The Middle East Crisis Factory
By Iyad El-Baghdadi and Ahmed Gatnash
Hurst & Company, 2021
1967 was the year of the Naksa (failure), when Israel occupied the Palestinian territories in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the process of defeating its Arab adversaries in the Six Day War. Since then, the Middle East has never strayed from the American radar of attentiveness, but mostly situationally - when a war breaks out, terrorists strike or oil prices rise - and in the context of how it impacts the United States. This form of myopia baked in a set of outsiders’ assumptions about the region, which activist authors Iyad El-Baghdadi and Ahmed Gatnash seek to dispel in “The Middle East Crisis Factory,” a provocative blend of optimistic idealism tempered by sobering realism that seeks to educate outsiders on what’s possible in the region while reminding them of how difficult it will be to achieve it.
The authors begin by listing a number of western oversimplifications about the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) that have shaped/warped its policies over the years, e.g. Islam is the problem or MENA is not ready for democracy, leaving a choice between tyranny and theocratic extremism. El-Baghdadi and Gatnash then remind the reader of what MENA once was, a vibrant, diverse, tolerant society filled with polymaths, innovators in the sciences, engineering, arts and philosophy (22). Over time a series of events – Crusades, Black Death, rise of the Ottoman Empire, European colonialism and modern nation-statism – replaced the broad society with a collection of repressive autocracies featuring governments who offered their people a series of quid pro quos: in exchange for providing something tangible – liberation from colonial rule, jobs and education, protection from terrorists – the governments asked for political subservience, i.e. “just shut up” (32).
In the 21st century there developed a “vicious triangle” of overlapping interests among tyrants, terrorists and foreign nations that maintained the status quo and worked in tandem to hold back the MENA societies. The tyrants fought against terror groups with aid from foreign nations, which too easily equated anything Islamic with terrorism and were generally unmoved by physical and political collateral damage to the general MENA populations. In the midst of all this came the 2010-1011 Arab Spring, a shining moment of possibility when youthful members of MENA societies, buttressed by education and enhanced access to outside information, rose up against their governments and enjoyed some short term successes, like ridding Egypt of Hosni Mubarak.
The successes of the Arab spring proved to be short lived, but the authors are hopeful that under the right conditions – ability to travel, education, entrepreneurship, internet access – “the pendulum will once again swing back” to the side of the societal activists (188). One has to celebrate this profound sense of idealism, but El-Baghdadi and Gatnash were also well aware of the difficulties that lay ahead - symbolized in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi regime praised as reformist by the New York Times (122). Sadly, shifting global attitudes and events since 2021 have likely made the path even harder, and the reader is left with the likelihood that “The Middle East Crisis Factory’s” legacy may be one of unfulfilled promise.