2. War, State, and Society in the Contemporary Middle East

5. Si Vis Stabilitatem, Para Bellum

State Building, National Security, and War Preparation in Syria

Volker Perthes

Since Hafiz al-Asad’s assumption of power in 1970, Syria has been transformed into a fairly strong security state. Political and social control have been firmly established. The extractive capacities of the state and the participation of the populace in regime-led institutions have been enhanced. Regime stability has been maintained even after the collapse of the country’s main international ally, the Soviet Union. Moreover, Syrian policy making has been marked by the virtual absence of external interference, that is, by a high measure of national autonomy.^[1] Perhaps most important, the state has become a security state in the sense that its prime function, if not its raison d’être for those who control it, has been to serve both national and regime security more than anything else. Economic rationalities, for instance, have regularly been subordinated to the rationality of regime maintenance and control.

The emergence in Syria of such a strong state and stable regime is of particular note in light of both the notorious weakness of postindependence Syria, which was very much an object of regional and international power politics and which even sacrificed its sovereignty to establish a union with Egypt, and the fragility of the Ba‘thist military-party regime that, after the failure of the union and a short interregnum of the ancien régime, ruled the country from 1963 to 1970. In hindsight, these first years of Ba‘thist rule appear to be a transition period in which the substructure of the postindependence regime was destroyed, while new structures did not provide for political stability. The parties of the ancien régime were banned, its leading representatives driven out of the country, its landed and industrial bourgeoisie seriously weakened, and its bureaucracy flooded with ambitious and often politically committed migrants from the countryside. The new regime, though, was internally fragmented, split between different networks and groups, and weakened by the struggle for power of various military and party leaders. It was not in control of the military, whose involvement in politics it had furthered and legitimized. Nor was the regime able to defend the country. The June war of 1967 revealed that the regime and its armed forces were anything but prepared for the battle that the Ba‘th’s radical nationalists had promised would come and that would lead to the liberation of Palestine. Furthermore, the regime proved unable to build viable legal institutions, and it was not able to create a legitimizing, nationally integrative myth. Even as late as 1970, important segments of the active population did not fully accept the Syrian state as the legitimate arena for national politics. Some of the country’s political elite were openly prepared to consider a capital other than Damascus—notably Cairo, where Nasser’s legacy still exerted a powerful appeal, or Baghdad where the exiled Ba‘thist old guard wielded influence—as their political reference point.

Only after Asad’s takeover was a new, coherent structure of power and control set up and national integration pushed forward. The state apparatus and the armed forces were vastly expanded, decision-making structures were centralized, and popular or professional organizations, such as the trade unions, Peasant’s Union, Women’s Union, and others, were reorganized into hierarchical, corporatist bodies that could, at the same time, represent, mobilize, and contain all important segments of the population. All these measures helped to establish regime control over the largest part of active society and also helped to make sure that such local or sectoral strongmen as still existed or were to emerge would rise only through regime-controlled organizations, exercise their influence through regime channels, and thereby invest their own power resources in the system. Although it relied on substantial rent income, the regime was by no means independent from domestic resources. It managed, however, not to become dependent on the support of one particular societal stratum alone. And while not regulating all spheres of life—the regime is authoritarian not totalitarian—it has deeply penetrated society, effectively monopolized the means of organized violence, and largely succeeded in making the Syrian nation-state the accepted frame of politics.^[2]

I will argue here that the achievement of a remarkably high measure of stateness, as well as the consolidation of the regime, maintenance of its stability, and the capacity to generate substantial external rents are largely the result of the pervasive militarization of state and society, an enormous buildup of the security forces, and an almost constant preparation for war. State building and the strengthening of the means of national security cannot be separated in the Syrian case. As I will explain, however, Syria’s experience of war preparation is distinctive in several ways. In contrast to the experience of war preparation and state building in other cases, Syria’s reliance on external resources to underwrite its perpetual state of militarization meant that specific shifts in state-society relations that we usually associate with intensive preparation for war—new patterns of bargaining between regimes and social groups, including the emergence of new constraints on the exercise of political authority—did not occur. In fact, Syria’s status as a belligerent generated high levels of strategic rent and thus reduced the regime’s dependence on domestic resources to fund its programs of militarization and its building of a security state. In this sense, the domestic outlays needed to maintain pervasive militarization can be considered an investment that paid off in the form of even higher levels of strategic rents. In addition, Syria’s experience since the early 1970s suggests the need to understand and explain war preparation and militarization as an end in itself and not as a prelude to actual war making. After the 1973 war, Syria’s continued militarization did not imply that the regime intended to lead a war, or that engaging in actual warfare or even preparedness for all-out war, had been the essential element of Asad’s political project.^[3] Rather, it is the domestic social and political benefits of protracted militarization, subsidized by external resources, that explain the regime’s determination to preserve Syria’s status as a security state.

Militarization and War Preparation

War preparation and militarization necessarily involve the mobilization of resources for military efforts and the buildup of military capabilities.^[4] This military dimension, however, forms only part of the picture. In the case of Syria under Asad, militarization and war preparation have been an almost all-encompassing feature of the country’s political-cultural development and political economy. These processes determine how the regime governs, and strategies of social incorporation help legitimate the regime and the Syrian nation-state and form an important element of resource generation. In the discourse of the regime, the preparation for “the battle” has been given absolute political primacy. All other goals figure as secondary.^[5]

In the following sections, I will first give an overview of the expansion of the security apparatus under Asad and the regional context of war preparation and buildup. I will then explain how these efforts served to legitimize the regime and build a fairly strong and consolidated state. It is important to note here that the use of the regional situation to legitimate militarization and the establishment of strong mechanisms of domestic control is not some kind of trick the government played on its people. External threats were (and are) real. However, the policies the Syrian leadership uses to confront these threats have at the same time had a domestic function—namely, the maintenance of stability and control.

The Buildup of Force and Control

Under Asad’s rule, the buildup of the security forces has indeed been enormous. The manpower of the regular armed forces, including the gendarmerie and the Syrian contingent of the Palestine Liberation Army, increased from some 80,000 in 1970 to 430,000 by the early 1990s. Even compared to the rapid growth of Syria’s population, the expansion of the armed forces is remarkable. In 1970, there were some 13 members of the armed forces for every 1,000 Syrians, growing to more than 35 per 1,000 by the second half of the 1980s. Since then, the total number of persons employed in the Syrian armed forces has remained more or less stagnant, producing a decline in the military/civilian ratio to around 20 military persons for every 1,000 Syrians. Notably, the main buildup took place only from 1974, that is, after the October War of 1973. Also, from 1975 Syria’s military expenditures, including estimated expenditure on arms procurement, soared, from only about 10 percent of the GDP in the 1970–74 period—except for the war year 1973, when expenditures were considerably higher—to around 15 percent, with peaks of over 20 percent, in the years till 1986; only thereafter did it decrease, dropping to around 10 percent of the GDP by the early 1990s, and below 7 percent of the GDP by 1995.^[6]

Even though the buildup of the 1970s and 1980s was not solely linked to the confrontation with Israel, it has to be seen in the context of this confrontation—which was also how it was generally understood both domestically and abroad. Given that the 1973 war and the ensuing disengagement on the Syrian-Israeli front had not ended Israel’s occupation of Syrian territory, and that a negotiated return of the Golan to Syria and a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace seemed unlikely at that time, Syria had to prepare for a possible renewal of fighting. In addition, the Syrian army had been heavily engaged in Lebanon since 1976. While Syria’s Lebanon involvement certainly enhanced the regime’s capacity to project its power regionally, it was primarily regarded as part of the confrontation with Israel, inasmuch as one of the major Syrian fears had been that Israel could take advantage of Lebanon’s fragmentation. Under the premises of the confrontation with Israel, Syria further increased its armament efforts in the wake of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979, which left Syria as the only credible confrontation state. The widely publicized rationale behind the armament policies of Damascus was now that Syria alone would have to achieve what was called “strategic parity with the enemy”; that is, a military capability that would allow it not only to defend itself against Israeli aggression but eventually also force Israel to make concessions.

At the same time, growing internal unrest provided further incentive to strengthen the regime’s security apparatus. From 1979, a close-to-civil-war situation evolved in parts of the country. Only by the employment of warlike means was the regime able to gain the upper hand over its Islamist-led challengers and finally crush their rebellion in the spring of 1982. In the summer of that year, during Israel’s Lebanon invasion, Syrian forces were dragged into open war by their Israeli adversaries. This engagement caused catastrophic blows to the Syrian forces, bringing home to the regime and to Syrians in general that the country was far from achieving anything like military parity with Israel, that Syria would not be able to choose the time and place of “the battle,” and that war preparation therefore would have to be intensified. Armament efforts were indeed increased considerably in the following years.

In the course of this preparation for the eventual battle with Israel, as it was constantly referred to in official discourse, the armed forces were also professionalized and depoliticized. While political indoctrination still played a role in the armed forces, the general theme of this indoctrination was the army’s role in defending the homeland as well as the “revolution,” that is, the regime: the army was no longer the breeding ground for an ideology or political project of its own that set the armed forces apart from the state and its leadership. It was transformed from a power center whose leading members pursued their own political ambitions and what they considered their sociopolitical mission into an institution that, though harboring and defending its own corporate interests, would obey orders and preserve the stability of state and regime rather than constantly threaten it. With political primacy given to the needs of national security and war preparation, the army was, for the first time since independence, effectively subordinated to the political leadership. The army and the rest of the security forces now formed the strongest instrument of the state, allowing the latter to monopolize the means of organized violence, including control over the Ba‘th Party militia and those Palestinian forces that until 1970 had enjoyed some independence from the Syrian state. Notably, this monopolization of the means of violence in the hands of the political leadership was referred to as a “unification of command”—that is, unification of state, party, and military as demanded in the light of the prospective battle.^[7]

There is no doubt that the military regards the Asad regime as “theirs.” While Syria under Asad does not represent a full-fledged military dictatorship, it is certainly a dictatorship in which the military wields strong influence. The president himself is a military person, and military and security officers occupy important government positions. Neither the prime minister, nor the minister of finance, let alone parliament, has a say over the military budget or matters of state security. And the highest echelons of the security apparatus, rather than the government or the leadership body of the ruling Ba‘th Party, are likely to have a decisive voice once the question of succession to President Asad becomes acute.

Militarization and Social Incorporation

Militarization, of course, does not only denote a particular condition of the relationship between the government and the military, but also denotes a condition of the state-society relationship that includes practices of governance and the political incorporation of society. For more than thirty years, emergency laws have been in force in Syria. Its various security services, or mukhabarat, have virtually unchecked powers and a long record of arbitrary encroachments on the freedom and property of citizens. According to the security logic of the regime, the continued application of emergency laws is vindicated or even dictated by the ongoing state of war in which the country finds itself.^[8] War and the necessities of the battle, however, are used not only to justify authoritarianism and the lack of personal freedom but also as the rationale behind the development of political institutions. The establishment of the Progressive National Front (PNF), for instance—the coalition body that joins the ruling Ba‘th Party with a couple of tolerated smaller parties—has frequently been presented as needed to mobilize “all progressive and popular energies” and put them at the service of “the battle.”^[9]

Since 1970, parts of the regime structure itself have been reorganized along quasi-military, hierarchical lines. This applies in particular to the Ba‘th Party. The principle of collective leadership that had applied within the party until Asad’s putsch of 1970 was replaced by a highly personalized style of leadership. Internal party elections were increasingly replaced by the use of appointments. Important policy directions were no longer decided upon by party congresses but commanded and transmitted through the party from the top down; and any discussion of the general party line, as defined by the president, has become off-limits even to the party congress. Moreover, the dividing lines between the party as a political organization and the security apparatus have become blurred, as much of the party’s energy is spent on the political control and so-called security evaluations of Syrian citizens.

Beyond the Ba‘th Party, much of Syrian society itself has been militarized, and a generally militaristic political culture has evolved. This is largely due to the direct incorporation into state structures of an important part of active society via the security apparatus, and to the militaristic socialization of the country’s younger generations in particular. The military and security apparatus are leading agents of socialization, and militaristic values form an important part of the curriculum, as it were, that young Syrians complete from prep school to university. Both incorporation and military socialization have helped to politically contain the population, which over the last three decades has undergone substantial processes of social change and mobilization, including rapid urbanization, increasing literacy, and the formation of more distinct class structures.^[10]

By the early 1990s, the security apparatus—including the regular armed forces, an estimated 100,000 police and mukhabarat, and some 60,000 civilians employed in companies run by the Ministry of Defense—gave work to almost half of all people employed by the state, or directly employed some 15 percent of the total workforce. Within that number were some 60,000 conscripts drafted into the army or police each year for their two-and-a-half-years of military service. For many a young villager the army still represents a chance to leave the rural environment behind and acquire a career. Many conscripts receive their only professional training during their military service. And many families, not only those from rural areas, consider it an opportunity to place one of their sons in the security apparatus. Given the large number of persons directly connected to the security apparatus, the military is anything but an isolated caste. Rather, it has widely penetrated society. Moreover, given that military persons and others working with the ubiquitous security apparatus are visibly privileged and can usually deliver wasta (mediation), and that dealing with the security services has become part of people’s daily lives and strategies of survival, few Syrians would not find it advantageous to establish good relations with some military or mukhabarat officer.

The military also organizes and commands volunteer militias attached to the Ba‘th Party, the Peasant Union, the trade unions, and other mass organizations and runs mandatory military training programs in high schools and universities.^[11] Indeed, education in Syrian schools is thoroughly militaristic. Intermediate-level and high school students wear military-style school uniforms; students who participate in parachute or special combat courses organized by the official and quasi-mandatory Revolutionary Youth Organization obtain special privileges such as preferential university acceptance; and members of the youth organization have occasionally been used as police reserves. A Syrian survey among primary school pupils analyzing the contribution of the pedagogic and political programs of the Pioneers of the Ba‘th—the mandatory organization for children of primary school age—to the development of children’s values and norms left no doubts about both educational goals and achievements at the primary school level. While pointing critically to shortcomings regarding the children’s geographic and historical knowledge, the study noted positively the deeply embedded values of sacrifice and martyrdom for the defense of the homeland against its enemies and for the liberation of its occupied territories.^[12]

While the young generation is the main recipient of such militaristic socialization, other social segments too are constantly reminded that Syria is at war and that one’s personal and the country’s collective war preparation efforts are what really counts. Public spectacles are a case in point. Consider the display of combat exercises at the opening ceremony of the Mediterranean Games in Latakia, or the transformation, in public speech and official posters of the president’s second son, Bashar al-Asad, from a civilian, almost intellectual eye-doctor to a military officer once he stepped in to replace his late brother as a young representative of the regime and potential successor to his father.^[13] There is a comparatively large output of books dealing with general—as opposed to specifically Syrian—military issues and of works of art praising struggle and martyrdom. Employees of the public sector and the bureaucracy are regularly mobilized for “voluntary” unpaid days of labor for the “twin battle of development and liberation,” and even the private sector is forced to participate through what is called, literally, the “war effort” (al-majhud al-harbi), a special tax for defense purposes that is levied on business profits. Amounting to only a fraction of normal business taxes, this additional war tax is not so much a meaningful source of government revenues as a reminder to the business class of the state of war and of their national duty to contribute to the nation’s defense efforts.

Legitimation of Regime and State

Not surprisingly, militarization and the pervasive reminders of the state of war and the country’s frontline status have had an important legitimating function for the Syrian regime. As noted, the demands of the battle have done more than serve to justify heavy-handed rule and limitations of personal freedom. Since the external threat to Syria and the greater Arab homeland—as well as Syria’s role in confronting these threats—has generally been credible, the militarization of public life has rarely been questioned. And Syria’s stance in the Arab-Israeli confrontation has been one element that has retained for the regime a modicum of domestic legitimacy during periods of serious public discontent. Consider how Israel’s Lebanon invasion of 1982, as well as the attacks by U.S. forces on Syrian positions in Lebanon the following year, helped to distract public attention from the destruction of Hama at the hands of the Syrian army just a couple of months before Israel’s siege of Beirut, and to silence domestic opposition.^[14] Or consider how the constant criticism by, among others, trade unions and Syria’s official Communist Party regarding the regime’s handling of social and economic policies and even its toleration of corruption and the lack of democracy have always been mitigated by references to the “national stance” of country and regime.

Asad is probably right when suggesting, if only to a Western public, that he might lose domestic support if he gave up his tough stance in the Arab-Israeli context and settled with Israel for less than a domestically justifiable peace.^[15] It is also notable that the army itself and defense expenditures have hardly ever been the object of criticism. As a matter of fact, regime representatives themselves have occasionally pointed to the country’s defense burden to justify administrative shortcomings or budgetary constraints, but have not, to date, felt any pressure to defend or explain this burden, that is, the military buildup and its presumed economic and social costs. This is so not only because the regime is not practically accountable to the public but also because under the premises of external confrontation and war preparation this burden is an undisputed and largely noncontroversial issue.^[16]

We can further assume that both militarization and the incorporation of a large part of society via the security apparatus, as well as the credibility of the external threat and of war mobilization, contributed to the territorialization of political and social life in Syria and, thereby, to the legitimacy and stability of the Syrian nation-state. Militarization, in other words, has helped to further a spirit of Syrianness—an identity related to the territory of Syria within its postindependence borders—and lessen the importance of both regional (subnational) and transnational links and loyalties. Despite official Arab nationalist rhetoric, the actual Syria-first orientation of the government has never been hidden, and it seems to be generally accepted. Distinctions are made, for instance, between “our Syrian people in the Golan” and the “Palestinian brothers” who must eventually assume responsibility for their own future—notwithstanding Syria’s aspirations to a dominant position in its immediate geopolitical environment. Lebanon too, despite Syrian domination over much of Lebanese policy, is neither represented in the public discourse, nor—as far as can be judged from largely impressionistic evidence—commonly perceived as part of the Syrian nation-state, but as an independent country in which Syria may have certain tasks and policy objectives. There is the occasional reference to the “one people,” but it is, clearly, sha‘b wahid fi baladayn—one people in two countries.^[17]

While other factors also play a role, Syria’s frontline position in the Arab-Israeli conflict has certainly helped a great deal to crystallize this distinctive Syrianness. There is considerable agreement among Syrians that their state is the strongest defender of Arab rights and the principal adversary of Israel, that it is the military power and national stance of Syria that Israel primarily seeks to weaken, and that Syria—the nation-state—is accordingly entitled to exert some influence over its weaker Arab neighbors and their regional policies. Israeli attacks on Lebanon, in contrast, do not cause many Syrians sleepless nights. While Syrians may display solidarity with their Lebanese neighbors, there is no indication that they consider such attacks as directed against their own country or people. The territorial boundary between Syria and Lebanon, it seems, is as much established in the hearts and minds of ordinary Syrians as it is recognized and respected by Israel’s fighter pilots.

And while other Arab leaders, notably King Hussein of Jordan and Saddam Hussein of Iraq, have enjoyed at times some popularity among Syrians, Damascus is clearly the qibla of politics, even for a dissident Ba‘thi nationalist from eastern Syria, or a traditional Druze from the Jabal al-‘Arab. The legitimacy of the Syrian nation-state and its institutions, including, prominently, the army, is not today in doubt, and the legitimacy of the state certainly exceeds that of the regime and its individual representatives. Regime legitimacy has known its ups and downs, but what the regime doubtless has managed to gain and maintain is a de facto legitimacy built on the fact that there is no one other than Asad who can claim to represent the country and its people. Whether Syrians adore Asad or strongly dislike him, both perspectives are defined in relation to him and his government’s policies rather than anyone else’s. And national, or nation-state, pride is generally boosted when Asad, regardless of whether or not he is really popular, insists on meeting U.S. presidents not in Washington, as other Arab and Third World leaders do, but in Damascus or Geneva, thereby demonstrating Syria’s regional power and importance.

Resource Generation: the War Dividend

Syria is one of few countries that has been able to combine substantial allocations for defense purposes with a comparatively high level of civilian public expenditure. Rather than being overburdened by its spending on defense, since the October War of 1973 Syria has successfully managed to exploit its strategic, regional location as a means of external resource generation.^[18] Syria paid for only a fraction of its armament bill, for example; most of its arms imports were paid for by its Arab allies or financed by Soviet soft loans, the largest part of which post–Soviet Russia probably will have to write off. Only Syria’s current military spending, as reflected in official defense budgets, must be covered from domestic sources. Although these expenditures are high—ranging from 30–35 percent of the budget—they cannot be considered simply a wasteful burden. Rather, they represent an investment that permits the regime to maximize returns on the country’s location and its strategic posture. Military expenditures, in other words, are an investment in military credibility that earn a strategic rent or war dividend in the form of financial transfers. Syria’s regional sponsors only put such resources at the disposal of the regime because of Syria’s strategic position and its military credibility, that is, its constant preparation for war. On the basis of a comparison of flows of regional aid to Syria with similar flows to structurally similar Arab states that were not at the same time confrontation states, Syria’s total war dividend for the 1970s and 1980s can be estimated at about $12–13 billion, or some 5–6 percent of the country’s GDP.^[19]

The buildup of a large security machine and the constant preparation for war has no doubt engendered socioeconomic and political costs—consider the absorption of qualified personnel by military rather than civilian sectors of the economy, or the militarization of public life and political culture. Also Syria has not been spared the distorting effects of rent on economic structures and culture—such as a strong import orientation, the relative neglect of agriculture, the disproportionate growth of distributive sectors and of the bureaucracy, and the spread of a rent-seeking mentality among Syrians.

In making these claims about the regime’s use of militarization to maximize strategic rent, I am not suggesting that rent-seeking policies represent a rational long-term strategy informed by cost-benefit calculations on the part of political elites. Nor is it my argument that war preparation was intentionally designed from the outset to serve as a strategy for the generation of strategic rents. Indeed, the Syrian regime viewed the buildup of force and the militarization of society as a political and security need. Yet it rapidly learned that it was able to draw economic benefits from its strategic position and hard-line posture. To the extent that the Syrian leadership was aware of the social costs and economic-opportunity losses militarization and war preparation involved, it may have considered these costs as bearable given their political value. Considering that Syria’s strategic rent was not dependent on domestic bargaining, and that it could be used freely for infrastructural development as well as for the expansion of state services and the bureaucracy, it served to increase both the autonomy of the state from its citizenry and its penetration of and hold on society.

Prepared for War?

In sum, war preparation in Syria has served as a useful means of regime consolidation, social mobilization, social control, and even economic development. Throughout history, of course, there have been many cases where war preparation or even the creation of international tension have been used to increase the infrastructural power of states, particularly to provide governments with enhanced extractive capabilities and to force or convince domestic oppositions to accept a truce with incumbent regimes. The Syrian case therefore is not particularly extraordinary. Its significance, rather, can be found in how its experience challenges our understanding of the relationship between war preparation and state institutional consolidation. First, while domestic resource extraction certainly has increased over the last two or three decades, there is no clear and direct link between this increase and war preparation, setting aside symbolic acts such as voluntary days of labor.^[20] Instead, as I have stressed, resources for war preparation largely were generated regionally and internationally. War preparation provided a substantial rent income that not only spared the government the need to bargain with citizens but enabled it to bind strategic groups to the regime by means of domestic rent distribution.

Second, in contrast to many alternative cases of militaristic popular mobilization and pervasive war preparation, Syria has not actually fought a major war for twenty-five years, during which the nation’s extensive militarization has continued at a rate largely impervious to changes in the political arena. My assumption is that, since the end of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the Syrian-Israeli disengagement agreement of 1974, Syria sustained its constant war preparation efforts but was not actually prepared in a meaningful sense for the “battle.”^[21] Preparedness to conduct, let alone begin, a war with Israel was not even the central objective of war preparation. Instead, regime stability and control seem to have been much more pivotal. Evidence for this assumption can be found in the patterns that characterize Syria’s buildup and use of its military force, in its economic policy orientation, and in the Syrian leadership’s handling of the peace process.

Force Buildup

It is notable, first of all, that the main effort to expand the Syrian armed forces took place after the 1973 war, and that their enormous expansion has not paralleled any increase of violence between Syria and Israel. On the contrary, the Golan Heights have been among the quietest Arab-Israeli front since the disengagement of 1974. Syria has not allowed any infiltration into Israel over this front since 1974. And in Lebanon too, where Syrian troops have been stationed since 1976, Syria has eagerly sought to avoid direct military confrontations with Israel, occasionally even at the risk of losing face.^[22] Syria was dragged into the 1982 war in Lebanon against its will and at catastrophic costs for its forces. The war revealed openly what the Syrian leadership probably had been aware of: namely, that Syria was in fact not prepared for a war with Israel and was far from achieving “strategic parity” with its adversary. New arms purchases were definitely needed to make up for the losses, particularly given that, as Israeli analyst Yair Evron put it, Damascus had lost confidence that it could avoid war by adhering to the limits or “red lines” that Israel had itself defined.^[23]

From 1974 onward, the Syrian leadership has obviously sought to build military capabilities that would enable it to defend the country and which could be used as an instrument of control and power projection. But it has neither sought war nor actually built a force for sustained warfare. In order to avoid or, if need be, fend off a potential Israeli attack, the Syrian leadership has sought to obtain a credible retaliatory deterrent potential—notably in the form of chemical weapons and medium-range missiles, and also by means of the Soviet-Syrian friendship treaty of 1980 that threatened Soviet involvement should Syria proper come under attack. The positioning of Syrian armed forces also reflects defensive rather than offensive options. Strong fortifications have been built on the Golan front. Tanks have been dug in rather than positioned for attack. And while the army and air force have a reputation of poor maintenance levels—with tanks cannibalized and jets grounded for lack of spare parts—the only well-maintained branch of Syria’s armed forces, according to Western military observers, has been its air defense.^[24] The dialectics inherent in Syria’s desire to avoid the “battle” for which it constantly has been preparing is probably best captured in the doctrine of “strategic parity.” While this doctrine demands that Arab confrontation states build up a military capability that balances that of Israel, quantitatively as well as qualitatively, it also entails that war must be avoided as long as parity has not been achieved.

As a rule, active troop engagements undertaken by the Syrian leadership of their own free will have always had the character of internal security operations or regional operation that were intended to serve Syria’s regional power projection. Syria’s enduring involvement in Lebanon, its limited deployment of troops to Saudi Arabia during the Kuwait crisis and war of 1990–91, and its tank concentration on the Jordanian border in 1980 all fall in this latter category. The conflict with Jordan, moreover, was directly linked to that country’s support for opposition to the Syrian regime.

The domestic security function of the Syrian military has never been hidden. Ultimately, of course, regime security cannot be traded off against external security, both being deeply interwoven and interdependent.^[25] To the extent that a ranking between the two objectives is nonetheless possible, the Syrian regime certainly places a higher priority on its own security than it does on the security of the country’s borders. Accordingly, the armed forces have a strong praetorian element, with the best-equipped troops still concentrated in and around Damascus rather than on the front line.^[26]

Economic Orientations

While significant efforts have been made to build up an impressive security machine during the almost three decades that Asad has been in power, Syria has not developed a war economy that would have supported sustained warfare. Its productive structure is not geared toward an economy of war, nor are public or private consumption actually made subject to the preparation of war. Militarization, to use Brzoska’s terms, has remained “traditional,” restricted to a quantitative expansion of the military sector and to militaristic value orientation and behavior. It has not become “technological” or “industrial,” which, among other things, would involve the creation of a military-industrial complex.^[27]

The experience of Europe during World War II suggests that the buildup of a war economy, and particularly of an economy that is to support sustained warfare, demands “the earliest and most far-reaching militarization of the economy, i.e., maximum expansion and the largest possible mobilization, beginning in times of peace, of war-economy potential at the expense of peace production.”^[28]

Two of Syria’s neighbors clearly fit this description. Israel and Iraq have both spent considerable efforts on building a war economy, directing the economic structure of their countries toward war production. Both have attempted to achieve a substantial measure of self-sufficiency in arms development and production, to allow them to bear a reduction or temporary halt of foreign military supply without being forced to cease operations. In the Syrian case, however, the picture is different. Some ammunition and light weapons are produced domestically, but on the whole—and this is quite astonishing, given the size of the Syrian forces and its defense budget—Syria’s arms industries are negligible, less advanced even than those of Jordan.^[29] Syria appears, as Yezid Sayigh puts it, “to have opted for reliance on its one secure source of armament”—that is, the former Soviet Union—”rather than embarking on a costly course of local industrialization.”^[30] Only since the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. has Syria begun to expand its arms production. Even so, this remains limited to the local assembly of imported parts, such as the reported construction of facilities for the assembly of North Korean and Chinese missiles.^[31] Since one can reasonably assume that the Syrian government would have been able to raise Gulf Arab funding for a local defense industry had it actually been willing to establish one (consider the fact that Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies have extended substantial financial support for the buildup of defense industries in both Egypt and Iraq, two countries that, from a Gulf Arab viewpoint, follow much more ambitious and disquieting regional policies than Syria), one is bound to conclude that the absence of such an industry in Syria is intentional and not due to a lack of resources.^[32]

Also, the production profile of both public and private industry is far from that of a war economy. Certainly, some basic public industries such as cement, oil refining, petrochemicals, and iron and steel would be of vital importance in a situation of war. Obviously, however, the main purpose of these industries has been to support the gigantic construction and development program that Syria launched in the mid-1970s. Similar to those of many other Third World and Arab countries that have followed a strategy of import substitution industrialization, Syria’s industry is heavily dependent on imported inputs and largely oriented toward the production of consumption goods. Strikingly, no machine tools industry worth mentioning—a centerpiece of any defense-related industrialization—has yet come into existence.^[33]

Not only has Syria’s productive structure remained largely civilian, but the Syrian government has not actually imposed any belt-tightening on the population for defense purposes. Given that arms purchases, as outlined, were for the greatest part covered by foreign aid, the population has been widely insulated from the costs of military buildup. And the defense budget, representing those military costs that have to be borne domestically, has in fact developed in a procyclical manner; that is, it has been reduced in real terms in times of financial constraints and expanded when budgetary conditions improved. The economic crisis of the 1980s thus caused real cuts to the defense budget; defense expenditures were not a cause of the economic crisis.

Syria and Regional Peace Efforts

Since demonstrating in the October War of 1973 its capability to launch an attack, to fight, and to gain at least a political and psychological victory, the Syrian leadership has been prepared to give international and particularly U.S.-sponsored peace initiatives a chance, and has considered a negotiated solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict a possibility.^[34] Syria accepted UN resolutions 242 and 338. It also responded positively to Kissinger’s mediations that led to the troop disengagement accord with Israel in 1974, and to the early Middle East initiatives of the Carter administration. The Camp David process, on the other hand, left Syria more vulnerable by neutralizing Egypt. And the position of the first Reagan administration, which the Syrians perceived as extremely hostile toward the Arabs and Syria in particular, led Damascus to adopt a more hard-line posture. Nevertheless, Syria supported the 1982 Fez Declaration, which, by demanding a peaceful solution that would guarantee the security of all regional states, made clear the readiness of the Arab states to come to terms with Israel. Syria’s reestablishment of diplomatic ties with Egypt in 1989 indicated Damascus’s eventual acceptance of the Egyptian-Israeli peace. And while the Syrian leadership remained highly suspicious of Israeli intentions when the Bush administration ventured to bring about a Middle East peace conference in Madrid in 1991, it nonetheless embraced the American initiative. Damascus realized that one alternative to a peaceful settlement of the conflict—renewed war—would be disastrous, particularly since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. deprived Syria of Soviet diplomatic and military support. Moreover, a second alternative—the perpetuation of the no-war-no-peace situation that had marked Israeli-Syrian relations since 1974—was seen as increasingly difficult to sell in a post–cold war environment.

However, and despite Syria’s entering into direct negotiations with Israel, the preferred regional constellation for many among the regime elite remains this no-war-no-peace situation.^[35] Such a constellation, as noted, allowed, if not compelled, the regime to prepare for war but at the same time avoided actual warfare and produced a wide range of political and economic benefits. It furthered the regime’s nationalist credentials and legitimacy both domestically and in the wider Arab environment. It enhanced Syria’s international weight. It secured the inflow of a substantial strategic rent. It did not place at risk the country’s infrastructure and other developmental achievements. Nor did it put Syria’s armed forces themselves at risk. Given that parity was not achieved and was virtually unattainable, any full-scale war with Israel would almost certainly have resulted in defeat. And in all likelihood, such a defeat would have endangered the regime itself, much as was the case, if with some time lag, after the military catastrophe of 1967.

During the period of serious negotiations between Israel and Syria—that is, from the takeover of the Rabin government in 1992 to the fall of Peres in 1996—Damascus was politically prepared to conclude a peace treaty if its basic condition was met, namely, the full withdrawal of Israel from the Golan. Even after the 1996 change of government in Israel, the Syrian leadership reiterated its preparedness to resume negotiations, on the condition, however, that they would resume from where they had left off earlier that year. Syria’s interest in the negotiations, however, was not so much a peace treaty or a quick resolution of the conflict with Israel, as the avoidance of war. Indeed, Syria was not in a hurry to establish what has been dubbed “full peace” in an attempt to express more than a simple termination of belligerency. It needed time to prepare for such a peace and for the economic, technological, intellectual, and political challenges it would entail.^[36] Domestically, therefore, even at a time when the Oslo Accords had come into force and Jordan made peace with Israel, the official discourse remained restricted to warnings against normalization with Israel, and the issues that Syria would have to face after a peace treaty were not even up for discussion. The peaceful intentions of Syria were frequently stressed, but those of Israel were doubted and the rhetoric of war preparation was maintained.^[37]

Only during the negotiations of 1995 did the Syrian leadership become convinced that the Labor government was indeed prepared to give up all of the occupied Syrian territory under certain conditions. As a result, the Maryland talks from December to March 1996 were much more serious and detailed than all previous negotiations. At that point, it seems, the Syrians decided that peace could and should be ventured upon. “We will be able to negotiate a treaty within one or two months of serious committee work, including security arrangements, the water issue, and borders,” commented a high-ranking Syrian military officer in the spring of 1996. “The era of military confrontation is over. Israel is there to stay. And as Israel is making progress in its relations with the Gulf states, with Jordan, and with the Maghreb, should we remain on our own?”^[38]

What probably helped the Syrian leadership decide that they should proceed to an agreement with the Israelis—once the territorial condition was fulfilled—were the prospects for Syria as a result of the new Mediterranean policy of the European Union. Syrian-European talks about a so-called partnership agreement similar to those the European Union (EU) had already concluded with Morocco, Tunisia, and Israel, and was about to conclude with Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority, began in March 1996. Obviously, Damascus had a strong interest in the funds and the technical assistance offered by the EU to make Syria fit for the establishment of a free-trade relationship with Europe by 2010. More important than the potential rent flows involved, European assistance in reforming the Syrian economy and preparing it for competition in a Euro-Mediterranean free trade zone would also make it easier for Syria to face the challenges of a new regional division of labor, once Israel had been fully integrated into a more open Middle Eastern economic and social space.

The Syrians did expect Shimon Peres to win the elections of May 1996 and to restart negotiations after that.^[39] The results, however, were different, and with the election of Benyamin Netanyahu the ball shifted to Israel’s court. One might argue that by not doing much to speed up negotiations with the Rabin and Peres governments, Damascus missed a chance. Many Syrians, however, would not agree, stressing instead that it was Peres who had called early elections and broken off negotiations.^[40] The change in Israel had the immediate effect on Syria of strengthening the hard-liners. For them, Netanyahu’s victory, his rhetoric, and his unpreparedness to continue negotiations where they left off in January 1996 all vindicated their skepticism toward Israel and toward the peace process in general.

At the time of this writing, the Syrian leadership sees no point in renegotiating with the Barak government what they already negotiated with its predecessors. The preponderant attitude in Damascus, therefore, is that Syria should wait. Syrian regime representatives are honest when they confirm that Syria, while prepared to negotiate with Barak, is not in any hurry. As noted earlier, peace with Israel is not considered an urgent need, and there is no reason to expect that Syria will settle for less from Barak than it could expect to achieve with Labor. Unless Netanyahu moves, therefore, we may well anticipate a continuation of the Syrian-Israeli no-war-no-peace situation, even if negotiations of sorts are held.

The Critical Dimensions of Peace

Given that only the perpetuation of that state of no-war-no-peace can guarantee that Syria’s political economy of war preparation might be maintained indefinitely, peace is a risky affair in the first place, from the regime’s perspective. Regional pacification and normalization will most likely reduce both Syria’s strategic rent and its international influence. At the same time, peace with Israel held out few prospects for economic gain.^[41] Not only does peace thus threaten to push Syria from its frontline status to a much less comfortable backyard position, it is also likely to destabilize Syria’s domestic political-economic arrangements.

In not a few historical cases, war and war preparation, while enhancing the infrastructural capacities and increasing a government’s access to resources, have at the same time reduced the despotic powers of a regime; that is, they have forced the regime to bargain with societal actors and thereby cede or share some discretion over policy making.^[42] The Syrian case appears to offer a contrasting picture. With the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict in sight, and with no other significant conflict likely to replace it, the Syrian regime may have to rely more heavily on domestic resources than on diminishing streams of strategic rents. It may therefore be subject to more extensive domestic political bargaining during the transition to peace than it ever was during times of war preparation and militarization. And as this suggests, such a transition may well call into question the legitimacy of militarization and authoritarian rule. One possible result, therefore, of a decline in both the political and the economic resources that have resulted from militarization could be the reappearance of open political conflicts in which the regime, if not the state itself, could lose capacity and perhaps become seriously destabilized.

In the course of a cautious economic reform and liberalization program, implemented gradually since about 1985, the regime has in fact already relaxed its hold over the economy. Foreign trade, in particular, as well as agriculture and industry have become less subject to government intervention, and the private sector has grown remarkably. Recognizing their increased economic role, the regime has even co-opted some representatives of the business class into the formal decision-making structures of the state. Liberalization measures have, so far, remained controlled, subject to the regime’s own rather than the business class’ agenda, and below the threshold of anything that could be called democratization. However, given that the contribution of the private sector to tax income, foreign exchange, employment, private income, and goods for local consumption will continue to increase, while other public and foreign sources of revenue are likely to stagnate or decline, one can reasonably expect that those structures that today allow a limited participation of private sector interests in economic policy decisions will be expanded and may even permit societal actors some discretion over the reform and policy agendas. As long as Asad remains at the helm, such piecemeal political reforms are unlikely to threaten regime control. Even so, they may gradually create space for a clearer articulation of contending economic and sociopolitical interests within the political-institutional frame of the system, and they may also prefigure the institutional edifice of a post-Asad Syria.

Regional peace could thereby serve as a critical catalyst, stimulating a gradual transition to a less authoritarian form of government. With regional peace in the air, it is noticeable that Syrians, privately at least, have started to question the future of the security state. Many expect political rather than economic opportunities from a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the short-term, hoping that peace will bring about a reduction of the political power of the security apparatus, a restoration of respect for the law, an increase in government accountability, and a broadening of public space not subject to tight government scrutiny.^[43] Such expectations of declining military and security influence over government and society may still exceed reality, but they reflect the delegitimation threatening the Middle Eastern security state, which Syria so thoroughly represents, once a credible threat and the credibility of war preparation are gone.

There are ample reasons to expect that the state in Syria in the post-Asad period will be weaker than it has become under Asad’s rule. Both his skillful leadership and the external threat that he has been able to employ in his state- and regime-building project will most probably be lacking. And the state, as I have indicated, will have to lean more heavily on private-sector resources. Such a weakening of state power will almost certainly open up space for society. Political and social conflicts could then more openly be tabled and negotiated; the political leadership would lose its prerogative of defining the public good and the interests of society; and new parties and pressure groups could come into being.

Such a weakening of state power vis-à-vis society need not, as is sometimes claimed, lead to an implosion of state structures or a disintegration of the state.^[44] Regional peace will come in doses and over time, thereby allowing domestic actors to adapt. Picard points out that in a militarized regime like the Syrian, peacemaking will demand some sort of symbolic or economic compensation for the military.^[45] This is indeed so. The military itself is likely to play an active role in the technical negotiations preceding a final agreement and, therefore, to consider such an agreement their own achievement. The chief of staff and two of his aides have already been involved in talks with the Israelis, and it is unlikely that security arrangements can be agreed upon without the military’s blessing.

The military is also likely to remain the strongest corporate actor on the scene for some time to come, and one should not expect that a largely militaristic political culture will simply dissolve. Both Syria’s historical experience and the present structure of authority suggest that a Turkish-style military democracy is much more likely to emerge in the post-Asad period than a full-fledged liberal democracy. While the military elite may well leave day-to-day politics to a civilian government, it would probably step in if such a government tried to undermine its entrenched interests or if government policies threatened to provoke unmanageable social unrest. In contrast to the 1950s and 1960s, however, there is no longer a highly politicized officer corps with a sociopolitical mission that would want to topple existing socioeconomic structures. Today, Syria’s military can be expected to guard these structures that, on the whole, are also much to the liking of the local bourgeoisie.

No future Syrian government, on the other hand, would likely have an interest in severely reducing the size of the armed forces or the military budget. Even after an eventual peace treaty with Israel, the former main contenders of the Arab-Israeli conflict will remain on their guard. Other conflicts in the region may erupt or reerupt, and the Gulf Arab states may have a strong interest in Syria’s maintaining a military force that could, if need be, help to balance Iraq. The maintenance of a credible force could therefore still be deemed necessary and could also generate some strategic rent—if less than the country has become used to during the last decades of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

There is, above all, a common interest on the part of all existing or emerging domestic power centers—the security apparatus, the state bureaucracy and the public sector bureaucracy, the bourgeoisie, the religious establishment—to maintain both Syria’s internal stability and, as far as possible, its regional position. Hardly anyone would like to relive the near-civil-war situation of the late 1970s and early 1980s or suffer through the external vulnerability that Syria experienced during the 1940s and 1950s. Also, while there is much Islamic conservatism today, there seems to be no infrastructure for another violent Islamist uprising.^[46] Given that the state has monopolized the means of organized violence and would hardly hesitate to use them again against any movement or group challenging its authority, a serious breakdown of domestic stability would probably have to begin with a split within the security apparatus. One cannot, in fact, rule out the possibility that two or more factions within the army of mukhabarat may face each other in a contest for power once the succession question arises. The scenario of a disintegration of the security apparatus is, however, not very likely. Syria may have a history of military coups and coup attempts, but it doesn’t have a tradition of civil war or of different parts of the army fighting each other. The corporate spirit within the army is probably too strong for the latter.

In the last couple of years, therefore, leaders from various sociopolitical groups—representatives of the security apparatus and representatives of the Sunni bourgeoisie in particular—have been in contact in order to prepare what they call a “soft landing.” The aim is to prevent the occasion of the president’s death from sparking individual acts of revenge or sectarian violence against the Alawites, the Shi’ite sect to which Asad and most top-level military and security officers belong. In addition, it is understood that the private wealth of leading military officers will not be touched. In return, high Alawi officers have indicated that they will not necessarily insist that Asad’s successor be an Alawi.

Thus, while the legitimacy of the present security state seems likely to disappear, and while the rationalities of regime security and political control that have so far largely determined government politics may gradually be replaced by economic rationalities, it is unlikely that any of Syria’s domestic political forces would want to do away with the degree of stateness and national integration that the years of war preparation have helped to achieve. With a broader social base, these achievements could well be maintained even without the threat of, and preparation for, war.

Notes

6. Changing Boundaries and Social Crisis

Israel and the 1967 War

Joel S. Migdal

From Doom to Boom

The sudden end of the June 1967 war brought not only unrestrained rejoicing in Israel but, just as palpably, a collective sigh of relief. What Israelis had called the “waiting period,” between Egypt’s blockade of the Straits of Tiran on May 22 and the beginning of the war on June 5, had been a time of unbearable tension in the country. Israelis saw the closing of the straits as a tripwire for war and waited those fourteen days with a sense of impending doom.^[1] This was a moment, as Itzhak Galnoor recounted, of “public confusion, lack of confidence in the political leadership and some threats of military insubordination.”^[2]

The dark warnings of Arab leaders about what would happen to Israel if their forces were to triumph had been all too explicit. Only a week before the outbreak of fighting, Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had threatened that “this will be a total war. Our basic aim is the destruction of Israel.” And the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Ahmed Shukairy, had added to the sense of looming tragedy, “Those native-born Israelis who survive can remain in Palestine. But I estimate that none of them will survive.”^[3]

I recall receiving a letter from Israel in May of that year describing a sense of resignation and foreboding on the part of the writer and her fellow kibbutz members. She wrote of people going about their daily chores with their heads hanging; a sense of fatalism gripped Israel’s Jews. But the sudden and complete military victory in June stood Israelis’ emotions on their head. The war itself was a fleeting, almost surreal, interlude. Bill Stevenson, a veteran British war correspondent, recounted how “the clocks stopped in Israel on Monday, June 5, 1967, and they started again a week later.”^[4]

The drastic mood swing began in the last couple of days of the war. On June 9, the fifth day, one Israeli woman wrote of “the two weeks of dreadful tension when all of us faced what we thought might, quite literally, be extermination, and the death of the young State, and our own total abandonment by the world. And then, the four breathless, incredible days and heights of victory.”^[5] Indeed, that sense of being collectively plucked from the precipice at the last possible moment—a feeling of miraculous, redemptive deliverance shared by religious and secular Jews alike—inaugurated a period in which Israelis seemed all but oblivious to the postwar currents sweeping them up. Like a death-row convict celebrating wildly after having been granted a pardon minutes before execution, Israelis followed the Six-Day War with a six-year spree that veiled many of the domestic difficulties caused or exacerbated by the war.

These six years, which ended with the October 1973 war, or what Israelis call the Yom Kippur War, both followed and preceded sharp economic downturns in the country. But that interwar period wiped out thoughts of recession and unemployment. Per capita income grew at among the highest rates in the world, at 8.5 percent a year, and personal consumption reflected the spreelike atmosphere, ballooning ominously at a rate of about 12 percent annually. Collectively, Israelis were recklessly living beyond their means.

Profound social and political difficulties simmered beneath the surface of this economic explosion, involving an increasingly beleaguered state organization and its relations with the Israeli population. Indeed, the central dynamics of state-society relations came under severe strain in the generation following the 1967 war.^[6] I will underscore three of the central problems: First, at a time of continuing tension in the Middle East—so high that it prompted a nuclear standoff between the superpowers in 1973—the Israeli state found itself with diminishing capabilities to govern its own society effectively. Second, deep and abiding divisions about what the character of Israeli society should be rent both political and social life. And, finally, the society’s model of social integration came to be seen as a failure, resulting in more intense and open social conflict.

Why did such fundamental problems afflict the state, society, and state-society relations in the wake of Israel’s greatest military triumph? In this chapter, I will argue that the boundary changes that the war effected unglued important social and political relationships. Three core ideas related to boundary changes will be developed:

1. Upsetting understandings of institutional reach. The stability that social and political institutions bring to everyday life depends upon the population’s understanding of their reach. Boundary changes bring into question the reach of those institutions and, in so doing, lead to crises in society’s central dynamics.
2. Challenging the principle of universalist exclusion. Reconstituted boundaries of the territory governed by the state open to question the established principles about the character of the state and its relationship to its population. In Israel, the civic principles of the pre-1967 period had the paradoxical effect of using the principle of universal citizenship as a method of exclusion, especially for Jews of Middle East background. The boundary changes opened the way for a contending ethnonational set of principles, which these Jews found much more inclusive.
3. Undoing labor segmentation and social fragmentation. Territorial boundary changes can have a deep impact on social boundaries. In Israel, the new borders changed the character of the labor market, opening the door to new types of social and physical mobility and undoing the old social boundaries that had been marked by social fragmentation and segmentation. For society, the change in social boundaries led to heightened tensions; for the state, the change resulted in new, increased demands on it without a corresponding growth in capacity to deal with those demands.

From a comparative perspective, the timing of this volume, the beginning of a new century, is opportune for revisiting the issue of the effect of the 1967 war through its transformation of boundaries. After World War II, the cold war had imposed an extraordinary stability on states’ boundaries. Significant border changes came only with the dismantling of the colonial empires, and, even there, many new states’ boundaries remained the same as when the territory had been ruled by Europeans. One would be hard-pressed to name more than a handful of cases in which state boundaries changed or states disappeared entirely during the more than forty years of the cold war.

But its end brought a host of boundary changes in a short period, including the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Ethiopia. As one of the few cases of state boundary changes in the decades leading up to the 1990s, Israel and the 1967 war offer some important insights into the process of how border changes affect labor markets, state-society relations, and ethnic relations.

In the following section, I will look first at the social dynamics that undergirded Israel’s state and society in the two decades leading up to the Six-Day War. I will then analyze how the crisis transformed those dynamics. Finally, I will tie the crises in state, society, and state-society relations to the 1967 war’s transformation of state boundaries.

State and Society before the War

Three key features had marked pre-1967 Israeli society: the important and growing role of the state in people’s daily lives; increasing consensus among Israel’s Jews about the extent and character of the state; and a focus on societal integration, at least among the more than 90 percent of the citizenry who were Jews. But, in the wake of the war that had so united this population, each of these cornerstones began to show worrisome fissures. Before analyzing how border changes that resulted from the war affected these three elements, I will survey the three.

Israel’s first prime minister, who dominated political life for nearly half a century, worked single-mindedly from the moment of the state’s founding in 1948 to make the state the dominant and central institution in people’s lives. Through an orientation that he called mamlahtiyut (which can be translated loosely as statism), David Ben-Gurion was determined to bring about a revolution in Jewish society.^[7] His first target was the abiding wariness of nationalism that had marked Jewish writings and thought since the Enlightenment.^[8] And, what was even more important, he battled the very institutions that he and others had built in the generation before independence. His own political party, Mapai, and the powerful labor federation that he had headed, the Histadrut, along with numerous other organizations had played key roles in creating a viable Jewish presence in Palestine during the thirty years of British rule. While Ben-Gurion certainly saw an important role for them in the period of statehood, he feared their divisive, even sectarian, tendencies. His aim was to shift the ability to allocate key resources in the society from the political parties, the Histadrut, and the once-powerful Jewish Agency (another organization he had headed) to the bureaucracy of the new state and thereby build a political center that would gain the loyalty and obedience of the population.

In its first two decades, the success of the new state in centralizing the allocation of key resources and in overcoming the long-standing distrust of nationalism among Jews was truly impressive. It quickly became the central focus of people’s lives, engendering not only endless complaining about its oversized and often unresponsive bureaucracy but also fierce loyalty that had a religious-like fervor.^[9] Tension continued to fester between the institutions that had predated the state and Ben-Gurion, and by no means did their leaders lose every battle with him. Health insurance, for example, remained outside the state’s direct control. But the swelling state bureaucracy assumed responsibility for education, welfare, labor exchanges, and more. Centralization brought increased state capabilities—from the battlefield to the control of the economy to the regulation of everyday social relations. An import-substitution economic strategy also heightened the activity of the state in the economy. All in all, the state organization grew to alarming proportions and insinuated itself into the daily lives of everyone living within the crazy-quilt boundaries Israel ended up with after the 1948 war.

Beyond the growing role of the state organization, a second feature of pre-1967 Israeli life was a developing consensus about the nature of that state. Prior to 1948, the Zionist political institutions were understood by Jews and non-Jews alike to have two highly sectarian qualities to them. First, those organizations represented and advocated for the Jews, against the claims of Palestine’s Arabs and, sometimes, against those of the colonial British rulers. Second, sectarianism also marked the relations among the Jewish political institutions. There was a unified framework incorporating the Jewish groups, but inclusion in it was voluntary. At various moments, key groups simply dropped out. And, of those that remained inside, representing most of the Jews, each had significant autonomy to pursue its own ends.^[10] S. N. Eisenstadt, Israel’s leading sociologist, labeled the weak framework consociational, one in which the framework served largely as a mediating forum among groups rather than one that set the tone for all political debate.

Once an independent state existed, important changes occurred in people’s thinking about political institutions. The old mediating framework’s “place was taken by an ideology of national social ethos articulated within a constitutional democratic-pluralistic State, based on universalistic premisses, universalistic citizenship and the access of all citizens to the major frameworks of the State.”^[11] This quotation from Eisenstadt points to a fundamental element in the character of the state, as well as an underlying tension. The change was critical, altering the political framework from a sectarian one claiming to speak for a people or nation—the Jews of Palestine, but not others in the country—to one asserting the right to represent all peoples within its boundaries. Both Jews and Arabs fell under the new state’s “universalistic premisses [and] universalistic citizenship.” Eisenstadt’s reference to “the access of all citizens to the major frameworks of the State” meant that the new political entity, at least in theory, provided equal rights to non-Jews and equal entrée to the administrative services of the state. Its “universalistic principles,” in the words of Erik Cohen, “would govern relations between all citizens.”^[12]

To put the matter a bit differently, the state (unlike the prestate political institutions) was constituted so as to interact with a civil society—a population united by its civic ties in which all held the key role of citizen—not simply the Jews in society.^[13] The declaration of independence, the Basic Laws that were to be the backbone of an as-yet-unwritten constitution, the judiciary, and many other key state institutions were created on the basis of an imagined society made up of equal citizens. While the construction of the state was geared to such a civil society, no such society bound through civic ties yet existed. Further complicating the picture was the fact that political leaders also defined the state as Jewish (what Eisenstadt obliquely referred to as a national social ethos), which put some of civil society—the Arabs—at a disadvantage. I will come back to this tension because it is so central to the internal dynamics of Israel, especially after the 1967 war. It is worth noting here that Arabs faced a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland existence: a set of laws and institutions designed to give them, like everybody else, equality and day-to-day practices that discriminated against them at every turn.

Before the war, however, this inconsistency tended to be somewhat muted. A combination of the terrible dislocation of Palestine’s Arab community during the 1947–48 war and the effects of the state’s military rule of the Arab population until 1966 dampened Arab demand for equal access to the state’s services and agencies.^[14] The promotion of a fragmented labor market in which the state prohibited Arab movement beyond their own localities reinforced the low profile of Arab citizens. In short, state policies and the trauma of 1948 veiled the dissonance that Arabs faced every day.

In what can only be understood as a supreme paradox, these conditions, which created the invisible Arab as a clearly less privileged citizen, allowed state leaders to proceed in building the civic orientation of the state, one whose institutions were geared to be universal rather than in the service of a particular group. In practical terms that meant the establishment of the rule of law, with its implied universality for all groups; the development of strong legal institutions, most notably the Supreme Court; and the emergence of other key agencies designed to protect the citizenry, including the offices of the attorney general, state comptroller, and ombudsman. The character of the state, even with the encouragement of a markedly Jewish ethos or civil religion and even with the repression and strong control of the Arab population, was being forged in the years before the 1967 war with strong universal components, premised on the development of a society forged by civic ties. Indeed, evidence mounted that even many of the country’s Arab citizens related positively to the civic dimensions put forth by the state.^[15] No more important sign for the development of a universalistic state was evident than the granting in 1950 “of Israeli citizenship to the country’s Arab residents [which] constituted a renunciation of the ethnonational principle.”^[16]

Consensus developed not only about the character of the state but on the extent of its reach. From 1937, when the British tabled a plan to partition Palestine between the Arabs and the Jews, Zionists had engaged in a loud debate about whether or not to compromise by taking only a portion of the promised Palestine in exchange for political independence in that truncated territory.^[17] Once independence was achieved, however, this debate quickly faded. Shlomo Avineri, the renowned political philosopher and onetime director-general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, noted a new implicit understanding about what the character of the state should be:

One issue which was central to the political debate within the Jewish Yishuv (community) in the late 1930s and the 1940s—the debate about partition—was over. The armistice lines of 1949 were considered by practically all Israelis as the realistic definite borders of Israel. If, prior to 5 June 1967, the Arab countries had been ready to sign a peace agreement with Israel on the basis of the existing frontiers, there would have been an overwhelming Israeli consensus in favour of accepting this, perceiving this Arab readiness as a major concession and a tremendous achievement for Israel. With very few exceptions on the lunatic fringe of Israeli politics, there was no irredentist call in Israel during the period of 1949–1967, advocating an Israeli initiative to recapture Judea and Samaria, or even the Old City of Jerusalem. This post-1948 consensus was visible across the spectrum of Israeli politics.^[18]

Avineri’s point is a very important one. The haphazard and irrational borders with which Israel was left after 1948 took on a kind of sanctity of their own. They imparted a stability to state and society. The state molded its reach to them and people simply assumed that those arbitrary lines would permanently define the extent of Israeli society. Borders, then, affect both institutional development (by defining the limits of an institution’s reach) and public culture (by providing the frame for a sense of we-ness, or common identity—what it meant to be an Israeli).

Finally, besides the growing role of the state and the developing consensus on its nature and territorial reach, a third mark of the pre-1967 period was an emphasis on social integration among Jews. The huge influx of Jews immediately after the 1948 war posed serious challenges for both state and society. Not only did the country’s Jewish population triple in the three years after Israel’s founding, but the majority of the new Jews were from the Middle East, culturally distinct from the dominant groups that had migrated earlier from eastern Europe. The state’s response was an attempt to assimilate the new Jews into the dominant eastern European culture through an ideology of mizug galuyot, or what we might call the melting pot.

While this model had worked relatively well in absorbing early waves of immigrants during the prestate period, it ran into serious bumps in the 1950s. The proportion of immigrants was now extremely high, and the Middle Eastern Jews came much less prepared or willing to take on many of the values and symbols of the dominant groups.^[19] Critics have emphasized the shunting of Middle Eastern Jews into low-paying, low status jobs—often in remote parts of the country with very little infrastructure. The immigrants quickly became the blue-collar class in a labor market that gave them limited opportunities for physical or social mobility. Here, the boundaries did not simply divide “us” from “them”; they provided the bases for the distribution of people in society, including their centrality or peripherality. New immigrants were relegated to the outer reaches of the frame. Just as the borders provided the space within which imagined civic equality would develop, the border also framed the scaffolding for real social and economic inequality that emerged.

In terms of income per person, by 1967 families originating from Africa and Asia (mostly the Middle East and Arab North Africa) had a bit less than 50 percent of the income of their counterparts of European origins.^[20] Even after taking into account factors such as length of residence in the country, education, and age, an “ethnic gap” in income of 5–15 percent persisted.^[21] Erik Cohen added a cultural dimension to the problem of economic inequality: “Oriental culture, in which at least some of the Oriental communities [African and Asian, mostly Middle Eastern] had been deeply steeped, has made no perceptible imprint on Israel’s cultural life. Oriental civilization was generally considered ‘backward’ or ‘Levantine,’ and Oriental immigrants were asked to shed their way of life as quickly as possible.”^[22]

These criticisms and gaps notwithstanding, the period before the 1967 war “was marked by the relative success in the absorption of immigrants. . . . A society made up of numerous, highly varied cultures underwent a rapid and sometimes painful process of consolidation.”^[23] This point is not made in order to minimize the problems. Rather, the period before 1967 is remarkable for the emphasis on integration in public, academic, and government discourse, even as real, serious problems abounded. Indications existed of seething anger and deep resentment on the part of many immigrants—against Ashkenazim, old-timers, the Histadrut, and the Mapai (the Labor Party). But the cauldron, while bubbling, rarely boiled over. Practically all Jewish groups were absorbed into almost all state and civic institutions (as followers and receivers of services rather than leaders), including schools and the military. Immigrants and old-timers alike participated in and promoted the new civil religion—only Arab citizens were largely excluded from that.

Israeli institutions and civic culture held out the promise of upward mobility for new immigrants. Indeed, as one sociological study gathering data on mobility and opportunity put it, “Israel has developed into an extraordinarily meritocratic society. . . . It is a country that both beckons to potential immigrants and integrates them into the mainstream of social life.”^[24] After 1967, as we shall see, serious protests arose against this formulation. Critics claimed that the meritocracy demanded accepting the dominant European Jews’ rules of the game, especially the primacy of education, while Middle Eastern Jews had inferior educational opportunities and less access to education. But before the war, the emphasis was much more on integration into the Israeli institutions and civic culture than on a critique of them.

War and the Crisis in Social Dynamics

The years following the Six-Day War brought unrestrained euphoria to Israel. But in a period of heady economic growth and consumption, and of a self-image as a regional powerhouse, Israeli state and society demonstrated clear signs of stress. The three processes that we have discussed—the state’s increasing centrality, the emerging social agreement about its character and reach, and the emphasis on social integration of Jews into the new Israeli society and culture—all developed in the context of new, fixed boundaries. When the 1967 war suddenly changed those boundaries, these three processes changed dramatically. Military, economic, and political shocks that came a bit later—the 1973 war and the long period of economic stagnation in its wake, as well as the 1977 defeat of the Labor Party (formerly Mapai), which in one form or another had dominated politics for half a century—exposed and exacerbated social dynamics stemming from the 1967 war.

The State’s Diminishing Centrality

The Israeli state, so domineering in the first two decades after Independence, suffered surprising blows after the 1967 war, both to its centrality in society and its capacity to govern. It is difficult to disentangle the issue of state centrality and capacity from Ben-Gurion’s resignation in 1963 and from the once-dominant Labor Party’s painful demise. The state’s legitimacy rested in no small measure on continuing allocative roles still played by the party and Ben-Gurion’s own towering stature in coping with threat and crisis.^[25] Nonetheless, one must not underestimate the amount of state institution building that had gone on in the first twenty years of the state to facilitate policy making and the bridging of differences among key groups. After the war these institutions’ capabilities eroded; “it became more difficult to overcome crisis and potential breakdowns with the old tools of accommodation and compromise.”^[26]

Several key signs of the changing status of the state were the mushrooming public protests and labor strikes directed against it, especially by newly independent groups “outside the rigid structure of Israeli politics; growing debt and faltering ability to finance public expenditures; reduced dependence of the population on state capital; and difficulties in mediating among competing demands by groups in the population, leading to high inflation, among other economic and social plagues.”^[27]

Israelis have always been political animals; political decisions have been too important to their daily life for them to remain aloof.^[28] Anyone who has sat on an Israeli bus as the hourly news is broadcast knows that. But in the prewar period high attentiveness was not matched by organized activity to influence government or by social initiative, especially by organized protest groups.^[29] By the 1970s, this diffidence vanished. This process must have been spurred by the international political mobilization of 1968 and the following years. But it had a decidedly local flavor in a country with such a quiescent society and domineering state. Where once the relationship between state and society had been analogous to a marriage in which the husband had taken all the public roles and the wife had faded into the background, now it resembled one in which the wife was newly assertive, making all sorts of new demands for changes in the relationship.

Leading the way at the beginning of 1971 was a group of mostly young Jews of Moroccan origin who called themselves the Black Panthers, after the notorious Black militant organization in the United States (again, the connection to international factors, especially the rise of a new identity politics, is evident). While the Black Panthers’ demands were comparatively rather mild—they asked the government to clear slums, provide housing, and stop discrimination—their effect was electrifying. “Although the number who actually joined the Black Panthers was not very large,” wrote Cohen, “the spontaneous movement quickly gained popularity and triggered off the expression of widely-felt resentment and dissatisfaction among Oriental Jews.”^[30] Other protest groups formed later, especially following the 1973 war. Social movements, including Gush Emunim and Peace Now, began to see organized demonstrations as a legitimate tool, and both organized a series of massive protests over the next two decades.

As time went on, much protest centered on the boundary question, the future of the occupied territories. The war had dramatically changed Israel’s borders, creating a sense of uncertainty about the appropriate reach of the state and its character. Violence against the state came from both sides. Jewish settlers from Gush Emunim (less than 10 percent of those surveyed) battled soldiers and police when they felt state leaders were contemplating giving up parts of the newly conquered lands, what came to be called territorial compromise.^[31] On a far more massive scale, Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip rallied, violently and nonviolently, against the state. Their protests culminated in the Intifada, an unarmed but violent continuous struggle, which began in 1987 and petered out by 1993. Palestinian citizens of Israel, too, joined the stream of demonstrations. Starting in 1976 with rallies that ended in a confrontation with the army and the shooting of several Arabs, Israel’s Arab citizens have marked Land Day as a means of expressing their frustrations with the state. All in all, a state that had escaped having more than occasional outbursts of unorganized political protest in the pre-1967 period found itself increasingly preoccupied and wearied by all sorts of planned public protest after the war.

Labor unrest was a second avenue of protest. As in the case of the Black Panthers, much of the impetus for the wildcat strikes that blanketed the country after 1967 came from dissatisfaction among Jews of Middle Eastern origins. Strikes were not unheard of before 1967, to be sure. A wave of labor stoppages crippled many enterprises in the mid-1960s. Even then, the strikes were concentrated in the public, not private, sector.^[32] That wave, however, had subsided in the prewar recession and a reinstitution by the state and the Histadrut of strict labor discipline. Within two years after the war, however, the strike craze was fully under way, again concentrated in the public sector. In 1970, strikes resulted in 390,000 lost workdays, three-quarters of them in the public sector.^[33] In one startling statistic, the number of persons involved in labor stoppages and lockouts for every thousand workers, rose from 23 in the years 1948–59 to 218 in 1975–88.^[34]

As the state become a target of surging unrest after 1967, its centrality to people’s lives diminished, as did its capabilities. As one professor of business put it, “The constant rise in the standard of living and the receipt of personal reparations money from Germany materially reduced the dependence of citizens on the political apparatus or the government system.”^[35] Not only did the economic dependence of the population on the state decrease, the state showed signs that it could not control social demands put upon it. Even as productivity lagged, the state continued to promote increases in public and private consumption. The only way to do that was to find outside money to continue catering to growing consumption. It is not surprising, therefore, that one clear sign of the state’s increased weakness was ballooning foreign and domestic debt.^[36] The state could not take the steps necessary to make Israel live within its means.

The state’s inability to balance available domestic resources against demands for growing consumption led to a host of serious problems. Investment dropped, balance of payments worsened, and the state’s liquidity diminished.^[37] But the two clearest signs of state weakness were debt and inflation. By the early 1980s, the state spent nearly a third of the country’s GNP on transfer payments and debt service, and, in 1985 the debt burden reached 127 percent of GNP.^[38] Spiraling inflation was another sign of the state’s inability to mediate demands even as it made substantial cuts in domestic financing of defense. The fifteen years after 1970 wreaked economic havoc on Israel, as first the Labor government and then the Likud government lost control of the economy. At the beginning of the 1970s, clear signs of accelerating inflation already existed; by 1979, rates reached a level of over 100 percent per year and soared to nearly 500 percent in 1984.

Growing Disagreements about the State’s Character and Reach

At the same time that the state’s centrality and capabilities diminished, bitter debates broke out about what the character of the state should be. No single powerful figure, as Ben-Gurion had been in the prewar period, could dominate the controversy. What had seemed to be settled before the war—the civic, universal model of the state in the territory under its control—became a source of bitter dispute, both inside and outside the halls of government.

The territorial controversies are well-known and need little comment here. Avineri captured the deeper importance of the new political battles:

What appeared to have been closed in 1948–9 by the dual impact of the acceptance on the part of Israel of the UN partition resolution and the outcome of the War of Independence, became once more an open question. The national consensus that Israel had to be defended, and defended at all cost, from within its 1949 borders, was broken and for the first time since Independence the question of the Israeli boundaries was reopened. While there was virtually no dissenting voice regarding the unification of Jerusalem, the future disposition of the West Bank and Gaza became the focus for the most acrimonious and divisive debate in Israel since its inception. For the debate is not only about policies, it is about the boundaries of the polity itself.^[39]

Deep social and political conflicts about the nature of the state followed closely on those over Israel’s eventual permanent international boundaries. At issue was whether the state held, for the Jews, a kind of stewardship over the historical Land of Israel or instead served as the representation of the population—largely but not exclusively Jewish—in a given territory, even if that territory was somewhat arbitrarily defined by twentieth-century circumstances. The tension between its ethnonational foundation as the Jewish state and its universal, civic nature—first and foremost found in its rule of law—now burst to the top of the public agenda.^[40] The Jewishness of the Israeli state and society has remained a central topic of public and academic discourse to this day.^[41] Certainly, the rise of the Likud after 1967 and its control of government for nearly fifteen years were not unrelated to deeper questions about the character of the state.

In the renewed ethnonational conception, the state was downgraded from the centrality of mamlahtiyut to the role of guardian of Jewish society. That society was defined independently of the state, as a product of the true territorial legacy of the Jews. Jewish nationhood was defined through its relation to the ancient homeland, and the state was simply an expression of the nation. As Alan Dowty summarized this view, the Jews, like any other people have “a distinct character that is inextricably linked to [their] statehood. The essence of nationhood was particularism, not a vague set of liberal principles that few states observed in practice anyway (especially when their survival was at stake).”^[42]

The Arabs would have only a limited role in such a state, much more as subjects than equal citizens. In the ethnonational image, then, society was not a civic construction in which the state played a pivotal role in forging the society by developing universal institutions, as had been widely accepted before 1967. Society’s very existence, the dissenters contended, stemmed from Jewish national rights, largely territorial rights.^[43] Arabs did not share in those rights; and this implied that they were not full members of society and that the state was not theirs in the same way that it was the Jews’. While I will concentrate below on group relations among Jews, it is worth noting that the problematic status of Arabs after the war led to “a reality of growing hostility, estrangement, and hatred” that governed relations of Jews with Arab citizens.^[44]

Faltering Images of Social Integration

In addition to the eroding position of the state and the divisive debates about its ultimate reach and character, a third social dynamic coming out of the boundary changes of the 1967 war was the faltering of Israel’s model of social integration among Jews, which led to deteriorating group relations. The slide down the slope of ethnic enmity took many observers by surprise. If anything, the 1967 war’s initial impact was to strengthen social integration, especially feelings of solidarity among Israel’s Jewish population. One anthropologist captured its effect: “The virtually traumatic experience of the Six-Day War in 1967 . . . was highly concentrated in time, packed with action, and dramatic in its outcome. The hypertension of this drama, whose result was seen by many as a miracle, streamed down to all levels of the nation. All strata of the highly variegated and motley society experienced themselves united by the bonds of common peril and salvation, an experience that overrode all the other particular exigencies of various social strata and individuals.”^[45]

It became a truism in Israel that the participation of Jews of Middle Eastern origin in the deliverance of the country from its moment of peril in 1967 cemented their place in society. The heroism of many of their children in the war itself established the credentials of the Middle Eastern immigrants as central members of the society. Additionally, by the mid-1970s, evidence appeared indicating that the ethnic wage gap was beginning to shrink.^[46] Indeed, the widening income differential between Jews of European and Middle Eastern backgrounds in the prewar period stabilized in the late 1960s and then shrank to its lowest point since 1951—at precisely the time that the Black Panthers burst on the social scene.^[47] While noting that domination by Jews of European background remained at the highest levels of society, one observer pointed out that “the economic expansion after the Six-Day War brought with it increased entrance of Orientals into white-collar occupations. They became bank tellers, secretaries, sales people, and moved into service jobs such as television and radio repair, became bus and taxi drivers, food-stand and boutique owners; they also entered the ranks of the expanded regular army, especially in N.C.O. positions.”^[48]

But the solidarity born in the experience of the war and the narrowing economic differential afterward did not prevent a serious deterioration in ethnic relations among the Jews. Perhaps, as Virginia Dominguez has argued, the problem of ethnicity comes only after a collectivity such as Israeli society develops a sense of collective self.^[49] Whether the 1967 war had such an effect or not, both the sensitivity and open dissatisfaction of Jews of Middle East background increased rapidly within a few years of the war. Smooha, for example, found that leaders of Jews with Middle Eastern origins were much more likely than leaders of, say, Romanian Jews to cite invidious comparisons and other forms of discrimination.^[50]

Public and academic discourse came to be focused on issues of discrimination, prejudice, unequal access, and segregation. Jews of Middle Eastern background became more conscious of, and outspoken about, their inferior status. No event had more impact in crystallizing dissatisfaction than the actions of the Black Panthers. Their demonstrations were followed by a host of new studies confirming the ethnic gap and active discrimination. Ethnic parties sprouted up, and ethnic anger was taken out on the ruling Labor Party, as Jews of Middle East origin flocked to the opposition Likud.

If the dominant discourse before 1967 had been one of social integration, in the aftermath of the war the talk was of “immigration without integration.”^[51] Anger welled up; one Yemeni intellectual challenged some of the sacred cows of Israeli society by stating that the children of Middle East Jews had died in the war “in order that the Abromoviches and similar people . . . might be appointed as civil servants.”^[52] The Black Panthers displayed the same sort of animus: “Their whole attitude,” wrote Cohen, “was permeated by the conviction that the Orientals had been oppressed and cheated by the Ashkenazi-dominated establishment or even used for its ulterior purposes.”^[53]

It is important to add that the sense of dissatisfaction did not lead many of the non-European Jews down the path of separatism. Even the few ethnic parties did not trumpet a separatist ideology. From the violent protests of the Black Panthers to the treatises of academics and writers, the call most often was for inclusion and equality, not a breaking off from the dominant groups.^[54] The prosperity of the immediate postwar period made the prospect of integration continue to seem attainable. At the same time, it heightened the frustration of second-class status, resulting in an increasingly vitriolic reaction against the methods and outcomes of the existing model for integration.

The three postwar crises that I have singled out—the diminishing centrality of the state, deep divisions in society about the nature of the state and its final borders, and growing ethnic tensions—intersected with one another. Israel faced growing social polarization, intractable divisions between Jews and a growing Arab minority, as well as ethnic venom expressed by one segment of Jewish society against another; and, on the future status of the occupied territories and the character of the state as universal or ethnonational, Israelis also faced off against each other. And, throughout the fray, no referee was in sight. The diminished Israeli state seemed paralyzed by the social divisions and unable to make hard choices. Its declining capacity to guide the society left Israel by the early 1980s with an economy spiraling out of control and an inability to come to terms with the question of where the society was headed. The war that had been heralded as redemptive, as the antithesis of the Holocaust, seemed within several years of its conclusion to have had satanic effects on Israeli state and society. What was it about the 1967 war that so unsettled state-society relations?

Shifting Boundaries

Fixed boundaries lend stability to political and social life. People’s behavior becomes predictable, social values become ensconced, and the established social roles of institutions—from the family to businesses to the state—become the defining elements for the character of interactions in a society.^[55] Institutions of everyday life depend upon the population’s clear sense of their reach—who is inside an institution and who is outside, which sorts of interactions they govern and which are external to their realm, what is private space and what is public space. These whos, whichs, and whats may institutionalize exploitative and brutal relations, or egalitarian and caring ones; ones based on individual autonomy, or those promoting group sensibilities first. Whatever the specific character of the institutions, their structure of benefits and sanctions carve out stable social roles and modes of interaction.

Institutions depend upon the permanence of boundaries. Shifting boundaries lend all sorts of uncertainty to the underpinnings of institutions. Boundary flux changes the calculus of incentives; it undoes the understanding of the institution’s reach and, with it, the whos, whichs, and whats that provide the parameters for behavior in the society. Ideas and practices embedded in institutions have meaning and influence in a certain space, both social space (say, that of a family) and physical space (as in the jurisdiction of a municipal agency). Sudden shifts in the boundaries of that space can subvert the rules and practices that characterize a single institution. Changes affecting multiple or central institutions in a society can lead to crisis in society’s central dynamics, both by opening routine rules and practices to question and by lending uncertainty to the relevance and efficacy of society’s central institutions, such as the church or state. The effect of boundary changes is particularly salient when the new borders are hotly contested.

Ian Lustick is one of only a handful of scholars who analyze the relationship of boundary changes to broader questions of state-society relations. His brilliant book Unsettled States, Disputed Lands analyzes how and when boundary changes may occur outside the context of war.^[56] He asks which circumstances move a polity from a point where lopping off some of the territory that the state controls (Ireland for Great Britain, Algeria for France, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip for Israel) is unthinkable to a point where such an act is an actively debated policy choice.

Raising the question of border changes, as Lustick does, is important in a broader theoretical sense, as well. When the concept of the state reentered academic discourse in the 1980s, all too frequently it was treated as a given; as an independent variable it seemed inviolable and unchanging.^[57] Rosenau remarked that scholarly discourse seems to assume that “the state is to politics what the hidden hand is (à la Adam Smith) to economics.”^[58] Along with several other scholars, Lustick shifted the focus of comparative politics, asking how the state may change from a seemingly impenetrable rock to something that is shaped and transformed by the currents in society or in the larger international system.^[59] His insight that states are not permanent fixtures but may contract or expand in size (or disappear altogether) furthered the entire enterprise of state studies.^[60]

It is the possibility of border changes that concerns Lustick. In technical terms, the shifts in boundaries are his dependent variable, and he looks to changes in state-society relations for his answers (the independent variable). The question I am exploring stands Lustick’s formulation on its head. What is the effect of boundary changes and continuing contestation over those changes, which now comprise the independent variable, on state and society, which here comprise the dependent variable?

It would be incorrect to say that by themselves the boundary changes stemming from the 1967 war caused the crises in Israel’s social dynamics. We can follow Galnoor, however, in stating that the war created a “broken path.”^[61] By undoing Israel’s boundaries, the Six-Day War chipped away at the hold of key institutions and unraveled the understanding of the character of state and society, opening a new period of intense debate about the future. Conquering and then holding territories that had been ruled by Jordan, Syria, and Egypt undermined existing institutional patterns in Israel and precipitated crises in Israel’s central social dynamics. Reopening the question of Israel’s borders in 1967, after a twenty-year hiatus in which the state’s territory seemed to achieve some permanent status in the minds of many in the international community and among Israelis themselves, led to divisive debates in the country about the fundamental nature of society. These debates spilled over into the political realm and had profound effects on state-society relations and relations among groups in the society.

Boundary Changes Open New Questions about the Construction of Society

In addition to the territory marked by the 1949 armistice lines, at the 1967 war’s end Israel ruled the Golan Heights, the Sinai Desert, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. The latter two, with their dense Palestinian populations and their relation to Jews’ construction of a “territorial legacy,” had a particularly profound effect on social dynamics in Israel. At the simplest level, the occupied territories presented Israelis with choices on issues that the vast majority had previously assumed were closed. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Israeli leaders seemed not to have assimilated these choices, giving indications that they assumed the territories would be returned in exchange for peace and recognition by Israel’s enemies. But quickly the issue of choice pushed itself onto the public agenda, leading to debates about what had previously been undebatable—incorporating new territories permanently into the state.

But the change in political boundaries had several other key effects that went beyond the question of the territorial reach of the state. First, the conception of an expanded Israeli state was accompanied by a rationale for its enlargement; that is, the new reach demanded a set of principles different from those that had supported the zigzag boundaries that had existed from 1949 to 1967. What emerged was a debate that went far beyond the question of where to draw the lines for Israel’s permanent borders. The controversy was an intense, still ongoing division between those supporting the old principles (with their heavy emphasis on universalism and citizenship) and the new rationale based on the ethnonational rights of Jews over the state’s other citizens.

The bitter dispute over the meaning of the state not only divided those in Israel along ideological grounds but also deeply affected group relations. Most obviously, the debate affected Israel’s Arab citizens and their relationship to the dominant Jews. But it also injected itself into group relations among Jews. The ethnonational principle offered the hope of quicker and more complete integration to frustrated Jews of Middle East origin. The established model of a universalistic state implied, as I noted earlier, a civilly constructed society. Such a society placed demands on citizens to conform to modes of interaction through civil behavior. Exactly what civil behavior entailed, however, turned out to be defined by the dominant European-Jewish groups. Much of the discrimination against those from North Africa and Asia, as Jews from a Middle East background knew all too well, was based on the claim or assumption that they did not possess civil attributes. Their acceptance into full membership in society, then, was attenuated and subject to unspoken tests, which in the eyes of those controlling major institutions they repeatedly failed. “They were thought,” noted Arnold Lewis, “to exhibit instability, emotionalism, laziness, boastfulness, inclination to violence, uncontrolled temper, superstitiousness, childishness, and lack of cleanliness.”^[62]

An ethnonational definition of society would subject Jews of Middle East background to no such tests. Ethnonationalism would mean automatic acceptance for such Jews, as is.^[63] In part, their gradual switch to the Likud reflected a desire to hook into that party’s model of society. Israel’s universal institutions, by their very exclusion of those who did not fit the criteria of “civil,” had created their own in-group qualities. Run, as they were, almost exclusively by Jews of European roots, they created what Danet called an institutional culture marked by mishpahtiyut, or familism.^[64] “It is almost a commonplace,” wrote Cohen, “that all the major institutional spheres of Israeli society—the government and the Knesset (Parliament), the political parties, the Histadrut (The General Federation of Labour), the major economic enterprises and corporations, the universities, state schools, and the cultural activities—are dominated, on the national and often also on the local level, by people of Ashkenazi [European] origin and by expressly Western values.”^[65]

The effect, oddly, was that institutions based on universalism used universalism as a method of exclusion, creating their own ethnic in-group.^[66] The change in Israel’s boundaries opened the question of what sort of society would be most consonant with rule over an extended territory and well over a million Palestinians in the newly conquered territory. Those Jews who had been excluded from the central institutions before the war took advantage of the reopened question about the nature of society to push for a redefined ethnic in-group. The new group would be ethnonational, not civic in character, leading to their automatic inclusion, as well. Outliers would then be the Palestinians, both citizens and those in the occupied territories.

Boundary changes thus account for a new contending model of what society should be. This model opened the door to inclusion in central institutions for Jews of Middle Eastern background and, at the same time, to new negativism toward, and exclusion of, Arab citizens (and certainly noncitizens in the territories).^[67] It is not surprising that Danet found almost no drop in the institutional culture of familism, between the war and 1980, in what were constructed as universal institutions.^[68] What may have changed is that after 1967 a multifaced battle developed over the lines of who was in, and who was outside, the family.

Boundaries Change the Labor Market

The effects of the wartime change in boundaries did not end with struggles over where the final borders should be drawn or with ideological divisions about the sort of society that went along with different boundary configurations. Another key impact of the war’s final demarcation lines was on the country’s labor market. The war created a new reservoir of low-wage workers in the conquered territories who had access to work opportunities in Israel across formerly impenetrable lines. This new worker pool affected the entire labor market, most markedly those who had occupied the lowest rungs of the labor ladder before the war. The high-level mobilization of the Israeli economy before, during, and after the war lifted the country out of recession. Palestinians from the territories filled much of the new labor demand by taking low-paying jobs. The mobilization and the existence of the new Palestinian labor pool from the West Bank and Gaza Strip enabled Israeli Arab citizens and Jews from Middle Eastern countries to take advantage of all sorts of positions at the next level up—they became subcontractors, foremen, supervisors, and the like.^[69]

Their occupational mobility often demanded new physical mobility as well. The result was that the Israeli economy, and its labor market in particular, shed much of the fragmentation and segmentation that government policies, wittingly or unwittingly, had engendered during the first two decades of statehood.^[70] Those barriers to physical and social mobility, the internal boundaries, had been most obvious in the case of the Arab population of the country but had existed for new Jewish immigrants from other parts of the Middle East too, as we shall see below. Because Israel seemed so militarily secure now, and because demand was so high for all sorts of labor, state leaders may have seen the breakdown of the old segmentation and the social relations that went along with it as largely cost-free. In fact, the costs turned out to be staggering: reorganization of society, with its new Gazan and West Bank underclass, prompted the erosion of the state’s privileged position, leading to important and profound changes in state-society relations.

In the years of high immigration right after the creation of the state, governmental policies had attracted new immigrants, especially those of Middle Eastern origin, to so-called development towns. Subsidized housing and low-interest loans were the biggest inducements drawing immigrants to these isolated new communities, “outside the main stream of Israeli society geographically as well as socially.”^[71] More than any other settlements in Israel, these towns were ethnically constituted, with as many as two-thirds of residents from a Middle Eastern background.^[72]

The state also gave incentives to certain kinds of industries to locate in the development towns, especially ones using labor-intensive technologies and low-skill labor.^[73] In effect, an ethnic division of labor developed in Israel that was geographically based. Isolation meant that new immigrants from Middle Eastern countries were concentrated in jobs and locations that impeded their physical and social mobility. Concentrated at the lower end of the occupational ladder and shunted to the geographical margins of the country, Jews with Middle Eastern roots formed a labor force within a labor force. Spatially, Israel was divided by what Oren Yiftachel has called “internal frontiers.”^[74]

Segmentation and fragmentation, then, were the hallmarks of the pre-1967 economy. The deep recession immediately before the war, fell hardest on precisely those in the isolated, low-skill industries.^[75] “To sum up,” wrote Swirski, “residential segregation, the predominance of intragroup marriages, the segregated and unequal school system, and the ideological apparatus that portrays the Orientals as culturally deprived or backward—all work to reproduce the ethnic division of labour that emerged in Israel during the fifties and sixties.”^[76]

Arab labor in Israel was even more disadvantaged. Even before the creation of Israel, many Arabs (especially those living in the coastal portions of Palestine that became Israel) had begun to commute from their villages to low-skill jobs in the cities. With the imposition of military administration of the Arabs after Israeli independence, that pattern continued. Now, however, severe restrictions were placed on how far and under what conditions Arab workers could commute to outside jobs, making them available for the lowest-skill labor but only in their local regions. They, too, formed a niche within a fragmented and segmented labor force.

Even before the 1967 war, signs emerged that the social boundaries associated with the segmented labor market, with its clear ethnic division of labor, were beginning to fray. The end of military administration ended the forced confinement of Arab labor. Since the geographic isolation of Jews from Middle Eastern origins was maintained through incentives, rather than force, it is not surprising that many began to move from the development towns. One study in the early 1960s found that interurban movement from these communities was four times the national average.^[77]

But it was the boom after the war, coupled with the reconfiguration of the labor market through the addition of Palestinians from the conquered territories, that opened wide the gates to new physical and social mobility, undoing the old social fragmentation and segmentation.^[78] Economic boom created a high demand for labor at all levels of the Israeli economy; in fact, unemployment rates until the late 1980s averaged just 3.6 percent. Amir described the result: “The 1967 war changed the composition of the labor force in Israel; there now existed accessible reserve labor which was cheap, unskilled, and nonorganized [Palestinians from the occupied territories].”^[79] For both Arab citizens of Israel and Jews from Middle Eastern background, the demands higher up on the occupational scale, coupled with the availability of low-skill labor to replace them at the low end, resulted in new social and physical mobility.^[80] The changing of the internal social boundaries and the external physical boundaries became coupled processes.

The mobilization of new social groups increased demands upon the state—many of them, as we saw, expressed in terms of ethnic and labor protest.^[81] Indeed, the end of the old residential isolation and labor market segmentation broke down the state’s ability to dampen demands put upon it. As new political and social demands strained the capacities of the state’s relatively young institutions, it became less and less able to regulate intergroup relations and to put brakes on Israeli consumption. And, with the reemergence of the ethnonational model of society expressed by the Likud, many Jews with Middle Eastern origins found a ready way to express their dissatisfaction.

It might also be noted, in conclusion, that some of the elements leading to the crisis in Israel’s social dynamics also put limits on that crisis. The unrestrained economy, with its soaring levels of personal consumption and low unemployment, allowed for high mobility and thus very focused bread-and-butter demands by Jews from Middle Eastern backgrounds. Their aims were not separation but inclusion and participation. They did not build exclusive institutions but integrated into established ones, such as the Likud itself. At least for some of the problems we have discussed, that meant an avenue for the creation of new institutional stability in the future.

Conclusion

When the 1967 war broke out, the Israeli state was only twenty years old. Its institutions had not hardened over many decades or centuries. Still, in a short period, those institutions had created remarkable stability in the relations between the state and those it governed. State organizations from the Knesset on down had become naturalized, that is, many in society, especially among the Jewish population, accepted the reach of those institutions and the rightness of their establishing codes for social behavior. To be sure, there was no shortage of grumbling about particular rules, but little questioning arose about the appropriateness of those organizations to make the rules.

Immediately after the harrowing days of May and early June 1967, very few Jewish citizens saw the outcome of the war as anything but an unmixed blessing. What they and Israeli political officials could not foresee was how unsettling to state institutions and the relations between the state and society the change in boundaries brought about by the war would be. If the prewar boundaries had taken on a kind of sanctity in those two decades, all sorts of doubts came to the surface about what the new proper boundaries and reach of political institutions should be. In a setting where the state had been elevated to a very special status comparatively, the postwar border changes, mixed with a number of other domestic and international factors, weakened the state and transformed its relation to society.

As I write these words, early in the new century, in the midst of intense negotiations with the Palestinians and Syrians, the questions of Israel’s permanent boundaries, including who constitutes the nation, the nature of citizenship, and the proper role of state institutions are as contested now as they were thirty years ago. If a glimmer of hope can be seen on the horizon that some of the most wrenching disputes will recede, it is that today’s debates are much more focused now on the signed agreements with the Palestinians and what they require of Israel. The absence of a viable alternative to the Oslo Process, as well as a growing sense of inevitability about the return of the Golan Heights to Syria, has channeled many of the divisions into questions of how to implement the agreements and how far concessions should go. Those are not inconsequential questions. But, if they can be resolved and final agreements between Israel and the Palestine Authority, and between Israel and Syria, can be ratified, the effect could be similar to Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai Desert and its settlements there, such as Yamit, in the late 1970s. In that case, emotions ran very high at the moment; then, as now, musings about the possibility of civil war could be heard in the street. But the permanent settlement with Egypt came to be nearly unquestioned within a few short years after the withdrawal occurred. If the Israeli people and state are fortunate, the same will occur in the context of a final peace with the Palestinians and the Syrians.

Notes

7. War as Leveler, War as Midwife

Palestinian Political Institutions, Nationalism, and Society Since 1948

Yezid Sayigh

That war has had a repeated and massive impact on the evolution of Palestinian politics and society since the early twentieth century can hardly be denied. The most graphic example is the conflict accompanying the end of the British mandate over Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel, which resulted in the exodus of around 55 percent of the Arab population (some 1.4 million people) and its dispossession of land and other properties and means of livelihood in the course of 1947–49.^[1] What the Palestinians have referred to since then as al-nakba (the catastrophe) had far-reaching consequences. The loss of a shared economic “space” and the dispersal of the refugees to several places of exile compounded their social dislocation severely, as did their subjection (along with those Arab inhabitants of mandate Palestine who were not displaced) to the diverse political, administrative, legal, and economic systems and security controls of the various governments that now exercised authority over them.^[2] No less important was the unwillingness of the Arab “frontline” states directly concerned—Jordan and Egypt—to sanction the establishment of a Palestinian state in those parts of Palestine that remained under their control, namely, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.^[3] This not only impeded the construction of recognized and unitary Palestinian political institutions, and consequently of a common postcolonial national identity, but also fragmented the social and economic base for the conduct of “national” politics and for the emergence of distinct elite groups and corporate interests. Official Arab policy after 1948 thus consolidated the long-term effects of the absence of a Palestinian version of the colonial state and native (Arab) rule during the British mandate.

Indeed, the sheer scale of al-nakba and the complexity of the varied and often hostile environment in which the Arab former inhabitants of mandate Palestine subsequently found themselves only beg the question of how the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was able to assert itself after the mid-1960s as a distinct political actor enjoying not inconsiderable autonomy and extensive recognition on the domestic, regional, and international stages. No other nonstate actor since 1945 has gained equivalent diplomatic status, while many other self-defined national communities have failed to assert their claims to self-determination and statehood with equal success.^[4] Of course it is obvious that the PLO was neither a sovereign actor, enjoying full empirical and juridical statehood, nor the inheritor of a previous state, as the Palestinians had not formed an autonomous political entity under the British mandate or even a single administrative unit under the Ottomans.^[5] However, as I have argued elsewhere, at issue was not “stateness” (actual possession of the key attributes of the state, such as exclusive control over population and territory) but rather “statist” character, as defined by “the emergence and maintenance of a particular set of political practices and institutional arrangements centred on the PLO; the processes through which it redefined its political relations with, and sought to co-opt, Palestinian society; and the manner of its interaction with sovereign members of the regional and international state systems. It is in this sense that the underlying logic of Palestinian national politics and organizational evolution . . . since 1948 has been one of state-building.”^[6]

The political ascendancy of the PLO is no less notable for the main features of the Palestinian state-society dyad (with the PLO standing in for the state) as it has developed since the mid-1960s. These can be summarized as its neopatrimonial character—typified by the use of rent, corporatism, and the tendency to populist nationalism and authoritarianism—and the political ascendancy of lower-middle-class strata, especially of rural-provincial background, thanks to their marked transition to salaried employment generally and to their direct engagement within the statist PLO framework more specifically. Moreover, this historical process went hand in hand with the promotion of a particularistic national identity that emphasized Palestinian-ness over wider Arab or Islamic affiliations, among others (even when these were acknowledged or co-opted). In short, the Palestinian experience has been remarkably similar to that of Arab states (particularly republican Egypt, Algeria, Syria, and Iraq, but also, arguably, monarchic Jordan in certain respects) in terms of organizational structure, political practice and culture, state nationalism, rent-based relations with society, and the social origins of the “new elites” who came to power at various points in the post-1945 independence period.^[7]

This was hardly a predictable outcome in the aftermath of al-nakba, and so the question is, what brought it about nonetheless? In answer, the central argument of this chapter is that it was war that enabled the PLO to emerge as the nonterritorial equivalent of a state (paradoxical as the notion may be), assert its brand of nationalist discourse and practice, and structure its relations with Palestinian society accordingly. This is not to suggest that these were conscious aims or anticipated consequences of the much-vaunted “armed struggle,” but simply to observe that war assisted the PLO both in acquiring such institutional autonomy as it did and in obtaining the resources (whether material, especially financial, or symbolic) that allowed it to occupy a statelike position in relation to its “domestic” constituents. War legitimated political leadership and helped decide the outcome of internal contests over political programs and the choice of military and diplomatic means, while in parallel altering the form, substance, and direction of relations with external actors. Similarly, it contributed unmistakably to the shaping of Palestinian nationalism, and exercised both direct and indirect influence on the political and economic fortunes of various social forces, affecting their access to key resources and impinging on paths of elite formation, and so shifting the relative balance between them.

That said, it is important to understand what war was, and what it was not. War explains how the Palestinians, having departed from so divergent a starting point, arrived eventually at a model of state-building and state-society relations close to that of many Arab countries, but it does not explain why they did so. This can be understood only by situating the impact of war within the broader context of the prevalence and power of two sets of factors that have affected state formation throughout the postcolonial world. The first consists of the models and norms of the international system—foremost of which are the “universalization of the territorial state format,” along with nationalism and other legitimizing enterprises such as welfarism and development—and the politically motivated interventions of major global and regional actors that provided opportunities for local actors to secure material resources in the form of strategic and diplomatic support or financial and military assistance.^[8] The second set comprises structural factors and secular trends affecting many postcolonial and developing countries worldwide, especially the expansion of state sectors, increase in salaried employment generally, spread of modern education, accelerated urbanization, and the rise of rentier politics financed by primary commodity exports and the rewards of superpower rivalry.

These are the factors that shaped the formation of modern Arab states and societies since World War I. They determined both the range of possible resources and images that could be brought to bear and the paths that Palestinian political and social transformation might actually take. War was a mechanism that brought certain of the external factors to bear and a midwife (to use Raymond Aron’s expression) for shifts in internal political and social balances at key moments (such as 1948 and 1967), but the fact that it could deny or provide opportunities for political and social change should not encourage us to read backward and regard it as either a sufficient condition for such change or a determinant of its direction.^[9] Indeed, whether it was even necessary is debatable: to belittle its role would be ahistorical and would seem to replace one monocausal explanation for another, but to posit that the transformation of Palestinian politics, institutions, nationalism, and society since 1948 would not have occurred as they ultimately did without its impact is to privilege it excessively and to confuse the contingency of its timely intervention for necessity. Indeed, given the additional knowledge that the PLO finally acquired qualified jurisdiction over a limited demographic and territorial base in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1994 through negotiation with Israel, it may be argued that war was not a necessary factor in its acquisition of what Barry Buzan terms the three components of the modern state, namely, the idea of the state, its physical basis, and its institutional expression.^[10]

To the extent that it was a decisive factor at key moments in modern Palestinian history, war acted as an intervening or facilitating variable. That is, it was a variable that could accelerate social processes that were already under way (such as the transition of elites) and that Palestinian (and other) political actors could use to accomplish ends (such as the promotion of Palestino-centric nationalism or the centralization of the PLO’s functional and symbolic authority) that might well have been achieved anyway through other means even if war had not occurred, albeit in somewhat different form or pace. After all, broadly similar political and social transformations took place in Egypt, post-1962 Algeria, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan in the same period without being driven by war; the militarization of politics and society in the Palestinian case was not fundamentally different in its political underpinnings and social consequences and did not require further war-waging once in place. Of course, there is a tension here between the seemingly incidental nature of war’s intervention and its equally demonstrable centrality in certain respects, but this is explained largely by the manner in which other actors blocked or impeded alternative courses of Palestinian institutional, political, and social evolution.

The role of war in the Palestinian case therefore also diverges fundamentally from its historical role in state formation in Europe. In the latter case, as Charles Tilly has argued, war and the preparation for war acted as a central and necessary mechanism affecting the entire process of state formation.^[11] Internally, it involved rulers in extracting the means of war (“men, arms, supplies, or money to buy them”) from those who held them, in a process that led them to centralize state authority, to impose taxation and conscription, and to develop the administrative agencies to manage these and other expanding functions. This involved extensive struggles with existing social organizations, out of which arose durable political and administrative structures; these structures, moreover, varied from one country to another according to the relative strength of those social organizations, the nature of previous constitutional arrangements, and the degree of concentration of capital and coercive resources and their geographical distribution.^[12] As Tilly, Gianfranco Poggi, and others have also noted, the eventual result of these negotiations and contests between state-builders and other domestic actors was the rise of nationalism and notions of citizenship and democracy. At the same time, war was an important mechanism tying state formation to the external environment—which impinged on that process, assisting it in ways and limiting it in others—and helped develop common “rules of the game” among states. Thus “national states always appear in competition with each other, and gain their identities by contrast with rival states; they belong to systems of states.”^[13]

In the Palestinian case, only the external dynamic is really evident, and then only to a limited degree, in that the PLO was able to utilize war as a means of activating regional or international alliances and of generating needed political and material resources. In addition to helping the PLO carve out sanctuaries in three of the four Arab frontline states, external alliances also allowed it to acquire “strategic rent,” much as Egypt, Syria, or Jordan did (whether as confrontation states with Israel or as peace brokers with it) from the oil-rich Arab states or from the superpowers. Crucially, the availability of financial and other assistance from external sources obviated the need for the PLO to engage in struggles with domestic social actors or to transform social relations in order to extract revenues for the purposes of war waging and state building. It further follows that the threat of war, and the idea of war as an image and even a norm, was more important than real war, the actual conduct of war. Indeed, most episodes of large-scale war waging in the Palestinian experience (as in the wider Arab-Israeli context more generally) are noticeable for their brevity, however seriously the Palestinians took their armed struggle and genuinely fought for the rights they claimed.

In most, if not all, of these respects the PLO followed the path of other postcolonial and national liberation movements in that war was not about the attainment of a desirable new political or social order (such as democracy or socialism), but rather was a means of creating a state in the Western image and a validation in itself.^[14] Evidently this privileged external factors while marginalizing internal contests (during the struggle for national liberation) between the principal domestic political actors and social organizations over the extraction of material resources and the construction of structures embodying and governing their relations. This had several negative consequences. One was that war could do as much to undermine state building as to facilitate it; for example, the availability of external supporters engaged in their own rivalries encouraged competitive rent-seeking within the Palestinian movement and therefore fragmented it and impeded centralization. Second, the parallel marginalization of internal social contests meant that the “right to rule” was based almost exclusively on the conduct of armed struggle and on control of the state and military apparatus, leaving fundamental aspects of state-society relations, best represented by the notions of “social pact” and citizenship, unresolved for the postindependence phase. It follows, finally, that the enduring legacy of political institutions and practices put into place during armed conflict is a postcolonial polity that is fragile, fragmented, and contested internally.^[15]

The role played by war in Palestinian political and social transformation, and the limits of that role, are revealed in four discursive areas in which identities, practices, and institutions were constructed in relation to international, regional, and local contexts. The first area is institutional and refers to the way in which the PLO was able, whether through conflict of its own making or that of others, to generate and maintain institutions and to obtain recognition as and relate as an autonomous political actor to the Arab and international state systems. The second area is political in the sense of praxis and refers to the manner in which the armed struggle enabled the PLO to acquire a “political class,” establish a new political system with its own culture and “rules of the game,” decide the outcome of programmatic contests (both political and ideological), and legitimize internal practices and modes of control. The third area is ideational and refers specifically to the connection between political violence, on the one hand, and the emergence and dominance of particular forms of Palestinian nationalism, on the other hand. The fourth, and last, area develops the notion of community by looking at the role of war in societal construction and, in particular, at its impact on social balances and elite formation. In all cases, the focus of this chapter is on those institutional, political, ideational, and social processes and forces that were promoted, enclosed, or otherwise represented by the PLO.

Carving a Regional Niche, Acquiring International Character: Institutional Autonomy and Recognition through Conflict

To apply loosely to the PLO Theda Skocpol’s observation about Third World social revolutions in general, “these revolutions have happened in settings so penetrated by foreign influences—economic, military, and cultural—that social-revolutionary transformations have been as much about the definition of autonomous political identities on the international scene as they have been about forging new political ties between indigenous revolutionaries and their mass constituents.”^[16] War, arguably, played its most significant role in this context, because the construction of statist political institutions required attainment of a key attribute—autonomy—as well as a territorial base (however modest), and therefore necessarily placed the PLO in a position of direct contestation and negotiation with external actors and host states. Yet because this process also required attainment of a second key attribute—recognition—adopting the norms and “rules” of the dominant states system eventually became a more effective way of mobilizing external support than waging war, even if this imposed constraints on the use of violence and necessitated parallel changes in national objectives and internal political structure.^[17]

The importance of autonomy from, and recognition by, established state actors in determining the form and purpose of Palestinian political institutionalization was evident especially in the thinking of Fateh, the mainstream nationalist guerrilla group formed in 1958–59 that was to win lasting control of the PLO a decade later. Fateh’s founders were clear that recognition by others, attainment of internal unity, and assertion of a Palestinian national identity required an autonomous political entity with independent organizational structures. Indeed, they were convinced that the aftermath of al-nakba “would have been very different had the Palestinian leadership after 1948 continued to raise the banner of the government and entity.”^[18] The inability of the All-Palestine government (formed in the closing stages of the first Arab-Israeli war in October 1948) to assert itself in the face of the indifference of some Arab states and active obstruction by others had prevented the Palestinians from independently making decisions and had turned them into a “neglected mass.”^[19] From the outset Fateh argued that “the Palestinian entity is necessary in order to concentrate the efforts of our people and mobilize them” but believed equally that an entity could only come into being if a Palestinian vanguard imposed it on the Arab state system and forced recognition through armed revolution.^[20]

Yet the need for recognition imposed its own logic. Fateh initially adopted an ambivalent, and then openly hostile, attitude toward the PLO, which was seen upon its establishment in 1964 as an overly bureaucratic and obedient instrument in the hands of the Arab states, which had formed it “with the express purpose of pre-empting the revolutionary process among the Palestinians.”^[21] For this reason many in the ranks at first opposed taking over or preserving the PLO structure once this became possible after the resounding Arab defeat at Israeli hands in June 1967. However, the Fateh founders were also aware that “the PLO enjoyed Arab legitimacy, and this was important,” since it “embodied an official Arab commitment to the Palestinian people for the first time.”^[22] In any event, Fateh conducted a systematic takeover of the PLO and its constituent agencies and departments from 1968 onward, instituting what was to be a permanent symbiosis between itself and the latter’s statist structures, much like that in Arab and non-Arab states dominated by a single or governing party.

The central issue here is that war played a pivotal role in the PLO’s acquisition and maintenance of its institutional character, described by a senior official as “an ambition of all revolutions,” above all by enabling it to “exercise significant autonomy in the face of other centers of state power.”^[23] The foremost instance of this dynamic was the 1967 war, which, by weakening the Arab host governments politically and militarily, enabled the Fateh-dominated PLO not only to establish guerrilla sanctuaries in rural areas but also, critically, to acquire an extensive political and administrative presence in the capital cities and other urban centers of Jordan, Lebanon, and (albeit to a lesser degree) Syria in the next two years. The extraterritorial status of the PLO was, moreover, recognized officially by the host authorities in these countries and enshrined in a variety of formal treaties and secret memoranda. Conscious of the immense moral and material advantages conferred by its ability to openly mobilize and direct its mass base, the PLO also resorted to force on several occasions between November 1968 and May 1973 to defend the arrangements sanctifying its public presence in Jordan and Lebanon, and formed a fully fledged state-within-the-state to protect its various institutions and consolidate its international diplomatic status following the disintegration (to which it had contributed heavily) of the Lebanese state in 1975–76.

At the same time it is necessary to note the limits of war as an instrument of Palestinian institutional development. The events of June 1967 and the following decade explain the ability of the PLO to obtain considerable extraterritorial privileges and institutional autonomy in specific host countries, where it became part of domestic power struggles and social conflicts, but are insufficient to explain why it came to enjoy regional and international recognition on a scale unprecedented for a nonstate actor. Here the answer lies primarily in the nature of the regional and international systems of states rather in the role of war as such, although the latter acted repeatedly as a mechanism connecting attitudes and developments at these levels with Palestinian institution-building. For example, it is true that the military conflict of 1948 triggered the collapse of Palestinian national institutions, but the conflicting agendas of the main Arab states were a major contributory factor throughout the 1947–49 period, as they opposed successive Palestinian proposals for the establishment of an Arab government and state in mandate Palestine and then disbanded Palestinian irregular forces.^[24] Their rivalry moreover ensured the subsequent lack of all but the most nominal Palestinian representation in collective Arab fora, such as the League of Arab States, until the mid-1960s. The situation changed only when the escalation of inter-Arab rivalries made the Palestinian issue a potent “card” in regional politics from 1959 onward: it eventually became expedient to set up the PLO as a means of defusing the “Arab cold war” and deflecting the rising Palestinian nationalism that threatened an untimely war with Israel, a fear that PLO founder Ahmad Shuqayri and Fateh separately utilized to gain leverage and seek relative autonomy from the Arab states.

The latter example, moreover, shows that it was the threat of war, rather than its actual conduct or material results in the first instance, that was most potent in Palestinian hands. This potency was due to the tendency of the Arab states system to balance politics and mutual intervention and to the power of symbolic competitions based on shared norms among its members.^[25] It was this that imbued the PLO with an influence far exceeding its physical capabilities after the 1967 war and, in following years, magnified the coercive power that the PLO could bring to bear in Jordan and Lebanon by mobilizing wider Arab backing for its extraterritorial status. The same characteristics could also render the PLO vulnerable to challenges from internal opponents who had outside backing—witness Syrian and Libyan support for the rebellion that split Fateh and the PLO in 1983. But more generally these characteristics enabled the PLO to mobilize regional resources and alliances to protect its institutional autonomy from external rivals—witness Arab support during the 1970 conflict in Jordan (extending to military intervention in the case of Syria) and Egyptian and Iraqi logistic backing against the Syrian intervention in Lebanon in 1976. Cold war politics further magnified the PLO’s manipulative capability as a convergence of interest emerged in the 1970s with Soviet policy objectives in the Third World.^[26] Indeed it can be argued, as Frantz Fanon did with regard to the Algerian war of independence, that the Palestinian armed struggle only had a serious impact and that the PLO was only able to win external recognition (at least from one superpower camp) in an environment in which international contradictions were “sufficiently distinct.”^[27]

Contradictions in the regional and international systems did not privilege war as a mechanism of political change, however, even though it provided the opportunity for ideological and programmatic changes. It was quite the reverse, as the evolution of PLO national objectives and strategies in the 1970s suggests. Thus the defeat of the guerrilla movement in Jordan in 1970–71 contributed to the mainstream PLO leadership’s pragmatic shift from its objective of liberating the whole of mandate Palestine by force to the more modest goal of setting up a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by negotiation. In much the same way, the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973 provided the PLO with a critical political moment in which to develop a credible diplomatic option, based on the justifiable calculation that it was in the interest of the major regional and international powers to settle the conflict. In both instances the first need was to consolidate PLO standing in the Arab states system: having faced several challenges to its status as Palestinian national representative after the expulsion from Jordan, it won decisive Arab confirmation (and defeated the Jordanian political challenge conclusively) following the October war. This was the basis for securing the second need: Arab diplomatic and strategic support, greatly enhanced by the war and use of the “oil weapon,” was critical in mobilizing international support for the Palestinians, leading over the next year to PLO membership in the Non-Aligned Movement and Islamic Conference Organization, observer status at the UN and Organization of African Unity, and official recognition from the Soviet bloc and other socialist countries.

The PLO could, and did, continue to use military means to advance its national agenda, but this occurred increasingly within a referential framework provided by the international state system. Even the use of terror in 1968–73, counterproductive as it was in terms of alienating Western public and government opinion, proved in the long run to have demonstrated the necessity of addressing the Palestinians as a distinct and separate strand in the wider Arab-Israeli conflict. However, the PLO also increasingly utilized more conventional military means to assert its political status and uphold its statist character. The transformation of its guerrilla forces after 1971 into semiconventional units with regular training, command and logistics structures, and heavy weaponry was as much a reflection of this concern (“soldiers, not bandits or terrorists”) as was the provision of a guard of honor for foreign dignitaries visiting PLO headquarters in Beirut up to 1982. The PLO meanwhile cemented its diplomatic gains in some instances by supplying arms, training, and combat personnel to Arab and Third World countries or Soviet allies—such as Libya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Nicaragua—and in others gave military assistance to domestic opponents of governments deemed hostile—such as Pahlevi Iran—as a means of pressure. Conflict could also be used to engage outside powers in support of the PLO’s political and diplomatic agenda: its military policy during the Israeli siege of Beirut in summer 1982 was calibrated to the diplomatic rewards it expected, and succeeded in prompting active Franco-Egyptian diplomacy on its behalf at the UN, while later its pursuit of the bitter “camps war” with the Lebanese shi‘a Amal militia in 1985–88 helped it restore relations with certain Arab states and the USSR.^[28]

The above account indicates that two, contradictory dynamics were in operation even as the PLO gained the autonomy and recognition it sought (both externally and internally). First, the fact that the PLO was obliged to observe certain norms (above all, that of sovereignty) in order to gain membership of the Arab states system, and to moderate its goals and means in the conflict with Israel in order to gain acceptance from the international community, demonstrates the limits of war as a means of acquiring recognition in the international system, at least so long as war does not come with exclusive control over territory and population. Indeed, the more noticeable trend was the substitution, by the mid-1970s, of the discourse of “guerrilla warfare” and “people’s war” with a terminology drawn directly from United Nations resolutions that spoke of “legitimate” and “inalienable” Palestinian rights, including especially that of self-determination.

Second, and conversely, the quest for recognition could work to opposite effect. Important as Western acceptance was, the PLO’s constant concern to combat any challenge to its status as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians and its determination, to that end, to secure the loyalty of its mass constituency and internal opposition, at times required it to adopt political stances (such as refusing to acknowledge unconditionally Israel’s right to exist) or military tactics (such as Fateh’s foray into international terrorism in 1971–73 and its “suicide” raids against Israeli civilian targets in 1974–78) that severely damaged or even derailed its diplomacy. Yet the overall trend was toward a redefinition of national goals and therefore, implicitly, of political constituency, culminating ultimately in the PLO-Israel Oslo Accords of September 1993. The ability of the Fateh-dominated mainstream PLO leadership to conduct this protracted transition, despite the deep rifts it produced and the fundamental challenges it posed to national identification, testifies to the durability of the political structures and practices developed over the preceding three decades of conflict.

War and the Ordering of Politics

Predictably, the transformation of Fateh and the other guerrilla groups into a mass movement after 1967 was accompanied by new contests over leadership, organization, and political agendas. Furthermore, the attempt to incorporate various social forces and build a secure constituency, acquire material resources, and institutionalize political practice led to intense competition and increasingly complex internal politics. In all cases armed conflict shaped the emergent political system, defining its sources of legitimacy, rules and norms, organizational structure, and balance of power. However, it did so in relation to two additional factors that exerted a determining influence on the evolution of Palestinian politics: “rent” and Arab intervention. The interplay of these factors can be assessed by examining the manner in which war impacted on three sets of political relations: between the various guerrilla groups, within their respective memberships, and between the PLO and its social constituency.

The cornerstone of the new political system was the legitimating function of armed struggle. This derived in part from the Palestinian “repertoire of contention,” the stock of familiar forms of collective action going back, in particular, to what Palestinians call the Great Revolt of 1936–39, rather than from an ends-related calculation of the effectiveness of military means.^[29] It also owed much to extraneous factors, not least the marginalization or outright suppression by Israel and Arab governments of alternative forms of Palestinian political mobilization, including nonviolent ones, that appeared initially in the aftermath of al-nakba.^[30] The Palestine Refugee Congress was one such example: formed by middle-class figures who were not affiliated to the pre-1948 national leadership, it sought to represent the Palestinians at the 1949 Arab-Israeli armistice talks but was excluded by both sides. Similarly, although the communists were undoubtedly in the minority in calling for coexistence with Israel after 1948, government repression of both communists and the other, more militant opposition parties that Palestinians joined in significant numbers in the Arab frontline states (and Israel) in the 1950s further narrowed the scope for political mobilization within participatory frameworks provided by the host states. The subsequent preeminence of organized violence makes it difficult now to conceive that the Palestinian national movement could have adopted any form or means other than those it eventually did, but this was not a foregone conclusion then; a significantly different course of events might have arisen had Israel and one or more of its Arab neighbors come to agreement on any of the various peace proposals mooted in the early years after 1948, or had a Palestinian state been allowed to come into being in the West Bank and/or Gaza Strip with the authority to press its own claims in diplomatic fora.

In any case, the legitimating function of armed struggle was evident in its role in the political demise of the founding generation of the PLO, which had been established with Arab sponsorship in 1964. Unable to break free from the restrictions imposed by host governments and army commands on its political and military activity, the original PLO leadership headed by Ahmad al-Shuqayri was discredited both by its association with the organization’s poor showing in June 1967 and by its own inability afterward to devise new strategies and resume the conflict with Israel. Conversely, the speed with which Fateh and other guerrilla groups responded to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip—by sending in hundreds of cadres in an (ultimately futile) attempt to mount an armed insurrection^[31]—assured them majority support within the Palestine National Council (the PLO’s unelected parliament-in-exile) and then formal control of its executive committee and conventionally structured liberation army by February 1969, when Fateh’s Yasir Arafat was elected chairman. This seemed to validate the underlying Blanquism in Fateh’s strategy, inasmuch as it had deliberately used the energetic and unrelenting action of a small number of resolute activists both to draw the mass of the people behind itself and to seize the helm of the quasi-state PLO, despite its own lack of the requisite organization and a revolutionary ideology.^[32]

The imprint that the ethos of armed struggle left on the guerrilla movement as a whole also showed how successful Fateh had been in providing a “collective action frame,” “inscribing grievances in overall frames that identify an injustice, attribute the responsibility for it to others and propose solutions to it.”^[33] After 1967 only those groups that demonstrably engaged in guerrilla warfare could compete with rival claimants to command a mass following, and only those individuals who actively espoused its tenets could join the ranks of the new “political class” that now formed. As George Habash, the secretary-general of Fateh’s main rival, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), put it, “The masses will not heed any group unless they feel that it continues its strikes against Israel and increases its effectiveness.”^[34] Additional confirmation of the validity and effectiveness of armed struggle, both as a norm and as a model, came from the recent experience of postcolonial national liberation movements: the Algerian was the closest in many respects, but the anti-British campaigns in the Suez Canal zone in the early 1950s and Aden in the mid-1960s were also influential, as of course were the successes of China, Vietnam, and Cuba. Cold war politics, Sino-Soviet rivalry, and the proliferation of new liberation struggles in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America only emphasized this further.

However, despite being a necessary element, the legitimacy derived from the armed struggle is not sufficient to explain either the durability of the nascent Palestinian political system or the emergence of rules and norms that were understood and shared by all. Similarly, the system’s rapid institutionalization provides an important part of the explanation but does not answer fully the question of why this proceeded in one form and not another or took place at all, nor why all the various guerrilla groups found it either desirable or unavoidable to join the statist, umbrella structure of the PLO, whether sooner or later. The political preferences of the group that had taken the lead in the armed struggle were of course influential, but Fateh hardly had a monopoly on military action and the legitimacy to be derived from it, and in any case its own ranks were initially divided over whether or not to retain the PLO structure and how to achieve national unity with other groups.

Two additional factors contributed significantly to the shaping of the emergent political system and, arguably, exerted a determining influence on it: rent and Arab intervention. These were interlinked, as it was both the huge popularity of the guerrilla movement after 1967 and consequently its appeal as an ally or proxy in inter-Arab disputes—especially among the countries of the Arab East—that secured financial, military, and other material assistance from Arab governments of all ideological persuasions. Much as was the case for attracting recruits and building a mass following, military action against Israel was the primary means to demonstrate credibility to Arab backers and ensure the continuity of external support. This only reinforced the fragmentation of the Palestinian arena by increasing the advantages to be obtained from forming new guerrilla groups and competing for rent flows. The other cost was the magnified vulnerability of the movement as a whole to the political agendas of the Arab states, which penetrated the PLO and threatened to entangle it in unwanted conflicts with host governments and to undermine the Arab consensus it strove to weave around its representation of the Palestinian cause. This “transnationalization” of domestic politics caused particular concern for Fateh, which, after the election of Arafat, strove to assert the authority of the PLO as the central decision-making body of the guerrilla movement as a whole, in keeping with its long-standing search for a unified Palestinian organization in order “to preserve identity and independence” from Arab control.^[35]

The armed struggle was therefore open to all as a field for political contestation, no less so because external rent was equally available to all, often out of real proportion to military effectiveness or size of popular base. Indeed, the weakness of Palestinian social forces or corporate identities in exile only confirmed the bargaining power of the guerrilla groups, since effective alternative channels for contestation and negotiation did not exist, and encouraged political fragmentation and decentralization of authority. What permitted a single, centralized institutional structure to emerge nonetheless was the intervention of war initiated by external actors. This helped decide internal political contests, as well as reduce political penetration of the Palestinian movement by the Arab states (without necessarily reducing its physical vulnerability to them). A significant instance of this effect was the Jordanian civil war of 1970–71, which ended with the expulsion of the Palestinian guerrillas from the kingdom. Worst hit were the leftist PFLP and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP): not only had they suffered proportionately more casualties than Fateh but their provocative rhetoric and behavior were widely regarded as foremost causes of the confrontation, leading to an ebbing of public support and internal splits and defections. Fateh was therefore finally able to strip the Central Committee—the main consultative body of the guerrilla movement, which operated outside the PLO structure—of any policy- or decision-making power and subordinate it firmly to the PLO executive committee, which Fateh already dominated.

The ability of the Fateh-dominated PLO leadership to consolidate the Palestinian political system by capitalizing on the incidence of war demonstrates war’s utility but does not mean that it was a necessary or determining factor, however. It continued to perform significant political functions, externally as well as internally, but these either took a highly instrumental form of limited military operations geared toward specific policy objectives or else related to the militarization of the PLO’s civilian base and internal politics. The brief resort by Fateh to international terrorism in 1971–73 was an example of the instrumental approach, as it was partly an attempt to obscure the PLO’s strategic dilemma in the wake of the defeat in Jordan, while its “suicide raids” on Israeli civilian targets in the mid-1970s were intended to spoil U.S. diplomatic initiatives to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict that excluded the PLO. Similar effects obtained internally, as both the “rejectionist” guerrilla groups, on the one hand, and Fateh and its mainstream allies, on the other, conducted dramatic raids to assert their patriotic credentials and so lend weight to their respective political positions against and for the evolution of PLO diplomacy. The fact that military action also attracted substantial assistance from Arab backers and, increasingly, the Soviet bloc demonstrated both its utility as a means of generating strategic rent and the degree to which its functions had become institutionalized within the Palestinian political system.

The PLO leadership strove from 1973 onward to make its own exchange, in effect, of military bargaining cards in return for diplomatic recognition and participation in the Arab-Israeli peace process. The fact that it consciously sought objectives that ran counter to its founding principles, including nonrecognition of Israel and the total liberation of mandate Palestine, raises the question forcefully of how it was able to maintain internal control despite effecting such a fundamental ideological shift. Here, the second set of political relations, those within each guerrilla group, reveal that more immediate and tangible measures of internal control were the practices and organizational structures put into place in the early years of armed struggle and consolidated in the context of constant military preparation and conflict in the 1970s. It was virtually inevitable for a movement formed in clandestinity and engaged in guerrilla warfare to acquire an authoritarian character; but the durability and cohesion of its top echelons (if not its general membership) are no less striking for that, especially as these features were maintained in the context of a political system that was both highly competitive internally and highly penetrated externally.

Several factors account for this state of affairs. The legitimacy conferred on the founders of the various guerrilla groups by their initiation of the armed struggle was one factor, an advantage they translated, almost without exception, into permanent tenure as leaders. This might seem paradoxical given their inability to achieve their stated national objectives and their questionable military competence, but can be explained in part by their ability to manipulate the situation of perpetual crisis and external threat in which the PLO found itself. Thus the defeat in Jordan in 1970–71 may have caused serious internal splits, large-scale defections, and a marked contraction of the mass base, but it equally enabled the leadership to stifle dissent in the name of survival. The Fateh leadership’s resort to international terrorism in this period was also partly a means to restore its internal credibility and distract the rank and file from pressing questions of accountability for recent defeats.

Another manifestation of the manner in which the idea, rather than reality, of war affected internal political relations was the transformation of Fateh guerrilla forces into semiconventional units in the early 1970s in a process described aptly as tajyish (making-into-an-army). Initiated in the wake of the expulsion from Jordan and bitterly resisted by many veteran guerrillas on political and ethical grounds, it served to assert the central leadership’s control at a critical juncture and was later emulated by the other guerrilla groups. Tajyish was also driven partly by a fear of domination by Arab states, above all by Syria, which was host and conduit for a substantial part of Palestinian military manpower and supplies, and was reflected in, among other things, repeated tussles for control over the PLO’s Palestine Liberation Army (formed in 1964 as a conventional force under Arab supervision), the bulk of which came under Syrian military command.^[36] Of equal significance was the militarization of the civilian membership: responsibility for the self-defense militia in the refugee camps and other population centers was transferred from local civilian to central military commands, and local military commanders were replaced by outside appointees. As with tajyish, militarization also met with resistance, which was stifled, sometimes forcibly, and similarly was undertaken first in Fateh and then other groups.

Not surprisingly, both processes were also driven by internal power struggles: the manner in which the centralization and extension of military affairs proceeded in Fateh’s case, for example, reflected Arafat’s striving both to weaken rivals in the central committee and to assert his authority, following the leadership’s wholesale transfer from Jordan, over the independent-minded civilian organization in Lebanon. The ability of the mainstream Palestinian national leadership to override opposition to these processes was, moreover, in inverse proportion to the power and authority of the host state: the PLO’s political and military writ was strongest over refugee camps or other areas that were furthest from capital cities and other centers of host-state power or most marginalized socially and economically; it was weakest in the case of communities and strata that were closest, physically or in terms of socioeconomic integration, to those same centers. The result was a marked tendency to authoritarian control and, on occasion, military coercion in the former case, and to negotiation and greater tolerance of dissent in the latter, at least so long as the central government held sway.

Once in place, two factors led to a massive expansion of tajyish and militarization of the civilian base. First was the virtually constant state of conflict in Lebanon over the next decade—Israeli retaliatory raids in the early 1970s and attrition campaign in 1978–81, Syrian intervention in 1976, and Lebanese civil war in 1975–76 and intrafactional clashes in 1979–81—in which fixed front lines emerged and Palestinian population centers were frequently assaulted. The need to achieve a decision in local battles, defend refugee camps and other vital areas, and deter foes accelerated the buildup of PLO regular forces and the acquisition of heavy weaponry, as well as the deployment of PLO units in civilian areas and a marked increase in numbers, training, and armament of local militia forces.

Yet this would have been difficult without the second, crucial factor: namely, the externally derived rent reaching the PLO and its constituent guerrilla groups, especially following the meteoric rise of Arab oil revenues after 1973–74 and, albeit to a lesser degree, the commitment of substantial Soviet political and military support. This allowed probably a large majority of civilian members of the various guerrilla groups to be placed on the payroll, nominally in security and other paramilitary agencies, in a process known as tafrigh (making-into-full-timers). Their formal subordination to central military commands in this way eroded the civilian organization and undermined its political functions, and therefore ensured the domination of the central leadership, which controlled the allocation of posts and funds. Tafrigh was common to all the guerrilla groups, but its impact was reinforced most notably in Fateh (in 1980) by amending internal statutes to stipulate that, in a movement engaged in armed struggle, military personnel should hold a majority of seats on central policy- and rule-making bodies.

The convergence of conflict and rent gave rise by the late 1970s to a system of political management best described as neopatrimonial, characterized at one and the same time by nationalist co-optation and charismatic politics, concentration of decision-making and allocative power, clientalist internal relations, and organizational fragmentation.^[37] It hardly needs to be said that this was moreover a male-dominated, in many ways patriarchal, system, no less so because it involved and even reinforced the built-in gender biases of war and nationalism.^[38] The role played by war in the shaping of this system was largely instrumental, in that it helped Palestinian political actors to decide internal contests and to justify the militarization of internal relations. Much the same can be said of the third set of political relations, namely, those between the PLO and its mass base. This was vital given the Palestinian reality of collective uprooting and widespread dispersal, which not only prevented the extraction of resources from a defined social and economic base over which the PLO exercised physical control (for example, through taxation and conscription) but also meant that any attempt to instigate social transformations in order to generate resources, let alone employ them in war against Israel, would necessarily constitute a direct challenge to the political, social, and economic structures of the host Arab states, leading to undesirable conflict. One consequence was a general disregard (even on the Left of the guerrilla movement, for all its rhetoric) for purposive social transformation, to which the emphasis on “pure” nationalist politics also contributed. Another was the absence in effect of autonomous social forces to which the PLO might be vulnerable or accountable in any meaningful way. The availability of rent undermined the necessity of social transformation, and indeed reversed the pattern of PLO-society relations, since the former was able to offer financial resources in the form of social services and material benefits to co-opt its target constituencies.

The PLO needed a credible social constituency nonetheless, whether to provide military manpower and secure its state-in-exile in Jordan (to 1970) and Lebanon (to 1982), or to confirm its claim to national and international status as sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians. As discussed earlier, the 1967 war caused the sweeping social and political dislocations that made Palestinian nationalism effective in general; but in a more immediate sense conflict did two further things: it created the insecurity and material dependency that reinforced the PLO’s statist function as provider of basic social welfare and a modicum of economic stability, and, by using violence to generate “mass” politics, provided the dynamic that prompted people to accept the organizational structures promoted by the PLO and take active part in them.^[39] This was obvious in the case of the communities most directly affected by war, such as the refugees in Jordan and Lebanon, but less so among those for whom it was not a constant experience, such as the Palestinian middle class in Jordan or expatriates in the Gulf. At the same time, it is instructive that the former category was less likely to contest the PLO politically or compel it to negotiate for the material and symbolic resources it needed, while the latter tended to be both more critical of the PLO and more amenable to alternative statist centers (such as that, primarily, of Jordan). The question, then, is to assess the impact of war on the emergence and consolidation of a shared nationalism that underlaid the mass politics of the PLO and its organizational structures.

Constructing Identity: Violence, the State, and Ethnicity

That violence and mass mobilization are intrinsically linked to nationalism is frequently, and rightly, asserted in the literature.^[40] It is argued that this is due to, among other things, the impact of military conscription, which both exposes subjects to new experiences and ideas in unfamiliar settings and turns them into citizens with new political claims and material entitlements, and to the breakdown of traditional controls, “of which war is the ultimate expression,” leading to “a search for alternative sources of authority.”^[41] What underlies these factors and explains their causal effect (what makes them “work,” in other words) is the way in which they act simultaneously on two social constructs—identity and the state—that determine the access of individuals to needed resources (whether material or moral).^[42]

A further implication is that identity is not fixed, especially in its political attachments, although nationalists and ideologues of other hues insist otherwise, despite the role of political, economic, legal-administrative, and cultural institutions in demarcating and reproducing specific identities. War makes certain of that, as its impact on identity is not independent of its impact on the state (and other social organizations): crucially, it affects how the two constructs relate to each other, altering their balance and generating the competitions and crises that may lead either to latent substate collectivities gaining new meaning as political communities or to the suppression of their challenges to the state.^[43] The issue therefore becomes not one of how war alters the preformed identity of individuals or groups, but rather of how, through its intervention, they are “induced, persuaded, forced or cajoled into making identifications” that are profoundly political and that affect their relation to the state.^[44] At the same time, as I will argue later, the nature and extent of war’s impact is bound closely to the manner of its convergence with other contextual factors and underlying processes that exist both prior to, and independent of, war.

It is precisely these dynamics and patterns that are revealed in the case of the Palestinians, no less so because they are stateless. Here, too, the central question is not about the ontological reality or makeup of Palestinian national identity, but rather of how armed conflict prompted people to assert or change identifications, and how this necessarily involved statist structures of one type or another and led to nationalist reformulations. After all, the emergence of a distinctly Palestinian national identity was not a foregone conclusion, since it did not correspond to a defined state-society dyad. The Arab inhabitants of mandate Palestine may have had the historical experience of the British mandate and al-nakba in common, but it is not self-evident that they formed a “people” or “cultural community” (as a historically derived ontological reality) distinct from neighboring Arab populations with whom they broadly shared language, religion, and social custom. The ambivalent relationship of Palestinian and Jordanian identities is a case in point: a persistent, if minority trend in Palestinian national politics has argued at least since the 1930s for the inclusion of any Palestinian patrimony under the umbrella of the Jordanian state; the defeat of the guerrilla movement in 1970–71 similarly decided the issue of overt identification for local Palestinians in favor of Hashemite-led Jordan, even as the undeclared policy of “Jordanization” of the armed forces and civil service reinforced the unspoken ethnic stratification of political power in the kingdom. Thus, only the assertion of a specifically Palestinian statist ambition and the associated territorialization of national claims could give rise to a separate political identity.

It goes without saying that violence has been the chosen means of most postcolonial and national liberation movements, but the fact that it was directly linked to self-image and identity was specifically clear to the founders of Fateh. Borrowing from Fanon’s writings on the Algerian revolution, in which he stressed the “cleansing” effect of violence on the psyche of the oppressed, they sought consciously to use it as a catalytic agent that could break through what they saw as the resignation of the Palestinian refugees.^[45] More to the point, “revolutionary violence,” as they termed it, was an expression of independent national will, proof of the existence of a distinct Palestinian people. It followed that armed struggle was required in order to cure “the worst diseases of dependency, division, and defeatism” that had afflicted the Palestinians since al-nakba, allowing them to take their fate into their own hands, achieve national unity, and “restore our people’s self-confidence and capabilities, and restore the world’s confidence in us and respect for us.”^[46]

Yet just because the integral relationship between identity, violence, and statist political institutions was central to Fateh thinking does not explain why Palestinians should have accepted its outlook and responded to its appeal, let alone done so with sufficient vigor and in numbers to make it dominant among the many guerrilla groups that appeared on the scene in the 1960s. After all, it was not inevitable that a majority of political activists among them should have coalesced at any point after 1948 into a single national movement with broadly agreed-upon objectives and strategies. No more inevitable, for that matter, were the use of organized violence (however likely in the long run) and the dominance of a particular mode of political mobilization or brand of nationalism over other alternatives. Indeed, in the first decade after al-nakba most Palestinian activists joined pan-Arab or pan-Islamist parties such as the Arab Socialist Renaissance Party (Ba‘th), Movement of Arab Nationalists, and Society of Muslim Brothers, while Palestinians in general still looked to the Arab states, above all Nasir’s Egypt, for salvation. In this context the pinprick guerrilla attacks that Fateh launched against Israel in 1965 drew attention to the inactivity of other Palestinian groups and of the Arab states but had only a modest effect otherwise.

For Fateh to be transformed into a mass movement characterized by the use of organized violence, and for its brand of Palestinian nationalism to become dominant when it did, reflected a set of three contingent factors or events: the prior emergence and experience of alternative, nonviolent modes of political mobilization; contextual conditions creating a social constituency potentially available for political action along the particularistic Palestinian lines that Fateh espoused; and a crisis that would both demolish the political and social certainties to which Palestinians clung and shake the physical, administrative, and ideological control of the state structures that held sway over them. Only in the latter instance was war directly a factor.

In the first instance, the experience gained by the activists who joined Arab political parties in considerable numbers after al-nakba was an important factor in the subsequent evolution of Palestinian nationalism. This was measurable not so much in terms of their acquiring organizational skills or political sophistication, as in limiting and eventually reversing the appeal of ideologies—from class-based ones to pan-Arabism, Islam, and pan-Syrian nationalism—that invoked broader objectives than Palestine. The parallel marginalization or closure of alternative options—such as the short-lived Palestine Refugee Congress of 1949—was key in the eventual emergence of what can be termed an ethnic form of nationalism, best embodied in Fateh’s stress on Palestinian-ness. It also underscores the importance of Palestinian grassroots associations—such as the general unions of students, women, and teachers—which emerged or revived after 1948. These played a crucial role in enhancing a distinctive national consciousness and provided many members of the guerrilla leadership that was to come to the fore after 1967 (although the unions’ experience of democratic internal practice was not to survive the takeover of the PLO by the guerrilla groups, most of which had paternalistic or authoritarian roots in Islamist and nationalist forerunner organizations.)

The second necessary factor was the marginality of Palestinians under Arab state control after al-nakba in terms of political entitlement, social mobility, and economic access.^[47] This varied markedly from one government to another, but for refugees of peasant, worker, or petty trades and employee background in particular the mass migration and economic dispossession of 1947–49 were compounded by their sense of social uprootedness and of degradation resulting from the disintegration of their cultural environment.^[48] Nor was marginality the result only of official policies; Palestinians ostensibly shared language, religion, and social culture with Arab host societies, but in reality there were numerous markers that could be used (by others or by themselves) to set them apart, including confessional denomination and socioeconomic mode (Sunni among Shi‘a Muslims and Maronite Christians in Lebanon, sedentary agriculturalists among pastoral bedouins in Jordan, and peasants among townsfolk in the cities of West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring Arab countries), not to mention landlessness and refugee status. These became operative in competitions over labor markets and in differentiating access to state services, public employment (both civil and military), and political power, even in Jordan where the Palestinians were granted full citizenship in the course of the 1950s. So, not unlike rural migrants in urban settings, they may have yearned “for incorporation into some one of those cultural pools which already has, or looks as if it might acquire, a state of its own” but knew they had been spurned and would “continue to be spurned.”^[49]

The third necessary factor was an external crisis that would undermine the structural and normative contexts within which Palestinians operated. This happened to be provided by war in their case, specifically the devastating defeat of the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian armies by Israel in June 1967. It shook not only the physical control of the frontline Arab states over their territory, allowing the Palestinian guerrillas to set up sanctuaries along the borders with Israel, but also their political credibility and moral standing. This was especially true of Nasir’s Egypt, and of the pan-Arabism and Third World socialism that it, along with the Ba‘thist regime of Syria, epitomized. The fact that Fateh now “ gaged in a popular discourse that was heavily laced with religious imagery and well-entrenched within the framework of an Islamic-oriented value system,” at a time when many Palestinians and other Arabs were turning to Islamic identification in response to the 1967 defeat, only enhanced its ability to draw support from most sectors.^[50] However, while the changed external environment and loss of certainties made the Palestinians available for new forms of political mobilization, this was insufficient by itself either to guarantee their active, mass participation in politics or to determine the particular ideological direction and organizational shape their participation would take.^[51] Besides the presence of a mobilizing agent, a demonstration of the effectiveness of the model it proposed as an alternative was crucial. This was provided in March 1968, when Fateh opted to confront a vastly superior Israeli punitive force at the refugee town of al-Karama in the Jordan Valley; its decision cost it half its trained manpower, but, aided by astute manipulation of the media, caught the imagination of a public starved of victories and turned the guerrilla movement overnight into a force to be reckoned with in Arab politics.^[52] For Palestinians generally, “a revolutionary expectation of fundamental changes was now available as an alternative to the passive acceptance of destiny.”^[53]

The battle of al-Karama gave birth to a new self-image. “To declare Palestinian identity no longer means that one is a ‘refugee’ or second-class citizen. Rather it is a declaration that arouses pride, because the Palestinian has become the fida’i [self-sacrificer] or revolutionary who bears arms.”^[54] Armed struggle was the new substance of the “imagined community” of the Palestinians. Guerrilla literature developed this theme by emphasizing the continuity of conflict and the tradition of resistance from the turn of the century; peasant imagery (real or imagined) and folklore were the source for political posters, compilations by academics of proverbs and songs, and traditional embroidery workshops run by middle-class women in the refugee camps. As a PLO pamphlet later presented it, the 1967 war and conscious action by the “various popular, political and military organizations” had “led to a reawakening of the people’s sense of national identity. . . . And so . . . the process of a Palestinian cultural renaissance began.”^[55] Naturally this also came with a romanticized imagery of war and an ethos of martyrdom; posters bearing the photographs and biographical details of guerrillas killed in action appeared regularly in the streets, serving to advertise the military presence and nationalist zeal of the group to which they belonged, and funerals turned into powerful political demonstrations.

The 1967 war and al-Karama therefore enabled the ascendance of Palestinian “proto-nationalism,” to use Eric Hobsbawm’s term for the “feelings of collective belonging which already existed and could operate, as it were, potentially on the macro-political scale which could fit in with modern states and nations.”^[56] This ambition was connected in no small measure to the rise of lower-middle-class and petty-salaried strata over the preceding decades, which discovered after al-nakba that the social and economic opportunities provided by education and employment could not be translated into tangible political assets under Arab or Israeli state control. As in other newly nationalizing societies, the collective dislocation and migration of 1947–49, followed by education, mobility, and the growth of novel strata in urbanized settings bred strong political discontent.^[57] Constant “pilgrimages” between places of study, work, and family residence in different Arab countries confirmed the commonality of their experience, while the myriad impediments to obtaining travel documents and visas emphasized their marginality.^[58] Little wonder that the marginalized wielded protonationalism as a response to their own middle class, which was perceived to have “denied its Palestinianism and hastened to obtain the nationality of Arab and non-Arab states, and which obscured its Palestinian features, for instance by deliberately changing accent or social customs.”^[59]

The relationship illustrated above between violence, nationalism, and social change demonstrates the need once again to “unpack” the role of war more precisely. To adapt Fred Halliday’s discussion of Yemeni nationalism, war was one of “a set of contingent events and processes” that explain the particular form that Palestinian nationalism took and the timing in which it emerged; but emerge it would, given universal pressures that made some form of nationalism inevitable by the middle of the twentieth century.^[60] Of course the British decision not to establish a Palestinian colonial state during the mandate period, compounded by the massive dislocation and dispossession of al-nakba, severely impeded the emergence of a dominant form of Palestinian nationalism by or after 1948 and heightened its fragmentation into varieties that emphasized pan-Arab, Islamist, or Jordanian components of identity (to mention the most salient), and so war can be said to have played a more central role in the Palestinian case. Certainly it played an important part in enabling the PLO to promote its own statist, cognitive brand of nationalism. However, the precise nature or form of this nationalism was dependent on other factors, as discussed previously.

To take this argument further, the success of the PLO was intrinsically connected to the manner in which the Palestinian encounter with Arab host states and societies produced what we have come to think of as a specifically ethnic form of nationalism. War, or rather manifestations of armed conflict, were an integral part of its rise, but primarily by providing an additional “marker” to distinguish Palestinians from Arab counterparts. This is not to suggest the ontological reality of ethnie, but simply to stress that, as a relational construct, it was influenced by the lack of alternative political or institutional paths, on the one hand, and the use of violence against, or by, others, on the other hand. Though reflecting a particularly bitter view that was not representative of all Palestinians, the way in which Fateh’s founding document described the encounter with the Arab environment and drew appropriate political conclusions is revealing: “Our people have lived, driven out in every country, humiliated in the lands of exile, without a homeland, without dignity, without leadership, without hope, without weapons. . . . With revolution we announce our will, and with revolution we put an end to this bitter surrender, this terrifying reality that the children of the Catastrophe experience everywhere.”^[61]

In short, the national and state-building project required the assertion of Palestinian difference, not from Israel but from other Arabs, as did the wielding of a specifically Palestinian (as distinct from pan-Arab, Islamic, or pan-Syrian) nationalism; armed struggle provided the means to this end. Equally, and not for Fateh alone, if it was the defeat of the Arab armies that “allowed the Palestinian people to grasp its cause in its own hands for the first time since 1948,” then the appearance of an effective mobilizing agent that used conflict to establish symbolic and institutional alternatives to the Arab host authorities, produced what may be described as ethnic politics.^[62] This implicit ethnicity was, moreover, to be maintained by the engraving in Palestinian official discourse and vicarious grassroots memory of massacres suffered at the hands of fellow Arabs—most notoriously in the Wahdat (1970), Tal al-Za‘tar (1976), and Shatila (1982 and 1985–88) refugee camps—effectively creating collectivity through victimhood and death.

Ethnic politics, arguably, manifested itself at one level as “competition ethnicity,” by which middle-class Palestinians initially sought in effect, through engagement in the PLO and use of their bicultural capital, to renegotiate their access to the political resources of host states. This was notably the case in Jordan, where they formed a major part of the population and private sector. At another level Palestinian protonationalism took the form of “ closure ethnicity,” as the economically deprived refugees, their numbers swollen by the three hundred thousand Palestinians displaced in 1967, replaced their previously “inward-looking strategy of collective self-definition” with membership in the paramilitary agencies of the various guerrilla groups.^[63] Driven by class grievances and resentment of government treatment prior to 1967, the newly armed refugees vociferously displayed their contempt for middle-class sensibilities, reordered power relations with neighboring urban communities to which they had been socially or economically subordinate, and repeatedly assaulted members of the armed forces and security services and other agents of the state (including, not surprisingly, collectors for public utilities).

It can also be argued that, for its part, the Fateh-dominated PLO leadership effected a shift from enclosure to competition ethnicity, but did so in order to secure extraterritorial status in the host countries and negotiate Palestinian entry to the Arab state system, rather than to assimilate culturally and integrate politically within host states. To succeed, this shift further depended on manipulating the territorialization of Palestinian national claims. Having originally raised the slogan of “total liberation” of the whole of mandate Palestine, the PLO effectively reduced its territorial goal to the West Bank and Gaza Strip by the mid-1970s, implicitly at first but then explicitly by the end of the 1980s. The implied redefinition of national identity that this entailed was paralleled by a discernible and lasting shift in the social constituency that the PLO targeted: from the refugee communities of the diaspora, especially in frontline Arab states, to the inhabitants of the territories occupied by Israel in June 1967. This process eventually culminated in the transfer of the PLO’s state-in-exile to its new territorial and social base in the West Bank and Gaza Strip following the start of Palestinian self-government under the terms of the Oslo Accords of 1993 with Israel. The question, then, is what role war played in constructing or deconstructing the social constituencies that correlated to these political transformations, and in particular in altering the balance between them and in shaping elite formation.

War, Society Building, and Elite Formation

The legacy of the British mandate and al-nakba raises the question, even more forcefully than for other former Ottoman and former colonial peoples, of how the PLO could emerge and maintain itself as a statist actor despite, specifically, the absence of a single, functionally demarcated Palestinian society occupying a bounded territory and sharing a recognized political and bureaucratic-legal system (defining citizenship, among other things) and a distinct economy (or at least a common labor market). Indeed, to reverse the analytical focus, the Palestinian case provides a telling reminder that society is itself constructed and bounded through contingent factors and historical processes that have tied it intrinsically to the formation of the modern state and, therefore, to the construction of its institutions, political system, and national identity. Certainly in the Middle East, society as defined here is no more a unitary or preexisting sociological phenomenon than is the state—there can in particular be no “national society” without a “national state”—and it may also be deconstructed and restructured as a result of disintegrative trends in the state.^[64]

There can be little doubt that war was an important factor affecting the nature and boundaries of Palestinian society in the twentieth century. Repeatedly since 1917 it has exerted a massive, direct impact on the Palestinians through physical interventions that have forcibly altered territorial borders, geographic distribution of population, and economic modes, thereby limiting or redirecting possible paths of social and political development. Much as the defeat of the Ottoman order in World War I and the imposition of the mandate system subsequent to the British military victory replaced one model of social and political community with another derived from the Western experience, so the 1947–49 war decided the outcome of the struggle to establish a modern Arab state in the whole of mandate Palestine and disarticulated local Arab society, removing the shared political framework and economic space within which distinctly Palestinian classes or social forces could form and compete. This role of war underlines the observation that the factors that shape state building have, necessarily, also intervened in society building.

By the same token, rump classes or fragmented social forces could seek to acquire particularistic corporate identities and interests in the aftermath of al-nakba by striving for a territorially defined statist structure that was specifically Palestinian, a process necessarily involving war in the Arab, Israeli, and international contexts of the period. This is by no means to accept the leftist DFLP’s charge that the PLO was directed by “feudal elements, bank-owning millionaire money-changers, large merchants, and dyed-in-the-wool Palestinian reactionaries”—a view that grossly underestimated the autonomy of the PLO’s statist political institutions and bureaucratic elite—nor to reduce Palestinian nationalism to the “chauvinism” of a bourgeoisie suffering constant Arab discrimination that prevented its political influence from matching its economic weight, as the communists argued.^[65] But nonetheless there was much in the criticism directed against Fateh by one of its own ideologues, who noted the convergence between elements in the movement who “had suffered greatly from Arab policies” and “businessmen, small merchants, and craftsmen who wish to . . . compete with their counterparts in the Arab countries. Indeed, we can find shopkeepers in a town who will reveal a particularistic Palestinian prejudice. . . . They all want to be master in [government] departments.”^[66]

In all cases, the precise nature and outcome of social contests owed far more to secular historical processes—such as the spread of modern education, salaried employment, and urbanization—and to the way in which they derived from, or affected, the position of distinct social groups in relation to the state, than to war. There is therefore a fundamental difference between the role of war as an intervening or facilitating variable in Palestinian social transformation, especially as the result of external agency, and the indirect influence it exerted on the evolution of the national political institutions through which Palestinian social forces have competed and gained ascendancy since the mid-1960s. In neither case, it can be argued, was war a necessary or internal mechanism of social transformation; it may have provided the opportunity to translate potential into actual political mobilization and made possible new forms of collective action and discourse, but it did not fundamentally alter or enclose the processes of social change and mobilization that were unfolding continuously before, during, and after armed conflict. War weakened incumbent elites and social groups, but what is striking is how durable they proved to be and how persistent their retention of socioeconomic assets (especially networks); the decisive factor therefore was whether or not statist centers acted on them in ways that institutionalized any changes accentuated by war in their status and material conditions and thus made these advantages or disadvantages permanent.

The distinction is evident in the impact of war on the formation of Palestinian elites, altering the basis of their social status and economic wealth and, above all, contributing to their political decline or ascendancy. The 1947–49 conflict gave a stark manifestation of this dynamic: although some capital assets may have been transferred abroad, the loss of fertile agricultural land and external trade routes in coastal and low-lying regions of Palestine severely weakened the old landowning and merchant elite, much as land reform and the nationalization of industry, trade, and banking did in Egypt and Syria in the 1950s and 1960s. The lack of political and military preparedness in 1948 was, moreover, laid at the door of the old elite, further diminishing its prospects for regaining national leadership. Families whose assets lay outside the areas incorporated into Israel in 1948 were able to employ effective strategies of survival, especially in the West Bank, where they were aided by nominal incorporation of leading members into the Jordanian government; but any prospect of reemerging as a distinct social force, let alone playing a significant political role at either the national or local levels (such as their public support for union with Jordan in 1948–50), was effectively ended by the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in June 1967.^[67] The modern middle class, which grew considerably in the mandate period and might have been expected to supplant the old elite in national leadership after 1948, was similarly discredited and fragmented by the exodus. Many of its members were active in Arab political parties in the 1950s and later joined with younger members of the pre-1948 national leadership to form the PLO in 1964, but were sidelined once more by their failure to provide effective national leadership and strategies after the 1967 war.

As suggested above, war could also affect the response of different social groups to the statist brand of nationalism and political institutionalization provided by the Fateh-dominated PLO from 1968 onward. On the one hand, the large number of refugees generated by the 1947–49 conflict broadly formed a natural constituency, whose desire to return to lost homes and properties and sense of collective injustice imbued the founding goals and strategies of the PLO and guerrilla groups alike and provided the armed struggle with much of its manpower. On the other hand, war also disempowered refugee communities, not least by depriving them of the economic basis to present demands, bargain over resources, and generally contest the PLO (or other statist centers) where relevant. The resultant overall political control of the PLO and the rivalry of its constituent guerrilla groups undermined what corporate identity the refugees had, as did the emphasis on nationalist politics rather than social agendas, and weakened them further. Of course the wide disparities in social, economic, and cultural capital that the refugees brought with them, coupled with the marked differences between them in access to social, economic, and political resources and networks in the various host countries or territories, led to significant variations in their relationship with the PLO. Lower-income or lower-status strata were generally more dependent on the social services and salaries it came to provide, as demonstrated in the refugee camps in Lebanon in 1969–82, but middle-class strata were not immune to the impact of war, as the forced exodus of some three hundred thousand Palestinians from Kuwait in 1990–91 showed. In the latter case, moreover, war dispersed a PLO constituency rather than create one, much as the 1970–71 conflict in Jordan and Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 had done earlier.^[68]

Comparison with the West Bank is instructive in this context. As indicated earlier, the Israeli occupation in June 1967 was a significant factor in the political (if not always economic) decline of old elite families; more pertinently it undermined the social control and political influence of the Jordanian state and provided the opportunity for the expansion of local civil society associations, media, universities, and other vehicles of potential political activism. Furthermore, Israel helped generate Palestinian nationalism and identification with the PLO by suppressing political expression at a time when Israel’s integration and subordination of the local economy to its own was altering social balances and drawing the rural and refugee camp populations into urbanized and industrialized settings. However, the Palestinians of the West Bank differed from their counterparts elsewhere in an important respect: because they remained within their own social, territorial, and economic base (though subject to pervasive Israeli control), they were both less vulnerable to the physical and economic dislocations of war and better placed to negotiate with the PLO over political agendas and material resources, in return for lending credence to its demand for statehood. Their significance for PLO diplomacy explains their growing influence in the 1970s and especially after the PLO’s expulsion from Beirut in 1982, leading to an almost exclusive concentration of its political attention and financial patronage on the occupied territories after 1987, and finally culminating in the Oslo Accords of 1993, which dramatized the abandonment of the diaspora refugee communities. At the same time their relative independence, reflected in, for example, the continuing political role of the “modernizing” second generation of old elite families (whether as mayors in the 1970s or as representatives of pro-PLO associations in the 1980s) also explains the PLO’s fear of their potential challenge to its leadership and its protracted, if implicit, effort to marginalize them.

Yet these examples only underline the limits of war’s role as a causal factor of social change, and instead privilege the policies of state actors and the various assets that different social forces were denied or could bring to bear. This is equally borne out by the manner in which the Palestinian armed struggle, by giving rise to institutional settings and organizational dynamics within which political mobilization and recruitment took place, enabled or limited various shifts in the social balance. Membership in the guerrilla movement could provide a social group with political influence and material resources greater than those of another group to which it had previously been inferior in social status and economic wealth. In the Burj al-Barajna camp near Beirut, for example, refugees from the village of Kabri altered the balance with their former landlords from the market town of Tarshiha (who also became refugees in 1948) by playing a leading role in the local Fateh branch once the camp came under PLO control in 1969.^[69] However, because the PLO did not utilize its political authority to extract human and financial resources from these constituencies through conscription or taxation, such shifts in the social balance were neither radical and permanent nor translated into fundamental alterations of social status and economic wealth. The PLO’s ability to pursue significant social transformation in the diaspora is moot in any case: even at the height of its physical control over defined populations and territories in Jordan and Lebanon, it exercised little of the legal and fiscal authority needed to alter the national systems of ownership and markets within which the bulk of its constituency operated on a daily basis. Nonetheless, the failure to institutionalize the situation of the refugees (that had been changed after 1948 or 1969) in ways that favored modern forms of solidarity or group consciousness (especially class and gender) meant that forms and sources of traditional authority not only survived but could easily adapt to, and even influence, the PLO neopatrimonial system.^[70]

A more striking feature of the relationship between the PLO as a social corpus and the refugees in the camps was the relative stability of the social difference between them. This reflects the operation of both informal and structural impediments to the upward mobility of refugees within the ranks of the PLO’s full-time salaried military, civilian, and security apparatus. Thus a majority within the PLO bureaucratic elite came from families deemed to be “resident” or “citizen” (muwatin), that is, who did not become refugees or lose their immovable capital in 1948. (The same can largely be said, for that matter, of the Palestinians who formed the backbone of the political parties of the 1950s in the West Bank and Gaza, and of those who staffed much of the civilian and security apparatus of the Palestinian Authority after 1994.)^[71] The vertical divide between refugees and nonrefugees reveals that, while nationalist conflict mobilized both sectors, the heightened existential insecurity of the former and their comparative lack of access, status, and key material assets made them less able to compete for political power. This confirms the importance of ownership of productive assets and property such as small landholdings for sustained political activism, in contrast to patterns of refugee activism. A related implication is that only where social forces had a distinct territorial base were they able to translate political assets into lasting, institutionalized advantage.

These implications appear to be further borne out upon inspection of the background of “resident” personnel in the PLO. Though incomplete, available data suggest a predominance within the bureaucratic elite of Fateh and the PLO, from 1967 onward, of members originating not from the main urban centers of mandate Palestine, which dominated nationalist politics until 1948, but rather from market towns and outlying villages of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.^[72] Of all the effects of the armed struggle, this brought the Palestinians closest to the experience of social transformation in Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Iraq, where new elites of similar social origin and political socialization came to power in 1952–68. Given that this social sector was not a class or group in the classical sense, what distinguished it was its access to, and hold over, state structures; as in other Arab cases, the expansion of state agencies enabled “dynamically autonomous” officers and bureaucrats drawn from previously subordinate social strata or peripheral regions to acquire control over major political and material (financial and coercive) resources and so displace established social forces.^[73] Taken in the context of PLO institution-building after 1967, the rise of combined resident and rural elements offers a telling example of how social actors may, by responding to political opportunities with collective action, create new opportunities, in this case the statist bureaucratization and militarization that provided channels for elite recruitment and undergirded authoritarian and neopatrimonial modes of political management.^[74]

It is evident that the determinant of these social transformations was not war, but rather the secular processes affecting all Middle East and Third World societies at much the same time. Not least of these were the spread of modern education and salaried employment, especially in government sectors that were rapidly expanding in the wake of independence, and state building and territorialization more generally. In the Palestinian case the expansion of the British-run civil service and wartime economy in mandate Palestine had already laid the basis, but of equal importance were near-universal access to modern education after al-nakba, leading, in line with developments in host Arab societies, to the transformation of a “people of small farmers, artisans and traders . . . into a people of clerks, accountants and administrators.”^[75] Moreover, these trends extended increasingly into the rural population, previously marginal or subordinate to urban sectors in terms of political power. After 1948 new political values and models were derived from the states in which Palestinians resided, worked, and moved—rentier politics and militarization being two salient features—and were further influenced by the international era in which they lived, one dominated by decolonization, cold war politics, and developmental or welfarist state models. The Palestinians were distinguished from fellow Arabs only to the extent that they strove to construct similar structures of their own—framed within the ubiquitous model of the national state—though in this case the enterprise was assisted by the timely intervention of war and the conduct of armed struggle.

To return to the discussion at the beginning of this section, only where a reiterative, recursive relationship has developed between Palestinian political and social organizations may a defined society be said in a real sense to exist or to be in the process of emerging, legitimizing claims to a wider national community and collective memory notwithstanding. In other words, although it is possible to speak of a Palestinian “people” (in the sense of national community) comprised of all the surviving inhabitants of mandate Palestine and their descendants, Palestinian “society” refers to those persons whose conduct of social, economic, and cultural relations is bounded in one manner or another by a political and institutional framework denoted specifically as Palestinian, with which they share a territory and which has successfully contested other statist centers for exclusive functional jurisdiction and a monopoly on symbolic representation. It is therefore the transfer of the PLO’s statist political institutions from exile to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1994, coupled with its entry into new recursive relationships with local social forces and consolidation of its political power and social control, that heralds the emergence of a distinct, if truncated Palestinian society in those territories. It follows that Palestinian society remains as much “in the making” as the Palestinian state, so long as its institutional and territorial boundaries have not been determined and accredited internationally. Deep ambivalence about the fate of the refugees of 1948 and the relationship between the West Bank and Gaza Strip, on the one hand, and the diaspora, on the other, means that national identity will remain fluid and that “official” nationalism will be seriously contested, not least by political Islam. The foremost social legacy of war for the Palestinians, therefore, is to have generated “the territorial shape of a state, the character of the regime institutionalized within its borders, and the power position of incumbent elites.”^[76]

Summary and Conclusions: The Palestinians Beyond War

It is the singular success of the PLO that, while not forming a sovereign state as such, it came to occupy a broadly similar position in relation to its constituents. It sought, to borrow from Poggi’s discussion of the state, “to entrust the conduct of political business to a single organisation, and to distinguish that from all other entities harbouring and ordering social existence.”^[77] It therefore conformed to a key feature of the state: namely, that its “organizational configurations, along with [its] overall patterns of activity, affect political culture, encourage some kinds of group formation and collective political actions (but not others), and make possible the raising of certain political issues (but not others).”^[78] Much like a state, the PLO was the receptacle for political legitimacy and the main locus for Palestinian political processes; it was the central arena for the conduct of “national” politics. The fact that opposition groups or factions found interests to pursue within its framework, and gave primacy to political over social issues and clienteles, only reinforced its centralizing, statist character.^[79] The sense of existential insecurity—rooted in al-nakba but reinforced by the mass dislocations caused by Israeli occupation in June 1967, Jordanian civil war in 1970–71, Lebanese civil war in 1975–76, Israeli invasion in 1982, Syrian intervention in 1976 and 1983, Lebanese “camps war” of 1985–88, and post–Gulf War expulsions from Kuwait in 1991—contributed heavily to this evolution. Underlying this process and binding its different elements together was the consolidation of a shared nationalism, shaped politically by conflict and defined discursively by the Fateh-dominated mainstream PLO leadership.

Ironically, by threatening the PLO’s statist character and hard-won international status, war also propelled it to replace its original emphasis on military means with diplomatic ones (albeit backed by more occasional and selective military action). This was demonstrated graphically by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which deprived the PLO of its main institutional base and diplomatic “address” and rendered it dependent on the goodwill of its new Arab hosts in Tunisia and elsewhere to maintain its headquarters and public relations effort. War could also impose untenable choices between allies and the accepted political norms and institutional roles of the regional and international state systems: PLO support for Iraq during the occupation of Kuwait in 1990–91 was in keeping with the mood of its general public, but alienated the Gulf petro-monarchies and Western powers and cost it the sought-after seat at the Arab-Israeli peace talks. The ability of the PLO to survive in both cases underlines the importance of international political, strategic, and financial networks and the degree to which territoriality was only symbolically necessary, as the experience of the Kuwaiti government during the Iraqi occupation of 1990–91 also showed.^[80] However, because the PLO was not a juridically recognized state to begin with, it was deprived of the advantages of “negative” sovereignty that Kuwait (and Cambodia, Somalia, and Liberia, for that matter) continued to enjoy even after losing the empirical attributes of “positive” sovereignty.^[81]

A further implication is that when the PLO’s evolving political and diplomatic agenda required a particular social constituency, it was relatively easy to abandon those segments of the mass base whose functional value had been superseded. This occurred demonstrably as the PLO directed its political and material resources increasingly toward the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the 1973 war and especially after its expulsion from Lebanon in 1982; by the same token there was a diversion of resources away from the refugee communities of the diaspora, most evidently after the 1987 intifada and, especially, the 1991 Gulf War when the Arab-Israeli peace process finally seemed likely to bear fruit. This utilitarian, not to say opportunistic, relationship had long been reflected in the PLO’s incorporation of the various trade and labor unions and mass organizations, some of which had previously played a critical role in maintaining a distinct Palestinian identity and politics in the first two decades after al-nakba. The corporatism, militarization, and bureaucratization that characterized the PLO in exile were, moreover, replicated in relations with grassroots organizations and social constituencies in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. There, Israeli economic and settlement policies and later the 1990–91 Gulf crisis created both the political conditions (generating nationalist sentiment) and those of social and economic crisis that drove people toward the PLO. So although the intifada initially appeared to reorder social relations, and thus to offer an alternative mode of politics and institution building and of nationalist identification, the combination of Israeli counter-measures and the co-optive and neopatrimonial policies of the PLO undermined any lasting transformative effect.^[82] Local political or social actors could always disengage, of course, but the crucial point is that anyone wishing to conduct organized, mass-based activity found themselves obliged to do so in an established political, institutional, and symbolic field represented and dominated by the PLO and its constituent groups (and subsequently transposed into the Palestinian Authority in 1994).

Moreover, this summary suggests that rent, rather than war, was the indispensable factor in the particular form and path taken by Palestinian state building, nationalism, and “state”-society relations under the PLO. Though generated by the conduct of armed struggle, its effect was to obviate the need for social transformation as a means of extracting revenues for war waging or state building. The PLO merely followed a prevalent Arab political model in this regard, acquiring “strategic” rent much as Egypt, Syria, or Jordan did from the oil-rich Arab states or from one superpower or the other. In turn, the fact that the PLO was able both to wage war and to acquire such autonomy, recognition, and capital as it did without needing to engage purposefully in social transformation (including class and gender relations) emphasizes the shift in Third World state formation since 1945 from an internal dynamic to an external one, appropriating outward organizational forms, ideological norms, and policy discourses available in the international system.^[83] War had an instrumental role in bringing the PLO into line with the regional and international systems of states, but because these systems (especially the latter) existed as a prior conditioning framework it was they that determined the structure and norms of the type of constituent unit that the PLO and other “latecomers” sought to construct.^[84] Furthermore, although militarization may remain central to state consolidation and maintenance, the fact that the organization of emergent states reflects their adaptation to the requirements of establishing political control over their constituents, rather than to local social and economic conditions, only confirms the shift from internal to external determinants of state building.

To drive the point home in the Palestinian case, the function of war as an engine for political transformation ended conclusively once the PLO was locked into an internationally recognized institutional arrangement, in which capital and international relations conclusively eclipsed violence as vital resources. Even though the Palestinian Authority established in the Gaza Strip and West Bank in 1994 fell considerably short of being a sovereign state, its political and social dynamics differed sufficiently from the earlier phases of armed struggle and intifada as to reduce the utility of coercive capabilities to a largely internal function, the continued nationalist conflict with Israel notwithstanding. The Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip therefore moved into a phase in which the militarization of society and politics still applied to a significant degree (as in Arab states), reflected in a noticeable shift of political contestation to the arena of citizenship rights (including gender, labor, and civil rights). But the reverse trend of the “civilianization” of the military is at least as important, and in future key social contests will be waged without the intervening effects of war against external foes.^[85] The forms and channels through which they will be waged owe much to the legacy of Palestinian political and institutional development during decades of armed conflict and of the conditioning contexts of cold war and Arab regional politics, but, from 1994 onward, inward flows of international capital and policy-related interventions of international actors have become the principal variables affecting the state-society relationship.

In closing, the relationship between past legacy and future course of Palestinian political and social development in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is evident in three main areas. First is the continuing tension between state and society (with implications for the instability of national identity) where each lacks clear or compatible definition, not least because of the way in which war previously combined with rent to shape state building without generating concomitant social transformations. Second, the emergence of a neopatrimonial system of political management during the period of armed struggle (and the accompanying lack of mechanisms linking the construction of state and society through contests and negotiations over resources) means that a key struggle since 1994 has been over the definition (or restriction) of civil society and citizenship rights, leading to deepening schisms not only over constitutional arrangements but also over formal and informal mechanisms of social dispute resolution, gender and labor issues, and religion.^[86] Third, much as in neighboring Arab states and elsewhere, pressures to dismantle rentier politics and liberalize economics in the Palestinian arena have led, not to a fundamental renegotiation of state-society relations, but to the emergence of a new nexus of state “managers,” senior security officials, and big businesspeople connected by overlapping, if variegated, commercial interests and heralding the rise of an authoritarian-liberal mode of governance in a globalizing world.^[87] It is perhaps a fitting historical irony that war, which did so much in the first half of the twentieth century to prevent the Palestinians from following the same path of political and social development as other post-Ottoman and postcolonial peoples, should have enabled them ultimately to rejoin that path at a similar point.

Notes

The author is grateful for comments on earlier drafts of this chapter received from Steven Heydemann, Paul Lalor, Michael Barnett, Rosemary Sayigh, Rex Brynen, Dimitris Livanios, Montserrat Guibernau, Roger Owen, and James Mayall.

8. War in the Social Memory of Egyptian Peasants

Reem Saad

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the ways in which Egyptian peasants remember wars.^[1] Peasants, who constitute almost half the Egyptian population, have been largely excluded from both academic literature and public political discourse dominated by the urban middle class. This situation is not unique to Egypt or to peasants. Recent studies of “resistance” and “voice” reflect the concern that the dominant classes in various parts of the world have denied representation to marginal social groups such as peasants, women, and blacks. My approach is primarily motivated by my belief that it is important to explore the opinions of social groups whose voices are politically inconsequential. Despite the romantic and patronizing overtones that characterize much work on “voice,” it remains a useful concept. In this chapter I do not intend to “give voice to the voiceless” or to celebrate the fact that the powerless have a voice, as much as to investigate what the “content” of such voice can tell us about the contemporary Egyptian village. More specifically, I would like to examine the ways in which war memories both structure and reflect an attitude toward the state that is more complex than is often implied in much of the recent literature on “peasant resistance.”^[2]

Although official narratives tend to exclude peasants, peasant memories are not a direct or mechanical response to this exclusion, nor are their voices necessarily ones of resistance. Peasants do not define themselves against the state whenever a national issue is at stake, and wars are matters that involve the nation perhaps even more than the state. In the issue of war, as in that of labor migration to oil-rich countries, peasants perceive themselves primarily as Egyptians rather than peasants. The terms in which memories are expressed, however, are still largely related to the world of the village.

The state’s (and its allied classes’) claim to the monopoly of representing the nation is far from being uncritically accepted or taken for granted. When it comes to issues involving the nation, this claim is ignored rather than resisted. Therefore although the official discourse dominated by the state and the urban middle class tends to exclude peasants and not regard them as complete citizens, peasants have no doubt that they are citizens who speak for themselves in matters of importance to their nation. This is true regarding national issues but not where economic or class issues are concerned. In the latter case, peasants do see themselves as excluded, powerless, and victimized, and this is the area where voices of resistance (everyday forms and otherwise) find expression. On the other hand, the state’s attitude regarding peasants is not just one of bias and exclusion. Official discourse about the war shows particularly clearly the importance of the idea of “the people.” State and intellectuals glorify the idea of “the people” primarily represented by the peasants who are the “soul of the nation,” to use Salim Tamari’s expression.^[3]

In looking at memories of wars, my main purpose is to examine aspects of the contemporary Egyptian village especially in its relationship to the state. Addressing the events of the recent past is important for the study of the present, especially since many present-day problems are often compared with, or related to, events or conditions witnessed or experienced in the recent past. This interest in the present and how peasants speak of the “now” and the “then” is related to the idea of social memory. What peasants remember or forget informs us about their identity and situates the contemporary Egyptian village within the broader framework of social, economic, political, and discursive relations. The village is linked to the state through various administrative structures and institutions, and the village economy is inseparable from the larger economy. The various levels on which village and nation are articulated shape the experiences of particular individuals and determine their perceptions in major ways.

A basic assumption of this chapter, therefore, is that peasants’ perceptions of history are inseparable from their personal experience and participation in the making of such history. Peasants not only know about particular historical and political developments taking place “outside” of the village but are themselves historical actors who have taken part in the making of events and in the general processes of social transformation. This issue is particularly evident regarding peasants’ participation in wars as soldiers or their witnessing these significant events as members of the Egyptian nation. There is a corresponding link at the level of narrative between autobiographical and historical accounts. Peasants’ reminiscences about recent political events and social transformations are very closely related to their reminiscences about their own life histories. This chapter focuses on the link between the local and national levels by examining the relationship between personal reminiscences and perceptions of the national past. Rather than being a source of facts or data, perceptions of the past illuminate the relationship between past and present, and between a village subordinate discourse and a dominant official discourse. This is not to deny, however, that a better understanding of recent Egyptian history can be achieved by considering villagers’ reminiscences and recollections as historical sources.

The study of peasant social memory should be examined in its relation to a dominant official discourse. Peasant discourses concerning public political issues are not a simple byproduct of a dominant discourse nor are they an antithetical image of it. This close link with the official discourse is not only due to effects of the state’s political hegemony but is more importantly linked to the multiple identities to which the villagers subscribe. Village dwellers do not only define themselves as peasants but equally they possess a sense of Egyptian-ness that often coincides with the official view of “who we are.”

Memories of Wars as Political Events

Before I begin a discussion of war narratives, two preliminary general observations are in order. The fact that Egypt fought its last war with Israel in 1973, coupled with the signing of the Camp David Accord in 1979, places war in the domain of the past. War is not normally a subject of everyday conversation in Imam, although fragments of the events find their way into discussions of current political developments. One resilient memory related to war is the false reports of victory that preceded the shock of defeat in 1967. The state remains unforgiven for this incident that serves as the major evidence for the state’s deception and lack of credibility. Official reports of “good news,” which are usually met with mistrust and apprehension, often trigger the memory of this incident. Another context in which war is mentioned is related to the personal experience of village men who took part in the fighting. War and labor migration are two major sources of direct contact with the world outside the village. Dispersed anecdotes drawn from the military experiences of peasant conscripts who took part in the fighting find their way into everyday conversation in the village and contribute significantly to ideas about and perceptions of the outside world.

Furthermore, and the second major point, war stories concern the marked generational divide that exists along lines of “war” and “peace.” Virtually all males have to perform military service. However, the military experience of present-day conscripts is very different from that of the previous generation who fought in wars. For members of the present generation who serve in the army in peacetime, military service is regarded as a “sentence” rather than as national service. The difference between the two generations is not only due to the change in the general historical circumstances but also to the difference in their respective age concerns. The youth link their military service to apprehensions about the future rather than memories of the past. They particularly stress the element of anxiety, whereby “the army” (el-geish) means no more than a two-year delay “in the start of one’s life.” Seen in this light, the army for the present generation is also linked to the value of the official military discharge papers for pursuing the work opportunities open to this generation, especially those that involve migration. A man cannot obtain a passport or a job in the private or public sector without having performed or been exempted from military service. The generational divide, therefore, applies not only to the very different army experience but also to the perception of wars as political events. This is particularly the case for the 1967 war—members of the younger generation are largely ignorant of it or they lack the passion with which the events of this war are remembered by those who witnessed them as “present.”

The following is mainly based on narratives that were recounted for my benefit and upon my request during field work in 1989–90, although I was never the sole audience, as others were always present.

The General Abstract Notion of War

In his book The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell discusses the influence that World War I has had on modern European thought.^[4] He also deals with the way the war has survived in modern memory, by looking at the literature and memoirs of the period. Fussell’s book is particularly relevant in this context, as many of his insights are helpful when looking at peasants remembering the Egyptian wars.

Fussell shows how World War I influenced people’s perceptions of World War II in a way that “is enough almost to make one believe in a single continuing Great war running through the whole middle of the twentieth century” (317). People came to think of the two world wars “as virtually a single historical episode” (318). This is an accurate way of describing how peasants view the Egyptian wars.^[5] In retrospect, people came to treat the frequent wars in which Egypt participated in a relatively short period of time as a “single historical episode.”

There is no unified, consistent view of war as an abstract concept. However there is talk of war as an important component of Egyptian history. War, in this sense, is not really regarded so much as an event or a number of similar events but rather as a feature of contemporary Egyptian history. In general, peasants’ view of war in this sense coincides greatly with the official view. In this context, peasants back the state and almost never challenge its role as representative of the nation.

Narratives of wars as political events are characterized by what Hayden White calls “a discourse that narrativizes,” that is “a discourse that feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story.”^[6] This is particularly the case regarding the 1967 war but is also true for talk of war in general. In its abstract dimension, war is often used to express concern about problems of the present rather than traumas of the past. War is linked to other contemporary political issues as part of an attempt to make sense of a present situation.

The most common association here is that of war and debt, the latter being a very contemporary concern. Linking war and debt comes as part of the “conspiracy” theme that is often used whenever an “explanation” is needed. Inflation and deteriorating living standards are the main concerns of the peasants today, and these are always associated in the official rhetoric with the debt problem. The debt problem (and economic hardships in general) and the wars Egypt fought are inseparable in the official rhetoric, especially during the time of Sadat, when they were used in order to justify the peace treaty with Israel. The views peasants express on this matter are heavily influenced by the changing political rhetoric of the different regimes.

In a general interview with Fathi, the mention of wars in this sense links past and present:^[7] “The only thing that is annoying people nowadays is the high prices. Also war has affected us to a very great extent. It affected us financially and otherwise. Financially, you and me and everyone has been contributing. The country’s economy itself has been contributing. And because I did not have [money] and was fighting I had to borrow. The state borrowed money from abroad, and perhaps, I don’t know but I imagine that since the days of the war and until this day there are still debts—long-term debts—for weapons and other things.”

The tendency to perceive and narrate certain events in terms of a coherent plot is especially evident when the purpose is to answer a “why” question. Toward the end of an interview with Sayed, who fought in the wars in Yemen and the wars of 1967 and 1973, I asked him, “But why did all these wars happen?” His answer was: “War is like a fitna [discord]. The big nations like to tiftin [create discord among] the other states in order to benefit. For example, when we fight Israel we need arms; where are we going to get them? Either from America or from Russia. We use these weapons and bring others. We get the most advanced weapons they have got, and with hard currency. They drag us into debt.”

Fitna is a key word in the discourse of conspiracy. In the everyday usage it is almost exclusively used in its substantive form, fattān, meaning someone who tells on others or who stirs up people in general, thus causing them harm intentionally. As a noun, fitna has a strong Islamic connotation and is usually used in situations pertaining to the wider community: Egypt, the Arabs, or Muslims. It refers to a much higher level of evil and manipulation by a person or a group who is not part of that moral community. It is used to explain defeat in wars and the underdevelopment of Egypt and the Arab world.

One important way in which war influenced peasants’ views on politics is that it provided them with a concrete reference point regarding the wider world of politics in which they live. Villagers are aware that they are part of a political arena that extends far beyond the boundaries of Egypt. One reason why peasants often resort to official interpretations is that these provide convenient formulations that serve to impose some order on matters that influence their lives but which they have no access to or control over. Peasants, like most other Egyptians, are well aware of Egypt’s dependent and often vulnerable position in world politics. The theme of conspiracy expresses a recognition of Egypt’s dependent and weak position without, however, compromising the nation’s integrity or honor. The conspiracy explanation essentially says that things could not have turned out otherwise. In that sense, “conspiracy” is more of an explanation for Egypt’s present state of dependency than it is an explanation of the occurrence of wars.

It is important to note, though, that the conspiracy explanation coexists with other ways of talking about war. The view of war as caused by fitna applies mainly in a general and abstract sense but does not hold when applied to concrete cases where the issue of will and initiative is more prominent. When each war is analyzed in its own context, it is justified, usually on the grounds of defending “land” and “house.” These are metaphors that are very commonly used to describe the Arab-Israeli conflict. Although this could be taken as an example of how themes from peasant culture bring the abstract closer to everyday concerns, we should also remember that “land” and “house” are powerful metaphors even in urban-based official discourse. The following description of the Arab-Israeli conflict by Sayed is typical: “We are fighting for our land only. Imagine there are people who want to take this house from us. If they came and stood in front of the house and we did not do anything, they would come to sit with us. If we went to sleep and left them there, they would take the whole house for themselves and we will not be able to drive them out of it. Our war is like this. We are fighting for our house and land only.”

Even in the case of the Yemen war, however, when Egypt was not defending its land, it was never said that this war was a mistake in principle. Also Fathi’s mention of war in the abstract in the general interview is different from the view reflected in a second interview, which was based on his military experience.

War As a Concrete Event

In contrast to the abstract notion of war, reference to specific wars brings out a tension between peasant and state versions of events. It is true that peasants are willing to go along with certain official justifications for Egypt’s present state of dependency, and that they do acknowledge the principle that the state represents the nation and is responsible for regulating and mediating relationships with the outside world. This, however, does not mean that they extend the logic of conspiracy to absolve the state of all responsibility. Peasants’ memories of the concrete events show wars as events that belong to the nation as much as, if not more than, the state. Not only are they part of people’s personal memories but they are also part of their perception of a collective national past. Memories of wars as concrete events play a major part in structuring perceptions of the national past, producing a view that is not easily influenced by state political rhetoric.

There are two important points here. First, peasants’ reminiscences about many issues may not be very different from those of other social groups. The narratives reveal a high degree of knowledge, interest and concern regarding public political issues that are of importance to the whole nation. The fact that their social memory reveals a strong sense of belonging to the nation runs contrary to widespread assumptions that they are ignorant and parochial. A striking example of this biased view can be seen in Richard Adams’s observation: “As has been noted by a number of keen observers[,] . . . peasants tend to have an ontology that stresses the concrete and immediate character of social reality. In the eyes of the average Egyptian fellah, the world consists of a series of very concrete social units: his immediate family, his extended family and a group of families known as a village. On the whole, Egyptian peasants remain quite incapable of abstracting beyond these concrete units in order to perceive groups of people who act together on the basis of shared political beliefs or economic conditions.”^[8]

Second, perceptions of wars as concrete events are linked to peasants’ attitudes toward particular regimes rather than to “the state” as an abstract authority. As will be shown later, this especially applies to memories of 1967 and the issue of Nasser’s responsibility. This is one of the areas where it is possible to discern a view that may be specific to peasants and where the narratives express the peasant as well as the Egyptian identities.

In discussing the surviving memories and the relative significance accorded them, one should look into the extent to which a national or political event is perceived or narrated in autobiographical terms. A certain degree of participation in any given event allows it to be narrated as autobiographical. The 1967 war offers a good example. Apart from the memories of those who actually took part in the fighting, 1967 is remembered in autobiographical terms by those who witnessed the nationwide demonstrations of June 9–10, 1967, that followed Nasser’s resignation. Those who fought, however, possess an added dimension to their involvement in the events, namely the direct experience of the war situation as concretely and physically felt. Elements of this experience enter into the ‘izba’s repertoire of anecdotes, besides forming an important component of their abstract notion of war. These two types of participation will be termed simply the physical and the political.

Physical descriptions of battles, and repeated references to death, are common to all war narratives. They form part of a definition of war in general and are not related to any particular war. The individual concrete experience of war—the battle situation—is the same in all wars regardless of whether the overall result was victory or defeat. Each battle is as bad as every other. In three separate cases, the description of the physical aspect of war as experienced by the soldiers carries the same message. One such incident is recounted by Abu Assad when a mine exploded during a routine training maneuver in 1953. The other is recounted by Sultan during 1967, and the third by Sayed in 1973. Despite the very different macro context of each of the three incidents, the descriptions of the particular cases are almost identical.

Abu Assad relates his story:

After we finished our training we were performing a maneuver to make sure that our training had been successful. We were thirty soldiers in a truck, and we stopped at a certain spot in order for them to divide us so that some would simulate the Egyptians and some would simulate the enemy. We went down from the truck and were almost three hundred or four hundred meters away. But that particular spot was mined, and a mine exploded suddenly and turned the ground upside down. It turned the ground, and I fell. I got up after the dust had settled. I got up and looked around this way and that way. The dust had settled. This is God’s predestined fate. They were thirty or more. Those whose heads had been separated from their bodies, and he whose body was divided in two, and another whose leg was separated: they resembled a group of pigeons that had been shot at by a machine gun. There was no one standing up in their midst except me. I was running frantically among them, but all of them, they were shattered by the mine.

Sultan tells his story from 1967:

The aircraft started strafing us. People were flying in the air, in pieces, tents were burning and cars were burning. I hid inside a hole in the ground until the dust settled. The sight was horrible. The cars were burnt and the people dead. Separate legs and separate arms and human heads. We did whatever we could do. One of us would collect some legs and bury them, and another would collect a human being and bury him.

Sayed’s account of the 1973 October war begins with the crossing of the Suez Canal, which he recounts with pride and joy; but the bulk of the narrative is devoted to a description of the siege of his squadron in Suez, their physical suffering, and the hardships encountered:

We were besieged. Aircraft, tanks, and cars were hitting at us and sweeping us like with a broom. . . . I don’t know for how many days I had not seen bread in the hands of anyone. When the night came we used to crawl to look for anything we could eat. If I found a small palm tree I would cut its fronds and eat them. In the night. In the morning, no—we could not come out in the morning. I would cut the frond and eat it, and it would taste like honey in my mouth. We would look for the grass—that which people tread on with their feet—and eat it, and it would taste like honey in my mouth.

This type of participation is, naturally, restricted to those who fought in the wars. However, as it is a general feature of all wars, it is not related to a particular time or place. In this sense it does not enter into the process of formulating a political statement about specific historical events.

Because these are examples of universal atrocities that are not restricted to 1967, they cannot be the reason why this particular war is clearly remembered by peasants. Not only was the 1967 defeat a huge blow to the whole Egyptian (and Arab) nation, but it was also a landmark event at the personal and local levels, mainly due to popular “political” participation during the events of 9–10 June. It is worth noting that these demonstrations are known locally as “the revolution” (el-sawra), and almost everybody who was old enough at that time remembers vividly what happened then.

The 1967 war is unique in the way it is perceived and narrated. What Hayden White describes as “emplotment” in narrative historical discourse applies particularly aptly to peasant narratives of the 1967 war.^[9] This war is narrated as a coherent, tragic drama, and the causal links are particularly stressed in an attempt to make sense of what happened. When the political events of June 1967 are narrated, the elements of a tragedy are discernible (hero, villain, treason, conspiracy, fate), the tragic hero being, of course, Nasser.

Peasants’ memories of 1967 are drastically different from contemporary official representations of this war. A transformation in official rhetoric about 1967 took place after 1973, a transformation that was not paralleled in the peasants’ narratives. The defeat of 1967 constituted a huge blow both to the Nasser regime and to the Egyptian people. Euphemism characterized the official presentation of 1967, in which the defeat came to be called el-naksa (the setback; lit. relapse). It is in this light that the 1973 war came to be hailed as a great victory. The “crossing” of the Suez Canal by the Egyptian army (el-cubur) has been imbued with tremendous moral significance, with the metaphor of crossing itself often used to represent a shift to a new age of triumph and dignity (karama). The contrast between the two wars was also heavily employed by the Sadat regime to establish the superiority of Sadat over Nasser. With the 1973 war, euphemism disappeared and 1967 came to be described in very harsh language. To say that 1967 “dragged [the] pride of the Arab nation through the mud” in a school textbook would have been unthinkable before 1973.^[10] It is as if stressing the “humiliation” and “shame” brought about by the naksa was a prerequisite for hailing 1973 as a victory. In short, “1973 has wiped out the shame of 1967.”

Peasant narratives reveal that they do not share this view of events. But the fact that peasants’ views on this issue contradict the official version promoted by the post-Nasser regimes cannot be adequately described as peasants’ resistance to the state. For one thing, accounts of the events themselves reveal a high degree of identification with the state. When the nation’s interests are at stake the state is never undermined. Peasants’ backing of the state points to aspects of the complex relationship between peasants and the state that cannot be captured if we rely solely on the “resistance” model. Points of convergence and divergence between state and peasant narratives do not follow the class-based antagonistic polarity that characterizes peasant-state relations in other domains. It is true that, in their subordinate class position, peasants feel powerless and antagonistic toward the Egyptian state and its allied classes, and state policies are invariably blamed for economic hardship and much of the problems of everyday life that peasants face. However, peasant-state relations involve much more than collecting taxes and extracting surplus. Peasants do not perceive themselves only as members of a powerless class, but they also identify themselves as members of the Egyptian nation. It is their national belonging that partly explains the overlap between their own interpretations of events and certain official interpretations.

In addition to this, the need to maintain the memory of 1967 is by no means unique to peasants but is largely shared by a generation of Egyptians who witnessed the events. This can be seen in Ahdaf Soueif’s autobiographical novel set against the background of Egypt’s political history in the years 1967–1980. In the novel, the mother sends her daughter who is studying in England a letter dated 6 June 1975 in which she mentions the reopening of the Suez Canal: “They opened (re-opened) it yesterday amid much fanfare as you can imagine—on the anniversary of sixty-seven: that is supposed to be quite wiped out by the Heroic Crossing.”^[11]

The humiliation of the defeat was taken personally not just by peasants but by the great majority of Egyptians who witnessed these events. Specifically, the memory of 1967 has a strong generational aspect. The leftist weekly Al-Ahali chastises members of the new generation for their ignorance of this event. In the 3 June 1992 portion of a two-part series on “5 June 1967 in the memory of the 90’s generation,” the journal claims that “this generation’s awareness of Egypt’s national history is in danger” and questions whether there is “a gap in consciousness between this generation of the future and the generations which preceded it.”

In Imam, a need to “make sense” of an incomprehensible event persists, and the 1973 war seems to have had no effect on a retrospective appraisal of 1967. Except for the people who fought in the 1973 war, it is a pale memory whose contents differ very little from the official media presentation and interpretation. There are a number of factors that could explain this. First, there was no popular sense of participation in the 1973 war, and therefore the personal aspect of reminiscence is largely eliminated. Second and more important, there has been so much official emphasis on this “victory” that it has become an event that belongs completely to the state; there is nothing left to be expressed by the people, nor is there a “need to remember.” Rather, people almost are ordered to do so. The following passage from the introduction to a school textbook on the October 1973 war illustrates this point: “The Ministry of Education places great importance on the present events, which are decisive in the life of this nation, and is concerned that our sons, the students, be completely knowledgeable about (these events) and that they possess a deep understanding of all the elements of the conflict which decides their present and future. Therefore it was only natural that the Ministry directs its attention to teaching the October War to all students at all stages and requires them to understand it and write about it in their school journals and their speeches and their composition pieces.”^[12]

With the 1967 war it is very difficult to establish the exact link between the conspiracy scenario as political opinion, on the one hand, and the personal experience of participation in or witnessing of the 9–10 June demonstrations, on the other. Participation explains interest and a need or perhaps a feeling of duty to know what happened and why. The personalized quality of this matter is evident in the passionate and authoritative manner in which these events are recounted. In the course of a general interview with Hagg Wahba, I asked him what happened during Nasser’s time. He answered:

Abdel Nasser was called “the war hero,” and then when the states let Abdel Nasser down, namely Syria, Libya, Iraq and Algeria, when they all joined forces against him he failed in 1967, when he entered the Palestine war. In 1970 he had a heart attack and died. Abdel-Nasser died ’ahran (of distress) at the time of naksa el-balad etnakasit minnu (the country was defeated while he was in charge). . . . We wanted to liberate Palestine. The reason for el-naksa was that we wanted to liberate Palestine. So we entered into an agreement with Palestine, Jordan, and Syria to become one state. So when Nasser came to power he kicked out the English. So who joined him? Russia. He wanted to kick out Russia from the country; Russia wanted to create a military base and I don’t know what in this country and that state, so he told them, No, we don’t want you. Then Russia tricked him. . . . Russia entered Palestine.

When asked to elaborate on how Russia came to enter Palestine, Wahba responded:

Listen carefully. Russia enticed Israel to take Palestine. That was in 1965. Things started to escalate until 1967. Abdel Hakim Amer kept saying let us strike first; by God, we are going to strike first. But Russia who wanted to trick Nasser told him, No, let Israel strike first. So Israel, when she started, instead of striking at the country she hit the airports. We stopped. She hit our airports. We were hindered. Israel came in.

Gamal Abdel-Nasser presented his resignation. Three days, no more, and he presented his resignation. He presented his resignation but of course the country did not accept. They said, “No, do you think you can throw us in the fire like this and then resign? Impossible. You are going to stay like this until you figure out how to rescue the country.” Then, people from all governorates went and surrounded Nasser’s house. They formed a circle around his house in Cairo and said, “You either let him look to see us or we are going in to see him. . . . If he is dead, tell us, but he shouldn’t throw us into the fire and then leave us. We are not going to accept a resignation from him.”

In the morning he had said, “I gave up the presidency in this day, and I will not be the president of the republic in this day.” The people revolted and they rose from all over the governorates and filled Cairo. Transportation was free. People made a revolution here in Fayoum and they were forcing the drivers to go to Cairo. Ten or fifteen men would hold the driver and hit him to force him to go to Cairo.

I did not [go to Cairo]. We went to Fayoum when this revolution took place, but I did not go to Cairo. Those who went to Cairo were saying, “You either let him look to see us or we are going in to see him. . . . If he is dead, tell us, but he shouldn’t throw us into the fire and then leave us.” The next day he said, “I withdraw yesterday’s declaration according to the demand of the people, because I am at the service of the people,” and he cried.

A similar view is expressed by Abu Maghrabi, the chief guard of the village: “The reason for el-naksa is the treason of Amer.^[13] They said he took bribes and some people said he used to get drunk. Each person says a different thing. But there was treason, anyway. And this treason was American because of Russia and the High Dam. They say Russia built the High Dam and so jealousy developed on the part of the U.S. or the other states, so a fitna happened and treason took place, and that led to the defeat of Egypt.”

For those who fought, the military aspect of their participation has no direct bearing on their political analysis. They share the same political views as the rest of the community. Sayed adopts the same interpretation for the reasons behind el-naksa: “The cause of what happened is treason. We Egyptians are kind-hearted. We were fighting against an enemy not a friend—it’s an enemy. The big states told Egypt, ‘Don’t start with the attack, don’t start with war.’ When they said that, we did not do anything. So they started first. The aircraft came, and then the tanks, and they stood at the Suez Canal. Everyone who was in the Sinai Desert was killed or taken as captive. It was treason.”

And Sultan too:

They started by hitting the airports at zero hour. It is true that we had good weapons, but we were paralyzed by the hitting of the airports. So when the leadership tried to get in touch with the airports, they did not find airports. . . . We would have won the war were it not for the matter of treason. As I told you, we were just soldiers, so we don’t know, but people were saying that Abdel Hakim Amer was having a party with Warda [a famous singer] in the airports, and it was a plan agreed upon between Amer and the Israelis. Nasser said, “We will attack first,” but Amer told him no we are not going to attack until they do.” . . .

The soldiers were not to blame at all, and the officers’ morale was very low, and I admit there was nothing wrong with them. The problem was with the leadership. No one knows exactly what it was. Was it embezzlement, or was it that Amer became too bigheaded?

If we had an air force to cover us, we would have taken Israel in 1967 because [the size of] Israel then was less than this ‘izba. It was photographed. Nasser photographed it and also Amer did, and they determined its area and the size of forces that were there. Treason. Yes, treason. And also America was helping Israel, and at that point we could not stand in the face of America.

When Nasser felt this pressure he declared defeat and resigned from the throne [sic]. Of course people did not agree, so he went back to the throne. Of course the people did not agree. They said he should not bring us to 1967 and then resign. They told him you have to go on and bring back this land. People revolted against him and went to his palace. . . . He resigned on the radio and tv. Everybody was very sad when this happened. People were committing suicide in the army. Soldiers and officers were committing suicide by shooting themselves. How could he resign and leave them at this stage! The army revolted. At that time also there were problems between him and Amer. But we were not present when these things happened, and we did not talk about them either. And then he went back to the throne.

From the above narratives on the naksa we notice that priority is given to having a coherent plot formed of elements of a tragedy. Treason is seen as the main cause of the defeat, but it does not seem to matter much who committed it. Amer, Warda, Russia and America are almost interchangeable in that respect. It is just “treason,” with no overtones of inefficiency or weakness. In a similar way, Fussell speaks of the spread of myths and rumors during World War I mainly for the purpose of providing explanations for events that were too shocking to accept. It is useful to compare peasants’ explanation of naksa with Fussell’s comment on a Canadian artillery sergeant Reginald Grant’s book S.O.S. Stand To! Fussell says:

We can now see that the book is a virtual anthology of fables, lies, superstitions, and legends, all offered as a sober report. Sergeant Grant’s problem is simple: he simply can’t believe that Huns can be skilled at counter-battery location through sound and flash calculations. Seeing his own battery constantly hit by accurate counter-battery fire no matter how cleverly it moves or hides itself, he must posit some explanation. This he does by conceiving of the Belgian landscape as swarming with disloyal farmers who signal the Canadian artillery locations to the Germans. . . . [This] fantasy of folk espionage Grant projects in a frantic search for some way of explaining the disasters suffered by the Canadian artillery which will not have to acknowledge the enemy’s skill in observation, mathematics, and deduction.^[14]

The main purpose of such explanations is “to ‘make sense’ of events which otherwise would seem merely accidental or calamitous.”^[15]

It is important to note that, as mentioned earlier, this interpretation of the 1967 war may be specific to peasants and should be read in light of their attitude toward Nasser. Nasser is appropriated by the peasants and regarded as a local hero especially for issuing the Agrarian Reform laws in 1952 (locally known as the Law of Freedom). Agrarian Reform (in its association with Nasser) forms a break point between past and present. The “age of freedom” (as opposed to “the age of feudalism”) is how they characterize the political and moral order of the community at present. The issue of Nasser’s responsibility regarding the defeat of 1967 offers an interesting case of how peasants maintain a version of national history that ensures the survival of Nasser, even as a defeated hero. The importance of Nasser for the community’s self-image could explain why they cannot just disown him and blame the defeat on “the state.” Also these memories show us the way in which “the state” is neither homogenized nor reified as far as they are concerned. The state of Nasser is certainly not that of Sadat or Mubarak.

The treason explanation is thus linked to the ambivalence concerning the question of Nasser’s responsibility for the defeat. On the one hand, he is portrayed as the tragic hero who was let down by his friends and tricked by his enemies, and these are portrayed as almost acts of fate that, naturally, entail no responsibility. On the other hand, the events of 9–10 June are portrayed less as an expression of love and support than as a protest against Nasser’s seeking to evade his responsibility. The phrase el-balad etnakasit minnu (the country was defeated while he was in charge) used by Hagg Wahba is, I think, a key phrase as it signifies that the naksa took place while he was in charge of the country but does not place direct blame on him. This form of the preposition min is rendered in Hinds and Badawi (1986) as “lack of control over a circumstance.” A common example of the usage of this form in the Egyptian vernacular is the phrase el-‘ayyil mat minha, meaning the child died on her [his mother]. It is a situation of formal responsibility but also of helplessness in the face of uncontrollable forces.

The dramatic or plotlike nature of this topic is also accompanied by the use of rhetoric and incidents pertaining to other times. Familiar clichés borrowed from official rhetoric are also employed but are taken out of their original contexts. There is a repertoire of what are considered to be serious political phrases that are often arbitrarily matched with subjects deemed to be of the same order of importance. For example, the account of Hagg Wahba is colored by rhetoric of the Sadat era, such as calling Nasser “the hero of war,” which is a favorite phrase used by the media to describe not Nasser but Sadat. Using this phrase in this context to describe Nasser adds to the dramatic effect of the narrative. Nasser, rather than Sadat, is also given the role of driving the Russians out of Egypt, adding even more dramatic effect to the plot. Also, when talking of the Arab states who let Nasser down, he mentions Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Algeria. These were among the Arab states that were most opposed to the Camp David Accord signed in 1979. They were frequently mentioned and criticized in the media at that time, which may justify the choice of these particular states for the role of the friend who behaves basely. In Abu Maghrabi’s account most of the references are borrowed directly from the Suez war of 1956.

Those who fought in the war did not participate in the 9–10 June demonstrations, because they were in the army. Sayed’s account of the events of 9 June provides a particularly powerful expression of a bitter memory:

On June 9 I was supposed to be transferred to another position where I had to pave the ground with a bulldozer. A special car took me to that position and left me there. I came to start the bulldozer but it wouldn’t start. Then I told myself I am going home—I am going back home. I went on the main road and waited. I saw the Fayoum bus coming, so I changed into a galabiyya I had in my bag and went into the bus.

When the bus reached Kum Ushim there was an inspection point there. There they arrested anyone who they discovered belonged to the army. The officer asked me where I have just come from, and I said that I was coming from Qanater. He asked me what my job was and I told him I was a driver and showed them my i.d. card. Then they searched me, and for my bad luck they found the army letter in my pocket. So they asked me to leave the bus. I found myself the only person leaving the bus, and I began to wonder what they were going to do to me. Then I told myself the worst thing they can do is send me back to war, and I am used to that.

They took me to the police station at Kum Ushim, and when I entered I found almost four hundred persons in the same position as me. So I thought, well, if we die, we die together; and if we live, we live together. Then they brought a huge truck, which transferred us to the police station at Fayoum city. When we arrived there a police officer came to us. He was not wearing a cap and his hands were in his pockets. He pointed to us and said, “Are these the sons of bitches who brought the naksa on us? They are deserting! They should all be shot dead.” Then one of us shouted, “We are not sons of bitches. You are the ones who are sons of bitches,” and he jumped at his throat and we all joined until the officer disappeared under us.

Then the ma’mur [officer] came out and ordered that we should be locked up in the school and not in the police station. They took us to the school and put us in the classrooms. We broke the windows. Then the ma’mur came and asked us what our demands were, and we said we do not want anything except our families. We asked them to bring our families to the school. Then a policeman entered each classroom to ask us what our villages were in order to call our families. . . . My family came and brought with them the stove and the tea and food and the cooking pots and everything. If you had seen this sight in the night—the school courtyard was like a mawlid [saint’s birthday], with each group of people coming to see their relative. It was like a mawlid and we stayed until the morning.

This was a situation where military discipline was totally meaningless, and alienation from the institution total. The defeat withdrew from the army its raison d’être. Order collapsed and the peasant soldier became only a peasant. This was a moment when the village and the army confronted each other as two distinct worlds, divorced by the defeat. What, for Sayed, simply meant “going home” was, in military terms, desertion. He only wanted his family, and so did everybody else: “the school courtyard was like a mawlid.”

Mawlid is the key word here. Being an occasion for visiting and socializing, it evokes the familiar world of the village. The word mawlid is also used to denote chaos. The example that Hinds and Badawi (1986) cite for this usage is “mafish nizam ya ‘amm da mulid”^[16] (There’s no organization [order], my good man, it’s complete chaos!). It was.

Conclusion

Peasants are concerned with events outside the boundaries of their own village, but they perceive and remember these events on their own terms. The merging of personal and national history and the use of themes and symbols from peasant culture are major ways in which these events are perceived and remembered.

Peasant discourse cannot be easily disentangled from official discourse. There are tensions but no clear-cut rupture. Consequently, I do not hold the view that a distinctive peasant social memory exists, at least not one that is primarily based on a discourse of resistance. In terms of identity, peasants generally define themselves vis-à-vis the state, the elite(s), and city dwellers. However, they possess a sense of Egyptian-ness that largely coincides with the official view. Where the issue of nationalism is concerned, there is a large degree of identification with the state. This is one reason why the concept of everyday forms of resistance does not adequately describe or explain the particular way wars are remembered. Moreover, this way of remembering 1967 and forgetting 1973 (to put it very crudely) is not exclusive to peasants but is shared by a wide range of Egyptians, especially the generation whose members actually witnessed the events of 1967. War memories are important mainly for those who witnessed the actual experiences of war. Members of the younger generation are largely unaware and uninterested in this matter. The “peace generation” has other concerns.

Peasants’ memories of wars as political events constitute part of their attempts to attach themselves to national history and show that their discourse is integrative rather than separatist. They possess a sense of peripheralization and attempt to seek a place for themselves within national history. Peasants’ experiences in, and reminiscences of, war reflect such attempts.

Notes

This work is mainly based on one year of fieldwork in a hamlet in the governorate of Fayoum, which is denoted here by the pseudonym “Izbet Imam.” The population of Izbet Imam is made up of a little over eight hundred inhabitants. The bulk of the fieldwork was carried out in the year 1989; I made subsequent short visits, the last of which was in March 1995. I am grateful to Steven Heydemann for his valuable comments on various drafts of this paper.

9. War as a Vehicle for the Rise and Demise of a State-Controlled Society

The Case of Ba‘thist Iraq

Isam al-Khafaji

Introduction: Is War Really an Exceptional Phenomenon?

A general assumption underlies most writings on wars and societies: namely, that war is an exceptional event, one that introduces qualitatively new and disruptive elements into the routine functioning of state structures, civil society organizations, and the daily life practices of citizens. Unfortunately, this assumption has all too often been challenged by the reality of long-term conflict, notably in various parts of the developing world. And in few regions have such conflicts been more prominent, or their effects more significant, than the Middle East.^[1] The distinction between war and peace becomes even more blurred when one tries to apply it in regions or periods where national states have not taken their final shape yet; that is, where the boundaries of an existing state are contested by noncitizens belonging to the nation that forms the majority within the given state, or by citizens that do not belong to the majority nation in that state. This phenomenon has also been painfully apparent across the contemporary Middle East, Indian subcontinent, and Africa.

On one level, therefore, Iraq’s experience of near constant war making since 1980 might seem entirely in keeping with other cases of protracted conflict in the Middle East and perhaps elsewhere. The situation in Iraq can be viewed as yet another example of the kind of hypermilitarism and aggressive nationalism so evident in cases like Syria and Israel. In all three countries, the current regime inherited but also deepened and consolidated extensive national security states that rely on war preparation as a principal mechanism of mobilization and control, of regime legitimation and rent seeking.

Iraq’s experience is nonetheless distinctive from other cases discussed in this volume in significant respects. First and foremost, Iraq is not a case in which preparation for war has been pursued without the intent to actually fight a war—which, as Perthes argues in his chapter in this volume, was the case for Syria after 1973. Instead, war preparation has been inextricably linked to repeated and extended episodes of war making that have, in turn, had pervasive effects on the dynamics of Iraqi politics, the organization of state and economy, and on state-society relations. In addition, war making—the projection of organized violence outside of Iraq’s borders—has been augmented in unique ways by the extraordinary routinization of internal violence as an everyday form of governance. The sheer pervasiveness of coercion as an instrument of governance has, for Iraq’s regime, erased the boundary between external and internal threats. War making is now channeled in all directions as a logical extension of the regime’s war-based system of rule. War preparation, war making, and raison d’état have become thoroughly and disastrously integrated in Iraq, in ways that differ both qualitatively and quantitatively from any other Middle East state. What is critical in the Iraqi case, therefore, is to explain how a familiar constellation of features coalesced in a set of forms and practices that are exceptional in their force and intensity.

To develop such an explanation, this chapter explores the trajectory of hypermilitarization in Iraq and its political, social, and economic dynamics. It also demonstrates how war making has achieved such extraordinary social, cultural, ideological, and political centrality in Iraq. The chapter traces the effects of shifts in Arab nationalist ideology on the formation of Iraqi political identity in ways that increasingly legitimated Iraq’s self-perceived mission as defender of the Arab nation and valorized Iraq’s military prowess. It explores how this aggressive form of nationalism interacted with and helped shape a centralized and ultradictatorial system of rule, paving the way for the increasing compression of Iraq’s political arena around the personality of Saddam Hussein. Further securing the consolidation of a war-based system of rule were the normalization of war as a social condition and system of governance, the construction of a war-driven political economy, and the use of war as a basis for the redefinition of Iraqi national identity. As will become evident, the first Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) proved to be a crucial episode in the consolidation of these dynamics.

Finally, this chapter puts the specific Iraqi experience of war preparation and war making within the wider context of theories of state formation and consolidation, whereby the state asserts its supremacy over society by monopolizing the means of coercion and by asserting its legitimacy as the sole agent capable of preserving the unity of a social formation. Had they not won their contests with various armed groups within their populations concerning who could best defend their interests, state makers in Europe, as in the Arab Mashreq, could not have proceeded to practice their violence internally, to homogenize their populations culturally, religiously, and linguistically in the name of nation building.^[2]

Waiting for Saddam

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq has been a long time in the making. This is not to imply that Iraq has been destined by some fault of nature to suffer under dictatorship, or that Saddam’s rise to power was somehow predetermined by Iraqi political culture. Indeed, Saddam’s rule has profoundly altered Iraqi political culture and transformed social relations in general, as I argue below. Instead, the intense compression of the Iraqi political field around the personal authority of Saddam Hussein resulted from a long-term trajectory of state formation in which a network of “received” political institutions—monarchical and later republican—were emptied of substance, authoritarian political practices were consolidated, and a dramatic process of state expansion undertaken. Throughout this process, the careful cultivation of threats, war preparation, and actual conflict reinforced and legitimated the efforts of successive ruling elites to centralize political authority and control the accumulation and distribution of national income. These legacies of Iraqi state formation made available to Saddam Hussein a style of governance that was well suited to his domestic political ambitions. Yet Saddam’s regime has not only appropriated an existing set of political resources, it has also vastly expanded and applied the politics of war making across a wide range of social, cultural, ideological, and economic domains, leading to wholesale shifts in the structure of Iraq’s society and economy and promoting the rise of a state dominated society.

The Erosion of Monarchic Institutions

During the period of Iraq’s monarchy (1921–58), parliamentary democracy was anything but representative of the majority of the population. This was not mainly the product of the malevolent will of the ancien régime nor of imperialism, as many Arab writings imply, but has to do with the virtual absence of civil society, which is the necessary condition for the rise of a pluralistic democracy.^[3] The parliamentary system that existed in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab Mashreq was based on a set of rules whereby representation, political solidarities, and alliances reflected not the voluntary choices of individuals, but rather the various “primordial” associations that characterize a prebourgeois community. Thus the relative weight of each ethnic, sectarian, and tribal association in the country’s politics, economy, and society was delicately preserved by assigning parliamentary seats to absentee tribal sheikhs or big landlords, religious leaders, urban merchants, and notables.

Even prior to its violent demise in 1958, however, processes of social and, in particular, economic transformation were eroding the social foundations of the monarchy. These include the exodus of Iraqi Jews after 1948, permitting Shi‘i merchants to strengthen their positions vis-à-vis the dominant Arab Sunnis, and the 1952 agreement between the Iraqi government and the Iraq Petroleum Company that began Iraq’s transformation into a rentier state. Related to both these developments was the breakdown of the semifeudal system in agriculture, causing massive migration from rural areas and provincial towns to the big cities, notably Baghdad. While the population of Iraq rose almost fourfold between 1919 and 1968, that of Baghdad jumped eightfold during the same period.^[4] During these years, a small coterie of first- or second-generation immigrants to Baghdad from impoverished provincial towns acquired modest education or training. Through networks formed around notables from their own towns of origin, they entered schools and gradually made their way into the expanding state apparatus (civil, military, or paramilitary). Yet their assimilation into urban life was at best partial: new migrants to Baghdad confronted significant barriers to professional mobility and were looked upon with disdain by established urbanites.

These urban newcomers expressed an ambivalence typical of ambitious immigrants confronting a rigid social order. For them, Baghdad was both a place where they could enhance their social and economic conditions, and one that deprived them of the means to participate in the comfortable lifestyles of longtime residents. No wonder they viewed their positions within such societies in terms of provincial-metropolitan antagonisms and regarded existing political arrangements as corrupt. One of the great contemporary Arab poets, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, himself a migrant from a humble village near Basra, described Baghdad as a “grand brothel.” Over time, animosity developed against city dwellers among the better off immigrants, who saw their chances of promotion blocked by Baghdadis.

Limits on the expansion of urban economic structures added to the sense of marginality among provincial immigrants. What little expansion occurred in these structures drew first from the larger pool of rural unskilled migrant workers. Ironically, these poorer immigrants, mostly from the Shi’i regions of southern Iraq, were more integrated into the structures of urban life than their lower-middle-class counterparts, but this should not be read as suggesting a deeper commitment to existing social or political arrangements. They too shared in the sense of alienation and marginality that shaped the worldviews of other newcomers to the city. Occupying subordinate positions as laborers and servants, however, they tended to view their oppression more in terms of class antagonisms than those of region, tribe, or sect. This may partially explain the relative success of the Iraqi Communist Party in mobilizing poorer immigrants.

Authoritarianism and the Rise of Revolutionism, 1958–68

In general terms, the political environment of Iraq in the 1950s was marked by a growing gap between the monarchy and its social base of big landowners, who were losing touch with the rapidly expanding groups of social, economic, and political “marginals” who made up an ever larger share of the urban population, and who hoped that the tremendous rise in state revenue after the 1952 agreement with the Iraq Petroleum Company would improve their miserable standard of living. The 1958 revolution that overthrew Faisal’s monarchy, under the leadership of Abdul Karim Qassim, grew out of these tensions and was explicitly reformist in character. It sought, at least publicly, the restoration of civilian democratic government, and a more inclusive strategy of national development. It promised a new era of economic opportunity and depicted itself as a reaction against both the widespread corruption that prevailed under Faisal and the monarchy’s collaboration with the British.

Yet in opening up the possibility of renegotiating the status of marginal urban populations, Qassim’s “revolution” was rapidly captured by more radical and transformational political forces that undermined its original intent and dramatically altered the trajectory of Iraqi state formation. Because the elite of Qassim’s regime was composed largely of urban Baghdadis and Mossulites, or high-ranking professionals and military officers who had already been incorporated into urban institutions, new actors championing the causes of marginalized strata came to challenge Qassim’s more moderate outlook, and placed tremendous pressure on the regime to move in more radical directions.^[5] In response to urgent demands for more job opportunities and for programs to alleviate the misery of the population, a reformist project that originally sought modernization and industrialization was replaced by a more radical developmental project based on expanding the state apparatus and increasing state intervention. Thus, Iraq’s cabinet expanded from fourteen ministers in 1958 to some thirty portfolios a decade later, with each of these new ministries requiring its own bureaucracy.

In an oil-rich economy, state expansion proved to be a relatively easy task. Yet its consequences were disastrous in the long-term. The growth of state institutions dramatically altered the balance of power between state and society, to the detriment of the latter. It also significantly recast the state elites’ conception of themselves and their relationship to society. As modernization gave way to revolutionism, state elites were transformed into a vanguard, their privileged positions justified, in part, by the sense of vulnerability and threat they created surrounding the revolution, and their subsequent (self-interested) determination to attack counterrevolution whether from within or from without. This increasingly politicized atmosphere served as justification for the vast expansion of the internal security apparatus, and what began in 1958 as a popular revolution against “a handful of traitors” turned into a nightmare for thousands and thousands who could be accused at any moment of conducting activities against the revolution. Moreover, with the multiplication of “revolutions” during the volatile years of the 1960s, few could escape being labeled as hostile to at least one of them. Not only was the General Directorate of Security (al-Amn al-‘Ammma) active in this field, but the Directorate of Military Intelligence (al-Istikhbarat al-’Askariyya) also played an increasingly pronounced role in harassing so-called opponents of the regime. With the intensification of terror after the fall of Qassim, more and more public buildings were turned into prisons and torturing places, including Qasr al-Rihab, the former royal house and the Olympic Club.^[6]

These developments were sharply at odds with the proclaimed intent of the Qassim government to restore parliamentary rule, a contradiction that became ever more transparent. When the monarchy was overthrown in 1958, the Qassim regime routinely stressed the exceptional and temporary nature of the revolutionary period. Time and again Qassim, whether wholeheartedly or out of sheer opportunism, spoke at length to assure audiences that a national assembly and a permanent constitution would come into being once the “feudal and [pro-British] agents’ regime was uprooted.” The official discourse, borrowed from the Egyptian revolution of 1952, denounced an already popularly discredited parliamentary regime, but stressed the need for a “healthy” political system in which political parties, civil rights, and personal freedoms would thrive once the corrupt elements in society had been eliminated. To keep up formal appearances Qassim instituted a totally powerless “Sovereignty Council” to act as the executive authority of the state, while preserving for himself the posts of prime minister, minister of defense, and the supreme commander of the armed forces.

In this way, the formal separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers was preserved—in the sense that executive power, the cabinet under Qassim, was acting temporarily under the supervision of a council that held sovereignty in its hands. And despite the cynicism of these arrangements, this was not entirely a matter of appearances. Legal-bureaucratic formalities were respected in some areas, including regulations governing military promotions.^[7] Yet the overall erosion of democratic and meritocratic practices was too pervasive to be papered over through modest and highly circumscribed observance of the rule of law. And even these feeble attempts at legalism soon broke down under the weight of increasingly authoritarian practices. The war in Kurdistan and the attempts of Nasser’s Egypt to overthrow the nascent republican regime gave Qassim and his allies the pretext to extend the interim period.^[8] And by 1968, with the multiplication of coups d’état, each claiming to rectify the errors of its predecessors, the proclaimed goal of returning to constitutional rule was abandoned.

Not all Iraqis were saddened by the regime’s retreat from a commitment to restore some form of political pluralism, at least at the time. Revolutionism found fertile soil in the Iraq of the 1950s and 1960s. People who cheered the revolution in 1958 were expecting radical improvements in their life conditions and in the status of their country. The remedy at the time seemed quite simple. The backwardness of Iraq, as of all the colonies, semicolonies, and former colonies, was attributed to the imperialists and their local agents who plundered the wealth of their former imperial possessions and implemented policies that were deliberately aimed at hindering their industrialization. Thus all that was needed was a good patriotic government to permit these countries to catch up with the developed world.

This anti-imperialist euphoria was shared by major sections of the population. The belief that imperialism would try to forestall any attempt to overcome underdevelopment, whether through direct intervention as in the Suez aggression of 1956 or through local agents as in Iran in 1952, reinforced the perception that a strong state with a strong army was an essential prerequisite for genuine development. Hence the easiness with which liberal and even reformist ideas were dismissed or discredited among the populace. The call for pluralistic democracy was synonymous with advocating the right of reactionary ideas and groupings to find a legal platform from which they could combat the revolution. By the second half of the 1960s, the general atmosphere was so radicalized that it was fashionable to talk about parliamentary democracy, even among those who suffered most from despotism, as a corrupt and bourgeois form of rule.

Revolutionism and the Military.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Iraq’s military was a major beneficiary of the complementary trends toward state expansion and the use of revolutionism to bring about the compression of the political field around a military-authoritarian ruling elite. As in many late-developing states, military officers dominated Iraqi politics throughout the period from 1958–1968. Officers held the posts of president, prime minister, minister of defense, director general of security, and director of military intelligence, as well as various ministerial posts.^[9] The role of the military during the first decade after the 1958 revolution was further enhanced by the nationalization acts of 1964, when newly nationalized public sector establishments were put under the direction of military officers. Moreover, the size of the armed forces increased enormously and the budget of defense and security more than quadrupled, from ID 31.2 million in 1958 to ID 142.1 million in 1969—though in relative terms this raised the military’s share of the national budget by only 10 percent, from 39 to 49 percent of expenditures.^[10]

In part, the military’s good fortune can be understood as the routinization of political protection payments. From 1958 onward, a primary concern of all Iraqi regimes became the foiling of coup attempts, appeasing and buying off the military, and giving it more and more privileges to stem its discontent and secure the loyalty of the officer corp. It was not surprising then that youth who had no chance of pursuing a career in such prestigious fields as medicine or engineering would look to the officer corps for their future. In the 1960s, Madinat al-Dhubbat, an exclusive suburb on the outskirts of Baghdad, was built for army officers; special shops were established to supply the military with expensive goods at cheap prices; and the second Iraqi radio station was established under the name Armed Forces’ Radio. Hanna Batatu estimates that in one decade after the 1958 revolution the number of army officers jumped by 250 percent, from four thousand to ten thousand.^[11]

The drive for a strong state, identified as a highly centralized and monolithic body with a strong and efficient army, reached its peak in the 1960s, when the Iraqi regime as well as its major opponents where competing to prove that they were the ones most committed to these ideals. But apart from isolated urban groups, no one was challenging the validity of these ideals themselves, or whether the goals of development, anticapitalism, anti-imperialism, and building a highly centralized and despotic state were compatible with each other. The political field, composed of numerous Nasserite groupings and parties, two rival factions of the Ba‘th Party, and two rival factions of the Communist Party, was thus undergoing a process of compression around an ever-smaller spectrum of ideological positions, none of which accepted the legitimacy or desirability of political pluralism.

Thus, the officers who undertook a revolution to serve the “cause of the people” ended up creating a monstrous state apparatus that compelled the people to serve it and its bureaucrats. By the end of 1967, political life in Iraq was in a deep crisis, to the point that periodic meetings were organized by former president ‘Arif with pan-Arab and Nasserite movements “to discuss the future of Iraq,” a move unheard of during the republican period, when every regime claimed that it had the correct answers and remedies to all the problems facing the country. Moreover, all the major political trends were suffering from numerous setbacks. The Ba‘th Party had badly tarnished its reputation during its bloody nine-month rule in 1963, to the point that its own officers, including al-Bakr, Hardan al-Tikriti, and ‘Ammash, joined hands with the Nasserite ‘Arif to remove their own party from power. The Iraqi Communist Party—which was then the most popular political force in Iraq—was still recovering from damage inflicted during the brutal 1963 massacre of party members and sympathizers by the Ba‘th when it splintered as a result of differences over how to respond to shifts in the policies of the U.S.S.R. toward nonsocialist, nationalistic regimes in the Third World.^[12] The Nasserites, never a popular group in Iraq, had ruled for five years under ‘Abdul Salam and Abdul Rahman ‘Arif, and had plunged the country into a deep crisis.

Political Transformation under the Ba‘th

It was in this highly tense and radical atmosphere that the Ba‘th seized power on July 17, 1968, overthrowing ‘Arif’s regime. The success of the coup, which has since been recast in official rhetoric as the glorious realization of Iraq’s destiny, was hardly a foregone conclusion. Bitter internal struggles splintered the party after 1963, which, together with harassment of the party by the ‘Arif regime, brought about its near demise in Iraq.^[13] The radical atmosphere of Arab politics in the mid-1960s made any effort to rebuild the official “right wing” party all the more difficult. Whatever militant Ba‘thists were there chose either to join newly formed Marxist groups or to be within the “left,” pro-Syrian wing of the party.^[14] It should be no surprise, then, that when the Ba‘th Party seized power in July 1968 it had no more than a few hundred full members.^[15]

For Iraqis, exhausted by a decade of bloody coups and the rule of corrupt military juntas, this was yet another in a series of palace settlements of scores. The indifference with which the new regime was met is evident from the fact that no curfew was imposed after the coup and not a drop of blood was shed during the seizure of power from ‘Arif. In an effort to appease fears of a new blood bath à la 1963, the Ba‘th continued to emphasize this last aspect in their propaganda to show the uniqueness of their “revolution” and to remind those 1960s youth who clamored for radical changes in society and politics that this swiftly implemented coup d’état was indeed the legitimate heir to Iraqi revolutionism.

At the time of the Ba‘thist coup, the predominant mood among politically articulate sections of the population was quite contradictory. On the one hand, people were weary of military rule and the bloodshed associated with it. The defeat of Arab armies in 1967 had undermined the appeal of pan-Arabism, although, as will become evident below, the Ba‘th Party skillfully managed to articulate this idea with a strong sense of Iraqism and thus kept it a powerful force in Iraqi politics. On the other hand, the second half of the 1960s witnessed a resurgence of radicalism in both the developed and the developing worlds. The Ba‘th played quite skillfully on both sentiments to transform the institutional structures of the Iraqi state and the cultural-ideological norms of Iraqi society. War, in particular the Iran-Iraq War, and the growing convergence of revolutionism and militarism, played critical roles in this process. How this dynamic unfolded must be explained with some elaboration, since it brought forward the crucial elements of the Iraq we see today.

Party-Military Relations After 1968

One of most significant areas in which Ba‘th elites pushed Iraqi politics in new directions concerned the relationship between the Ba‘th Party and the military. While appropriating many of the practices introduced during the period of military dominance, and while continuing to expand the military apparatus, Ba‘thist elites nonetheless moved rapidly to assert the supremacy of the party over the military.^[16] Under the Ba‘th, the size of Iraq’s army doubled from six divisions in the mid-1960s to twelve in 1980, and then to forty-four divisions during the eight-year war with Iran.^[17] By the first year of that war, military expenditure constituted some 70 percent of Iraq’s GDP.^[18] Yet even while continuing to pour resources into the expansion of Iraq’s military capacity, the Ba‘thist regime skillfully worked to neutralize that huge institution politically.

Nowhere is this shift more evident than in the Ba‘th’s efforts to marginalize the military as a channel of elite recruitment. Under the Nasserist regime in Egypt and long periods of Ba‘thist rule in Syria, those who headed the rapidly growing apparatus of state security and intelligence, ideological indoctrination, and propaganda, as well as the economy, were mainly professional army officers. Algeria and the former South Yemen, two other “postcolonial” Arab states, manned such posts with cadres drawn from the liberation fronts that fought the French and British colonial powers, respectively. In contrast, the leadership of Ba‘thist Iraq—which built the biggest armed force of all the Arab countries and went into the longest and bloodiest wars that the Arab world has witnessed in its contemporary history—was largely civilian.

With the exception of former president al-Bakr (1968–79) none of the top officials of Iraq under the Ba‘th, including those who held the post of minister of defense, had a high military rank before the Ba‘th came to power.^[19] As president of Iraq, the civilian Saddam Hussein assumed the post of the supreme commander of the armed forces. His deputy chairman of the Revolution’s Command Council, also a civilian, is the vice-commander of the armed forces. The defense portfolio in the Iraqi cabinet has twice been given to noncommissioned officers. The major personalities responsible for decision making on matters concerning the armed forces—that is, the members of the Military Bureau of the Ba‘th Party, most of whom were assigned high posts in the military in addition to their membership in the bureau—were either noncommissioned officers or civilian party activists with no higher education.^[20]

To further ensure the subordination of the military, the Ba‘thist government resorted to other forms of control as well, including the creation of a praetorian guard within the army itself (the Republican Guards). Moreover, it placed the armed forces under the surveillance and supervision of people with no background in the officer corps, producing a decline in the prestige and influence of career officers. As arbitrary promotions and the awarding of military ranks (even staff ranks) to such people became a routine practice in the Iraqi army, seniority ceased to play a significant role in commanding loyalty or obedience among the rank and file. To counter the negative impact of these changes on the morale and loyalty of the professional army officers, Ba‘thist authorities heaped generous material incentives on them, especially after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War.^[21] Through such measures the Ba‘th sought to balance its need for a professional and functioning officer corps with its determination to subordinate the military politically by whatever means necessary: surveillance, repression, or bribery.

By thus routinizing and trivializing the military as a career, it was possible for the Ba‘th to enlarge the professional army without enhancing its social and political weight. As a result, the party was able to appropriate popular appeals to patriotism and militarism, without concern that such rhetorics would promote the political influence of the military as an institution. And having tamed militarism, the Ba‘th celebrated manifestations of militarism as indicators of its own achievements. As noted in the chapter on “social and cultural transformation” in the political report of the ninth Ba‘th Party congress: “By affirming the values of patriotism and courage . . . in the new society, another important value spread and took firm roots, namely the affection toward militarism. Military dress has become fashionable among the youth. Military toys have become the most attractive to Iraqi children. And military expressions are being widely used in society.”^[22]

Aggressive Arabism and a New Iraqism

A second mechanism through which the Ba‘th transformed not only political institutions but also social norms was the construction of a new, hypermilitarized and aggressive form of Arab nationalism in the period leading up to the Iran-Iraq War. Moreover, and in contrast to what came earlier, Ba‘thist constructions of Arabism were grounded in and legitimated by a rigid narrowing of Iraqi identity. Like other transformations wrought by the Ba‘th, these changes drew on the legacies of earlier shifts in Iraqi politics and society. Yet the Ba‘th invoked these legacies to advance ideas and policies that were profoundly transformative, and ultimately, deeply destructive. They would have devastating consequences for Iraqi society as the Iraq-Iran War and the second Gulf War wound on.

As early as the 1950s, and accelerating over time, a new concept of Arabism emerged to compromise the pan-Arabist raison d’être of such ruling elites as the Ba‘thists and the Nasserists with the raison d’état of such solid states as Egypt and Iraq. As Nasser achieved his victories in nationalizing the Suez Canal and bringing Syria under his rule, and as the Iraqi Ba‘th succeeded in nationalizing Iraq’s oil industry, a distinction began to emerge between the “liberated base” of the Arab Nation, which denoted the countries that had been under Nasserist or Ba‘thist rule, and all the other parts of the Arab world. This distinction had far-reaching consequences, because, from then on, partisans were expected to treat the “liberated bases of Arab Revolution” as eternal entities, the defense of which was the criterion for their loyalty to the ideals of pan-Arabism. Moreover, any attempt to achieve Arab unity, or other goals of this vaguely defined Arab Revolution, had to be conducted on behalf of the liberated base.

Thus, Arab unity was no longer viewed as a fusion between equally artificial entities, but rather as a newly liberated zone obediently joining the leading core, with all that this implies concerning a new sense of hierarchy and superordinate versus subordinate Arab states. To complicate matters more, the concept of liberated bases was formulated by each of the major pan-Arabist trends in such a way as to exclude all the others from claiming an equal or superior status compared to the original “liberated base.” Hence, Nasserism never recognized the Ba‘thist experiences in Syria or Iraq as achieving what it had achieved in Egypt; Ba‘thists in turn mocked the failures of Nasserism to achieve the goals of “Arab revolution”; and Syrian and Iraqi Ba‘thists enthusiastically denounced one another’s legitimacy and authenticity.

Rather than devolve toward an angry stalemate, as seemed likely by the end of the 1960s, the regional environment that prevailed in the 1970s led the Iraqi Ba‘th to feel much more confident in representing themselves as the sole representatives of the Arab cause. Nasserism had already died with the coming of Sadat in Egypt, and Syria was no longer engaged in the ultraradical rhetoric of the 1950s and 1960s. Many Egyptian Nasserist and leftist intellectuals and politicians were moving to Iraq, where lucrative jobs were waiting for them. Syria’s competition with the Iraqis was of no significance; Syria had tarnished its Arabist credentials, in the eyes of Arab pan-nationalists, as a result of its deals with the Israelis after the 1973 war and its bloody intervention against Palestinians and the Lebanese left in the Lebanese civil war in 1976. Sadat’s visit to Israel and the subsequent Camp David agreements further enhanced Iraq’s drive to assert itself as the sole remaining legitimate defender of Arabism.^[23]

To understand how the Ba‘thist appropriation and transformation of Arabism took place, and to understand the kind of policies it made possible during and after the Iran-Iraq War, it is necessary, above all, to examine the connections between the Ba‘th’s redefinition of Arabism and its redefinition of what would henceforth constitute Iraqi national identity. One critical aspect of these shifts can be traced through the Ba‘th’s use of language. During the 1970s, the discursive reification of such concepts as “Iraq” and “the Arab Nation” by Ba‘thist elites played a central role in the process of elevating Iraq as the leading defender of Arabism. This reification not only accounted for the existence of separate state structures but also insulated Ba‘thist policies from any Arab interference or criticism. In the meantime, it helped to legitimize the aggressive attitude of the Iraqi leadership toward Arab countries and its own citizens in the name of defending the nation’s will.

The regime’s new emphasis on Iraq’s special character, and its promotion of an aggressive notion of “Iraqism,” could have been interpreted as a Ba‘thist drive to foster collective awareness of a common identity and equality among Iraqis were it not associated with a troubling redefinition of “true Iraqism” and the regime’s willingness to impose this definition through the coercive restructuring of Iraqi society. The main features of the Ba‘thist formula for restructuring ethnic and sectarian relations in Iraq are not found simply in its extreme reliance on violence. Rather they can be seen in the new norms and practices of governance and social mobilization created by the Ba‘th that found little resistance from a political culture impoverished as a result of the previous republican regimes.

As Ba‘thist rule brought a radical improvement in the economic conditions of Iraqis, including a vast network of public education and health institutions and the construction of a wide range of infrastructural facilities, the party’s claims to be fulfilling the “will of the nation” grew bolder and bolder. The metaphors frequently used in the Ba‘thist discourse are of great significance here, because the concept of representation of the interests of the people or of “the Nation” were totally absent. The reification, or the subjectification of both the nation and the political leadership, which was always given the name “the Revolution,” was intended to completely identify one with the other in such a way as to present those who dared to criticize or oppose the regime as enemies of the revolution, that is, the nation. Since the nation was a subject with a will, it could not be hostile to itself, naturally. Thus the only source of hostility could come from forces outside the nation that infiltrated it through local opposition elements, making any critic, no matter how moderate and no matter how strong his or her claim to Iraqi or Arab identity, an outsider and thus someone who could legitimately be repressed.

To romanticize the “Arab cause” and portray the Iraqi leadership in an inflated image, it was necessary to view the latter as fighting on behalf of the Arabs as whole, on the one hand, and to overdramatize the challenges it was facing, on the other. Even when Iraq was enjoying significant support in its war with Iran from both the West and the Soviet Union, as well as most Arab governments, the founder and secretary general of the Ba‘th Party, Michel ‘Aflaq declared, “The real and profound nature of the battle fought by the Ba‘thist Iraq is revealed by its facing of an alliance grouping the Christian West, Jewish Zionism, and atheist communism.”^[24] In this spirit, whenever hostile acts were uncovered, the Ba‘thist ideological machine did its best to prove that their perpetrators had non-Arab blood running in their veins.^[25]

These factors help explain why the Kurds were easily targeted whenever they demanded recognition of their national rights. The degradation of Iraqi politics under the monolithic rule of the Ba‘th further explains how it was possible to move from the first interim constitution of 1958, which stated that Arabs and Kurds were partners in Iraq, to the resolution passed by the Tenth Pan-Arab Congress of the Ba‘th Party, twenty years later, stating that Iraqi soil is Arab land. Thus whenever autonomy was granted to a minority, it was to be understood as an autonomy for people and not for land.^[26]

The tensions with Iran that climaxed in the eight-year war were the catalyst that speeded and facilitated this redefinition, to the detriment of urban Iraqis in general and the Shi‘i and Kurdish communities in particular. It was in association with these tensions that, for example, the Ba‘th launched, for the second time in the modern history of Iraq, the practice of deporting a significant proportion of a specific Iraqi community on the grounds that they were not “true citizens.”^[27] In 1970 some sixty-five thousand Faili Kurds were deported to Iran because the Ba‘th leadership considered them to be of “Persian origin.”^[28]

Increasingly as the 1970s wore on, Ba‘thist slogans emphasized the “special role that the Nation had assigned to Iraq and the Iraqis to achieve its goals.” Seen from this vantage point, the war with Iran—a conflict undertaken with the sole purpose of securing a hegemonic position for the Ba‘thist leadership in the region—is all too easily portrayed as a defense of the “Eastern Flank of the Arab Nation,” a role for which Iraq claimed singular responsibility and expected to reap singular rewards.

War and the Formation of a State-Dominated Society after 1980

By the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, therefore, the trajectory of Iraqi state formation had produced a political context with tremendous capacity for violence, both outward and inward. Institutionally this took shape through the formation of a massive military apparatus, now under the control of the civilian elite of the Ba‘th, and through the deepening and extension of the internal security apparatus throughout Iraqi society. Politically, this context manifested itself through the institutionalization and sharpening of revolutionist politics under the Ba‘th and the decisive rejection of pluralist or republican practices as antipathetic to the organic unity of Iraqi society. Ideologically, and perhaps the most significant element in a combustible mix, this context was shaped by the consolidation of an Arabism that depicted aggression as necessary to protect a beleaguered Arab nation—now embodied in a vision that presented Iraq, regime, and nation as a seamlessly integrated whole—from threats. What made this even more potent, of course, was the ability of the Ba‘th to exploit the “betrayals” of Egypt and Syria both to monopolize this role for itself and to attach to it a new and frightening urgency. For a regime intent on maximizing its own power both domestically and regionally, this context provided all the necessary ingredients for war. It served up the symbolic, discursive, and institutional material the Ba‘th used in initiating and managing its war with Iran and later the invasion of Kuwait.

At the same time, and of crucial importance, it also provided the ingredients for a tremendously brutal approach to the management of the Iraqi economy, society, and political system during the course of almost twenty years of near constant conflict. Still, if the availability of these ingredients made possible a distinctively coercive, aggressive, and militaristic strategy of governance and resource extraction, their presence did not make this strategy inevitable. The Iran-Iraq War was the trigger. And what brought these ingredients together in such a destructive and volatile combination was, among other things, the economic effects of the war, notably the impact of Iraq’s postwar economic crisis on the Ba‘th’s strategy of rule.

To fully explain the importance of transformations brought about under Saddam’s auspices, this section elaborates on four specific mechanisms through which war and domestic politics interacted to shape the political, social, and economic character of Saddam’s regime. First is the shift from oil rents to strategic rents as the basis of Iraq’s political economy, and the role of war in the construction and breakdown of Iraq’s rent-seeking strategy. Second is the cynical and dangerous manipulation of social violence as a basis for stabilizing the regime politically. Third is the redefinition of Iraqi identity as the basis for the coercive reorganization of Iraqi society, and the violent marginalization of Kurdish and Shi‘a communities. The final mechanism is the deinstitutionalization of Iraqi politics and formation of an even narrower and more intensely personalized notion of political authority—embodied in the physical person of Saddam Hussein—than had ever previously existed in Iraq.

Rent-Seeking and War Making in Ba‘thist Iraq

Thanks to the oil boom of the 1970s, Iraq under the Ba‘th had become virtually a textbook form of rentier state, dependent financially on the revenues accruing to it from its natural resources.^[29] It was through the massive influx of oil revenues during the 1970s that Iraq was able to pursue a policy of guns and butter, spending lavishly on both social development and military expansion. By 1982–83, however, the costs of the conflict with Iran forced a dramatic change. Iraq remained dependent on external resources, but now military power rather than oil became the source of rents. Strategic rents—that is, sums of money received from other countries in exchange for political support or military protection against adversaries—now became a critical source of foreign exchange.^[30]

During the first two years of the war, Iraq’s comfortable economic situation did not prompt its leadership to ask for rents from neighboring states.^[31] Iraq entered the war with a fully utilized oil export capacity of 3.5 million barrels per day and an annual income from oil of close to $30 billion. It had already accumulated liquid reserves equal to a year’s annual income from oil exports. This gave the Iraqi leadership an additional chance to present itself as the dedicated savior of its weak brethren to the south, sacrificing its wealth and sons without asking for any advantages or benefits. As the war dragged on, however, confounding Saddam’s expectations of a blitzkrieg, and as Iran began to absorb the shock of the Iraqi attack, turn to the offensive, and recapture its occupied territories, Iraq’s economic situation began to deteriorate. Its oil-export facilities in the Gulf (Mina‘a al-Bakr and Khawr al-‘Umayya) were heavily damaged by Iranian air attacks; Syria closed a pipeline passing through its territory to the Mediterranean; and oil prices began a downward slide. From 1983 until 1989, the Iraqi economy was kept afloat through regular infusions of cash and oil exports made on its behalf by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE. As a result, most Iraqis did not suffer real hardship during this period of the war. Army officers and technicians employed in military industries were arguably better off than during the prewar period.

It is quite interesting to note that the official discourse of the Iraqi leadership was very cautious not to overestimate the vital role of these rents in preventing Iraq’s defeat. Whenever an acknowledgment was made of support received from Arab states or through “donations” from wealthy Iraqis, it was always accompanied by a reminder that without Iraq’s war Arab rulers would not be sitting on their thrones, their wealth would have disappeared, and their territories would have been occupied by the Iranians. In addressing wealthy Iraqis, the regime added an additional note: that they had been barefoot before the revolution made it possible for them to accumulate their fortunes.^[32] In the official reports of the Ba‘th Party, the boldness of the discourse did away with external support altogether, praising the heroic Iraqi leadership for its ability to stand alone against a bigger Iran that had “suspicious” international connections with the enemies of the Nation.^[33]

This aspect of the mechanism of strategic rent extraction is quite essential for understanding why the Ba‘thist leadership was so confident at the time that Iraq would not face economic hardship once the war was over, and to make ever bolder demands for support, touching upon the sovereignty of its neighbors after the cease-fire with Iran. Saddam’s regime, in other words, took it for granted that it was doing the hardest and most costly part of a job whose rewards would be shared by all the monarchies of the Gulf. Hence its insistence that no official debt arrangements through financial institutions should be made to account for their contributions toward the costs of their own joint venture. Unlike the case in cash-strapped Syria (or Nasser’s Egypt), squeezing financial gains from Iraq’s neighbors was not in and of itself a rationale for prolonging its military adventures. Rather, the Ba‘thist regime felt that securing military supremacy or hegemony in the region would be economically rewarding in its own right, because, once that objective had been achieved, Iraq would be able to implement its plans to export 8 million barrels of oil per day without fear of competitors blocking its tiny outlet to the sea or threatening to shut Iraqi pipelines passing through other countries. Indeed, throughout the war, Iraqis were told that they would reap the fruits of their suffering once the war was over, that they were viewed by their Arab brethren with high admiration, and that Iraq had acquired a unique place in the Arab nation thanks to the war.^[34]

By the end of the war, however, the harsh realities of everyday life cast a gloomy shadow over what Iraqis had been told they should expect. Iraq’s economic difficulties began to show directly after the cease-fire with Iran. Three quarters of a million soldiers, mostly conscripts, had been waiting eagerly for demobilization to go back to normal life. But the war had redefined the terms of normality in Iraq. For one thing, the state was simply no longer capable of securing jobs and welfare services for every citizen. In 1986–87 a huge privatization campaign had been launched under the rubric of “the administrative revolution.” Within two years, this campaign led to more wide-ranging economic restructuring in Iraq than had been accomplished in Egypt in the ten years following the Infitah.^[35] Draconian measures were taken to amend the labor act, giving private entrepreneurs the right to dismiss their workers and lengthen the workday. For the first time in more than a decade, Iraqis began to feel the pinch of unemployment. Far from creating a bright economic future, the war confronted young Iraqis with the most dismal of economic prospects, while the postwar economic crisis posed a significant political challenge for the regime.

In response, the regime once again deployed the techniques and practices it had developed during the prewar period, but this time with even more devastating consequences for Iraqi society and political culture. Reaffirming its identity as the defender of the Arab nation, Saddam’s government now turned its energies inward, cynically and strategically manipulating the politics of inclusion and exclusion to focus popular discontent on targets other than the regime—notably the weakest and most vulnerable populations within Iraq.

Discharging Violence

The mood of despondence and disillusion among the youth had far-reaching repercussions for the regime. Throughout the war, and especially during its last three years, Iraqis were exposed to high levels of paranoid indoctrination, told that because of their superior qualities and traits they had been subject to all sorts of external conspiracies intended to hinder their progress and their opportunity to assume their natural role in leading the Arab nation. Now that the war was over, there was no foreign enemy to blame for local difficulties. What sense of national pride and unity the war had fostered among Iraqi youth could disrupt into unpredictable violence once the demobilized fighters, who had been through all the atrocities of the war, discovered that the rewards of the war went into the pockets of others, especially the nouveaux riches who had benefited from the privatization campaign and war contracts.

The regime was quite aware of this potential violence among many Iraqis.^[36] Two episodes that took place between 1989 and 1990 could well have been intended to discharge this potential and direct it toward two targets: Egyptian workers in Iraq and Iraqi women. In the first case, more than one thousand Egyptian workers were brutally slaughtered in various “vague accidents.”^[37] Though the Iraqi authorities, including Saddam Hussein, were forced to acknowledge the existence of such murders only after an uproar in the Egyptian press, no official account has been given as to why they took place or who the perpetrators were.^[38] However, since the murders were carried out immediately following the cease-fire with Iran and reflected similar if not identical forms of violence (smashed or pierced skulls)—and given the intensity of surveillance in Iraq—it seems likely that this violence was tolerated and perhaps encouraged by Iraqi authorities to stem the discontent of unemployed Iraqi citizens by implying that Egyptians had taken Iraqi jobs and were thus legitimate targets of violence. Indeed, the Ba‘thist regime had additional motives to encourage these brutal acts. Egyptians working in Iraq were allowed to transfer half of their earnings abroad in hard currency, at the highly inflated official exchange rate of the Iraqi dinar. And while it was highly embarrassing officially to rescind past decrees concerning Arabs working in Iraq—simply because the presence of Arab workers had never been cast in terms of economic need but as a reflection of Iraq’s commitment to the principle of Arab unity—these Egyptians represented a clear drain on Iraq’s already depleted foreign currency reserves.^[39] The exodus of Egyptians as a result of the massive violence directed against them, whether officially sanctioned or not, was therefore an outcome the regime can be expected to have greeted with a measure of relief.^[40]

Militarism and Hypermasculinity.

The other act aimed at discharging violence was directed against women. It took concrete form in a Revolution’s Command Council (RCC) decree that empowered Iraqi male citizens to murder their female relations if they were found to have committed adultery.^[41] The significance of this decree, however, goes far beyond discharging violence and can be seen as an attempt to reaffirm the supremacy of Iraqi males over females after eight years of war, which, for all intents and purposes, had widened the scope of freedoms enjoyed by Iraqi women. Throughout the war years, Iraqi women, as well as immigrant workers, had filled the gap between supply and demand for labor in civilian sectors of the Iraqi economy. The rate of women’s participation in the total workforce rose from 17 percent in the late 1970s to some 25 percent in the mid-1980s.^[42] While the Ba‘thist regime exploited these developments to show how secular it was and how committed—in contrast to Islamist Iran—to building a modern state, its ideology and the provincial origins of the Ba‘th’s leadership and rank and file were heavily imbued with a stress on masculinity, strength, and manhood.^[43]

The symbolism of Ba‘thist discourse succeeded in reconciling these two contradictory aspects of the need for women’s participation, on the one hand, and the male chauvinist ideology, on the other, through a heavy emphasis on what was turned into the true criterion for real manhood and, hence, for promotion and respect in Ba‘thist Iraq, namely, the fighting experience. As the war dragged on, the prewar division of labor within Iraq, whereby most of the Egyptians would work in agriculture and the construction sectors of the economy, underwent a profound change. Iraq was becoming like an Athenian society of citizen-warriors and slave-workers. The ratio of armed forces to the total workforce leaped from about 12 percent in 1981 to 21.3 percent in 1988.^[44] Those who were too young to participate in the war directly or who occupied civilian jobs were expected to join the People’s Army (al-Jaish al-Sha‘bi) and spend a few weeks each year at the front. Intellectuals were brought to the front, as well, to provide material for a “battle literature” and to underscore the “softness” of their everyday lives.^[45]

In such an atmosphere, it was natural to look upon those who could not or did not participate in the fighting as inferior. Women, intellectuals, and non-Iraqis working in Iraq belonged in this category. They were routinely reminded that they were able to live their ordinary lives only because of the heroes defending their honor. The repeated references in official discourse to the concept of honor served to reiterate the subordinate role of women in Iraqi society while valorizing the masculinity of the Ba‘th. Time and again, Saddam Hussein would remind his (male) audiences that, were the Iranians to invade Iraq, they would rape their wives and kinswomen. The tribal norm, in which the honor of a kinship group resides in the sexual conduct of its womenfolk, was invoked repeatedly by Iraq’s leadership. Thus, in defending the honor of Iraqi women, male fighters were at the same time defending their own honor, because dishonoring women sexually was a powerful means of attacking social cohesion and humiliating their male kin. In order to preserve the honor of war widows, who were left without a man to protect them, “grants were introduced which were payable to men as financial incentives to marry war widows. This was supposedly to protect the honor of martyrs’ wives who might otherwise be forced into prostitution. . . . Women without men clearly could not be trusted and there was a need to increase the population.”^[46]

In exchange for being defended by the male fighters, Iraqi women were expected to serve national security by raising their birth rates. Under the slogan “we promise you a cradle in every home,” contraception that had previously been freely available was made illegal, as was abortion. Every family should have five children. . . . Women in their forties and even fifties were pressured into giving birth. . . . ”We hope,” Saddam Hussein told leaders of the General Federation of Iraqi Women “that a woman’s inclination to go out to work will not take her away from her family or from giving birth along the lines set by our slogan.”^[47]

Whether these developments helped in discharging the violent mood among discontented Iraqis is not entirely clear. Yet in manipulating and directing social violence toward vulnerable communities within Iraq, and by reintroducing traditional, gendered norms of social cohesion and hierarchy into its strategy of governance, the Ba‘th had tapped into two very powerful veins of political mobilization it could exploit to enhance its own stability.

Forging National Identity

Foreigners and women were not the only two social groups affected by the war. In addition, the Iran-Iraq War served to redefine the borders between Arab Sunnis, Shi’is, and Kurds in Iraq, putting the latter two communities on the defensive by questioning their “true Iraqism.” This process brought into the open what no previous government dared to acknowledge publicly. Moreover, a new hierarchy of privileged subcommunities was established even within the Sunni community to the extent that it would be incorrect to talk about whole sects in a generalized form. In some respects, Ba‘thist practices can be seen as the reinvention and reconstruction of a long-standing tribal practice, Dakhala, that established differing degrees of participation and entitlement among members of a given community.

During the Ottoman period, a dakheel (the word can be translated as “stranger” or “guest”) individual, family, or clan would seek the protection of a stronger tribe or clan. The granting of this right is the sole prerogative of the chief of the tribe. In exchange for his protection, the dakheel is then expected to work for the tribe as would any of its members. Theoretically, the dakheel can gradually acquire the same rights as the tribe’s members, including marriage rights, if he proves his loyalty to the host tribe through fighting or hard work. But in practice, a dakheel is always considered inferior since he has been cast out by his kinsmen. In the context of the contemporary Ba‘thist regime, what might be called a system of neo-Dakhala has emerged in which individuals who prove themselves loyal to the regime are permitted to occupy senior posts in its decision-making bodies, but on the condition that they act as faithful individuals and not as representatives of any non-Ba‘thist group. Once such individuals lose favor with the regime, however, their families or even their tribes are subject to reprisals.^[48]

Moreover, this neo-Dakhala has important implications in determining the boundaries of social inclusion and exclusion. From the point of view of a tribe, its territory is that land that it had conquered or settled in, and which it can protect from the incursions of rival groups or tribes. When we say that the Ba‘thist attitude toward the different associations of Iraqis is a modern version of Dakhala practice, therefore, it implies that centuries of Kurdish presence on their own land is viewed by the Ba‘th as irrelevant in determining whether the Kurds should be included or excluded from Iraqi society. In fact, the Ba‘th always looked upon the Kurds as dakheel, or at best as guests in Iraq who were expected to behave as such, including providing customary forms of service to the regime in exchange for its protection.^[49]

The Kurdish leadership, however, did not live up to the expectations of the Ba‘th during the Iran-Iraq War. For the Kurds, this was a war between two alien and hostile regimes. The longer it lasted the better. War would distract and weaken both Iran and Iraq, so that the Kurds ultimately could hope to force more concessions from both regimes.^[50] For the Ba‘thist leadership, this posture represented a severe violation of the basic principles of membership in Iraqi society. It called into question the authenticity of the Kurdish commitment to Iraqism and thus exposed the Kurds to horrifying retribution. Indeed, under conditions of war, and with the benefit of its intense nationalist agitation, the Iraqi regime could play on this feeling of betrayal so cleverly that atrocities committed against the Kurds were met with a degree of complicity, or at least acquiescence, on the part of many non-Ba‘thists and even some anti-Ba‘thists.^[51] In fact, by the mid-1980s the pursuit of Iraqism as a core “raison de revolution” had become so embedded that it could justify almost any act without fear of a public outcry against the excesses committed in its name. Brutality and despotism alone cannot explain the silence that met such acts as the use of nerve gas against Kurdish villagers.

While it was relatively easy to single out the Kurds as traitors, given their history of antistate revolts and the bitter memories of two generations of military conscripts in fighting them, dealing with the Shi‘i opposition to the Ba‘th proved to be a thornier problem. With the Shi‘a and Kurds constituting some 75 percent of the Iraqi population, it obviously was not possible to question the Arab origin of all the Shi‘a in Iraq, otherwise one would risk making ridiculous Iraq’s claim to be an Arab country.^[52] Nor was it possible to attack Shi‘ism as an heretical sect, for that would automatically lead the Iraqi Shi‘a to defend their identity through an alliance with Iran and create the conditions for a civil war in Iraq. In the meantime, the war with Iran had to be cast first in terms of defending “authentic” Islam, because Iranian propaganda had put great emphasis on the secular aspect of the Ba‘thist regime, branding it as corrupt and atheistic. The ideological legitimization of the war was of tremendous importance during the first years, when Iran enjoyed great popular sympathy among many Arabs and Iraq was unquestionably an aggressor. Iraq thus adjusted its discourse in a way that put heavy emphasis on the Arab character of Islam, so that anyone who opposed the Arabs became as a matter of course an enemy of Islam. Moreover, the Persians, it was stressed, had never been faithful to Islam. They pretended to accept Islam when they were defeated by the Arabs, but they in fact simply disguised their continued commitment to heresies such as Zoroastrianism, hence the almost daily use by Iraqi officials and media of the term “al-Furs al-Majus,” the Zoroastrian Persians, to refer to Iranians.

Following this logic, the Ba‘th proceeded to show that there had always been Iranian agents and infiltrators in Iraqi society who benefited from the weakness of the past governments to control Iraq’s domestic trade and markets, and who were using their economic power to bring the Shi‘i of Iraq under Iranian influence. The rise of Iraqi nationalism, and the atmosphere of war preparation in 1980, made it possible for the regime to deport no less than a quarter of a million Iraqi Shi‘a to Iran, confiscate their properties, and resell them to favorites of the regime for a fraction of their value.

By the mid-1980s, the relations and borders between and among the various Iraqi communities had taken their new shape. Not only were Kurds and Shi‘a redefined as marginal communities, but a gradual transformation of Arab Sunni society was also achieved, whereby urban Sunnis lost influence in Iraqi politics and society to the benefit of those with provincial backgrounds. Except for General Husham Sabah al-Fakhri from Mosul, no one from Baghdad, Basra, or Mosul was present in the higher levels of the Iraqi political apparatus. The main beneficiaries of this change—the continuation of a process that had been under way since the days of the first Ba‘thist government in 1963—were not only Tikritis but also newcomers to the Iraqi business community originating from the so-called Sunni Arab triangle in north-central Iraq. While the Jubour tribe, whose lands extend from the south of Mosul to Tikrit, had its sons staffing the main military and intelligence posts, Kubaisis from a town west of Baghdad, acquired a quasi monopoly of the textile industry and trade after the deportation of Shi‘ites in 1980 and the confiscation of their properties.^[53]

Through this process, a new hierarchy of powerful tribes and elites emerged during the Iran-Iraq War in which certain clans, families, and individuals found their places not because of their a priori sectarian or ethnic affiliations but because they proved their loyalty to the hard core of the regime. Within this power block were Kurdish, Christian, and Shi‘i individuals who had not lost favor with the regime despite its outbursts against their respective communities, while there were Sunni Arab towns or clans that had been subject to the regime’s wrath.^[54] Obviously, the chances of a whole Shi‘a or Kurdish tribe or town occupying a privileged position in the power block has always been slim and became even slimmer following the uprising after the second Gulf War, in which Shi‘a played a prominent role. However, in the economic sphere, the Kurdish tribes that cooperated with the regime and constituted the mercenary Juhoush troops to combat the Kurdish movement, along with the Shi‘a families and tribes that supported the regime during the Iran-Iraq War, enjoyed a considerable improvement in their economic situation. Their leaders were incorporated into the elite of the Iraqi bourgeoisie, even though they were prevented from occupying sensitive or executive positions in decision-making bodies of the regime.

Thus, by the end of the Iran-Iraq War, Iraqi society seemed to have developed a new structure, whereby the most decisive political and administrative functions were fulfilled by Tikritis, followed by Samarra’is, Douris, and Jubouris, all of whom belong to the region north of Baghdad and south of Mosul. The economic elite came mostly from the Ramadi region west of Baghdad, besides those from Tikrit and Mosul. However, there were many affluent and influential Kurdish, Shi’ite, and Christian businessmen and families who had close relations with the regime and reaped tremendous fortunes through their connections. The Shi’ites, Kurds, and Christians were more prevalent in the lower echelons of the state hierarchy and the business community.^[55]

The Deinstitutionalization of Iraqi Politics

Iraqi society was not the only target of the regime’s policies. If the Ba‘thist regime proved all too willing to use the worst forms of demagoguery to reshape Iraqi society and to marginalize communities it perceived as threatening, the dangers of potential rivals among the ruling elite were eliminated through an artful use of carrot-and-stick techniques combined with a radical populism aimed at encroaching upon the authority of even the Ba‘th’s own institutions to the benefit of the presidential office. This aspect of Saddam’s rule has been overlooked by the vast majority of writers on Iraq, who tend to lump the entire Ba‘th period under the rubric of “dictatorship” or “fascism.” While this has elements of truth, it does not allow for an understanding of variations in internal political dynamics of the regime over time.

The changing course of the Iran-Iraq War since 1984, and Iraq’s position as a defender of its sovereignty once Iran turned to the offensive, gave a significant boost to Saddam Hussein’s bid to distance himself from the existing institutions and take upon himself the role of the patron of the nation. In this way, he could turn the war with Iran into Saddam’s Qadisiyyah (a seventh-century battle in which Arab Muslim forces defeated Persian troops), harness military and administrative institutions, give them strictly executive and professional tasks, and erode the power of other Ba‘thist institutions.^[56] Thus the mid-1980s witnessed the eclipse not only of the Revolution’s Command Council and the Regional Command of the Ba‘th Party but also of organizations that the Ba‘th had designed to mobilize supporters, such as the National Union of Students and Youth and the Federation of Peasants’ Associations. The Federation of Labor Unions was abolished altogether, and workers in the state sector, comprising a majority of wage earners, were henceforth banned from joining unions.

The drive to crush associational life and to cut intermediary links (or buffers) between the patron and his atomized subjects culminated in the 1986 Bai‘a, Saddam’s call for a march by Iraqis to show confidence in him, in retaliation for Iran’s denunciation of the Iraqi regime as illegitimate. In one of the largest political spectacles of our time, millions of Iraqis poured into the street to show their support—not for the Ba‘th Party, the RCC, or any other institution—but for Saddam himself.^[57]

Deprivation, Repression, and the Renewal of Identity Politics after Kuwait

Saddam’s bid to create a personalized dictatorship, putting the single leader above the nation and establishing some sort of a Francoist regime, was going more or less smoothly in the period between the cease-fire with Iran and the invasion of Kuwait. However, the economic factors that facilitated this same process were at the heart of the problems that ultimately led to the breakdown of the whole endeavor. Indeed, Saddam’s drive into Kuwait, motivated by his concern to provide the economic resources to stabilize his system of rule, led instead to its collapse and the emergence of a bitter and polarizing identity politics. The importance of this shift cannot be overemphasized. What resulted from Saddam’s efforts to construct a new vision of Iraqi identity based on a glorification of the Iraqi nation produced the deep fragmentation of Iraqi society along subnational lines. It would be a mistake, however, to see anything primordial in the struggles that gripped Iraq following its defeat in Kuwait. These conflicts can in fact be understood as the culmination of more than twenty years of policies which, by denying the legitimacy of ethnic, regional, and sectarian identities, only reinforced their centrality as frameworks of opposition and dissent. With the near-destruction of Iraq’s national sovereignty in 1991, it is not surprising that cracks in the brittle armor of “true Iraqism” would reveal a very different political dynamic at work underneath.

As the economic situation began to deteriorate following the 1988 cease-fire with Iran, as inflation and unemployment increased, and as disparities between the flagrantly rich and the poor became more visible—with the nouveaux riches belonging mostly to the Tikrit-Ramadi Sunni Arab region—people were driven more and more to search for security in their towns of birth or among their extended family relations or tribes. Hatred toward the newly rich took regional or sectarian dimensions. The 1991 Intifada following the end of the second Gulf War was an expression of the strength of subnational identities in Iraq. As the Islamist agitation began to take charge of the Intifada, breaches not only between the various groups but also within each group began to surface, such that it would be misleading to use general categories (Sunnis, Shi‘a, or Kurd) to describe the attitudes of the various communities toward the present regime or their perceptions of the future of Iraq.

Since the invasion of Kuwait, and particularly after the Iraqi defeat, Sunnis, whether sheikhs of tribes such as the powerful Shammar tribe or secular former Ba‘thists, Nasserists, liberals, or leftists have shown their opposition to the regime and their willingness to overthrow it. Many of those opposing the existing regime posed alternatives that were, in fact, mirror images of the Ba‘thist model, such as authoritarian forms of Islamic rule, or lived in hope of yet another coup d’état that would bring a new junta to power.^[58] The regime itself, once faced with the mounting opposition of the population, gave up its pretensions of building a new Iraq. The tanks of the Republican Guard that were sent to crush the 1991 Intifada were painted with graffiti reading “No Shi‘a from Now On.” A series of editorials in Al-Thawra, the daily organ of the Ba‘th Party, tried to “explain” the Intifada through an explicitly racist and sectarian discourse: “A certain sect [i.e., the Shi‘a] has historically been under the influence of the Persians. . . . they have been taught to hate the Arab Nation.” As for the Iraqis in Nasiriyya and Samawa, known for their secularism, Al-Thawra dismissed them as “the marsh people, so accustomed to breeding buffaloes that they have become indistinguishable from them. When they migrated to big cities like Baghdad they made their living through begging, prostitution, and robbery, not out of poverty but because of their intrinsically degraded nature. A true Arab, of course, cannot be so degraded. These are not Arabs. They were brought with their buffaloes from India by Mohammed al-Qassim” (the Abbasid leader who conquered India in the ninth century).^[59]

In this context, the terms “Arabs,” “non-Arabs,” and “anti-Arab” were gradually detached from their ethnic substance and came to play a role equivalent to that of “anti-Sovietism” in the former Soviet Union; that is, they became terms used to defend one’s ghetto in the face of mounting opposition and criticism. It was not the fact of being an Arab that entitled a citizen to the full rights of citizenship, but his faithfulness to the “spirit of Arabism.” Being a highly subjective criterion, this could well favor a certain region, clan, or even non-Arab Ba‘thists (such as the Chaldean Tariq ‘Aziz or the Arabized Kurd Taha Yassin Ramadan) while acting against whole Arab communities.

The sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council on Iraq following the invasion of Kuwait, the devastation of the infrastructure during the war and the deprivation and immiseration of Iraqis since then, have drastically altered the relations of power between the various Iraqi communities. The fragile equilibrium of the social pyramid that took shape during the 1980s has been fatally weakened because of the regime’s incapacity to defend its own proclaimed goals politically and economically.

The fall in the standard of living of the vast majority of the population came in a sudden and shocking manner. At its height, per capita GDP in Iraq (in constant 1980 prices) reached about $4,200 in 1979. By 1988, at the close of the Iran-Iraq War, this figure was $1,756. But in 1990, per capita GDP had fallen to less than half of these depressed levels, slumping to $868. The fall has continued since then, reaching an estimated $485 in 1993, a figure comparable to the standard of living of Iraqis in the 1940s.^[60] Such a drastic decline within such a short span of time left Iraqis with no viable options for adapting to new economic realities. Moreover, those classes and communities that had acquiesced in the 1980s status quo to secure some small measure of their benefits were becoming economically marginal. The pie had simply shrunk to a degree that the regime monopolized it and distributed the bulk of it to close allies in order to keep their loyalty.

Indeed, the 1991 Intifada and the regime’s response to it, was an outright acknowledgment by both the regime and its opponents of the breakdown of the social pyramid of the 1980s. The rebellion took sectarian and regional dimensions, while the regime responded by making its regional and clannish nature more explicit.^[61] For this reason the short-lived Iraqi Intifada was more of a civil war than a revolution, because a civil war implies that a major component of society has withdrawn its obedience to the existing political regime and entrusted its leadership to others that it judged more representative or capable of defending its actual or mythical cause. The military or quasi-military course that the Intifada took clearly showed that both warring parties took their communal identities with the utmost fanaticism.

From the above, one can see that if the Ba‘thist brutal dictatorship is facing its quart d’heure, this will by no means give way to a Jeffersonian democracy. Any reorganization of political life in Iraq through the institutional forms of parliamentary democracy would almost inevitably reproduce a configuration of power that is already taking shape, in which political organizations would tend to operate as interest groups of their respective regions, clans, sects, or ethnicities.^[62] Yet even this outcome is unlikely. For the more sophisticated urban middle and working classes, severe economic pressures will probably undermine the appeal of a social democratic or liberal alternative, because the solutions that such alternatives profess are too slow to come into effect. Thus one should not be surprised that a people that have suffered so much from tyranny and populism might search for its own Zhirinovski, opening up the possibility that the demise of Saddam Hussein will simply pave the way for some new Iraqi dictator to take his place.

Notes

10. The Political Economy of Civil War in Lebanon

Elizabeth Picard

In the comparative study of the political economy of war, the case of Lebanon permits endless and rich insights. Yet unlike other cases of war making discussed in this volume, Lebanon’s experience between 1975 and 1990 shifts our attention to the political economy of civil war, a form of violence that implies the collapse of the state and thus breaks the causal chain that has linked war making to state consolidation in much of the literature on this topic.^[1] What Lebanon’s descent into civil war reveals, however, is not the eruption of disorganized, anarchic violence as a byproduct of the state’s collapse. Just the opposite proved to be the case.

Largely through the activities of various militia groups, pervasive and wide-ranging networks of social organization emerged in the course of the war as competing militias struggled to construct and defend institutional arrangements that would permit them not merely to survive but to manage the organizational, material, and human demands of war making; maximize the economic opportunities created by the war; and compensate for the absence of the state in the provision of essential social services to specific communities. Militias provided an institutional framework—organized largely around the interconnected tasks of coercion and predation—that nonetheless aspired to consolidate practices of economic and political governance that would have the legitimacy, predictability, and integrity of the Lebanese state whose collapse they had brought about. Ultimately this effort failed, but in the process it profoundly influenced the shape of Lebanon’s postwar political economy.

In addition, the civil war reveals a tremendous diversity in the responses devised by Lebanese militias in their modes of social domination and extraction of resources, their linkages with sources of external support, and, most important, their relation to the residual structures of the state, as well as their mode of access to the material and symbolic resources of its institutions.

Lebanon thus provides a fascinating window into the institutional and organizational logics that shape the strategic choices of those who take part in a distinctive form of war making. Almost inevitably, these are logics that produce high levels of fragmentation—territorial, social, economic—and Lebanon’s experience provides ample evidence of this. Yet here too, the image of fragmentation needs to be tempered by a recognition that, in the economic realm in particular, markets in wartime Lebanon operated not only within but across newly created territorial boundaries, producing forms of interaction, even interdependence and collaboration, that seem almost out of place given the intensity of the violence between (and sometimes within) Lebanon’s highly polarized communities.

After first situating the genesis and development of the wartime economy in a general framework characterized by a shift from clientelism to predation, I will focus on the redistributive dimensions of what I have called the “militia economy” and explore in detail the dynamics of these economies within specific territories under militia control. I will, moreover, go beyond an analysis of the formation of what might be called a “militia system” and begin to elaborate a typology of these militia economies in a comparative perspective. Finally, I will discuss various modes of adaptation of these militia economies to the end of the war and to the initial years of the postwar era.

The Genesis and Trajectory of the Militia Economy

The birth of a militia economy during the Lebanese war was marked by the transition from the local mobilization of armed defense groups in villages or neighborhoods that operated within the framework of a unified state to the monopolization of resources and means of coercion by large, organized, and hierarchical militias that gradually carved up Lebanese territory after 1976. These militias consisted primarily of the Lebanese Forces (LF), which united into a Christian stronghold between 1975 and 1980; Kamal Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), which ruled over the Druze community from its stronghold in Chouf; and ’Amal, which garnered support among the majority of the Shi‘ite population until its radical competitor, Hizballah, gained momentum after 1982. There were, in addition, other less influential militias, such as the South Lebanon Army (SLA) in the zone occupied by Israel, the Popular Nasserite Organization (PNO) in Sidon, and the Marada Brigade in Zghorta. The consolidation and territorialization of the militias unfolded under the financial and military influence of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the regions with a Muslim majority, and in the shadow of Syrian hegemony in all of Lebanon starting in 1976.

In a general sense, the notion of a militia economy refers to various modes of adaptation to destruction, shortages, and more broadly, to a situation of deep social and institutional fragmentation. In other words it refers to the economy of Lebanon as it evolved during the war. However, it also refers to the various strategies the belligerents developed to turn the wartime economy into a strategic resource.^[2] In establishing the periodization of the transition to a militia economy, it should be pointed out that there was a lag between various phases in the development of this economy and the military trajectory of the conflict due to the greater inertia of economic processes relative to military operations, on the one hand, and the strong external dimension of the Lebanese economy, on the other. Broadly speaking, however, the militia economy took shape during two distinct phases in the course of the civil war.

During the first phase, from 1975 to 1983, the prewar liberal economy subsisted on the margins of the civil war, showing a certain measure of resilience. Prewar economic arrangements were reconstructed to a considerable extent following the destruction of the commercial infrastructure in the center of Beirut and of the industrial infrastructure in the eastern and southern suburbs of the city in the period 1975–76. However, this resilience was soon exhausted as the militias became an increasingly powerful economic force. Even in this first phase of the conflict, armed militias operated as predators in the communities in which they had sprung up during the earliest days of the fighting. Throughout this first phase of militia accumulation, these groups attempted to concentrate the means of coercion and administration within the confines of each community so as to maximize their own resources. The result was the emergence of more efficient “survival units” within the territory of Lebanon which represented, in effect, “ministates” in formation.^[3] In other words, this first phase represents a shift in the militias’ operating practices from banditry to organized forms of extraction and exploitation.

The militias’ mode of operation during the first phase of the war illustrates several important paradoxes associated with the political economy of civil war. First among them is that militia fighters were relentlessly seeking to destroy the very infrastructures they also sought to appropriate for themselves. All of the souks (markets) in the city center and half of the factories in the suburbs were either shelled or burned down. In Beirut’s port, militia members “sold” goods simply on the basis of their volume rather than their value; and through continued fighting they prevented any activity at the port during nine months in 1976. The logic behind the destruction of fixed capital assets was in fact twofold. First, it destroyed the physical infrastructure that constituted the material basis of the coexistence between communities to legitimize the militias’ bellicose project. And second, it deprived their adversaries of resources such as oil and electricity so as to secure a monopoly over them. The effect of this destruction was brutal, since Lebanon’s GDP fell by 30 percent in 1975 and by an additional 40 percent in 1976. As a result, populations and armed groups were quickly forced to turn to external actors, and especially to expatriates, to secure financial resources; the revenues obtained from diaspora sources were estimated at the time to be $1.5–2.5 billion per year.^[4]

Another paradox is that the maintenance of an overvalued exchange rate characterized by a strong pound relative to the dollar and to the money supply fostered overconfidence concerning the strength of the Lebanese economy even while the political system disintegrated.^[5] Among other things, the overvalued currency provided opportunities for speculation that earned Lebanese some $300 million per year. More important, however, and somewhat ironically, it provided the means for the besieged Lebanese state to retain some capacity to manage macroeconomic policy. Governments like Selim Hoss’s (1978–79) explicitly sought to alleviate the war’s effects on lower income wage earners. Salaries of civil servants were paid regularly, including those of soldiers who had deserted the armed forces to join militias as fighting intensified. And the government established price controls on oil products, flour, beets, and other essential commodities.

In the second phase, 1983–90, the state finally collapsed. Following the 1984 split within the army the state lost its means of coercion, controlled less than a tenth of Lebanon’s territory, and no longer controlled any of its financial resources. Whereas in 1980, the Ministry of Finance was still able to collect 90 percent of revenues from tariffs, this percentage dropped to 60 percent in 1983 and to a mere 10 percent in 1986. Worse, military goods worth several billion dollars, which had been bought from the United States to rebuild the army, fell into the hand of militias when the army rebelled in the western part of Beirut and split in February of 1984. The collapse of the army undermined confidence in the pound and resulted in a massive devaluation.^[6] Finally, the international context, especially the drying up in 1982–83 of the resources contributed by the PLO and the repercussions of the 1984 oil crisis, accelerated the decline of state revenues and contributed to a general condition of economic crisis.^[7]

The militia economy subsequently expanded on the ruins of a national economy that was falling back on agriculture as its leading sector. While agriculture’s share of GDP was only 10 percent in 1974, it grew to 33 percent by 1985. However, this was a larger share of a much smaller GDP; indeed, GDP had been halved between 1984 and 1987 and further reduced by a third between 1987 and 1990. Fixed capital assets that had suffered two waves of destruction in 1982–84 and 1989–90 were no longer replaced. Massive capital flight took place following the collapse of the pound. Civil servants and salaried workers in the service sector were the hardest-hit victims of a crisis that polarized Lebanese society, dividing it into a minority who benefited from the militia economy and a pauperized majority. This situation led to the long-term emigration of skilled and even unskilled workers. And as a result, Lebanon ended the war with a population of nearly 3 million people, no more than fifteen years earlier.^[8]

During the early postwar period, from 1990 to 1995, the restoration of state sovereignty remained partial, and it unfolded in ways that preserved many of the political prerogatives of the militias. One-tenth of the country remained under Israeli occupation in the south. The remaining 90 percent was under tight Syrian control following the signing of the Treaty of Brotherhood, Cooperation, and Coordination in May 1991. Moreover, both the Lebanese Forces and Hizballah successfully resisted an April 1991 law that mandated the disarming of militias. The LF complied with the law only in June 1995, while Hizballah still retains its military autonomy. The legitimacy of the regime resulting from the Ta’if accords of October 1989, as well as that of the legislature elected in August of 1992, was contested. The government and the bureaucracy incorporated militia leaders, and their participation renewed political communitarianism by bringing brute force to bear on the competitive relations between communities.^[9]

Nor did the end of the war and the partial reassertion of state sovereignty mean the breakdown of the militia economy. In the economic as in the political realm the government sought to mobilize and engage militias rather than to control them. In its effort to rebuild the country it gave priority neither to public services nor social infrastructure. Rather, it privileged land and real estate operations such as Solidere in the center of Beirut and Elyssar in the southern suburbs, as well as rampant privatization (for example, of Lebanon’s state-run telephone company). By so doing the government sought to attract the participation of the businesses created under the militias—as well as to attract the capital they had accumulated—in support of its efforts to reconstruct the Lebanese economy. Given that reconstruction was estimated to require between $15 and 20 billion, the global needs of the economy constituted a perfect opportunity for the state to rein in the militia economies by facilitating their integration into leading sectors of Lebanon’s reemerging, postwar national economy.

From Clientelism to Predation

Wartime economies, of course, are not born sui generis. In the case of Lebanon, they can be traced back to widespread clientalist practices that consisted of exchanging personal loyalty (such as a vote during the legislative elections that take place every four years) for protection, a job, or various material or financial advantages.^[10] But new phenomena would grow out of these long-standing practices. At the outset of the war, most local militias were self-defense organizations formed in response to a real or imagined threat, and they had a symbiotic relationship with the populations in which they originated. The first militia fighters did not receive wages. Unlike those of the “professional” fighters of the PLO, their initial arms purchases were financed by local entrepreneurs, and administrative tasks were performed by neighborhood volunteers. These early militias thus shared certain features with citizen-based vigilante movements that arise in other contexts, and even with such volunteer organizations as the neighborhood watch groups found in the United States. At this stage one cannot yet talk of a militia economy. Although the destruction and interruptions of economic activities had an impact on the resources of households, they did not really have structural effects on the overall economy of the state. Nor did localized economic hardship have an effect on popular perceptions and official representations that blamed the fighting on insidious foreign elements.

Next, the proliferation of defense units and the eclipse of regular forces encouraged petty criminality among urban gangs that lived off the looting of territories under their control—both those they protected and those they captured. Such petty criminality took the form of stealing cars, hijacking for ransom, squatting, and racketeering either at roadblocks or by patrols plundering neighborhood buildings. The resulting insecurity gave rise to new activities such as locksmithing, armor plating, and private security services. Meanwhile, activities such as the setting up of the large souk organized in 1975 by the Lebanese Forces in the port of Beirut, or the salvage of furniture by the Mourabitoun in the part of the city where the big hotels were located, constituted implicit modes of payment for the fighters whose allowances ranged from very meager to nil.

It was only later, during the 1980s that the big militias (primarily the Lebanese Forces, the Druze PSP, and later, Hizballah) turned into professional organizations whose members were paid a wage. This evolution, however, was enormously important, transforming the status of the militias. From then on, militia fighters were less “neighborhood youths” than servicemen in uniform. Their salaries were often the only resource for families hit by unemployment and the paralysis of the economy. Yet, this contribution was probably less important than the “extraordinary” resources that were available to militia fighters as a result of their new status. It was these new “professional” militia members who had ready access to rationed resources such as flour and gas, to “free” goods obtained by looting (even Israeli soldiers looted private homes during their 1982–85 occupation), and to profitable illicit activities such as the smuggling of cigarettes and drugs. In a fragmented social field, where the old aristocratic and commercial elite kept a low profile (those who had not emigrated), these new actors acquired prestige based not only on their weapons but also on their command of economic resources. They had the capacity to create a clientele for themselves even if the population condoned neither their project nor their practices. It is noteworthy that the members of Hizballah, who were notoriously the best paid, also had the reputation of being the least corrupt and least predatory with respect to the populations they controlled.^[11] And yet they too knew how to manufacture artificial shortages (in water and electricity, for example) in the southern suburbs of Beirut so that the aid they offered would be appreciated to a greater extent.

Compared to the ultraliberal clientalist system that characterized the boom years of the prewar era, the militia economy operated on a different scale, with a different character, and through different spatial arrangements. It operated on a new scale because criminal activities such as smuggling, which had been a low-level activity in the 1970s, became systematized as the war dragged on. The harbors of Tyr and Tripoli thus became centers for the import of vehicles (often stolen in Europe) by private operators.^[12] Militias also engaged in the export of goods that were subsidized in neighboring countries: a quarter of the gas imports, sold cheaper in Lebanon than in the Gulf oil-producing states, was smuggled into Syria, Turkey, Jordan, and even Cyprus.^[13] Further, the militia economy operated on a new scale because Syrian troops inserted themselves into Lebanese social and economic networks through their own participation in looting, taxing and reexporting gas, wood, iron, tires, and medicine. In fact, the value of merchandise that passed through Syrian hands in these various ways was estimated to be $5 million per day in 1985.^[14]

The militia economy also exhibited a different character than prewar economic arrangements because economic management was quickly perceived as an intrinsic part of the war between militias. In a country that imported more than 50 percent of its consumption goods, securing access to resources without having to rely on the mediation of an enemy, even if this enemy was the state administration, quickly became a priority. As early as 1976, Jumblatt’s Druze PSP began to engage in the all-out import of petroleum products in the improvised ports of Jieh and Khaldeh because they did not have access to the refineries of Zahrani and Tripoli, and even less to the oil storage tanks in Dora. The Lebanese Forces that took control of the Christian regions to the north of Beirut also violated the state monopoly on oil: a crony of Camille Chamoun, the head of the National Liberal Party (NLP), became the first importer of smuggled goods in these regions through the port of Dbayeh. Here and there, various people called on businessmen who were sympathizers or members of their community. The first institutionalization of a parastatal economic structure was that of the Gamma groups that emerged in 1978 around the Lebanese Forces, the armed branch of the Kata’ib led by Bachir Gemayel. The groups were constituted of tens of academics but also entrepreneurs who mastered the functioning of the banking and commercial economy and became responsible for supply and distribution activities on the territory dominated by the Christian LF militia.

This, however, was only a first step. These entrepreneurs working for their community realized, and persuaded their patrons, that even though the war was destructive it could also produce economic wealth. And so they lobbied politicians and military men to organize wartime activities that were “economically oriented,” to use Max Weber’s formula. Asked to participate in the war effort by supplying the armed forces and the civilian population in the region with necessary civil and military equipment, but subject at the same time to new and significant taxes established by the militias, entrepreneurs applied a capitalist logic to their activities: they had to profit from them. They thus became accomplices of the fighters whose interventions affected the value of their goods and services. The ferryboat ride from Jounieh to Cyprus, which represented the way out of the country for the inhabitants of the eastern region who could not reach the Khaldeh airport to the south of Beirut, offers a telling example. On the one hand, no agreement was sought with the other militias in 1986–87 to reopen a safe passage to Khaldeh, because the Lebanese Forces were at the time completing construction of an alternative airport in Halate near Jbail with the cooperation of the banker Roger Tamraz. And, on the other hand, exchanges of artillery between militias around Jounieh as ferryboats departed were invoked by the transport companies as a reason to increase the cost of the fare.

Another example is provided by the inordinately high benefits that were reaped by the private companies that supplied the Christian town of Deir el-Qamar with flour and heating oil during the prolonged siege to which it was subjected by the PSP from mid-September until Christmas of 1983. The clientelism that had prevailed before the war shifted to practices of political and military extraction of social resources and to the development of mafia-like processes that supported not only the survival of the group but tremendous capital accumulation. If we take seriously several consistent estimates, the looting of Beirut’s port allegedly generated some $1–$2 billion, as did the looting of Beirut’s city center.^[15]

In the 1980s, having secured control of the economy’s key sectors (such as petroleum imports and cement production), militia leaders invested in new activities, including communications, computers, and maritime transport. They crossed, unhindered, the boundary between the legal and criminal economy by taking up drug production and trafficking. These activities quickly led to the emergence of new economic actors who were distinct from politicians and militiamen. These new actors worked both for the militia and themselves, reexporting short-term profits made in Lebanon to Western banks, or investing in Lebanese real estate. One should nevertheless not underestimate the discreet but continuous participation of the largest fortunes from the prewar era in these new profitable ventures, nor the complex financial ties that formed between nonmilitary economic elites and the new entrepreneurs who prospered in the shadow of the militia system.

Finally, the intervention of militias produced a restructuring of Lebanon’s economic space. It fragmented this space into territories where each militia sought exclusive control of resources.^[16] This, for example, was the effect of the 1978 confrontations between the Lebanese Forces and the Maradas from Zghorta for the control of ports and cement works in the north. The division of territory that resulted from this confrontation lasted until 1990 and gave Samir Geagea, who took over leadership of the LF in 1986, a financial foundation based on the internal “customs” of Barbara on the coastal route. The desire to control resources was also the goal behind the crushing of Chamoun’s NLP militia, its annexation by the Lebanese Forces under Bachir Gemayel in 1980, and Gemayel’s takeover of the collective finances of the Lebanese Front, the coalition of Christian parties and militias.

However, the formation of quasi-statist political and economic spaces does not at all imply that each militia existed in a condition of autarky; quite the contrary. Not only was it necessary for militia economies to maintain a relation with “the outside,” but trade between them was also central to their prosperity by making it possible to avoid shortages in certain goods such as flour or gas, or by feeding internal customs, or even sustaining illicit activities such as the drug trade from the Beka‘a. Because the banking system also continued to operate within transcommunal and transterritorial networks, the breakup of the Lebanese mosaic was not a process in which boundaries between the communities became rigidified, but one that exhibited a dynamic quality that facilitated the accumulation of capital. Thus, militias were not only the agents of Lebanon’s fragmentation, they were also the managers and immediate beneficiaries of territorial divisions in ways that combined economic and military-strategic logics.^[17]

The Micro-Dynamics of the Militia Economy

Can the militia economy in Lebanon be captured in its specific dimensions? Before analyzing four of its major characteristics, I will first offer a quantitative, though necessarily cautious, overview of the scale and composition of the impact of the militias on Lebanon’s economy. The need for caution is not hard to understand, given the poor quality of the available data. Indeed, estimates of the total economic impact of the war differ considerably, ranging from $150 million to $1.5 billion per year, depending on the period in question—whether one focuses on relatively peaceful years or on those in which major battles took place—and whether calculations take only direct military costs into account or include broader economic effects as well. Even zeroing in on direct militia expenditures, however, does little to improve one’s confidence in available data. For example, Roger Dib, the Lebanese Forces’ second in command, announced in 1989 that the cost of his militia’s equipment and salaries amounted to $40 million per year.^[18] The cost in arms, ammunition, and salaries of the “liberation war” waged by General ‘Aoun from March to July 1989 is estimated to be $1 billion.

It is even more interesting to break down the military and civilian resources of the militias, which have been estimated to have amounted to approximately $2 billion per year.^[19] Half of this sum was alleged to have come from nonmilitia sources, either from patron states or from individuals or institutions belonging to the same community. By opening “embassies” in countries to which Lebanese had emigrated (in western Europe, the Americas, West Africa), militias tapped into diaspora resources that had previously been channeled into Lebanon through personal and family networks. Because the militias were the producers of economic insecurity and criminality, only they were able to guarantee emigrants access to their assets, whether in the form of bank deposits or fixed assets such as land or real estate. As for the militias’ patron states (virtually every state in the region funded one armed group or another), they spent some $700 million per year to secure the superiority of their various local allies. After the war, Israel disclosed that it had given $25 million per year in subsidies between 1976 and 1982 to the Lebanese Forces. In addition, the looting of regular armed forces, including international monitoring groups, was a primary source of weapons for all the militias. The United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) estimated that it lost nearly $500 million between 1975 and 1978 as a result of looting, including what was lost at the hands of Palestinians.^[20] Similarly, the storage facilities of the Lebanese army were looted on many occasions: between March 1976 and February 1977, when the Lebanese Arab Army units withdrew from the Lebanese Army; in 1984, when three of six operational brigades seceded after having been incited to do so by ’Amal and the PSP; and finally in October of 1989, when there was a division between two legal armies, those of Generals ‘Aoun and Lahoud.

When it comes to the economic functioning of the militias, it is more useful to identify their specific modalities rather than to assess their overall resources as distinct from the global economy that they literally cannibalized. Four specific modalities stand out. First is the capture by militias of state functions for private gain. Second is the collapse of the state’s monopoly over the legitimate use of force and the privatization of public security functions. Third is the criminalization of the Lebanese economy as militias increasingly expanded their activities in the economic domain. And fourth is the role of the militias in financial speculation.

The militia economy rested above all on the capture and appropriation of state functions. While the state administration was ever less capable of collecting land and real estate taxes and trading dues, or of exacting payment for the provision of electricity and water, armed groups enjoyed two strategic advantages in undertaking such tasks: their power to intimidate and their control over territory. Even if the services offered by the militias were of inferior quality compared to those provided by the public offices and ministries, society’s dependence on them was greater. This dependence even took on totalitarian overtones when the most ordinary activities, such as going to movies or restaurants, using public transportation, traveling to other countries or, more simply, passing through a roadblock, became grounds for the exercise of control and the exaction of payment.^[21]

The dramatic proliferation of ports offers a telling example of this phenomenon. Indeed, the expansion of militia-controlled ports during the war did not simply reflect the central administration’s decline as a regulator of trade but also signaled the privatization of the country’s maritime relations. The fifteen piers or so that sprang up were not accessible to average citizens who wanted to engage in trade or travel. The use of these piers was, instead, contingent on membership in the community networks of the militias that each controlled specific port facilities. And, as in other economic domains, the interweaving of financial interests and political tactics led to paradoxical decisions in the management of these facilities. Between 1985 and 1987, for example, a few hundred Palestinian fighters were clandestinely brought into the country through the Jounieh port—then controlled by the Christian and anti-Palestinian Lebanese Forces—to return to West Beirut to participate in the war of the camps against the Shi‘ite militia, ’Amal. While the political objective of the LF in helping their enemy was to weaken their rival, it also generated a financial profit that was far from trivial.

The erosion of legal control over the militias’ economic activities unfolded in a series of steps. Militias exploited breakdowns in communication occasioned by the fighting to justify their increasing economic autonomy. They permitted what little remained of official functions to subsist for a time, but simultaneously compelled the ever less viable public administration to acknowledge and eventually legalize criminal practices that were linked to the provision of essential economic services. The import of crude oil for the Tripoli and Zahrani refineries and the import of oil derivatives for the Dora reservoir escaped state monopoly as early as 1976, when the Ministry of Energy began to tolerate the emergence of private importation. State bureaucrats tolerated, for instance, an overland import network with which the Syrian president’s brother was associated, as well as a seaborne import network that operated via Greece and Bulgaria. Still, the state oil monopoly continued to grant import licenses. More important, the Caisse des Carburants (the Fund for Fuel), whose accounting books disappeared after a battle in 1977, subsidized oil products until 1986 even while militias were collecting taxes from consumers and illegally reexporting oil to neighboring countries.^[22] To make up for the subsequent shortage of oil, the government accepted the de facto deregulation of petroleum trade, causing the number of importers to rise from five before the war to several dozen by the middle of the 1980s. Finally, during the last months of the war, the Conseil supérieur des douanes (the Higher Council of Customs) granted official status to the dozens of private oil terminals that had been established along the coast. Although this recognition allowed the government to tax fuel once again, it also legalized the transformation of a state monopoly into a nonstate oligopoly consisting of five or six holding companies of importers—a situation that has become consolidated since the end of the war.

The case of tobacco is both less complicated and more telling, since it was the state agency itself that negotiated the terms according to which its monopoly was to be dismantled. The Régie de tabac, Lebanon’s state tobacco monopoly, which at one time imported two thirds of local consumption and oversaw the marketing of South Lebanon’s tobacco crop, was no longer able to suppress massive smuggling despite pitched battles between the Forces de sécurité intérieure (FSI, the state police) and smugglers in 1977 and again in 1983. In September 1987, the government signed an agreement with the six leading militias (the Lebanese Forces, the Progressive Socialist Party, ’Amal, the Marada Brigade, the Popular Nasserist Organization from Sidon, and the South Lebanon Army), whereby it granted them the right to sell cigarettes in their respective territories. The agreement produced an 8 percent increase in the price of tobacco, which went to the militias who had committed themselves to confiscating “contraband” cigarettes in the areas they controlled.^[23] Yet, as in the case of oil, it would be a mistake to assume that the coerced appropriation of public resources implied the formation of alternative public services. In the two most developed cases of a militia economy, the Jumblatt’s PSP in the Chouf and the Lebanese Forces, revenues were more than ten times greater than investment and social expenditures.^[24] Such predatory structures are far from the kind of state modernity discussed by Tilly, who assumes that redistribution and legitimacy are linked.

Second, the shift from the state’s monopoly over the legitimate use of force to unbridled private violence gave rise to a demand for security that the militias avidly exploited. As the army and state police withdrew from the provision of security, urban populations very quickly established agreements with fighters—a practice in the tradition of the khuwa.^[25] Contrary to common representations, the main source of danger to populations other than unpredictable events such as car bombs or air raids did not come from enemy territory—since frontiers had been drawn between the militias’ respective areas of control by the fall of 1976. Instead, the danger came from within, from the routine exercise of intimidation and criminality by the very people who represented themselves as providers of security. In this environment, the private provision of public order was a booming business. Security and armored transport companies proliferated, as did firms manufacturing and selling electric and electronic material and martial arts clubs run by paramilitary men. Not incidentally, these kinds of activities also served as a safety valve against unemployment, mirroring the role of public enterprises in many countries throughout the Middle East. Some 20 percent of the salaried employees in the cement works of Chekka were “protector-guards,” according to local terminology. At the Khaldeh airport in the southern suburb of Beirut, the number of people close to ’Amal who were holding security-related jobs was estimated to be around five hundred, and it has not decreased much in the ten years since the war ended. The privatization of public order did more than generate profitable businesses that would remain in place after the end of war. It also kept social groups from constructing their collective security through shared norms or through public and enforceable rules. Instead, it promoted aggressive self-defense and the proliferation of weapons.

The third type of economic activity that the militias performed is also the most interesting because it locates militia activities at the intersection of the political and military realms, on the one hand, and sheer criminality, on the other. Indeed, militias did not simply take advantage of their physical domination in order to extract resources. They also invoked the needs of the population in the areas they controlled, and used established businesses and criminal networks to carry out their activities. Thus, by hijacking goods transported by their own regular companies, they were able to require an insurance premium on these goods while selling them to consumers at higher prices on the black market. In another case, the installation of a telephone switchboard by a militia in Zahleh that bypassed the public network’s paralyzed lines, or the installation of pipes that made it possible to “hijack” the equivalent of a twenty-ton fuel tanker per week for five years from the refinery in Tripoli.^[26] Between such activities and straightforward criminal endeavors motivated purely by profit there was a fine line. This line was swiftly crossed with the unregulated traffic in toxic waste from Italy, which has been circulating within Lebanon since 1987 with complete disregard for the humanitarian consequences. The development of drug-related activities including the production, extraction, and commercialization of hashish and heroin illustrates the distortions of an economy that fulfilled immediate financial needs by involving various social groups without, however, taking their long-term interests into account. The area used for growing hashish doubled between 1976 and 1984, and did so again in 1988. Likewise, the area where poppy fields were cultivated increased from 60 to 3,000 hectares between 1984, when poppy cultivation was introduced by Kurdish experts under the protection of the Syrian army, and 1988. As a result, drugs gave rise to a sudden and ostentatious prosperity in the Hermel and the Beka‘a and peasants abandoned the production of food crops in these areas.^[27] The severe reduction of poppy cultivation in these areas, which was imposed by Syria starting in 1990 at the request of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, produced a long-term economic crisis. Whether Christian or Muslim, many peasants from the hinterland chose to leave rather than to revert to the unprofitable cultivation of cereals or face competition from Syrian imports of vegetables and fruits. Meanwhile, neither the reconstructed Lebanese administration nor the international community was able to come up with a rescue plan.

As for drug production, transport, and commercial networks protected by militia members, their net profit was immeasurable.^[28] Drugs were, in some respects, a direct response of militias to the extraordinary financial demands of war making, yet their sale also provided for massive capital accumulation among militia leaders, riches whose full scale will never be fully known. Perhaps most important, however, the interruption of poppy production around 1990 did not cause the death of the networks feeding upon the external production zones and bank circuits of northern countries; far from it. The dismantling of the militia organizations that gave rise to and protected local drug networks was followed by their long-term integration into international drug marketing circuits.

The fourth type of economic activity that constituted the militia economy was the militias’ involvement in financial speculation. This activity actually grew out of the need to launder drug money through means other than real estate operations, but was fueled by the increasing volatility of the Lebanese pound. Until 1982, the impressive stability of the pound helped the militias purchase all kinds of goods outside the country. Following the decline of oil prices in 1984 and the depletion of the state’s foreign exchange reserves from which the militias benefited, however, this tendency was brutally reversed. The fiscal crisis was such that in 1985 the value of the Lebanese pound dropped by 30 percent per month: $1 was worth 2 £L in 1975, 50 in 1985, 500 in 1987, 1,500 in 1990 and 2,000 in 1992. Many Lebanese and others speculated on the currency’s devaluation, but militia leaders had a definite advantage at this game. They obtained fictitious bank guarantees for their loans, insisted on using short-term deposits to obtain long-term credits, and exerted pressure on the Société financière du Liban, the official body responsible for allocating liquid assets among banks, to appropriate available foreign exchange. Moreover, certain banking institutions were created solely for managing the finances of militias, including the Prosperity Bank of Lebanon, which was linked to the Lebanese Forces. The protection of profits was also facilitated by the presence of big Western banks in Lebanon.^[29]

On the whole, the relation of the militias to the Lebanese state remained ambiguous. This ambiguity dismisses the oversimplifying thesis analyzing the militias’ onslaught against the state as part of a large plot aimed at dismantling the Near Eastern states (Syria, Lebanon, and possibly Jordan) to the benefit of communitarian statelets. Such a plot, depicted as an Israeli scheme, as the ultimate goal of extremist Lebanese Christians, as well as the secret vow of the Syrian ‘Alawite minority, could never be implemented during fifteen years of war, even if several militia groups, among them the Lebanese Forces and the Druze PSP, envisioned at some stage being able to do without the Lebanese state and to create their own set of institutions, including a central bank and foreign relations department.

What the dynamic of the militia economy shows, on the contrary, is the complexity of the relationship between the state and the militia entrepreneurs. The state, with its central administration, its national institutions, and its sovereignty, remained an asset and a stake. The militia took greater advantage from their complementarity to the state economy than in its destruction and replacement. Even while despised, weakened, and delegitimized by the militias which concurred in its destruction, it was still their common good, as witnessed during the “reconciliation meetings” of Geneva (November 1983) and Lausanne (March 1984), when the warlords summoned by their Syrian “patron” competed in “national loyalty.” Finally, by denying each other the right to secede or to take hold of state power the militias acted collectively as the warrant of the perenniality of the state.

Allocation and Legitimacy

The militia economy’s predilection for criminality worked hand in hand with the militias’ role as redistributive agents. As the war went on, militias came to play a growing role as economic patrons. Indeed, by the second half of the 1980s, one-third of Lebanon’s population received income from the militias.^[30] A comparison of various estimates indicate that one-sixth of men old enough to carry a weapon actually joined the militias at one time or another, and another sixth joined the militias’ administrative organizations. The monthly salaries paid to the militants ($65–350 in the LF, $75–150 in the Maradas in rural area, and $60 to the part-time volunteers of the PNO) were not particularly attractive compared to salaries in the public sector, especially after the rapid devaluation of the Lebanese pound after 1984.^[31] This situation partially explains the petty criminality of low-level militia members who were inclined to engage in criminal forms of resource extraction at the expense of the surrounding community.^[32]

What we might add to these figures, however, is that the rest of the population was also becoming increasingly dependent on the militias for their security and material well-being. Indeed, the militias became the main providers not only of salaries but also of material goods, health care, and education. And they were more interventionist in the performance of these functions than had been the prewar “laissez faire” state. Quite apart from the economic scale of their operations, moreover, it was the militias’ hegemonic control of collective and individual strategies in the economic realm that was important. Indeed, their economic centrality in the everyday lives of Lebanese helps explain the sense of confusion and helplessness that the Lebanese population experienced when faced with the organizational-institutional vacuum of the immediate postwar era. It also explains the intensity of the expectations they imposed on the new billionaire Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.

Among Lebanon’s social groups, displaced populations were the most dependent on the militias, leaving them vulnerable to various forms of exploitation. So while displaced persons were provided with welfare support by militias, and were resettled in facilities the militias had either requisitioned (in the case of the Lebanese Forces) or forcibly and illegally appropriated (in the case of ’Amal), they were also kept in precarious conditions so that militias could appeal to charitable organizations for support and exploit the presence of these displaced populations to secure political and financial advantages in any future peace negotiations. When the reconstruction projects Solidere and Elyssar were launched, in 1991 and 1995 respectively, ’Amal and Hizballah were thus able to increase the number of applicants eligible to receive government indemnities. As for the leaders of the eastern region who succeeded the Lebanese Forces, an accumulation of obstacles to the return of displaced Christians from the Chouf was at the core of their grievances against the postwar republic. It was, in turn, among the young generation of these displaced populations, cut off from their roots and animated by a spirit of revenge, that militias recruited the core group of their fighters. The reorganization of the Lebanese Forces after 1985 under Samir Geagea offers the most telling example of this recruitment pattern, since his shock troops were made up of fighters and new recruits driven out of their villages in the north, the Chouf, and the Iqlim-el-Kharroub.

And yet, having acknowledged the extraordinary range of economic activities in which militias engaged and the extent to which they were effective in fashioning militia organizations into mechanisms of predation, it must nonetheless be said that the militias by and large failed in the tasks of institutionalizing and legitimating their economic and political roles. In spite of their intention to formalize their economic status and undertake projects of social transformation that would alter Lebanon’s balance of social power, their economic activities never provided a stable regulatory framework and continued to reflect the interests of individual militia members in self-enrichment—interests they persistently advanced through tactics that were entirely at odds with their concern for legitimacy or the formation of lasting institutional structures.

Examples abound of the gap between the militias’ aspirations and the rather tawdry character of their activities. The enthusiasm manifested toward the end of the 1970s by some intellectuals in the Lebanese Forces for a collective agriculture inspired by the model of kibbutz was short-lived and was rapidly overtaken by a form of speculative agroindustry. In Hizballah, a Research and Documentation Center was founded in 1988 with a mandate to promote urban development projects for the poor southern suburbs. At the execution stage, however, private offices and unsupervised real estate projects prospered and became sources of individual profits even, and especially, for the most pious of the local shaykhs.^[33]

The development of social and medical services in all the militia regions, on the other hand, took place in the context of a growing cost of living and competition between militias or armed groups within each community. Among the Maronites, this conflict was between the LF and President Gemayel in 1984–88, and then between the LF and General ‘Aoun in 1988–89. Among the Shi‘ites, the conflict was, starting in 1987, between ’Amal and Hizballah. The provision of social services operated, therefore, as an instrument in the hands of the militias to mitigate the disaffection of populations tired of destruction and high handed methods. Hizballah illustrates this situation best. It invested in social and medical services through local branches of foundations headquartered in Iran: the Jihad el-Bina’ for housing, the Martyrs’ Foundation, the Foundation for the Wounded and a similar institution created to support orphans. Such investment was politically profitable among the populations of the Baalbek region and those of the southern suburbs of Beirut. Generally speaking, the legitimizing function of social programs, and the attraction of foreign private humanitarian aid (estimated at $10 million per year) which their adoption brought about were more important to the militias than the social objective itself.^[34]

The Territorial Illusion

After an initial period of political paralysis, followed by the collapse of the Lebanese Army and the beginnings of territorial fragmentation, the territories controlled by militias underwent a three-stage process marked by the increasing consolidation of autonomous sectarian “statelets” in the period from 1976 to 1983. These phases were characterized by the coercive unification of populations within the same communal space; the forced homogenization of those populations, causing the displacement of several hundred thousand Christians and Shi‘ite Moslems; and physical separation along sectarian lines. Through this process of territorialization of militia control, the militias sought to establish their legitimacy and authority as sovereign entities. Ultimately, this quest was no less illusory than their pursuit of social or economic legitimacy. Yet it provides further insight into how the militias hoped to parlay their military capacity into a longer-term political role in Lebanon.

In the economic realm, this process of territorialization had three consequences. First, it favored the emergence and development of alternative urban and commercial centers whose economic circumstances fluctuated depending on the economic climate of the moment;^[35] some of these centers would later suffer from the postwar reemergence of Beirut as Lebanon’s financial capital. Second, the construction of internal frontiers generated revenues in several ways: the levying of custom duties, the artificial creation of local scarcities leading to skyrocketing prices and windfall profits, and even the lengthening of transportation distances (Beirut-Zghorta via Hermel, Homs, and Tripoli), that increased transport fees. As the state retreated, the partitioning of Lebanon among militias reproduced the old Ottoman divisions of military and fiscal domains (iqtâ‘), each with their borders and customs checkpoints; Bater or Monteverde for the PSP, the Awali north of Sidon for the PNO, the Qasmieh bridge for ’Amal, and Barbara for the LF. Each of these crossing points generated significant revenues for the militias that controlled them.

Beside extracting taxes, militias took advantage of price differentials and the creation of artificial monopolies. As early as the first year of the war the refineries of Zahrani and Tripoli (located in Shi‘ite and Sunni zones, respectively) were destroyed by shells fired from the Christian zones. The minister of industry and petroleum, who had close links to the Kata’ib, deemed it technically impossible to bring the refineries back into use quickly. Almost overnight, coastal storage units in the Christian regions between Beirut and Jounieh (Dora, Nahr el-Mott, Dbaye) became the country’s main supply centers for fuel, and they provisioned other regions on the basis of intermilitia agreements.^[36] Moreover, the SLA threatened several times to shell the ports of Tyr and Sidon in order to replenish its coffers, and received an allowance for abstaining from such action, thus collecting “taxes” from its enemies, ’Amal and the PNO. Finally, territorial divisions fueled real estate speculation through the expulsion of populations (for example, the Palestinians and Shi‘ites from the shanty town of the Quarantine and the Christians from the region north of and around Sidon), through the massive arrival of refugees in southern Lebanon or in the northern suburbs of Beirut, or even through the development of a new political center such as Bikfaya, President Amin Gemayel’s “capital” from 1984 to 1988.^[37]

The territorial illusion, or the militias’ quest for some status comparable to sovereignty, rested on an ideological construction concerning the importance of territory that was very much at odds with the way the militias were organized and actually operated. First, while the militias attached symbolic and even military importance to what the Lebanese Forces called the “liberated” territory, and while they also marked these territories with all the iconography of sectarian struggle, especially Hizballah, the majority of the militias had lost contact with the areas from which their fighters largely originated: the high mountains in the north and the remote villages in the Beka‘a or the south. Moreover, most militias took as their main military objective the conquest of Beirut, an economic and social space far too vast and complex to be dominated by a single militia. Similarly, a principal economic aim was to use their military apparatus to seize control of the service sector, though this, too, defied any neat spatial division.

In fact, the militias had no need for a territorial “homeland” to engage in war making, to assert their control over populations, or even to enrich themselves. All of them, including the openly anticapitalistic Hizballah, shared the desire to be part of the “Hong Kong of the Middle East,” if not to control it.

Second, the obsession with territory expressed in the militias’ discourse of communal unity was continuously undermined by internal rivalries and conflicts among militia leaders. Such conflicts were usually based on personal or regional issues rather than programmatic ones, and their stakes were in most cases economic. The ’Amal movement in South Lebanon, for example, started fragmenting after 1982. Each warlord controlled a village and aspired to monopolize the benefits of traffic between zones occupied by the Israelis, the Shi‘ite southern suburbs of Beirut, and the two ports of the region, Tyr and the illegal port of Zahrani. At the leadership level, the rift between ’Amal and Hizballah was more the result of competing interests than the product of ideological or strategic disagreements,^[38] although such factors were nevertheless significant since Hizballah’s sponsor, Iran, funded several Shi‘ite charitable foundations. In the Christian regions, this logic of economic competition produced territorial divisions and a series of fratricidal confrontations. Christians in the north, for example, set themselves apart from the majority of the community when they sided with the Syrians as early as 1978, following a succession of pitched battles for the control of the ports and the distribution of gasoline and cement. There was also a series of coups to remove Fuad Abou Nader (1985), Samir Geagea (1985), and Elias Hobeika (1986), from the leadership of the Lebanese Forces. The expulsion of Hobeika was the final stage of a fierce struggle for the control of the Sunduq al-Watani, the “national fund” that was in fact the private bank of the LF, and for the control of revenues generated by illegal ports. Following his overthrow, Hobeika retreated to Zahleh, where he and his “finance minister,” Paul Aris, continued to ransom enterprises and traders from the eastern part of Beirut. At this stage, they were no longer pursuing a political or economic project but merely using force, albeit from a distance, to extract resources.

The Militia System

The territorial divisions and economic conflicts among the six, and later the seven, major militias (Maradas, LF, PSP, PNO, SLA, ’Amal, and, after 1982, Hizballah) did not undermine the presence of a national market within which the militias were forced to cooperate in order to maximize their revenues. Even while Lebanon was divided politically and militarily into communal territories, transcommunal and interregional networks were diffused throughout the country, creating a dense web of interconnections across militia lines. As a result, despite the militias’ rhetorical commitment to economic autarky, the interdependence created by the persistence of a “national” economic space imposed a degree of collaboration on the warring forces. These connections are revealed through the timing, type, and duration of military operations in which the militias engaged.

Cooperation between militias started as early as the autumn of 1975, when the souks and port of Beirut were being sacked. At that time it took the form of various mechanisms of compensation and supervision between regions, mechanisms which depended, ultimately, on personal trust. Occasionally, this cooperation was also broadened and institutionalized, as in the case of natural gas, whose import was entrusted to a single dealer. The £L 2,000 or $3 paid by consumers for each gas container in 1988 included a £L 360 tax that was not collected by the Ministry of Finance but was, rather, distributed among the militias according to negotiated agreements.^[39] Narcotics trade provided a second example of cooperation between militias, this time organized around multiple, cross-militia economic networks, which negotiated specific divisions of labor. For purposes of drug trafficking, ’Amal was associated with the PSP; Hizballah was associated with the ‘Alawite militia of Tripoli and the LF, or with individual members of the Kata’ib party and even with officers of the Israeli Golani brigade in the occupied south. Each militia performed its share of the operation and took its share of the profits. Likewise, in the aborted project to construct the new Halate airport near Jbail in 1987, the LF received the support of Walid Jumblatt, then minister of public works as well as the LF’s sworn enemy since their confrontation in the Chouf war. Together, the different militias created a profit network at the expense of their population, thereby rendering obsolete the state principles of res publica such as equity and rationality.

Toward a Typology of Militia Economies

The interwoven character of the militia economy system that crisscrossed the Lebanese “territories” and produced organized networks of militias did not, however, diminish organizational differences among the militias. Besides their conflicting ideologies and political projects, the militias also differed in the methods they used for carrying out the various tasks involved in building the economy in the zones under their control: acquiring resources, particularly external resources, exploiting the state apparatus as an economic tool and source of wealth, accumulating capital, cooperating with entrepreneurs and, finally, formulating explicitly or implicitly an ethos that would complete their political doctrine in the economic sphere. In order to analyze and understand the diversity of the militias’ economy-building strategies while taking into consideration the main two phases of their evolution (1975–82 and 1983–90), we can identify four ideal types corresponding to the four main militias dominating the Lebanese arena.

The Lebanese Forces: Between Business and Corporatism

From September 1976 until 1983 the economy of the Christian regions under the control of the Lebanese Forces (East Beirut, the North Metn, and Kisrwan) was characterized by the persistence of prewar economic structures and types of activity, and enjoyed a certain prosperity. Except for confrontations with the Syrian army in July and October 1978, the Lebanese Forces sustained a measure of order. The Christian zone enjoyed relative security and benefited from the relocation of a number of enterprises and from the arrival of Christians fleeing West Beirut.

The various military groups constituting the Lebanese Forces profited from land speculation. They also benefited from the wartime enrichment of various types of entrepreneurs such as carriers, importers, and middlemen, by levying protection taxes on economic activities and smuggled imports.^[40] Foreign support, which was for the most part military and to a lesser extent humanitarian, remained marginal.^[41] The transfer of activities abroad in Cyprus or Europe, on the other hand, as well as subsidies from the Christian Lebanese diaspora, helped to maintain a reasonable standard of living. The LF’s main resources came from the levying of external customs and taxes ($60 million per year), from the organization of transport and internal customs ($15 million), and from the activities of the fifth dock in Beirut’s port ($15–25 million). Together, these resources provided some $300 million annually.^[42]

In the 1980s, several factors, including the impoverishment of wage earners following the collapse of the Lebanese Pound, the arrival of more than one hundred thousand displaced persons in the Christian zone, and the intensification of the struggle for power, led the LF’s military leadership to tighten its control over the economy by multiplying parastatal institutions, increasing taxes, and establishing relief and social services, especially for the “displaced” population. The economic apparatus which the LF established under the name of Sunduq al-Watani was by far the most developed and up-to-date financial organization created by a militia. No civil activity, whether lawful or unlawful, could escape the control of the LF, which proved far more efficient than the state had been in collecting taxes. The scope of their takeover of the economy in the Christian regions is evidenced by the long list of enterprises belonging to the holding company they founded in 1989, and which encompassed virtually all fields of activity.^[43] The militia was thus showing signs of a move toward authoritarian corporatism.

The last period of the war, starting in 1988, was characterized by a sharp shift in the balance of power between armed forces and businessmen. Taking advantage of the militia’s lack of legal standing, economic actors emancipated themselves from military and territorial logics. Businessmen did this in part by exploiting intercommunal networks and playing on internal rivalries within the Christian regions.^[44] They also undertook to reprivatize and civilianize properties that the militia had registered in its name.^[45] While it was powerful, when it was holding a besieged population under its control, the Lebanese Forces had created exceptional and favorable conditions for accumulation that would allow enterprises and individuals to outlive the militia after the war. But its domination of economic activity nonetheless eroded as the war came to a close.

The Druze PSP: The Autonomous Principality

During the first phase of the war, the Druze regions of the Chouf, Aley, and the upper Metn, as well as the mixed bordering regions such as Iqlim el-Kharroub, were controlled by the PSP, Walid Jumblatt’s Druze militia. The PSP was at the time one of the many militias that made up the National Movement. While the militia claimed to abide by the law, it was making the most of its militant position, smuggling gas at Jiyeh, obtaining supplies of ammunition from the PLO and Syria, and receiving financial aid from Libya.

A radical change occurred in 1983. After the Israeli withdrawal and the defeat of the LF in the Chouf, the PSP discarded the trappings of legality—notwithstanding Walid Jumblatt’s participation in the national conferences of Geneva and Lausanne and his continuous presence as a cabinet minister in Lebanese governments. The militia established the “Mountain administration,” the PSP’s public service operation, which gave Jumblatt and a few of his close associates control over the region’s main economic activities: ports, cement works, a power station, and the maintenance of public infrastructure. The economic logic of the PSP was thus clearly more predatory than productive. Its main resources came from taxes levied at the domestic customs houses of Jiyeh, Bater, and Monteverde. Civil servants, while still on the payroll of the state, fell under the authority of the PSP. The militia was thus simultaneously complementing and substituting for the state, with the result that the region emerged from the war as the best controlled and the best kept in the country. With a civil budget of approximately $200 million, the Mountain administration was a privileged instrument of communal control.^[46]

In some respects, the Mountain administration exhibited an apparent historic continuity with the Druze principality of the seventeenth century. Indeed, Jumblatt controlled relations between the Druze community and other Lebanese communities and shared with the leaders of ’Amal the monopoly on hydrocarbon products importation and distribution in the south through the oil company COGECO. On a personal level, Walid Jumblatt symbolized the symbiosis of the charismatic leader, the warlord, and the businessman exercising personal control over a clientalist form of redistribution. After the war he retained his role, despite the resumption in Druze areas of a state of legality, and his mediation remained decisive in every economic and political decision concerning the Chouf. As minister of displaced populations in Rafiq Hariri’s government (1992–98), he handled a budget of several hundred million dollars, more than two-thirds of which came from foreign aid. This position greatly facilitated his control over the Druze.

’Amal, the State, and Diaspora Networks

The budget of ’Amal, the largest Shi‘ite militia, was less than the PSP’s and only half that of the LF, even though the territories and population under its control were much greater (in 1984 ’Amal’s leader claimed to have one million Shi‘ite followers).^[47] ’Amal was, moreover, a loose organization built upon a variety of local self-defense groups controlling small territories such as villages or individual streets in the southern suburbs of Beirut as well as in southern Lebanon. Yet, the weakness of ’Amal’s chain of command and military organization does not in and of itself account for the type of economy that was developed in the areas it controlled. Two other factors must be considered. The first is that since the 1950s and thus long before the war, the Shi‘ite population of Lebanon had been deeply concerned about securing its position in the state bureaucracy and economy. This reinforced the militia’s capacity to infiltrate the bureaucracy and public services, and to appropriate the revenues from the Zahrani refinery or the customs of Khaldeh airport. Its political power enabled the militia to keep the revenues it derived from the state and even to increase them, in spite of its open insubordination—Shi‘ite soldiers of the Sixth Brigade, for example, continued to be paid by the government even after they rebelled in 1984. Linking the government and the militia, Nabih Berry, minister of the southern region after 1980, and Mohammed Beydoun, president of the Council for the South, ordered public (and even private) infrastructure works in the regions dominated by ’Amal, at the expense of the state. They also supervised the distribution of public funds to displaced Shi‘ites and to victims of Israeli attacks. Beside facilitating the misappropriation of public funds, its links to the state enabled ’Amal to place a large number of its followers in the regular armed forces and, following the demobilization of April-June 1991, in the civil service.^[48]

The second critical factor is that ’Amal collaborated with networks of diaspora Shi‘ite investors eager to bring prosperity to their villages of origin in southern Lebanon, and just as eager to shield themselves from political tensions in their countries of emigration, particularly in West Africa. Responding to such concerns, ’Amal took over the role formerly performed by the traditional Shi‘ite bourgeoisie of Beirut, such as the Beydouns and the ‘Awdis, of capturing diaspora investment flows. These included real estate investments at Ras Beirut and Rue Verdun as well the industrial investments of the newly recommunalized bourgeoisie that was collaborating with Iraqi Shi‘ite or Syrian entrepreneurs such as Ahmad Shalabi, who controlled Petra Bank in Amman, and Sa’ib Nahhas, a Syrian representative of Peugeot and Volvo and the owner of a luxury hotel chain. The most visible representative of these “African Shi‘ite” associates of ’Amal was the Sierra Leone billionaire Jamil Sa‘id, a rice and diamond wholesaler who mined sand off the beaches of Tyr and sold gasoline smuggled from Zahrani throughout all of southern Lebanon.^[49]

After the war, however, the economic power of ’Amal eroded as a result of three factors. First, senior party officers neglected the movement as they became more interested in their positions within the state: Berry became speaker of the Lebanese parliament; Beydoun was made minister, and so on. Second, new, private Shi‘ite banks took over from ’Amal the ability to capture the capital flows originating within the Shi‘ite diaspora. Last, and perhaps most significant, Hizballah supplanted ’Amal within the main Shi‘ite stronghold, namely, the southern suburbs of Beirut.

Hizballah and the Islamic Welfare State

Besides its leading role in the resistance effort against Israeli occupation in the south, and the clever adaptation of its religious doctrine to popular culture in the regions under its control, Hizballah owed the rapid growth of its legitimacy within Shi‘ite areas to the expansion of its charitable, medical, and educational activities. Unlike ’Amal, whose strategy rested on its relationship to the state, Hizballah undertook to distance itself from the state as a way to enhance both its organizational autonomy and its popular legitimacy as an independent alternative to ’Amal. To solidify its popular appeal, Hizballah established local branches of numerous Iranian foundations created during the Iran-Iraq War to provide aid to various groups of the injured (orphans and the wounded) and for reconstruction, or for the support of social services such as the Imam al-‘Uzma hospital and many professional schools founded after 1987 in deprived areas such as the Beka‘a and Beirut’s southern suburbs. Known for relative integrity of its leaders, and for paying its fighters salaries that were three times higher than those of other militias, Hizballah had little difficulty establishing its hegemony in a region where the state had been totally absent since 1983.

With what resources did Hizballah operate? Various Iranian subsidies, even if they diminished in the postrevolution period following Khomeini’s death, constituted a decisive factor of Hizballah’s influence. One should not underestimate either the party’s participation in the development of poppy farming in the Hermel and Baalbek, or in the preparation and the marketing of drugs in a region where Hizballah became the dominant force, with the full knowledge and agreement of the Syrian army. In addition, the party was locked in a sharp struggle with Shaykh Fadhlallah and his important Mabarrât Foundation, as well as with the Shi‘ite Higher Council, directed by Shaykh Chams ed-Din, to collect and secure control over the money produced as a result of zakât and khoms—the alms that hundreds of thousands of Shi‘ite believers are obligated to give. The diaspora, in particular, was the target of rival appeals from missionaries dispatched from Beirut by these three competing religious authorities.

Born in adversity and preoccupied with armed struggle, Hizballah had to deal with an economy of destitution and assistance during the war. Yet the party demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt to the challenges of the post-Ta‘if period. To begin with, Hizballah was perceived as outdoing the government in various operations of popular assistance in Shi‘ite areas. These included a dangerous mountain rescue during a snowstorm in the spring of 1992, rapid reconstruction following the shellings that accompanied Israel’s July 1993 operation, and the distribution of water to the entire southern suburbs of Beirut. With twelve members elected in the 1992 parliamentary elections, the party asserted itself as Rafiq Hariri’s unavoidable interlocutor in the development and execution of the Elyssar project in 1995, whose goal was to rehabilitate the southern suburbs. Although Hizballah continued to hesitate between the tempting strategy of deepening its autonomous control over the areas it dominated, on the one hand, and a strategy of collaboration that could bring it recognition at the highest level, on the other, many of Hizballah’s leaders chose the latter approach. In this instance too, however, collaboration often took an economic form that secured significant benefits for the participants. Hizballah leaders established engineering design and private construction firms, for example, some of which became involved in shady real estate deals in a suburb of Beirut that was expected to become an area of urban renewal and tourism. The party of God demonstrated, if proof was at all necessary, that in Lebanon the conversion of a fundamentalist militia member into an ultraliberal businessman was not merely a hypothetical possibility.^[50]

Entering the Postwar Economy

This typology, though perhaps overly rigid in the distinctions it draws between modes of militia operations, can nonetheless serve as a starting point for identifying the trajectories of actors irrespective of their communal differences, and for disentangling the shifting patterns of economic activities that rose and fell under both the pressure and the protection of various militias. In short, it can help to understand the functioning of a system restructured by a culture of war in an ultraliberal economic environment.

In the years following the war, continuity was secured by the presence on the economic scene of firms that had been launched through the illegal accumulation of capital. Far from being marginalized when their militia partners were disarmed or even, in some cases, ostracized, wartime entrepreneurs had no difficulty finding new protectors among senior Syrian officers stationed in Lebanon. Nor was it difficult for them to share in the joint public-private consortium headed by Rafiq Hariri. Even those who voiced their hostility toward the Second Republic and the pervasive presence of armed Syrian forces in Lebanon took part in the speculative transactions that accompanied “reconstruction” by purchasing Solidere shares and Lebanese Eurobonds. Despite the amnesty law’s provisions regarding economic and financial offenses committed during the war, no action was taken against the perpetrators because the needs of “reconstruction” were great and diaspora resources, together with international aid, were far from sufficient to meet them. While the Lebanese political system was restored with few modifications and the Second Republic inherited many of the flaws of the First, the war forced open financial and economic domains to new actors and new practices.^[51] The relationship between political and economic arenas also underwent a significant shift. Before the war, that relationship was patrimonial and characterized by political patrons presiding over economic redistribution. After the war, the practices of the militias enabled the financiers and the big businessmen to establish themselves as protectors and sponsors of a weak state and a declining public sector.

What was the place of militia members themselves in the postwar Lebanese scene? They had to convert their military power into economic power by taking advantage of the demobilization and amnesty laws. The compromise solution reached in Ta‘if allowed them to make a transition toward full participation in the political system. Having become ministers, parliamentarians, and top-ranked civil servants, they established their influence over economic matters in general and over the vast project of national reconstruction in particular. Their control over public and private foreign aid gave them exceptional leverage to broaden their clientele and thus to renew their legitimacy. Existing specialized agencies like the Reconstruction and Development Council, the Fund of the Displaced, and the Council of the South provided new sources of redistribution and patronage for former militia leaders.

The most tangible effect of the militias’ economic practices is precisely to have reduced the notion of public good and to have crippled the legal and financial instruments of a state whose autonomy had already been curtailed by ultraliberalism. After the war, one-third of the population lived below the poverty line as a direct consequence of wartime destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure and the ongoing currency crisis.^[52] In spite of this, the government refused to tax financial profits, terminated the remaining subsidies on essential commodities (such as flour) in July of 1995, and gave up the state’s monopoly in strategic sectors, such as communications and the importation of petroleum products. Since the government did not consider itself accountable to citizens and lacked political independence, it was nothing more than the representative of financial interests and militias who now had an opportunity to pursue their military objectives by other economic means. This is how Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, who participated in the war by financing successively or simultaneously each of the protagonists, became the symbolic figure of the postwar private entrepreneur who took over from the militia leaders and contributed to the marginalization of the state while financing huge reconstruction works, including a national telephone grid, road network, electric power grid, and the rebuilding of Beirut’s city center, in which he was the most important investor.

To conclude, while the civil conflict in Lebanon did not generate a war economy in the classical sense of the word, it did facilitate the birth and development of certain specific characteristics that have not disappeared with the return of peace—far from it. The new role played by the former militia leaders and the importance of militia resources (such as physical violence and illegal fortunes) in the postwar political and economic reconstruction showed that the civil war was not a parenthesis but contributed to the shaping of lasting new social activities and identities.

Moreover, the endurance of militia activities after the war found legitimacy and support in the globalization process and the existence of a “bifurcated” world, to quote James Rosenau. First, a variety of nonstate actors operating along transnational networks dominated the reconstruction economy. According to a postmodern logic, many of their activities and hierarchies remained out of state control and regulation policies.

Second, the Lebanese administration had to take into account the segmentation of the national territory by the militia powers during the war. While the decentralization provided by the Ta‘if Accord intended to take this reality into account and contribute to restoring local security and confidence in public services, it could hardly prevent the deepening of communal specificities and regional inequalities.

Finally, beyond the dramatic years of 1975–90, the Lebanese civil war has thus to be considered in light of the modern history of the Near East. For many of the logics at work during the war both revealed and exacerbated the weaknesses of the Lebanese state.

Notes