Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2009, page 37
Islam and the Near East in the Far East
Obama’s Speech: “It’s Really About the Arabs”
By John Gee
“HE WAS talking about the Arabs,” said a Singaporean Malay journalist to me shortly after hearing President Barack Obama’s appeal on June 4 for a “new beginning” in relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world. I did not think further about the remark until I heard much the same thing again from other Muslims from Southeast Asian countries. They found the speech interesting, but thought that Obama’s message was primarily for the Middle East, not for them.
I had clearly heard the speech differently. The Bush administration’s “war on terror” and its largely adversarial relationship with a big chunk of the world’s Muslim population had had a negative impact on Muslims everywhere, and Obama was careful to address many of his remarks to Muslims in general and to non-Muslims’ perceptions of Islam as a faith. So why was there this sense of disconnectedness from what he had to say? It couldn’t only be due to his comments on the Palestinians and Israel, since this is a concern of Muslims in Southeast Asia.
In the end, I was left with a couple of impressions of the reasons for this attitude. One was that Muslims in Asia east of Iran often feel as if they are regarded by outsiders as of less importance on the world stage than those of the Middle East—that they are almost an afterthought in considerations of the Muslim world. They think this is unfair: the most populous Muslim country is Indonesia, the second largest Muslim population in the world is in India, and both Bangladesh and Pakistan are more populous than any Arab state, so why should they often be made to feel like the poor relations—or, to be more precise, like Muslims of another rank?
Related to this perspective is another regarding the practice of Islam. Despite the terrorist attacks in Indonesia and the Philippines in the past decade, Southeast Asian Muslims mostly consider themselves to be politically moderate and open-minded on social and cultural issues, and they draw a line between themselves and what they regard as an intolerant and rigid interpretation of Islam that has its home in the Middle East. They see terrorists and fanatics as being wholly at odds with local Islam, and relatively few would know that in the Middle East, most Muslims also see terrorism and fanaticism as alien to their own tradition and approach to life.
In short, in choosing to make his first presidential sally into the Muslim world a visit to the Middle East, Obama made the right choice if his primary concern was to take on the issue of the Palestine conflict. However, a “new start” to relations with the Muslim world has to be not only a matter of backing words with deeds, as many commentators pointed out, but recognizing the diversity among Muslims: the “new start” must be made in various localities, according to these different circumstances and interests.
Why was there this sense of disconnectedness from what he had to say?
Perhaps opportunities will be made as the administration looks to its relations with countries in South and Southeast Asia. One thing’s for sure: when Obama goes to Indonesia, where he spent part of his childhood, he’ll meet an enthusiastic response from people who want to hear what he has to say. Then it may be seen whether the inadequacy of a “one size fits all” approach to Muslims has been fully incorporated into the administration’s thinking.
Territory for Peace
On the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty following Camp David, Israel’s ambassador to Singapore wrote an op-ed to mark the occasion for The Straits Times (“Peace is possible,” by Ilan Ben-Dov, March 31, 2009). Similar articles probably appeared elsewhere. Ben-Dov made points about the desire for peace, the difficulties of a peace process and the durability of the treaty. To those not well up on their recent history, it would all have seemed praiseworthy and sensible. Surely, if peace was possible between Egypt and Israel, and Jordan and Israel, it could be achieved between Israel and the rest of the Arab world?
The argument has been made many times before and no doubt will be heard again. Unfortunately, it leaves out an inconvenient fact about what made those treaties possible from the point of view of their Arab state signatories.
The Egypt-Israel treaty was controversial in the Arab world at the time, and was regarded as a betrayal by the Palestinians, who believed that it strengthened Israel’s hand politically—and, three years later, allowed it to concentrate its forces against the PLO in Lebanon. Instead of dealing with its Arab adversaries collectively and facing the alternatives of continuing a “no peace” situation or agreeing on a comprehensive settlement, Israel, supported by U.S. diplomacy, was able to break the Arab united front and deal with its neighbors as if it was tackling a series of bilateral conflicts.
Nevertheless, there is a point about the treaties with Egypt and Jordan which their celebrants in Israel and the U.S. choose to overlook: neither would have been possible without Israel agreeing to and implementing a full withdrawal from the territories of both states. In the case of Egypt, Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula to the international border that separated Mandate Palestine from Egypt. It accepted arbitration over the future of the disputed Taba area (which it ultimately lost). The areas of Jordan held by Israel were far smaller: a tiny pocket of land in the Jordan Valley and slivers of territory between the Dead and Red Seas. Amman still wanted them back, and their return to Jordanian sovereignty was part of the peace settlement.
In both cases, Israel made a peace treaty possible by accepting a condition that it has thus far rejected in its dealings with the Palestinians: to withdraw from their territories in full and return those lands back to their sovereignty. Given that U.N. Resolution 242 is still regarded internationally as the major guide to the shape of a settlement, that means giving up the West Bank and Gaza Strip and withdrawing totally from them. The principle is clear, according to what Israel itself did on two occasions—so when are its supporters going to admit the point and accept that a basic condition for peace with the Palestinians on anything other than a “one state” settlement is the honoring of terms on territory in line with those agreed with Egypt and Jordan?
John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Southeast Asia, and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel.
