Jacob Goldberg
Why is the Middle East So Unstable and Unpredictable?
Summary
Professor Jacob Goldberg sits down to discuss how the Middle East is not as unpredictable as many think and that it works and behaves very much like other regions in the world, though with several key differences.
Jacob Goldberg
Jacob Goldberg is the former acting head of the Dayan Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel-Aviv University. He has been a visiting professor at Cornell University, George Washington Universtiy, and the University of California San Diego. He received his undergraduate degree in Middle East and Arabic from Tel-Aviv University. He holds a law degree from Tel Aviv University along with an MA and PhD in Middle East politics from Harvard University. Additionally, he was the foreign policy adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. His book, The Foreign Policy of Saudi Arabia was published by Harvard University Press in 1986.
Carly Maisel
Carly Maisel is the global CEO of Kirsh Philanthropies.
It’s very simple, even though there are many explanations, but the two most important ones are immigration of Christian Syrians, waves of immigration because they realised that they live in an Arab Middle East. They wanted a secular European or Western oriented state in Lebanon and hundreds of thousands of them realised that this is never going to happen. Lebanon is part of the Arab world. And little by little they emigrated, first wave in 1948, second wave during the first civil war in 1958, third wave in 1975, fourth wave after the establishment of Hizballah, fifth wave and sixth wave and so on and so forth. And then of course there is the rate of birth among the Christians. The Muslims, especially the Shiites, have three or four more children as the Christians because they are European secular, modern oriented. They have at maximum two kids, whereas the Muslims have a lot of children. So if you add childbirth and then first and foremost immigration, you understand why they declined from they were even more than 55%. But please keep in mind that what I called the original sin was that non-Christian regions were incorporated into the Mount Lebanon original Christian enclave, the Northern Shiite, the Northern Sunni, the Saudian, and the Eastern Shiites. That was the first historical reason for the erosion in Christian majority.
It’s not a coincidence that I did not mention Israel even once, except one time when I mentioned it in the context of how how many Arabs were killed in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel does not fit at all into this domestic dimension. And this is why I made it clear at the beginning of my talk that these four dimensions of instability, domestic, regional, global, and the Arab-Israeli conflict are totally separated from each other. Or to put it differently, had there been no Arab-Israeli conflict, everything that I said this afternoon would’ve remained intact. The identity crisis, the artificialness of the countries and the borders, the multiethnic realities of these countries all would’ve existed regardless of whether there is Israel or there is no Israel. And I’m grateful for the question because this was an important clarification and the best one I could make in order to drive home the nature and the magnitude of the domestic crisis. It has nothing to do with Arab-Israeli conflict, nothing to do with the inter-Arab rivalries and nothing to do also with the global dimension, the French, British, and in for 40 years, the Soviet American, all these elements of the domestic dimension would have existed without the other three dimensions.
You can imagine that solving the domestic dimension and these multi crises would be equal to square in a circle. The only solution that I have heard that is a comprehensive solution is to go back to the Ottoman Empire. During the Ottoman Empire, there was one major centre, one major authority, one major identity. Everybody knew who the emperor was. He was the head of the state and the head of the religion. Their loyalty was to him. The empire was divided into districts, provinces. Each one was governed by a Wali or governor of a province, a governor of a district. Each province was basically monolithic, predominantly monolithic, to reduce the possibility of crisis, of chaos, of civil wars. So going back to the Ottoman, the days of the Ottoman Empire would potentially be a solution, but of course, this is what Arad Duhan would like to have. This is the agenda that he tried to advance. Having again, a Middle East ruled by Turkey, reviving the Ottoman Empire, maybe with a different name, not maybe using a different name because the Ottoman Dynasty is nonexistent, calling it an Islamic state. This is what all these Muslim groups that I described in all these parts of the Muslim Arab world would’ve loved. What are the chances of this happening? Close to zero. In the absence of going back, I can see in the foreseeable future any other answer, but continuing strife, continuing chaos, and continuing civil war ups and downs, but basically unresolved issues of identity, of being an artificial creation and having all these ethnic groups fighting each other.