The conflicts raging across the Middle East and North Africa began in large part because entrenched rulers put their own interests and security above the safety and well-being of their people. In the countries that remain at peace, many leaders still embrace the same short-sighted priorities, raising the risk that they too could descend into disorder.
Although the Egyptian regime’s self-defeating drive against dissent—a violent campaign enabled by American and Gulf state aid—has been widely criticized, a number of other Middle Eastern states have escaped international attention while they quietly clamp down on already limited political participation and civil liberties. These include Morocco and Kuwait, where journalists and civil society activists found themselves under fresh assault in 2015. The United Arab Emirates sought to further restrict scrutiny of the country’s abhorrent labor conditions by denying entry to academic researchers, and Bahrain’s government, with little pushback from its U.S. ally, continued its shameful efforts to silence the opposition by stripping its leading critics, most of them Shiites, of their citizenship.
Saudi Arabia, one of the worst human rights abusers in the world, increased the number of executions to its highest level in 20 years, and tried to cover up its failure to safeguard participants in the annual Hajj pilgrimage after a stampede killed more than 2,400 people. The kingdom’s military campaign in neighboring Yemen showed a similar indifference toward protecting innocent lives.
Undergirding all of these cases is a model of governance that erodes the kind of long-term and inclusive stability the region desperately needs. By sacrificing public safety for regime security, these governments alienate and anger their citizens, squander public resources, and enfeeble the institutions that are necessary for sustainable political and economic development.
Also in 2015, relations between Israel and Palestinians remained combustible. In the aftermath of the previous year’s war between Israel and Hamas, which caused the deaths of over 2,100 Palestinians and 73 Israelis, the peace process was moribund. Right-leaning Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu won reelection in March, and the deeply divided Palestinian political institutions in the West Bank and Gaza were in disarray. The administration of President Barack Obama reportedly concluded that it would be unable to make significant progress on peace talks during the remainder of its term. Meanwhile, individual Palestinians carried out a series of knife and vehicular attacks on Israeli Jews, and Israeli security personnel responded with deadly force.
