by observation of those values. But we also have a responsibility to listen, and to respond, where we can, to those who carry the burdens and opportunities of a changing Middle East.
It is Arabs, and Iranians, who must reboot their institutions according to their own sense of what it means to be Arab, or Iranian, in this century. For Australia, like other western countries, turning away from the region will neither help those countries to resolve their problems, nor will it prevent serious challenges to our values, security and other interests.
Interests-based engagement between Australia and the Arab world, combined with the ethical use of power in support of our values, is surely preferable to standing back and hoping for the best.
Robert Bowker is the author of Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots: an Australian Diplomat in the Arab World (Shawline).
