Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer’s Middle East Briefing to the Reform Rabbis Convention

Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer, spoke the Reform Rabbis annual convention CCAR Monday morning about recent developments in the Middle East. Ambassador Kurtzer is a former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt and Israel, currently at Princeton University.

Here are my notes on what he said:

He began: “About 8 months ago the collective hard drive of all middle east experts crashed.”

1. What is happening or has happened and why now?
Facebook and Twitter did not create this revolution. The simmering cauldron of discontent has been present for many years and derives from a number of fundamental structural flaws that are endemic to Arab society.
Such as resistance to globalization (Thomas Freedman: Lexus and the Olive Tree). The Arab society was producing nothing of use to the rest of the world other than energy. The Middle East was not trading with their neighbors. They were not even producing the final end products of oil and gas.

Second problem was that the wealth earned from these energies were not being recycled in to Arab society. But rather put in sovereign wealth funds in the west.

Third lack of democratization. They tried to follow the China Model. Improve the economics of a society but keep the political/social system locked down. But the problem is that it only works in China and in societies that are industrious. There are no Middle Eastern counties outside of Israel where the people are entirely free to pursue their interests. This resistance to democratization is further evidenced by a deficit in women’s rights and freedoms and a deficit in knowledge/education.
Further there is the problem of terrorism. Not all Muslims are terrorists but too many terrorists are Muslim and Arab societies have ignored this fact for far too long.

Lastly, there are not enough jobs to go around in the Arab world. The unemployed have been easy pray for religious fundamentalists who can provide money for patronage.

2. What are the differences among the revolutions in these Middle Eastern countries?
The only two that seem to have a chance to succeed are Tunisia and Egypt. Even in those and certainly in the others it is not always a case of good versus evil. In Lybia the rebel fighters are now some of the same people that fought against the US in Iraq.

3. Implications for the US?
Once the leader that US Aid Dollars propped up leaves the US gets no credit for that investment. Our dollars were our influence. Egypt in particular is a highly nationalistic revolution. They don’t want to hear from us, and so they don’t want our dollars. The one place the US might have something to do is in the Middle East peace process. Even though it is hard and the possiblility of success now is very slight, the failure to work on it will come back to bite the US. The Arabs will eventually look to their Palestinian brothers and wonder why the US has not done more for them and then the US will become the focus of the problem. WikiLeaks has shown that there is a Palestinian partner in Mahmud Abbas – he made big offers through 2008. But Israel and the US did not move on those. We know them to be MUCH closer than it appears – so why not solve that problem.

4. Implications for Israel?
Don’t trust experts. As we read about the upheavals in the Arab world think about them in highly differentiated ways. Just because diplomacy is hard no reason not to pursue it.