If Gamal Abdel Nasser, the late president of Egypt and legendary champion of Arab nationalism, had risen from his grave during the heady days of November 1989, he would have rubbed his eyes in disbelief.
The stirring on the streets of Prague, Berlin and Bucharest not only spelled the end to the “enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend” politics that Nasser had mastered in playing off the rival superpowers against each other, it was a sharp break with the sweeping pan-Arab nationalism that Nasser espoused and the top-down political style he practised.
In 1989, the Arab world saw this fervour played out in the dun-coloured hills east of Bethlehem, where the drive for self-determination was attempting to erase the debacle brought about by Nasser’s thwarted pan-Arab vision 22 years earlier.
On November 5, 1989 – four days before the Berlin Wall fell – the people of the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour decided they would no longer pay for Israel’s occupation of their land. A coalition of Arab armies inspired by Nasser’s Pan-Arabist dream had failed in 1967 to expel Israel from the same soil; now, in an echo of the grassroots street protests sweeping Europe, the people of Beit Sahour would try to achieve it by refusing to pay their taxes. “No taxation without representation!” their leaflet cried.
In reply, Israel did not follow the path of Mikhail Gorbachev. When told on March 3, 1989, of the decision of the Hungarian Central Committee to “completely remove the electronic and technological defences from the western and southern borders of Hungary”, the Soviet leader did not condemn the move or order retaliation. According to recently disclosed notes, he simply told the Hungarian prime minister, Miklos Nemeth: “We are also becoming more open.” Thus did the first crack appear in the Berlin Wall.
Nor did Israel take the cue of opposition and reform communist leaders in Eastern Europe who, upon witnessing the vicious crackdown by Chinese authorities on protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, redoubled their efforts to avoid violent confrontation – an undertaking that prevented a bloodbath on the streets of Eastern Europe later that year.
Israel did none of this. Instead, in answer to the residents of Beit Sahour, it adopted Tiananmen-style methods of the Chinese government – a move that discredited the value of peaceful, grassroots political protest in the Palestinian territories, if not beyond, with consequences that reverberate to this day.
“We will teach them there is a price for refusing the laws of Israel,” announced Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s defence minister and a future Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In the days that followed, Israel crushed the tax boycott by imprisoning 40 inhabitants of Beit Sahour and seizing money and goods from local stores, factories and homes. Israel’s military also cut phone lines to the town and put it under a 42-day curfew. So much, Palestinians said, for the spirit of 1989.
Besides the cynicism and desperate search for other alternatives that it helped sow, the grassroots, essentially nationalist, political fervour that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 had another important consequence for the Arab Middle East and for Muslims more broadly.
Many of the movements it fuelled had a religious, more than a secular, accent – a fact that probably would have confounded Nasser, who was suspicious of Egypt’s main Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, and had been a target of a 1954 assassination attempt by one of its members.
It certainly dumbfounded Yasser Arafat. In 1989, while the secular-minded Palestinian leader visited the capitals of Eastern Europe from his base in Tunis and called on leaders of soon-to-be deposed governments – in the first 10 months of the year, he visited Prague at least three times and Budapest once – the Islamist movement Hamas took root in the Gaza Strip, leading Palestinian civil disobedience in the second full year of the first intifada.
It was not only Arafat who was surprised. With much of the world focused on the momentous events under way in Europe, the development of Islamist parties and movements in the Arab-Muslim world such as Hamas was underappreciated, misconstrued or ignored.
Case in point: determined to marginalise Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Israeli authorities led by Rabin met frequently with Hamas’s founder, Sheik Yassin, and other Hamas officials throughout 1989. They were determined to view Hamas only as a moderate Islamist movement for social reform.
Eventually the Israelis caught on. So did pundits and policy wonks in the United States and Europe. In the summer of 1989, it was Francis Fukuyama’s essay, The End of History? that seized their attention; within four years, it was Samuel P Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations that did.
Also lost in the giddiness of those days in late 1989 in Eastern Europe was the profound effect of the Soviet military occupation of Afghanistan. That occupation ended on February 15, when the last Soviet soldier crossed the Friendship Bridge to the border city of Termez, nine years and 50 days after Soviet troops intervened to support a coup by a Marxist ally.
The withdrawal ended what many both in the West and in the Soviet Union called “Moscow’s Vietnam”. Indeed, many insisted Moscow’s defeat in Afghanistan was the real trigger for the events that began in 1989 and culminated three years later with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In a 1998 interview with the French newsmagazine Le Nouvel Observateur, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the US president Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, was asked whether he regretted sending arms to the Afghan mujahideen. With two questions of his own, he answered the question to his satisfaction: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
Others would come to mistrust Mr Brzezinski’s certainty, as no doubt Nasser, the pre-eminent anti-colonialist, would have, had he lived to see the events of 1989.
On the one hand, the expulsion of the supposedly invincible Red Army from Afghan soil served to reinvigorate Muslim political activism and was hailed widely in the Muslim world as a victory. On the other, the shift of international attention away from Afghanistan would help speed that country’s descent into civil war and set the stage for the emergence of the Taliban, al Qa’eda and the September 11 attacks, consequences of which still preoccupy the Middle East today.
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