Letter From Cairo: Charting A Global Course Through The Local Arab Debacle

Bilateral trade deals with Israel or using Israel as a conduit for exclusive trade with the US don’t quite count since they avoid the US-sponsored regional dimension altogether. I’d been wondering about this myself for some time given how obedient Arab states are to the US and how in cahoots they are with Israel and the whole (now officially dead and buried) ‘peace’ process. Just look at the early Arab response to the war on Lebanon if you want a blunt illustration of this. The Dr Hazem filled me in on a little tidbit of information I didn’t know. With the cascade of revelations about corruption in Egypt recently, centering round the businessmen members of parliament and the ruling party, it turns out that one of the top business advocates of no normalization with Israel is a major supplier to Israel, and involved specifically in the building of the Israel Exclusion Wall! I’d heard about Palestinian cabinet ministers, under Arafat and Abbass, up to their eyeballs in such contracts but this is completely different. They’re the peace brigade and have been advocates of normalization all along, what are Egyptian businessmen opposed to normalization doing in the picture? How does one reconcile this apparently contradictory set of positions? Dr Hazem’s argument was that Arab elites want to monopolize relations with Israel to stave off attempts by the Arab masses from co-operating with likeminded individuals in Israel against Arab states for democracy and human rights. He sees this as part and parcel of the way Arab states carefully police interactions with the outside world, specifically the Western states and the international order, again at the level of foreign intervention to bolster civic liberties here (monitoring elections, civil society promotion, reform, etc). http://www.turkishweekly.net/comments.php?id=2291#

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