Analysis. The recurrent debate on the causes of Arab misfortune invariably points to the deleterious role played by oil in a list of explanatory factors. Instead of facilitating development and social progress, the basis of democratic development, the oil rent was confiscated by the elites resulting from decolonization, who used it to patronize political life and cement their grip on power. . From Algeria to the Gulf monarchies, via Iraq and Libya, the wealth drawn from hydrocarbons has made Arab autocrats more happy than that of their people.
But the regimes in place in the Middle East were able to count on another rent, less obvious, but no less effective: Israel. The never-healed wounds of the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 and the occupation in 1967 of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights constitute a ferment of destabilization that the powers of the region have always known how to cash. The recent wave of normalization between the Hebrew state and four Arab countries (United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco) has brought this transactional principle to its climax, but it is not new.
The dollars of the Gulf monarchies
In the wake of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Syria of Hafez Al-Assad (1930-2000) received billions of dollars from the Gulf monarchies as a state on the front line with “the enemy. Israeli ”. These funds, officially intended to finance the reconstruction and rearmament of the Baathist regime, especially enabled the master of Damascus to institutionalize a dictatorial and predatory system of government.
In the early 1980s, it was with the newly formed Islamic Republic of Iran that Hafez Al-Assad went to haggle over his hostility to Israel. The alliance signed with the mullahs in Tehran has brought it millions of tons of free oil. Enough to further consolidate its power, then challenged by an internal insurrection, led by the Muslim Brotherhood.
At that time, the Egyptian regime, led by Anwar Sadat, resorted to the same tactics, but in the opposite direction. In exchange for the peace treaty with Israel, signed at Camp David, in 1979, he obtained access to American financial aid. The annual $ 1.3 billion paid by Washington has mainly benefited the Egyptian military. An institution that protects both the country’s borders and its own preeminence in economic and political affairs. His participation in the overthrow, in 2013, of Mohamed Morsi, the first – and only to date – regularly elected Egyptian president, demonstrated this.
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