Extreme Politics
A not-so-recent piece in Foreign Affairs is recently featured discussing a timely topic: Hamas and its prospects for peaceful political activity. It argued in March 2006 that Hamas would not moderate its military aims in the near future just because of political integration, a prescient argument in light of recent events. The article–which, incidentally, is written by the son of a former president of Israel–identifies three conditions required for the successful integration of a radical movement into mainstream politics: a healthy political system, a way to leverage power against extremists, and enough time for moderation to occur.
By drawing on examples of state/Islamist cooperation–and the occasional lack thereof–in Turkey, Jordan, and Egypt, Herzog observes insightfully that Islamic groups in stable Arab states generally have either legal political power or illegal military power, but never both. Unlike the case of Mahmoud Abbas’s government, peaceful states like Jordan or Egypt draw a strict line between encouraging Islamist participation as political movements, or banning them outright as illegal terrorists. To allow Hamas’s political participation without demanding disarmament was the Palestinian Authority’s first mistake, according to Herzog. As he mentions,
Islamists in Jordan were recognized publicly and given a stake in the political life there from the country’s founding, in 1946, and as a result they have led the most establishment-oriented and least violent Islamist movement in the region.
On the other hand,
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt…which favored violence to the point of assassinating a prime minister in 1948, was outlawed in 1954. Decades of repression and political exclusion eventually split the movement into two branches.
In a way, however, Herzog’s argument is a bit of a political tautology. Read the rest of this entry �