The peoples of West Asia live under constant siege. Siege from the Western powers and Israel as well as from their own rulers, warlords and militias. This harsh fact was driven home in 2007 and, unless, there are major changes, can be expected to dominate the regional scene during 2008. 

The Palestinians, whose country was occupied by Israel in two stages in 1948 and 1967, have contended with siege for decades. But today their situation is worse than ever.  Some 1.5 million are confined to the blockaded Gaza Strip and 2.5 million to isolated enclaves in the West Bank where they have no freedom of movement. They are surrounded by Israel’s 720 km long wall complex, 148 Jewish colonies, 96 settler outposts, 27 military bases and dozens of exclusion zones.

The UN estimates that Israel has appropriated 48 per cent of the West Bank and Israel fully intends to expand its holdings in spite of recently resumed negotiations over the future of the territory. The Western powers, particularly the US, do nothing to curb Israeli settlement activities.

Instead, they provide subsistence funding for Palestinians, 80 per cent of whom live below the poverty level, thereby subsidising the Israeli occupation. More than half of Palestinians live outside geographic Palestine, the majority in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria where they face growing economic and political pressures.

The people of Iraq also live under occupation and siege. The US, which conquered the country in 2003, remains largely in charge. The writ of the Shia fundamentalist Iraqi government is confined to the US-fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad while the citizenry lives in the insecure Red Zone comprising the rest of the country where suicide bombers and sectarian cleansing militias roam.

Since the US occupation, four million of 24 million Iraqis have been driven from their homes, 1.5 million are internally displaced and the rest are refugees in neighbouring states.  Many of the refugees are doctors, lawyers, teachers and other professionals who fled under threat. Mixed neighbourhoods where Sunnis and Shias lived peacefully together have been transformed into mono-community districts by sectarian cleansing.

 Women are compelled to don conservative dress and kept from taking up jobs outside the home. Shia militias are engaged in a power struggle in the south while the northern Kurdish region is under attack from Turkey for harbouring Turkish Kurdish separatist guerrillas who have been fighting Ankara since1984.

Economic siege
In Lebanon, the US-allied government is besieged by the Hizbollah-led opposition which demands that agreement on power-sharing arrangements before allowing parliament to choose a new president to fill the post vacated more than a month ago. Members of the rump cabinet (opposition ministers resigned more than a year ago) confine themselves to the Ottoman-era Serai at the heart of Beirut where opposition protesters live in tents.

Pro-government legislators are holed up in a luxury hotel on the seafront.  Although the two sides agreed that the president should be army chief Michel Suleiman, they continue to dispute the composition of the government to be formed when he takes office. 

Iran is under economic siege and threat of military action by the US which accuses Tehran of seeking nuclear weapons and of backing anti-US militias in Iraq. Washington demands that Iran halt its nuclear programme and cease its interference in Iraqi affairs. While the risk of US attacks on Iran's nuclear and military facilities seems to have receded for the time being, Bush administration hawks are determined to "contain" Iran by sanctions and force, if necessary.

In Turkey, the senior ranks of the army and the Westernised political elite are under siege from the moderate Muslim Justice and Development Party (AKP), which won its second parliamentary election in 2007. The AKP represents the devout, conservative mass of poor urban and rural Turks who have been excluded from power by militant secularists since the founding of the republic in 1923. Although the AKP is carrying out major reforms and has achieved a high rate of growth, tensions are rising, particularly between the AKP and the army, which sees itself as guarantor of the secular state.   

The pro-Western rulers of Egypt, and, to a lesser extent, Jordan are under siege from their citizens who demand that their governments exert pressure on Israel and the US to withdraw from occupied Arab lands. In Kuwait there is tension between Sunni fundamentalists and the ruling family while Bahrain’s Sunni rulers face unrest from the Shia majority. Arabs, Iranians and Turks see occupation as the root of regional instability but are powerless to do anything about it.

Oman and the prosperous United Arab Emirates, ruled by enlightened autocrats who oppose occupation and cultivate the West, are the only West Asian countries to remain relatively untouched by regional tensions.