Max Fisher: Have we been projecting on to the Middle East?
The Arab Spring has provided some of the most thoughtful articles yet on Middle East and North African politics. What is especially good here is that Arab domestic politics are suddenly being discussed, and at a level that goes beyond Michael J. Totten’s journeys into the Middle East or overemphasis on resentment towards Israel or the United States. As writer Max Fisher notes, our perception of the Middle East has been a classic case of “projection:”
Part of the problem is that the absence of true Arab democracies — not to mention the incredible difficulty of accurately polling the region — has left Arab public opinion largely a matter of inference and conjecture. We never knew what Arabs wanted because they had so few opportunities to express it. So we’ve been left to guess. It’s little surprise, then, that we in the West have focused most on the issues that affect us most: foreign policy, especially toward Israel and the West; terrorism and violent extremism; and treatment of religious minorities. For years, we’ve projected our concern with these issues onto what we often call “the Arab street” — a woefully clumsy term that is itself an expression of our difficulty and confusion with understanding the preferences, priorities, and desires of the 280 million Arabs of the Middle East and North Africa.
The best part comes when Fisher makes the case for universalism in illustrating the simple fact that people have been coming out in force in the Middle East for the same reasons anyone ever has anywhere:
Now that Arabs are taking to the streets from the northwestern reaches of Moroccan Africa to the edges of the Arabian Peninsula, expressing popular will in a way that their governments had long made nearly impossible, we have a much clearer picture of what Arabs want. Their desires, it turns out, look an awful lot like those held by the rest of the world’s people. Freedom from oppression and arbitrary rule, economic opportunity for self-sufficiency and advancement, and the chance for real political participation. Anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism remain real social forces in the region, as anyone who’s spent time there can tell you, as do nationalism, legitimate concerns over the plight of Palestinians, and the angry legacy of anti-colonialism.
I would make the comparison (and this has alot of projection here as well, but I’m aware of it) when talking about anti-Semitism in the Middle East with the lingering racism that we see in the United States. If you do research into treatment of Jews in the Middle East, it begins to sound a whole lot like treatment of blacks in the United States - largely a case of routine and institutionalized humiliation.
Like the United States with race, however, it is not the primary force. The primary force is apparently in the Middle East the same thing it is for anyone: economic opportunity, political rights and civil liberties, with lingering prejudices not at the forefront.