Published on 17 April 2013, by M. Tomazy.
Optimistic observers of the Arab world might like to believe that the Islamist wave sweeping across the region is but a temporary phase that must be traversed before the people regain control of the revolutions that began in Tunisia and were subsequently hijacked by the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafis, Wahhabis and their various strands and offshoots.
Sadly for those who put life and limb on the line only to see the fruits of their struggle stolen by the Islamists who played no part in igniting the Arab Spring, this phase could last for generations. In the meantime, observers interested in the international dimension of the Arab Spring’s consequences may be wondering how the Western powers and Israel on the one hand, and the resurgent Arab Islamists on the other, will relate to one another.
If Israeli and post-9/11 Western rhetoric is to be believed, then the two sides are destined to be locked in interminable conflict. However, the facts point in a different direction.
One of these facts is the cosy relationship enjoyed by the United States and Britain, among others, with the likes of Osama Bin-Ladin before he went independent and, before him, with the extremists of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami when these were seen as a counterweight to progressive pan-Arabism in the 1960s.
Another is the help and encouragement given by Israel first to the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and then to Hamas in the 1980s to counter the influence of the secular Palestine Liberation Organization, which at the time was seen as the bigger threat to the Israeli occupation and the Zionist project.
In other words, Western-Islamist hostility is only relatively recent and, therefore, another scenario could play out as the new Dark Age continues to engulf the Arab world. As Hussein Agha and Robert Malley say in “This is not a revolution”, while the West is embracing and feting yesteryear’s “dangerous” and “extremist” Muslim Brotherhood and painting them as sensible, businesslike pragmatists, the Islamists, in their turn, propose a bargain:
This bargain may surprise those Westerners who have bought into Washington’s, London’s and Tel Aviv’s – and the Islamists’ own – propaganda about a clash of civilizations and similar nonsense.
However, Arab progressives with a long memory will not raise an eyebrow. Given a choice, the former Western imperial powers will always prefer reactionary Islamists to progressive pan-Arab nationalists. The living proof of this is, and always has been, the unbreakable bond between the Western states and Saudi Arabia and its Arab Gulf allies, despite the fact that the latter are the antithesis of freedom, democracy and human rights.