The Industry of Security: Why Middle Eastern Peace is a Business Threat

Several Arab regimes do not want the Arab-Israeli conflict to end. They cannot afford to want it to end. The conflict is the central instrument by which they generate their domestic legitimacy, their strategic relevance to the West, and the rents that keep them solvent. Resolution would dissolve the instrument. So they manage the conflict instead, keeping it cold enough to prevent open war, hot enough to maintain its political utility, and arrayed in such a way that any approach to genuine resolution can be pulled back to the starting line at the necessary moment.

The mechanism is the Industry of Security. The pitch the regimes make to the West is the operative content of the industry:

“we are the only thing standing between you and the Jihadists. The populations we govern are hostile to your interests, hostile to Israel, hostile to liberal civilization, and only authoritarian rule by us prevents the hostility from translating into action. Pay us. Arm us. Tolerate our human rights record. Because the alternative is what would happen if the people we suppress were free to act on their own preferences. “

This pitch has been the foundation of Western policy toward several Arab states for fifty years. It has produced something close to a hundred billion dollars in cumulative aid. And it has produced a powerful structural incentive, inside the regimes themselves, to ensure that the populations remain exactly as hostile as the pitch requires.

The hostility the regimes capitalize on is not their invention. The hostility was produced by Islam. The regimes inherited it, found it useful, and built an industry on top of it. The industry refines and channels what Islam produced.