The Struggle Against Terrorism Calls For Neighboring Countries To Cooperate

As terrorism knows no borders, the struggle against terrorism calls for neighboring countries to cooperate for the sake of regional and global security. That is why in Europe over the past decade, dozens of governments have forged unprecedented partnerships in policing, intelligence, and counterterrorism. It is also why in the Middle East and North Africa, jihadist carnage and Iranian expansionism have inspired some Arab governments to make common cause not only with each other but also with the neighboring state of Israel. Security cooperation has reached new heights between Israel and its formal peace partners, Egypt and Jordan, while elsewhere in the region, new relationships are at a more junior stage but growing.

In one crucial aspect of counterterrorism, however, no substantial partnership between Israelis and their Arab neighbors has yet been forged: the struggle to end the use of media, schools, and religious pulpits to spread radicalism and hate. This gap does not stem from ignorance of the general problem. To the contrary, widespread concern about extremist indoctrination has led some Arab governments and NGOs — as well as others worldwide — to seek remedies, ranging from education for tolerance to rehabilitation of former jihadists. Some of these efforts are multilateral: The Tony Blair Faith Foundation has engaged government and civil society in numerous Muslim-majority countries, while the UAE-based Hedaya center, a public-private partnership, has forged collaborations from New York to Jakarta. Other efforts are unilateral: The Saudi security sector has used state television to develop an immensely popular program called Humumna, which strives to dissuade young viewers from joining extremist groups.

Israelis in government and civil society alike have much to contribute to such efforts, and are indeed engaged in some of the educational initiatives that stem from North America and Europe. But as far as Arab countries are concerned, there has been no cooperation to speak of. The reason should come as no surprise: Some of the same Arab security and intelligence systems that now work with the Jewish state in repelling jihadists and Iran have themselves been major propagators of antisemitism and hostility to Israel for decades. As is well known, Arab security sectors exercise a weighty influence over media, schools, and religious instruction within their borders. They have long used these platforms to incite against Jews and Israel preponderantly — whether as a tool of blame deflection for local problems or as a means of unifying a fractured population against a perceived foreign enemy. Yet despite this legacy, the Israeli government, in its enthusiasm to grow new Arab security partnerships, has not been particularly forceful in demanding an end to the ongoing legacy of incitement.

But should the onus be on Israel to press Arab leaderships to end such indoctrination to begin with? The answer is no — because antisemitism in the region, for which Arab security sectors deserve so much of the blame, is in reality less a threat to Israel than it is to Arab governments and their populations. Consider that the tools of scapegoating and blame deflection that initially targeted Jews and Israel have long since found new, local targets — whether ruling elites or rival ethnicities and sects. Radical trans-state militias and movements routinely use the same hostile tropes in attempting to foment civil war or turn a given Arab population against its government. They have at times succeeded. Thus the case for ending Arab antisemitism — and the tropes of demonization that go along with it — is first and foremost a matter of Arab national security.

Perhaps some enlightened Arab leaderships have begun to appreciate this problem. To the extent they have, they will have also noticed that the promotion of coexistence and tolerance toward the region’s Jewish and Israeli neighbors is not easy to manage unilaterally. How, after all, can strategic communications officers in an Arab security apparatus, themselves raised to hate Israel and Jews, suddenly message honesty about a country and a people of which they know little that is actually true? To reform the state’s impositions on media, schools, and mosques will require enormous political will; knowledge and expertise from the outside; and substantial personnel changes.

It should of course be acknowledged that Arab security sectors’ domination of the national discourse is distinctly open to criticism. Proponents of democracy in the region naturally demand that the government stop controlling what people publish, broadcast, teach, and preach. But in the relatively stable autocracies of North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Gulf, radical change of this sort is not imminent, as many prominent reformists eschew the revolutionary option altogether in favor of incremental reform. Thus Arab security sector influence over Arab public discussions is likely to continue for some time. It therefore behooves Arab reformists to demand that such influence, as long as it endures, serve the common good. One way in which it can is for the security cadres to help roll back the legacies of antisemitism and hostility to Israel that have proved so damaging for so long.

In a hypothetical situation in which a given security sector receives such a mandate, the implementation would require a new series of cross-border partnerships among the state and reform-minded civilians. Recall the counter-jihadist TV programming of Saudi Arabia’s Humumna and the public-private educational collaborations brokered by the likes of Hedaya and the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. New collaborations would involve the migration of corrective content about Israel and Jews to all Arab platforms in which they are a topic of discussion, supported by cadres of bilingual, bicultural communications specialists with the talent and creativity to do so.

Meeting this challenge will be hard — but failing to try is unconscionable.