Why A Gaza Ceasefire Is So Difficult
July 16, 2014 § 1 Comment
There was a strong expectation in Israel yesterday once the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire terms were announced that Hamas was going to accept the deal. Even after Hamas rejected the terms and launched 80 more rockets at Israel yesterday morning, some prominent voices, such as former Israel national security adviser Giora Eiland, were predicting that Hamas would ultimately accept the deal today. While anything may still happen, it is highly unlikely given Hamas’s vociferous objections to terms that are essentially a replica of the 2012 ceasefire agreement and Hamas’s release of its own offer this morning, which calls for an end to the Gaza blockade, the release of any prisoners swept up over the last month who had been released in the Gilad Shalit deal in 2011, building an airport and seaport in Gaza, expansion of the Gaza fishing zone, and the opening of all crossings into Gaza, including the Refah crossing into Egypt. Like the Egyptian deal was to Hamas, these terms are unpalatable to Israel and will not be accepted. Unlike in 2012, when a ceasefire was brokered relatively easily and put an end to hostilities, this time around things are proving to be far more difficult, and it isn’t just a matter of Israel and Hamas meeting halfway.
For starters, there are no good brokers for a truce. The problems with Egypt are well-known; Sisi and the Egyptian government want to isolate Hamas, and Hamas does not trust Sisi any more than they trust Bibi Netanyahu. Egypt’s ceasefire deal was negotiated without any Hamas input or even prior notification to Hamas before the terms were made public, and was likely more of an effort on Egypt’s part to isolate and weaken Hamas even further by having the entire Arab League and Western countries line up behind a deal that Hamas was almost certainly going to reject rather than a true effort at brokering an end to fighting. At this point, it is difficult to envision a situation in which Egypt plays a role in mediating between the two sides. The U.S. cannot do it alone given that it has no ties to Hamas, and that leaves aside the reporting in Haaretz that Israel specifically asked Kerry to stay out of it to avoid the impression that the U.S. was pressuring Israel and thus granting Hamas a win. I wrote last week about the potential for Turkey and Qatar to step in so no need to rehash the variables there – and indeed Mahmoud Abbas and Meshal are meeting with President Gül and Prime Minister Erdoğan in Turkey on Friday – but both countries are deeply flawed due to their lack of successful experience in wading into Israeli-Palestinian fights, and Israel for good reason does not exactly trust either of them (particularly after Erdoğan yesterday compared Habayit Hayehudi MK Ayelet Shaked to Hitler).
Second, Hamas is an organization fractured between the Gaza leadership and the international leadership based in Qatar, and so it is unclear what it actually wants and who has the authority to make a deal. Signs point to Khaled Meshal following the military leaders right now than the other way around, and the military guys in Gaza appear to be averse to ending the fighting anytime soon. The atmosphere is very different now than it was in 2012, and while I will for the second time in a week emphasize that internal Palestinian politics are not my expertise, I have the sense that Meshal will be subject to the Gaza leadership’s veto on any deal he is involved in brokering. There is also the complicating factor of Gazans wanting a ceasefire and whether this will create any pressure on Hamas’s Gaza wing to at some point acquiesce.
Next, there is the fact that there is enormous political pressure on Bibi coming from his right flank to not accept any ceasefire – even one, like yesterday’s proposal, that is almost entirely on Israel’s terms – and to instead send the already-mobilized ground forces into Gaza. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman yesterday gave a press conference during which he advocated the IDF invading and retaking Gaza, and after Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon – who has long been a thorn in Netanyahu’s side within Likud – trashed Netanyahu for supporting the Egyptian ceasefire proposal, Netanyahu immediately fired him from his ministerial post. The ostensible reason was that it is unacceptable for a deputy defense minister to so harshly criticize the government’s defense policy in the midst of a war, but Netanyahu has been looking for ways to cut Danon down to size for awhile, and so he seized the opportunity once it presented itself. The larger point here is that Netanyahu has been isolated within his own party for some time as it moves further and further to the right, and his instinctual conservative behavior when it comes to sending troops into battle is not lauded by Likud members but is instead distrusted and viewed as weakness. I don’t think that Bibi wants to get involved in a ground war in Gaza, which entails lots of messy fighting, larger casualty numbers on both sides, guaranteed international opprobrium, and which last time led to the Goldstone Report following Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9. Nevertheless, the longer that rockets come flying from Gaza and the longer ground troops sit idly by waiting for orders, the more the rightwing is going to yell and howl about the need to take stronger military action rather than accepting a ceasefire deal that will only guarantee a few years of quiet at best.
There is also the factor of international support, and each side’s delusions about where it will lie as this drags further on. Israel made it very clear in the aftermath of the Hamas rejection of the Egyptian ceasefire that it views Hamas’s refusal to lay down arms as granting legitimacy to an eventual Israeli ground invasion, and the Israeli government believes that much of the world agrees with this position. I find it hard to believe that this logic will hold up in the face of mounting Palestinian deaths and a continued lopsided body count, even if the one-sided casualty numbers need to be viewed in the context of Hamas’s failure at killing Israelis not being for a lack of trying. It is also generally the case that world opinion does not work in Israel’s favor, and I do not think that structural feature is going to change as Operation Protective Edge continues. On Hamas’s side, it believes that world opinion will turn against Israel as things progress, which is in my view correct, and that the Israeli public will eventually get fed up and pressure Netanyahu to stop fighting, which in my view is comically incorrect. Furthermore, world opinion and international support are two different things, and at the moment Israel does not lack for support. In fact, yesterday Congress approved more funding for Iron Dome, and Hamas underestimates how much support in 2012 was driven by Arab countries that have since abandoned Hamas wholesale.
Finally, there is the balancing act that Israel is trying to play with the eventual outcome regarding Hamas itself. Israel’s goals are delicately balanced between weakening Hamas and taking out its capabilities to launch long-range missiles at Israeli cities while still keeping Hamas alive and viable to the point of it maintaining its rule over Gaza. Israel recognizes that while Hamas used to look like the most radical group in the neighborhood when compared to Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, Hamas now routinely gets pressured from Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other even scarier jihadi groups. That basic fact is what led Hamas to escalate things in the first place, as it has its own internal politics with which to contend. The Israeli government knows that until last week, Hamas has largely been trying to keep rockets from being launched out of Gaza rather than themselves doing the launching since the 2012 ceasefire, and it also knows that it is a pipe dream to hope for the PA to regain control of Gaza. Israel needs Hamas to run Gaza and keep it from spiraling even further out of control, so any ceasefire agreement that Israel signs will have to keep Hamas in power but assure Israel that Hamas’s military capabilities remain degraded following the fighting.
The upshot of all this is that Gaza in 2014 is a lot more complicated than Gaza in 2012, and assuming that the U.S. or Egypt can just swoop in and put an end to things when both sides have had enough is naive. There is lots of politics, both international and domestic, involved here, and while I still hold out hope of some combination of the U.S. and Turkey/Qatar being able to bridge the various gaps, the problem is that the gaps look more like chasms.
Will Turkey Have Any Role In Brokering A Gaza Ceasefire?
July 10, 2014 § 5 Comments
As Hamas continues firing rockets (and allowing other groups to fire rockets) at Israel from Gaza, and Israel responds with airstrikes, people are beginning to wonder how this round of fighting will end. During Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, a ceasefire was brokered with U.S. and Egyptian intervention – and we can debate all day about how much Mohamed Morsi himself had to do with that, although my sense is that his role was overstated – but this time around such intervention does not seem to be coming. The U.S. does not want to put pressure on Israel to stand down while rockets are flying against civilian targets, including heretofore untargeted locations such as Jerusalem, Ben Gurion Airport, and the nuclear reactor in Dimona, and it also does not want to be seen as bailing Hamas out of its self-made mess after furious criticism that U.S. backing of the PA-Hamas unity deal strengthened the terrorist group. On the Egyptian side, the government has been doing all it can to squeeze Hamas, which is unsurprising given the prevalent feelings about the Muslim Brotherhood, and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has largely kept quiet on the subject of Israeli airstrikes and has sealed the border to prevent Hamas members from escaping into Egypt.
There is increasing chatter that Hamas is looking for a way out of its miscalculated escalation – and yes, every available shred of evidence indicates that this was initially escalated by Hamas and not Israel – and while internal Palestinian politics is not my expertise so I am reluctant to go too far down this analytical path, I am not so convinced that Hamas does indeed want a way out just yet. Hamas’s unpopularity and economic isolation is what forced it into the unity agreement with the Palestinian Authority in the first place, and one sure way to bolster its standing is by reasserting its “resistance” bona fides. Unless Israel is willing to undergo a sustained ground invasion and reoccupation of Gaza, Hamas’s military domination there vis a vis other Palestinian armed groups is not going to be threatened, and continuing to fire rockets at Israel ensures its political future. But let’s concede that whether it is now or later on down the road, at some point both sides will be looking for a way to end the fighting. With the U.S. having no influence with Hamas and Egypt seemingly uninterested, who is left to step in?
The only two plausible parties are Turkey and Qatar, whose motives and standing are similar. Both Qatar and Turkey have spent years either openly or tacitly backing Hamas at the expense of the PA, and they are also the only two countries left – not including Iran – that are still providing support and cover to Hamas now that Egypt and Syria are out of Hamas’s corner. Both Qatar and Turkey have also seen their foreign policies, which seemed so ascendant a couple of short years ago, crash and burn and are looking for a win anyway they can get it. Due to its own missteps, Turkey has found itself mired in the breakdown of the Arab Spring and particularly the fallout from the Syrian civil war, and Qatar’s support of Islamist groups around the region led to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates all withdrawing their ambassadors from Doha in March as a protest against Qatari meddling in their internal affairs, i.e. supporting various Muslim Brotherhood groups. If either Turkey or Qatar can step in as a mediator and use its influence with Hamas to get a ceasefire deal, it will demonstrate their regional value and show that they can put their foreign policy to productive use. It will also in some measure rehabilitate both in the eyes of the other Sunni governments in the region, who view Turkey to a lesser extent and Qatar to a greater extent with increasing suspicion.
Prime Minister Erdoğan has been relatively quiet on Gaza so far given his track record, although I should note that when I pointed this same dynamic out in 2012, it immediately backfired on me in a spectacular way. So this time I won’t make any hard predictions about Erdoğan keeping his mouth shut, and in fact I expect him to be more vociferous at some point given the presidential election next month. Nevertheless, I am sure that Turkey would like to play a role this time in mediating some kind of agreement, and with the dearth of other candidates who have working relationships with both Israel and Hamas, this time it is actually a possibility. Turkey wants to cooperate with Israel on Mediterranean energy issues, has still been waiting for Israel to sign a reconciliation agreement, and also wants to get back into the good graces of the U.S. Domestic politics are always at the forefront in Ankara and Erdoğan has the temperament of a ticking time bomb, so you can cue the nasty rhetoric at some point, but the fact remains that Turkey hates the fact that nobody outside of its own Foreign Ministry, SETA, and the staff of Daily Sabah care about anything the government says on foreign policy these days, and it is desperate to reclaim some regional role. All of these factors point to a small possibility of a U.S.-Turkey initiative at a ceasefire when both sides are ready. Let’s just hope that Erdoğan, Davutoğlu, and the rest of the AKP crew can keep their feelings about Israel enough in check to maintain some shred of credibility with Jerusalem as a potential go-between.
Why Does Anyone Care What Mahmoud Abbas Thinks About The Holocaust?
April 28, 2014 § 4 Comments
Today is Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day fraught with the worst types of historical memory for many Jews around the world. In a reversal of Abba Eban’s famous witticism about the Palestinians never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has seized the opportunity presented by the day to dub the Holocaust the most heinous crime in modern history, which is significant given his extensive history of Holocaust denial, most prominently in his doctoral dissertation. In the past, Abbas has written that fewer than one million Jews were killed by the Nazis and that the Holocaust was enabled by the Zionists, who plotted with the Nazis to exterminate European Jewry in order to encourage Jewish immigration to Palestine. The New York Times portrays Abbas’s new statement as a significant shift in his thinking, while Yair Rosenberg over at Tablet argues that Abbas has not actually said anything to indicate that his views have changed, as Abbas can simultaneously believe that the Holocaust is the most heinous crime in modern history and that Zionist Jews were themselves responsible for it.
Whatever one’s views are of Abbas’s latest statement and whether it is indeed an evolution or simply artful obfuscation, the big takeaway is that Abbas’s take on the Holocaust is being widely interpreted through the prism of the peace process. For optimists – in what can only be termed as the soft bigotry of low expectations – Abbas’s willingness to condemn the Holocaust is a signal that he is a true partner for peace. For pessimists – in what can only be termed as shifting the goalposts – Abbas’s condemnation of the Holocaust no longer matters because he has agreed to a reconciliation deal with Hamas, which certainly does not recognize or acknowledge the singular evil of the Holocaust. Bibi Netanyahu, for instance, yesterday explicitly used Abbas’s pact with Hamas to negate his Holocaust declaration, and dismissed the entire thing as a public relations stunt.
I myself fall somewhere in the middle here. On the one hand, I welcome any reversal – no matter how illusory, qualified, or legalistic – of previously stated odious views about the scope of the Holocaust and am not willing to be curtly dismissive just because of something else that Abbas has done. On the other hand, let’s not act as if this makes Abbas some great humanitarian or a candidate to be the next executive director of Yad Vashem. People can, and will, debate this until they have exhausted themselves, but the real question for me is, why does it matter? Who cares what Abbas thinks about the Holocaust? What practical effect does it have on anything?
Let’s assume Abbas actually has the willingness and capacity to eventually come to a fair deal with Israel. I don’t see how his views on the Holocaust affect that in any way. Those views don’t make him any more likely to agree to conditions that he views as unfair, or to endanger his own political situation and agree to a fair but unpopular deal. If he is willing to come to an agreement, then quite frankly I don’t care if he considers Mein Kampf to be light bedtime reading. Conversely, let’s assume that Abbas does not have the willingness and capacity to eventually come to a fair deal with Israel. Do his new acceptable views on the Holocaust somehow make up for the fact that he is not a true negotiating partner? Israelis do not need Abbas to be a moral leader or a paragon of virtue; they only need him to negotiate an agreement that is acceptable to them and one whose details he can execute. His importance for Israelis or Jews around the world is not as a moral philosopher or historian, but as a political leader, and all that should matter is his capacity for politics and not his personal views. It is a delusion to see Abbas’s views on the Holocaust as a stand-in for his propensity to make a deal; there are plenty of data points suggesting that he will and plenty that he won’t, but this is not one of them.
In many ways, I view this as an unhelpful distraction similar to the debate over whether the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. If the Palestinians come to an agreement with Israel that both sides can live with and that makes a final determination on borders, security, Jerusalem, and refugees, then it doesn’t matter whether the Palestinians call Israel a Jewish state or not. Israel is a Jewish state and will remain so in the aftermath of any deal agreed to by any Israeli government, and so the official opinions of the Palestinian Authority, Palestine Liberation Organization, and average Palestinians have no bearing on the equation. All that matters in this case are the actual facts, and what is important is the world as it is rather than the world as we want it to be. Would it be nice if the Palestinians recognized an obviously Jewish state for what it is? Sure. Would it be nice if the Palestinian president acknowledged a terribly calamitous atrocity for what is is? Of course. Do either of these things matter in the context of a lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Not a whit. On this Yom Hashoah, let’s focus on things that matter rather than those that don’t.
Tom Friedman Dashes Any Hopes I Had For A Peace Deal
February 4, 2014 § 8 Comments
As regular readers know (although since I have been so neglectful about blogging, I’m not sure I can legitimately claim to have any regular readers anymore), I am never optimistic that a successful Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is on the horizon. For some reasons why not, you can read this or this or this or this. The two sides are way too far apart on core issues, don’t even necessarily agree about what the most important core issues are, make demands that the other side will not meet, and feel that they have better options available to them, not to mention the fact that the negotiations are designed to rectify the problems of 1967 when in reality the issue is 1948. There is no sense of urgency and the two sides are completely talking past each other. Despite all of this, the reports from the Kerry camp have been consistently optimistic, the team led by Martin Indyk has been beefing up staff, and it actually seems like maybe both sides will accept a framework agreement. So despite my conviction that none of this will lead to anything permanent or concrete, maybe it all demonstrates that there is some light at the end of a very far tunnel.
And then I read Tom Friedman’s column this week in the New York Times, and I am now even more pessimistic than before. Entitled “Abbas’s NATO Proposal,” it turns on the idea that NATO will have to keep troops in the West Bank indefinitely in order to have the security arrangements for a peace deal fulfilled. In Abbas’s words, NATO troops “can stay to reassure the Israelis, and to protect us. We will be demilitarized. … Do you think we have any illusion that we can have any security if the Israelis do not feel they have security?” Friedman argues that this is a suggestion worthy of consideration because it meets Israeli security needs and meets Palestinians needs to not have an Israeli military presence in the West Bank after an initial five year period, and presumably only NATO can bridge this gap.
It all sounds very nice, but the fact that Abbas is pushing it says to me that he is either fundamentally unserious or knows just how desperate the situation is, and neither of those possibilities is encouraging. None of the three constituencies involved in this scenario would ever actually accept the parameters as Friedman lays them out. Start with the Palestinians, for whom it would be a hard sell having some security force confined to the Jordan Valley, and then think about the idea of having foreign troops spread throughout an entire Palestinian state forever. It is one thing to have foreign troops confined to a very distinct area, as is the case with American troops in South Korea, and quite another to have them literally anywhere and everywhere. I find it hard to believe that Abbas speaks for his own constituency in opening up this possibility, let alone for groups like Hamas that don’t accept his authority at all. The loss of sovereignty that comes with a demilitarized state is a hard enough obstacle to overcome, and throwing this additional factor on top blows the whole thing up. Troops for a finite number of years, or confined to a specific location, or with limited authority; these are all things that are potentially workable from the perspective of what the Palestinian side might reasonably accept. What Abbas suggests is not, plain and simple, and it makes me wonder whether he has any credibility left on his own side.
Next come the Israelis, who as Abbas relayed via Friedman do not want to have any third party overseeing their own security, and rightly so. UN troops based in Sinai literally cleared out of the way in 1967 when Nasser ordered them out in preparation for a strike against Israel (a strike that the Israelis preempted with the Six Day War), and the UN force in Lebanon hasn’t exactly been effective at preventing Hizballah from shooting rockets across the border, abducting soldiers, or conducting sniper attacks. That Friedman brings these examples up as something that Israel has tolerated before is completely removed from the reality of what Israel will accept when it comes to territory right on Tel Aviv’s doorstep. In both of these instances, foreign forces meant to in some measure safeguard Israeli security have been complete and unmitigated failures. Furthermore, Friedman is talking about NATO troops, and in case you haven’t been paying attention, Israel and various European NATO countries aren’t always on the best of terms. Israel is convinced that Europe is out to get it and that Europeans side with the Palestinians over the Israelis in every instance – convictions, by the way, that are not entirely unrooted in fact – and accepting American troops as guarantors of Israeli security would maybe, maybe eventually be ok with the Israelis. But NATO troops as the first line of defense against Palestinian rockets? I find it very hard to see an Israeli government that can be elected in the current climate ever acceding to that condition.
Finally comes NATO itself. Think about the reaction the vast majority of Americans have right now to sending U.S. troops to another location overseas in order to fight a war or safeguard vital American interests. Then think about the reaction people will have to sending U.S. troops to police a political and territorial dispute in which we are not involved in any way. Then realize that nearly every other NATO country is even more reticent than we are to put troops into harm’s way, particularly when it will involve those troops being stationed in a Muslim-majority country. I could keep going, but it seems unnecessary at this point. No elected politician will be able to justify any type of real commitment to such an operation, and quite frankly, why would they even if they could get away with it politically? I care about Israeli-Palestinian peace as much as anyone, but this is not something that NATO countries will be eagerly signing up for, not to mention that it is well, well beyond NATO’s mandate. Is Abbas or Friedman suggesting that a NATO country is at risk, necessitating placing NATO troops inside the West Bank? Or that NATO has somehow evolved into an organization that is willing to send its resources anywhere in the world for the sake of peace?
The bottom line is that if this proposal is what a peace agreement will hinge upon, you can forget seeing anything resembling a permanent agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians for decades. I hope Abbas has something else up his sleeve.
The Harming Power Of Elections
July 3, 2013 § 10 Comments
We here in the U.S. tend to fetishize elections. For many people, elections and democracy are synonymous with each other, and there is a tendency – particularly among the non-political scientist set – to assume that any country that holds free elections must be democratic. This mindset has been out in full force over the past decade as genuine elections have become more common in the Arab world. When Iraq held its first free elections after the American-led ouster of Saddam Hussein, supporters of the Iraq War (and in the interests of full disclosure, I was firmly in that group) rushed to dub the war a success because Iraq was now deemed to be a democracy. Time and again we are reminded that Hamas is the legitimate government in Gaza because it was democratically elected (never mind that those elections happened in 2006 and have not been repeated since). When Egypt elected Mohamed Morsi a year ago, Egypt was immediately declared a new or emerging democracy by dint of those elections. For many people, elections are what matter to the exclusion of all else.
For a long time, this view of elections being the dividing line between democracies and non-democracies held sway in political science as well for the simple fact that non-democratic regimes did not bother to conduct elections. When Juan Linz wrote his groundbreaking and still seminal work on non-democratic regimes in the 1970s, he did not even consider that totalitarian and authoritarian regimes would hold elections; trying to distinguish free and fair elections from illegitimate elections did not factor into his analysis because it was not an issue that ever came up. When he updated his work two decades later in book form, elections still not did make it into his exhaustive typologies of non-democratic regimes. Nevertheless, because the West had placed such a priority on the legitimizing power of elections, authoritarian regimes began to catch up and elections became a permanent feature of all manner of non-democratic states. In some cases, such as Saddam-era Iraq, they were complete shams where the dictator routinely won 99% of the vote, and in other cases, such as parliamentary elections in Egypt and Jordan, the parliaments held no real power and the election outcomes were predetermined, albeit not to the absurd extent in places like Iraq or Tunisia. Political science quickly caught up to what was going in the real world and came up with a new category of regimes, typically called competitive authoritarian or hybrid regimes. These regimes were recognized to fall somewhere in a gray zone, as they held competitive elections but not ones that were free and fair, and so while there was the possibility of a transfer of power post-elections, it was a difficult feat to pull off. Research was also done on regimes, oftentimes called hegemonic authoritarian regimes, where non-competitive elections were held so that the regime could claim the mantle of electoral legitimacy but where the outcome was never in any way in doubt. Because elections themselves are a powerful tool, we now live in a world where there are elections all over the globe, but in many instances they mean next to nothing.
We are now moving into an interesting phase, where elections are not only being used by authoritarian regimes to justify their existence, but are being used by a wide class of states to justify any specific action they take. Examples A and B in this regard are Turkey and Egypt, where elected leaders repeatedly refer to their elected status as justification not just for their continuation in office but for any actions the government wants to take. In Turkey, which is a problematic democracy but still to my mind meets the criteria for being an electoral democracy (even if it is looking increasingly shaky), Prime Minister Erdoğan has spent the last month dismissing any and all concerns on the part of the protestors because, as he likes to remind everyone, the AKP was elected in 2011 with an overwhelming plurality of the vote, and if people don’t like what he’s doing, they can go back to the ballot box in a couple of years. Erdoğan fiercely believes that elections confer absolute power, and his view of majoritarian democracy states that the majority can do as it pleases, no matter the consequences or the nature of the opposition. Never mind that democracy is about much more than elections, or that massive numbers of people are protesting in the streets against specific policies. For Erdoğan, all that matters is what happens on election day, and the party that finds itself in government has four or five years to pursue any manner of policies that it chooses to implement. If people don’t like it, than they can voice their displeasure in the next election, and it is as simple as that. Elections confer blanket authority.
In Egypt, which is not yet a democracy no matter how many people would like to believe otherwise, Morsi became president following democratic elections, and has ever since pursued a narrow, sectarian policy in which he has made clear that he believes he is the president of the Muslim Brotherhood rather than all Egyptians. He too has fallen back on the fact that there were elections to justify all sorts of policies that rankle most Egyptians, and the fact that Egypt this week saw what were likely the largest demonstrations in human history makes no difference to him. He cloaked himself in the mantle of elections in order to shunt aside Egypt’s courts and force through a new constitution six months ago, and during the crisis of the last two days, he has refused to acknowledge having made mistakes or grant that changes need to be made because he insists that his policies have the ultimate legitimacy emanating from the fact that he was elected. Morsi is using elections not only to justify his position, but to justify any actions that he takes.
To be clear, if the military moves in and deposes Morsi by force, it will be a disaster. As I pointed out during the constitutional crisis in December, such a move will doom any real hope for democracy in Egypt for decades:
The Egyptian army has already stepped in once to try and steer the ship of the state on a temporary basis. The logic in doing so at the time was in many ways justifiable, and while the results were less than ideal, it was a popular move with many Egyptians who saw no good alternative. This time, however, if the army gets in the middle of the various parties and tries to intervene and sort things out, the long term results will be even more disastrous. Creating a pattern in which the military is expected to act as a referee and step in any time things get hairy will doom any hope for civilian rule or the semblance of democratic politics in Egypt.
Free and fair elections need to be respected, and no matter how poor of a president Morsi has been and no matter how wrongheaded and disastrous his government’s policies, the millions of people in the streets should be heeded by the government in terms of changing course but not in allowing mob rule. Egyptians have legitimate grievances, but by the same token a military coup to get rid of Morsi is not the answer. Nevertheless, Erdoğan, Morsi, and heads of state everywhere need to unlearn the lesson that they have taken away, which is that elections are all that matter and that what happens between elections does not. Voting for one’s leaders is an important and necessary component of democracy, but elections alone do not a democracy make. This idea of an absolute majoritarian mandate conferred based on election results is enormously damaging, and it harms democracy rather than furthers it. We went through a period in which elections were emphasized as the primary component of democracy promotion, but perhaps now it is time for a switch in which elections are deemphasized in favor of other things, such as checks and balances, horizontal accountability, respect for minority rights, and other similar factors that have been lost in the shuffle. Elections are needed to usher in democracy, but in a disturbing number of cases elections are now being used to choke off the democracy that they allegedly heralded.
