PHILADELPHIA – September 5, 2023 – The Fall 2023 issue of Middle East Quarterly features a trio of competing perspectives on how to address the threat posed by Hamas in Gaza, analyses of two important strategic alignments in the Mediterranean, and contributions by other leading specialists on issues of contemporary concern.
In “Is Disarming Hamas Israel’s Best Policy?,” Middle East Forum president Daniel Pipes, Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS) president Efraim Inbar, and Israel Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) founder and CEO Martin Sherman critique the ambitious strategy for achieving the disarmament of the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement outlined by Israeli Brig. Gen. (Res) Yossi Kuperwasser in the Summer 2023 issue of MEQ. In addition to questioning the efficacy of Kuperwasser’s prescription of economic pressure, regional diplomacy, and military force in achieving the desired goal, all three call into question the very desirability of this goal.
Inbar worries that the disarmament of Hamas will serve only to strengthen the Palestinian Authority, which he sees as “more dangerous to Israel than Hamas because it enjoys international legitimacy and has greater control over Palestinian-populated territories.” Pipes, in contrast, thinks disarmament will transform Hamas into “an Islamist equivalent of the Palestinian Authority,” a “cure worse than the disease,” because the primary threat to Israel is not Palestinian violence, but Palestinian delegitimation efforts led by the PA, which have helped fuel the growth of global anti-Zionism to “hitherto unimaginable heights.” If Hamas sheds its terrorist image and is “transmogrifie[d] ... into an international darling” much as the old PLO was after Oslo, this would “add an Islamist message of delegitimization to the PA’s nationalist one, greatly speeding and enhancing the reach of Palestinian anti-Zionism.” Sherman, for his part, sees disarmament leading to chaos in Gaza, as it would “inevitably undermine Hamas’s ability to impose law and order” in the face of challenges from “even more virulently Judeophobic Islamist adversaries.”
In “Greece and Libya: A New Maritime Dynamic,” Spyridon Plakoudas, an assistant professor of homeland security at Rabdan Academy, United Arab Emirates, examines the response of Greece to Turkey’s growing military and political domination of Libya. In a manner befitting a member of the EU (and the birthplace of democracy), Greece has responded to its archrival’s proxy warfare and arms smuggling in Libya not in kind (as Russia has done), but by “invest[ing] heavily” in ambitious, but failed, initiatives to organize free and fair elections in Libya (believing that elected leaders will resist Turkish satellitization), by forging multilateral economic and energy cooperation with other Mediterranean states threatened by Turkey’s advance, and by strengthening U.S.-Greek military cooperation.
In “Cyprus and Israel: A New Geopolitical Equation,” George N. Tzogopoulos, a lecturer at the European Institute of Nice, discusses a second strategic reorientation in the Mediterranean triggered by Turkish aggression – the evolving Cyprus-Israel relationship. For decades, Nicosia prioritized relations with the Arab world over Israel ties in order to secure its diplomatic support on resolution of the “Cyprus question” vis-à-vis Turkey. With the deterioration of Israeli-Turkish ties beginning in 2008 and the discovery of natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean, however, practical cooperation between Nicosia and Jerusalem has grown steadily.
Turning to Iraq, the wave of mass anti-government protests that swept through Iraq in 2019-2020 was a Middle East rarity in having actually achieved something – a new election law that eroded the ability of Iraq’s ruling Iranian-backed Shiite parties to buy votes. In “Were the 2021 Iraqi Elections Fair?” Raed Ahmed, an assistant professor at Al-Iraqia University in Baghdad, traces how Iranian-backed parties defeated in the 2021 elections nevertheless managed to get the government they wanted, annul the election law, and “keep the same ethno-sectarian political system running.”
In “Blaming Pro-Israel Christians for Palestinian Problems,” Focus on Western Islamism managing editor Dexter Van Zile critiques three books that seek to place the lion’s share of blame for suffering in the Middle East on Western Christians, from nineteenth-century Protestant writers and missionaries to present-day evangelical Zionists. This tendency to “portray Muslim violence as a variable dependent solely on Western misdeeds and not a result of Islamic doctrine or Muslim agency” is an endemic feature of modern Middle East studies.
Finally, book reviews by Pipes, Mark Durie, Ilan Berman, Alberto Mingardi, and Roger Kaplan critically examine new works on a range of important topics.
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Gregg Roman
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