The Paradigm of Arab National Security: Between Systematic Distortion and the Need for Redefinition
A special post from our comrade and fellow translator Mohammed ElAbadsa, who wrote this essay on the regional question of “national security” from the heart of Gaza.
The concept of national security is a pillar in the construction and reproduction of nation-states in a capitalist system. In the Third World in particular, security is the defense umbrella that protects the entity of the nation, its productive capabilities, and its future. This paradigm is a crucial vector in the regional balance of power in the Arab world, and it bears the marks of systematic and profound distortion by mechanisms of both colonial and post-colonial origins. This has led to a conflation of national security with the security of dependent regimes and class elites. Stripped of its historical meaning, the concept of national security no longer refers to an extensive paradigm encompassing state sovereignty, having been transformed instead into a means of reinforcing US-Zionist imperialism and its regional proxies.
One important consequence is that the Arab citizen has become a primary target of continuous surveillance and persecution by security apparatuses. This has drained them of their feeling of belonging and political agency and has instilled an overwhelming sense of alienation within the homeland. Many of them have become resigned to the presence of foreign (mostly U.S.) military bases – from which few Arab countries are exempt – as well as their dependence on the very foreign aid that ensures their subordination and consolidates the hegemony of oppressive regimes.
As a result of this distortion, national security for Arab nations has become more and more indeterminate, and no state in the Arab world has a clear, unwavering vision for this notion. National security in the substantive, Third Worldist sense is a paradigm that mediates internal, regional, and international relations based on foundations of sovereignty and dignity. But when Arab leaders are in reality colonial satraps charged with implementing the policies and plans of imperialism and Zionism within their territories, the Arab citizen’s perception is solidified: to them, the concept of national security extends no further than the passport official at border control points and airports.
In the context of a regional and expansionist war of aggression by international Zionism and American imperialism, the question of Arab national security has become urgent. For example, Arab regimes like Jordan will facilitate the violation of their airspace by Zionist fighter jets, but at the same time they will invoke national security to intercept Yemeni and Iranian retaliation on the pretext of constituting a threat to citizen safety. This bitter contrast reveals that the “resistance axis” is currently the regimes’ largest threat. A successful instance of resistance in the region represents an existential threat to these regimes as it threatens to tip the existing balance of power.
The contradictions of national security have likewise been evident at Arab borders no less than Arab skies. In the wake of the “Sumoud Convoy”, appalling reports and videos have circulated showing the abuse, assault, and humiliation faced by solidarity activists at the hands of Egyptian security forces and border guards. The convoy, aiming to break the siege on Gaza, departed from Morocco and Mauritania and travelled across North Africa before being stopped at the Egyptian border in Libya. Despite failing its stated aim, however, the convoy succeeded in highlighting the fact that what sustains the Zionist entity and ensures its continuity are the client regimes surrounding it. Egypt’s insistence that it blocked the convoy because participants do not have entry visas flies in the face of daily border crossings by “Israelis” without permits or visas. In the same way, Libya’s Khalifa Haftar stepped in to arrest most of the participants in the convoys, cutting them off and depriving them of food and water before deporting them. In these instances, Arab regimes operated no differently to “Israeli” forces when they abducted and deported the solidarity activists on the ship Madleen.
In stark contrast with this, the Zionist entity’s security policy is one that draws on two intertwined logics: first, to undermine the dangers against it, and secondly, to achieve a Zionist vision for the region. This is different to that envisioned by the early fathers of Zionism, as it has been developed and tailored to the current situation. The Zionist security doctrine, which all of the state civil and military establishments are bound by, posits that the security of the entity is linked to their complete military dominance of all the countries of the Middle East. Thus, for instance, it entails the possession of an arsenal far greater than the aggregate total of military hardware of all the Middle Eastern countries, and it insists that no group within the region should be accorded technological, military, or political superiority that could threaten its security in the future.
The Zionist paradigm of national security is central to the entity, since it is, in essence, an expansionist settler colonial project premised on violent displacement. To succeed, therefore, it must overcome the presence of the indigenous Palestinians, which forces its security doctrine to revolve around two central themes: the “annulment of time” (a strategy to delegitimise existing history) and “access to space” (a strategy for geographic and demographic control). Within this project, therefore, national security acquires an indefinite character: “Israel” is under constant threat, war with its adversaries is practically eternal, and its primary goal is the maintenance and expansion of the military occupation.
The national security doctrine of a country is therefore of paramount significance in the pursuit of state prerogatives and the realisation of state power, both within and beyond its borders. In the context of the Middle East, this paradigm has a regional character and is heavily skewed in the favour of Zionism and U.S. imperialism, to the detriment of the Arab masses. In pursuing their sovereignty, the latter must be able to seize and transform, among other things, the national security paradigm of Arab states. Restructuring begins with the liberation and reconstitution of human beings through the creation of spaces for expression, participation, and popular mobilisation. It entails rebuilding civil and military capacities through defensive industrialisation that is poised against foreign, Western subordination. In other words, national security must be redefined as a regional question and one that presupposes access to the levers of state power by the Arab masses for the purpose of liberation from the Zionist project.