Israel, Morocco, and the Western Sahara

What does this mean? And why is the American right so crazy about the Polisario?

Editors’ note: Friend of the Cosmopolitan Globalists Arun Kapil was kind enough to share his thoughts about the Western Sahara with us in exchange for a link to his website, here. We enthusiastically recommend you visit it: It’s a consistently well-informed, well-written resource for anyone interested in the politics, history, and society of France (and Europe more generally); the Middle East and North Africa; the United States; and geopolitics in general. It’s also the go-to blog if you’re keen on international film: We have no idea where he finds the time to watch as many movies as he does, but if you’re interested in international cinema, his blog is the place you want to be.

The conversation below was inspired by his recent post on the subject.

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Map courtesy of Wikitravel

A quick introduction:

After Spain’s hasty exit from the Western Sahara in 1975, Morocco and Mauritania jointly invaded the territory, setting off a sixteen-year dispute and the large-scale displacement of the local population.

Mauritania withdrew in 1979. But Morocco kept going—and has been there ever since.

In 1976, a Western Saharan liberation movement, the Polisario Front, created a quasi-governmental structure in refugee camps in Algeria, near the Algerian town and military base of Tindouf, and waged a guerrilla war against both Morocco and Mauritania.

Mauritania signed a peace agreement with the Polisario in 1979 and granted recognition to the newly-formed Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

Morocco did not.

The war was only brought to a ceasefire in 1991 with the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force—MINURSO—in the territory. The conflict has thus far defied diplomatic efforts to resolve it. The ceasefire collapsed last November after Morocco sent troops into no-man’s-land to reopen a road to Mauritania.

The United Nations considers the Polisario to be the legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people and defines the territory as “non-self-governing.”

Morocco considers the territory “Morocco.”

The Polisario is considered anathema, of course, in the parts of Western Sahara under Moroccan control.

This above is, obviously, a simplified version of events.

Highly simplified.

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By Arun Kapil and the Cosmopolitan Globalists

Paris

Claire: Arun, the Cosmopolitan Globalists would like your views about the rapprochement between Morocco and Israel, and the role of the United States—i.e., Trump’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara. Particularly in light of your knowledge of Algeria, which is quite extensive.

Arun: Neither of these developments have been warmly received by Algerians, needless to say.

Claire: I should imagine not. Moroccans must be delighted beyond words, though. Bet they never imagined a US President would say, “Okay, fine—just take it.”

Arun: As for the Israel-Morocco aspect of the matter, the reestablishment of diplomatic ties between the two states is normal and hardly necessitated US mediation, as they have enjoyed a close, unofficial relationship since the early 1960s—which became official in 1994 with the opening of liaison offices in their respective capitals (Tel Aviv for the Moroccan one). The liaison office was closed by Morocco in 2000, during the second intifada, but this did not fundamentally change anything. The two countries have enjoyed six decades of close military and intelligence cooperation, probably the most steadfast secret relationship between Israel and any Arab state.

Morocco’s rich Jewish past and present  is obviously the bridge between the two countries, with Morocco valorizing and promoting that heritage. Morocco had, along with Iraq, the largest pre-1948 Jewish population in the Arab world (around 250 thousand); but, unlike Iraq, Moroccan Jews emigrated pacifically (albeit surreptitiously in the decade after 1956) to Israel, with no pressure to leave nor flight from persecution. Israelis with personal or family ties to Morocco (between ten and fifteen percent of Israel’s Jewish population) maintain an affectionate relationship with the country and freely travel there. This is unique for Israelis with roots in MENA lands, even though the status of Jews in Morocco to the early 20th century was not significantly better than in Eastern Europe. For this reason alone, it makes total sense that the two states would have diplomatic and commercial relations, with tourism, direct flights, and all.

As for the Palestinians, the Israel-Morocco rapprochement won’t change a thing. It will further comfort Netanyahu and those around him in their calculation that Israel can normalize with Arab states—as it already has with the UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan—without conceding a thing to the Palestinians. It is increasingly evident, however, that no state—not even a powerful one like the US—nor coalition of states can compel Israel to make substantial concessions to the Palestinians that it doesn’t want to make, either because it believes concessions will compromise its security or because they will be rejected by Israeli public opinion. When I visited the Beit El settlement on the West Bank in 2009 and talked to people there, it became clear to me that no Israeli government will ever get those settlers out of there. Were it to try, there would be refusal and resistance, and this would be the case with just about every settlement in the occupied territories. Israel is content with the status quo, as are most Arab states in regard to the Palestinians, alas.

Claire: I wouldn’t say Israel is “content” with the status quo; I would say most Israelis see no alternative to it. The most common view among Israelis is that withdrawal from the West Bank would turn it into another Gaza. Growingly, this seems to be the view of most Arab states, too.

Arun:  The normalization with Israel by Arab states will not necessarily prejudice the Palestinians, it may even work to their benefit, with the UAE and other Gulf states financially supporting the Palestinian Authority and investing in it. This may be part of the deal with the Israelis, who will have an interest in that. The American aspect of the Morocco-Israel deal is another matter.

Claire: Yes, this is a mysterious development. I’m very eager to hear your thoughts.

Arun: Not only was the US role superfluous—it was thoroughly unnecessary—but the US got nothing whatever out of it. No tangible US interest is advanced by Israel and Morocco reopening liaison offices and establishing direct flights.

Claire: Not quite. Certainly, the US has always believed it has an interest in Arab-Israeli peace; every Administration since Truman has thought so. Whether in fact the conflict is as central as American planners believed is another question, but let’s grant that this has long been a US policy objective. That said, the US has a much greater interest in the stability of the MENA region, and God knows what the consequences of impulsively recognizing Morocco’s claims might be.

Arun: The US has certainly had an interest in Arab-Israeli peace but none of the four Arab states that have just normalized have ever been in a state of war with Israel; and in the case of the UAE and Morocco, the informal relationship has already been extensive and long-standing. And Sudan remains a source of instability for reasons that have nothing to do with Israel. Trump was simply doing Netanyahu’s bidding, to reinforce the latter’s election prospects and further solidify Trump’s evangelical base as he tries to stage an autogolpe before January 20th.

Claire: You think? From all the reporting I’ve seen, it was even less strategic than that: Trump did it to piss off Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) who—curiously—is the Polisario’s most ardent enthusiast in Congress. The Tel Aviv-based reporter Barak Ravid, at least, reported in Axios that Jared Kushner and special envoy Avi Berkowitz had been speaking with the Moroccan government for years about normalizing relations with Israel in exchange for recognition of the Western Sahara. He claims Kushner, Berkowitz and Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita reached a deal more than a year ago, but Inhofe and John Bolton vehemently opposed it. Trump needed Inhofe’s support so he shot it down. Then Trump and Inhofe—again, according to Axios—fell out over the National Defense Authorization Act. Trump supposedly wanted Inhofe (who’s Chairman of the Armed Service Committee, in case anyone forgot) to include provisions to repeal protections for social media companies, and he wanted Inhofe to indulge him on keeping the names of bases named after Confederates. Inhofe refused on both points; Trump started blasting him on Twitter; and—again, according to Ravid—Kushner and Berkowitz saw this as their chance: They brought it up with Trump again and he agreed. Just to piss off Inhofe.

Ravid also reported, interestingly, that Netanyahu was not happy: Ravid’s unclear about why, and Netanyahu’s office has denied it, but apparently “sources close to Netanyahu” didn’t like the language of the deal, for some reason. But Inhofe, obviously, was infuriated. So at least Trump achieved that important strategic goal—

Arun: —What I say about Trump humoring the evangelicals and giving Bibi a coup de pouce is admittedly idle speculation on my part. But there is simply no net benefit for the US in the Israel-Morocco deal. This cannot be considered a foreign policy triumph for Trump. Nor are the UAE-Bahrain-Sudan deals. No tangible American interest was advanced and Trump’s mediation was not needed (except maybe in the case of Sudan, though why should the US care one way or another if Sudan recognizes Israel?). Recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara is a big foreign policy blunder and setback for the US: It sets a terrible precedent, signaling to other states that they can get away with land-grabs, cf. West Bank, Northern Cyprus, Kashmir.  . The US thus becomes the first Western state (Albania excepted, if that counts) to recognize Morocco’s annexation of the Western Sahara. À propos, one notes with interest the left-right consensus on Trump’s action among the handful of US academic and policy specialists of the Western Sahara question.

Claire: Indeed, and one is baffled by it. I would expect the left to be pro-Polisario and anti-Morocco, but the right?

Arun: For example, on the left, the engagé University of San Francisco political scientist (and friend) Stephen Zunes—co-author of a book on the subject—fired off a Washington Post op-ed arguing that “Trump’s deal on Morocco’s Western Sahara annexation risks more global conflict.” Human Rights Watch—which is not stricto sensu on the left (though I’d be most surprised if a single one of its American staff members did not vote for Biden-Harris)—issued a communiqué stating, “US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty doesn’t change territory’s status.” In the Uber-gauchiste Jacobin, Madrid-based writer Eoghan Gilmartin wrote, “Donald Trump has just traded Western Sahara like a Victorian colonialist.” But the reactions from Republicans are particularly interesting.

Claire: —Yes. Just not the people I’d expect to be all warm and fuzzy about the Polisario, you know?

Arun: James A. Baker III, who was the UN Secretary-General’s personal envoy for Western Sahara from 1997 to 2004, penned a Washington Post op-ed bluntly stating, “Trump’s recognition of Western Sahara is a serious blow to diplomacy and international law.” John Bolton, who knows the Western Sahara dossier comme sa poche, placed a strongly-worded piece in Foreign Policy: “Biden must reverse course on Western Sahara: Trump’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty dangerously undermines decades of carefully crafted U.S. policy.”

Claire: Knows it comme sa poche? What’s interesting is his claim here:

Trump’s insouciance gave the State Department bureaucracy exactly what it has wanted since Resolution 690 first encountered stiff Moroccan resistance within months of its adoption nearly three decades ago. Rabat had argued that losing the Western Sahara referendum would destabilize its monarchy, and the State Department’s bureaucrats lapped it up. 

Certainly it’s true that the default position among career officials at State is that it’s better to manage the status quo in Western Sahara than risk unsettling the balance between Morocco and Algeria by trying to resolve it. Might they be right? Bolton has, historically—how to put this—not necessarily grasped that sometimes an imperfect but reasonably stable situation is preferable to a sudden sharp shock to the status quo, however well-intentioned. If you get my drift.

Arun: Another Polisario supporter way out there on the Republican right-wing is the longtime Washington conservative operative David Keene, who also happens to be Algeria’s well-remunerated Washington lobbyist—

Claire: —At least that’s explicable: He’s in it for the money. Jeune Afrique claims they pay him 30,000 Euros a month. (They also note that he’s the former head of the NRA.)—

Arun: —He ran an op-ed in the Washington Times explaining “Why Trump’s deal with Morocco is immoral and shamefully cynical.” “The people of the Western Sahara had no say in it’s making, another blow against self-determination.” I find it intriguing that these right-wing Republicans are so harshly critical of Morocco, which has always been such a faithful ally of the United States and the West—

Claire: —So do I. Morocco is literally the United States’ oldest ally. And Cuba has been the Polisario’s biggest plumper. The Carter Administration pumped military aid into Morocco because it feared an independent Sahrawi state would represent the definitive expansion of Soviet and Cuban influence in the area. Reagan pursued the same policy. The intimate connection between the Polisario Front and Cuba is hardly a secret, right?

Arun: —and favorable toward Algeria, which has had correct-to-good relations with the US, but tilted toward the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, even though nominally it was a leader of the non-aligned movement. So why are they so supportive of the Polisario? It’s a national liberation movement identified with the tiersmondiste camp. It always has a large stand at the French Communist Party’s annual Fête de l’Humanité.

Editors: Arun and Claire attended this communist jamboree together last year. Claire wrote about it, here. For more pictures, go here. Here was the Polisario booth:

Arun: Why do these America-First conservatives care so much about a sparsely and exclusively Muslim-populated patch of desert in Africa?

Claire: Exactly, it’s weird. And frankly, even the European left is sick of the Polisario. Paris is squarely in Morocco’s corner. But Jeune Afrique may well be right: It may be that Inhofe sees this as a way to detach Algeria from Moscow.

Arun: The European left—insofar as such a thing exists—has forgotten about the Polisario. As for Algeria and Moscow, there is nothing to detach anyone from here. Algeria is no one’s client state, has never been, and will never be. Perhaps the Polisario has had an effective US lobbying operation?

Claire: Come on, it wouldn’t be the Polisario that has an effective US lobbying operation, it would be Algeria—and Algeria does have an effective lobbying operation, as does Morocco—

Arun: —Christopher Ross, in my opinion, offers the most reliable establishment commentary on Trump’s action. He served as the UN Secretary General’s personal envoy on Western Sahara from 2009 to 2017. Ross was a US Foreign Service officer, spending most of his career in the Arab world (he’s a fluent Arabic-speaker), including as US ambassador to Algeria from 1988 to 1991. Those were the years I spent in Algiers, and I spoke to him a number of times about the political situation in Algeria. We were much on the same page, particularly about the rise of the Islamist FIS). Ross represented the best of the US Foreign Service. Voilà his reaction, posted on Facebook:

This foolish and ill-considered decision flies in the face of the US commitment to the principles of the non-acquisition of territory by force and the right of peoples to self-determination, both enshrined in the UN Charter. It’s true that we have ignored these principles when it comes to Israel and others, but this does not excuse ignoring them in Western Sahara and incurring significant costs to ourselves in terms of regional stability and security and our relations with Algeria.

The argument that some in Washington have been making for decades to the effect that an independent state in Western Sahara would be another failed mini-state is false. Western Sahara is as large as Great Britain and has ample resources of phosphates, fisheries, precious metals, and tourism based on wind surfing and desert excursions. It is much better off than many mini-states whose establishment the US has supported. The Polisario Liberation Front of Western Sahara has demonstrated in setting up a government-in-exile in the Western Saharan refugee camps in southwestern Algeria that it is capable of running a government in an organized and semi-democratic way. The referendum proposal that the Polisario put forward in 2007 foresees very close privileged relations with Morocco in the event of independence. It has answered the claim that it could not possibly defend the vast territory of Western Sahara from terrorist or other threats by stating that it would request the help of others until its own forces were fully in place.

It is true that the US has always expressed support for both for the UN facilitated negotiating process and, since 2007, for Morocco’s autonomy plan as ONE possible basis for negotiation. The word ONE is crucial because it implies that other outcomes might emerge and thus ensures that the Polisario stays in the negotiating process instead of retreating into a resumption of the open warfare that prevailed from 1976 to 1991. It was in that year that Morocco and the Polisario agreed to a UN settlement plan that promised a referendum in exchange for a ceasefire. Thirteen years were spent trying to reach agreement on a list of eligible voters, the last seven of them under the supervision of James Baker. In the end, these efforts failed because Morocco decided that a referendum was contrary to its (claims of) sovereignty and, in doing so, got no push back from the Security Council. In 2004, this caused Baker to resign.

The Security Council then substituted direct negotiations between Morocco and the Polisario as an alternative approach. Chaired by three successive UN envoys from the Netherlands (van Walsum), the U.S. (yours truly), and Germany (Kohler), thirteen rounds of face-to-face talks in the presence of Algeria and Mauritania took place from 2007 to 2019. To date, these efforts have also failed because neither party has been prepared to alter its position in the name of compromise. With the resignation of the most recent envoy in 2019 “for health reasons” but more likely out of disgust for Morocco’s lack of respect and efforts to impede his work (as they did with me), the UN Secretary-General is looking for yet another envoy. Those approached to date have demurred, probably because they recognize that Morocco wants someone who will in effect become its advocate instead of remaining neutral and that, as a result, they would be embarking on ‘mission impossible.’

If we are ever to arrive at a settlement, it will be through a drawn-out negotiating process of some kind. President Trump’s decision to recognize Moroccan sovereignty destroys any incentive for the Polisario to remain in that process. It also threatens US relations with Algeria, which supports the right of Western Saharans to decide their own future through a referendum, and undercuts the growth of our existing ties in energy, trade, and security and military cooperation. In sum, President Trump’s decision ensures continued tension, instability, and disunion in North Africa.

Pour l’info, my principal source of knowledge on the Western Sahara is Western Sahara: The Roots of a Desert War, by Tony Hodges. It’s a terrific book, the first to read on the subject, in which one learns, among many other things, that Morocco has no legitimate claim to the Western Sahara—historically or legally—and that the Sahrawi people, historically mostly pastoral nomads, were largely sedentarized by the early 1970s, had developed a national consciousness under Spanish colonialism, and possessed all the attributes of a nation deserving self-determination.

Claire: Pour l’info, my principal source of knowledge about Western Sahara is that I spent a week there on a press junket sponsored by the Moroccan government. It was ethically indefensible, journalistically, so I never wrote about it. I accepted the offer hoping that Algeria would offer me a counter-junket—and perhaps even help me get access to the camps in Tindouf. But Algeria and the Polisario were not nearly as keen to win me over as Morocco was.

So I can absolutely, personally, attest to the splendor of Moroccan lobbying efforts. I can also say that I was well aware I was being shown what the Moroccan government wanted me to see. But I did manage to slip the minders and do some exploring on my own. My impression—and it was just that, an impression, not a formally conducted poll—was that people there didn’t give a damn whether the territory was controlled by Morocco or the Polisario. They wanted jobs. This was in, I think, 2010?

Overwhelmingly, people told me their biggest concern was employment, not self-determination. Were they telling me this because they feared I might be an informant? I doubt it. I heard similar things in Mauritania, just this past year. Sahrawis and Mauritanians struck me as quite similar, culturally—and be they “pastoral nomads” or “sedentarized” it would be a mistake to think of their “national consciousness” as something akin to European nationalism. There’s centuries of tribal history. Most Sahrawi tribes, historically, have and continue to identify with Morocco. Moroccan nationalists in the 40s and 50s struggled to liberate both the Rif and Spanish-occupied Sahara. “Sahrawi” is a geographic expression. The people living there aren’t distinct in any significant way from everyone else in the Maghreb—not that I could see, anyway. Same language, ethnicity, origin, culture, religion.

Arun: NB: Colonialism shapes identity. Whether or not Morocco will ever surrender the Western Sahara—I have my doubts—is another matter, but the conflict remains. The parallel between the Moroccan occupation of the Western Sahara and the Israelis in the West Bank-Gaza is evident (Moroccans naturally go ballistic over the comparison). There are similarities and clear differences (e.g. the cultural proximity of Moroccans and Sahraouis is obviously closer), but on the level of human rights violations, the left-wing Stephen Zunes has asserted on social media that these are “much worse” in the Western Sahara than in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Claire: I don’t doubt it, but for what it’s worth, life is worse under the Polisario. The Moroccan government arranged for us to speak to refugees from the Polisario—as they would, naturally—and their stories were horrifying. I would have liked to have written about them, but since I couldn’t get the other side of the story, I couldn’t do it without, in effect, becoming a shill for the Moroccan government. It’s too bad, because I believed them. I am not in any doubt that conditions in those camps are horrifying. The dissidents to whom I spoke were, of course, produced so that I might write something to support the Moroccan narrative, but I’m sure of this: They weren’t actors. I’ve some experience of distinguishing between “government flaks” and “dissidents who’ve been tortured.” My hosts were the former. The refugees were the latter. The Polisario has no business lecturing anyone about human rights.

Arun: Returning to the subject of Moroccan Jews and Israel, I want to briefly mention two feature-length films I’ve seen on the subject over the past several years. One is the 2010 ‘Où vas-tu Moshé?’ (Where Are You Going, Moshe?), directed by Hassan Benjelloun, who recounts and reenacts the literally overnight exodus in 1963 of the Jewish community in his town in the Atlas mountains, which he witnessed as a boy. There was no particular problem between the communities, which coexisted cordially, but the deeply religious Jews dreamed of Aliyah to the “land of Zion,” of which they concretely knew little. Because emigration to Israel was not authorized at the time, the Jewish Agency organized their collective departure clandestinely. So one day the townspeople woke up to find that the local Jews were all gone, their shops shuttered; they had slipped out of town en masse in buses in the middle of the night. It’s an interesting, original film.

The other film is a 2012 documentary, Tinghir-Jerusalem, Echoes from the Mellah, by Kamal Hachkar, a Franco-Moroccan public school teacher in Paris. His family hailed from the southern Morocco town of Tinghir; his parents emigrated to France shortly after his birth, in 1979. Growing up, he regularly visited Tinghir on family vacations. On one visit, he learned, to his surprise, that Tinghir had once had a Jewish community. It suddenly departed, in the 1960s, to Israel. The younger generation in the town knew almost nothing about them. Fascinated, Hachkar researched his ancestral town’s Jewish past and made a documentary in which he interviewed inhabitants of Tinghir about their memories of the town’s Jews. Then he tracked them down in Israel and traveled there to meet them.

This part is quite interesting. The Tinghir Jews imagined they were going to a mythical Jerusalem in the mythical land of Zion, but when they arrived in Israel they were settled in apartment blocks in soulless development towns. It wasn’t what they were expecting. When Hachkar met the Tinghir old-timers in Israel, who spoke with him in Tamazight, they welcomed him like a long-lost member of the family:

It’s too bad other Israelis from the MENA region don’t have the same relationship with their countries of origin.

Hachkar’s film was shown on Moroccan television in 2012 and screened publicly, provoking a firestorm. Islamists and others in the anti-normalization crowd, perhaps stoked by Hachkar’s manifest philo-semitism, denounced it. Jamal Bahmad, who teaches at Mohammed V University in Rabat, has an informative post on this from February 2013 in Africultures, “Tinghir-Jerusalem-Tangier: The Jew, the imam and the camera in Morocco.”        

But that’s all in the past, so says Hachkar—who now lives in Morocco—in an interview last week in the Moroccan Le 360 website, with the film and its message of fraternity no longer arousing controversy. C’est bien.

Claire: I’ll close by saying that Trump’s deal is meaningless. The Western Sahara issue is not part of the Arab-Israeli peace process and won’t be resolved by a silly transactional deal in which Morocco recognizes Israel. It’s a Maghrebi issue.

The US has no coherent position.  Beyond that, people in Washington seem to parrot either Moroccan or Algerian lobbyists, depending who’s paying them better.

The real question is how a post-Bouteflika Algeria might respond if the Biden Administration made a serious attempt to resolve the conflict. I don’t expect his Administration will have the bandwidth, but what if it tried? You’d have a much better idea than I would: I don’t have much of a feeling for what’s happening in Algeria. Look, we’re adults: We both know Algeria’s interest in creating an “independent Saharawi state” has nothing to do with high-minded American ideals about national self-determination. This is a contest for hegemony in the Maghreb and the Sahel. Obviously, it would be best for the entire region—and the Sahrawi people—if Morocco and Algeria could come to some kind of agreement roughly along the lines Morocco has proposed.

It could be that Trump’s decision to recognize Moroccan sovereignty destroys all incentive for the Polisario (and by extension Algeria) to negotiate. But not necessarily. It seems to me that as with many other dumb things Trump has done—like withdrawing from the WHO—a skillful Biden Administration might exploit it for leverage to bring Algeria (and by extension the Polisario) to the negotiating table.

I don’t know. What do you think?

Arun: The big issue for the Biden administration here will be if it goes back on Trump’s recognition and if not, what it does about the consulate in Laayoune. I really doubt that this will be any kind of priority for the Biden administration. And the Algerians are not likely to appreciate the Americans sticking their nose into this affair (independently of the United Nations).

Claire: Probably not, I suppose. But it’s a shame: A resolution to the conflict would be a great benefit to all concerned. And the suffering involved—as you point out—exceeds anything happening in the more mediagenic West Bank.

Arun Kapil is a political scientist with a particular interest in immigration, ethnicity, and electoral politics. He teaches at the Catholic University of Paris.

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