Arab Betrayal

Countercurrent – August 22, 2024

Why Has The Gaza Genocide Failed to Move The Arab Street?

by Dr Marwan Asmar

The ongoing genocide on Gaza over the past 11 months have failed to move the Arab Street even one iota. This is an Israeli genocide but the Arab world continues to look on helplessly and hopelessly unable to fathom of what to do to stop it.

Despite the intensity of Israel’s war on the whole of the Gaza Strip since 7 October, 2023, and the consequent daily massacres perpetrated by the Zionist army, literally committed nonstop, the popular streets across the Arab world has largely been dormant, lethargic and ineffective, spectators to a deadly bloody match with vastly unequal partners.

Gone are the days…

People have been glued to their television sets, especially on Al Jazeera, stunned at the annihilation of Gaza by the Israeli bombardment and missiles. But they have not been able to do anything except wonder in amazement at the scale of destruction of the Palestinian territory with men, women, children, toddlers, babies and infants standing alone to face the Israeli enemy only to be blown up to pieces.

Gone are the days when popular protest gripped the Arab world to-the-teeth and were a sense of nationalism, dignity, values and pride once held sway. This of course was not always this way.

The pan-Arab street have always been ripe with anger and frustrations and political awareness of right and wrong expressed in almost daily demonstrations right from at least 1956 when Israeli, Britain and France carried their tripartite attack on Egypt at the nationalization of the Suez Canal.

Then countries like Kuwait, Jordan and others took part in the protests against the three-country attack crying foul of neocolonialism and subjugation. But then was the period of the pan-Arab nationalist movement that grew up in Beirut and spread to other Arab cities in the wake of the fall of Palestine in 1948 and the creation of the state of Israel.

No new dawn!

Despite statist policies and autocratic governments popular protests continued across the Arab world sporadically, whether in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s with the central question being Palestine.

This culminated in the Arab Spring of 2011 when there was a new popular push forward and the promise of a new dawn across the regions. With the economic squeeze increasing against the Arab masses Palestine was joined by calls for regime change and economic modernization to increase employment and lower the stinging rates of poverty.

Despite the fact that governments were brought down, here and there, starting with Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya, the Arab Spring – the great popular deluge of protests that was unprecedented in many ways – succumbed to the strong and powerful Arab state, together with its institutions, leaderships, bureaucracy and security apparatuses and military forces.

Whilst Arab governments were at first taken by surprise, they quickly recuperated, gained their power back and dominated the will of the majority and stomped the popular uprisings movement in their tracks; halting regime change there and then.

The popular Arab street may have erupted again in 2019 in particular in Lebanon, Sudan and Algeria but it once again failed in its demands to change the political status quo and reflected the dichotomies of awkward change. There was regime change in Sudan for instance, but the country degenerated into a civil war up till now with its power elites fighting each other over the seats of government.

Cool reaction

The present Gaza situation, and the Israeli onslaught on its people and resistance, must be understood within this context. The ebbs and flows of the popular street and its failure to change states, regimes and governments – starting from the radicals to the most conservatives – may explain why the present pan-Arab street is reacting in coolly to the present attacks on Gaza and which very quickly turned into a criminal genocide, in deed and practice.

People feel even if they continue to rally, and protests are continuing against the mass bombing of Gaza by countries like Morocco which has established a normalization deal with Israel, they will not be able to stop Israel from its daily war crimes in Gaza mainly because popular movements have limits. And that it is finally it is up to states to make decision and pressure the United States and Israel to stop the genocide on Gaza.

It’s a strange situation with emotions dampened and cushioned despite the horrific images of babies cut to pieces, children dying in hospitals, women and men crying at loved ones and which are jam-locked in the social media. Growing daily statistics of the dead, buildings bombed, homes ripped apart have become just numbers regurgitated daily by televisions anchors or skimped through in newspapers and websites.

In this onslaught on Gaza, the apathy of the Arab street has reached a very low point – to the nadir because people are in a whirlpool of helplessness. They tried before and they failed and now these people have long become divided between poor and rich states in the Middle East region where consumerism and the high life has taken the better of them and where ideologies and nationalism are reduced to second place and where religion is interpreted differently.

This time around, the “popular world” erupted for Gaza, in Europe, across America, including in US university campuses and elsewhere like Japan, demonstrating time and again, against the genocide, but sadly this has not been the case in the Arab world.

Later on sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists would need to explain what happened this time around – almost total Arab silence against the Gaza genocide, why!

Dr Asmar is a Jordanian writer based in Amman and covers Middle East affairs.

https://countercurrents.org/2024/08/why-has-the-gaza-genocide-failed-to-move-the-arab-street/

Middle East Eye – August 14, 2024

Why Arab regimes' betrayal of Palestine may come back to haunt them

Abdullah Al-Arian

The calculus that informed the decisions of the region's ruling elites has been challenged like never before, resulting in a more precarious situation in the years ahead

On August 2, funeral prayers for Ismail Haniyeh drew thousands to Doha's Imam Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab Mosque to honour the assassinated Hamas leader.

Among them were dozens of emissaries from across the Arab and Muslim worlds who travelled to Qatar to express their solidarity with the Palestinian people amid Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza that has inflamed much of the region.

Notably absent from the funeral were representatives from the governments of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt and Morocco.

Despite their critical policy differences, similar occasions in the past, such as the funeral of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, brought together Arab leaders in a symbolic display of unity and collective mourning.

For all their glaring contradictions, Arab states previously found it necessary to pay heed to the question of Palestinian liberation in the eyes of their populations, though more often with words than deeds.

However, since their violent suppression of the Arab uprisings, authoritarian regimes no longer need to legitimise their rule through declared support for Palestine. They now have a free hand to pursue deeply unpopular policies, including normalisation with Israel.

So, the absences in Doha are just the latest example of a shift in these regimes' style and substance that was more than a decade in the making and has become more pronounced since 7 October.

Indeed, several Arab states have offered Israel significant support since it unleashed its assault on Gaza. This has brought into focus a long-developing regional picture of how these states have been enlisted in the US-Israeli security order.

Some have gone as far as mobilising their military capabilities to intercept retaliatory strikes by Iran and regional militia,s and rerouting goods through alternate trade routes in response to the Houthis' Red Sea blockade against Israeli shipping.

For its part, Egypt has faithfully patrolled its border with Gaza in close coordination with Israel, further compounding the unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in the besieged strip.

In prior eras, the sight of Arab regimes acting in open alliance with Israel would have been unimaginable. This raises questions about how such a reality has come to be and what impact the current moment will have on these alliances going forward.

Palestine exception

Historically, the question of Palestine offered a convenient lever for Arab authoritarian rulers to establish their legitimacy on the one hand and channel popular discontent on the other.

Forming a core component of modern Arab national identity, from the 1950s onwards Palestinian liberation was at the heart of President Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalist project in Egypt and the Baath Party's platform as it rose to power in Syria and Iraq.

Gulf monarchs frequently raised the banner of Palestine to establish their own post-colonial legitimacy, enhance their regional profile and elicit the acquiescence of their populations.

Regimes that were notoriously intolerant of popular mobilisation made exceptions for Palestine.

They allowed for mass protests, the establishment of NGOs and aid missions, and popular cultural expressions in support of Palestinians to flourish, even while showing no tolerance for similar activity on the domestic political front.

Political scientists have long theorised that these regimes' "authoritarian durability" was owed in part to their ability to distract and deflect popular discontent. In this case, Palestine frequently served as a useful pressure release valve.

Even as states like Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties with Israel, their rulers nonetheless felt the need to continue their rhetorical calls for Palestinian liberation.

They took strong (if mostly symbolic) measures in response to widespread outrage at Zionist colonial violence, including periodically cutting off diplomatic relations and severely limiting economic and cultural exchanges with Israel.

What was once a reliable formula was completely upended by the Arab uprisings and their aftermath.

In the wake of the popular protests that erupted in 2010 and led to the weakening or outright collapse of a number of regimes, a counter-revolutionary wave swept the region. It was exhibited most notably in the 2013 military coup that toppled Egypt's tenuous democratic transition and installed Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the autocratic ruler of the largest Arab state.

Tunisia also witnessed an abrupt end to its democratic transition when President Kais Saied dismissed the elected parliament and suspended the constitution in 2021.

Meanwhile, post-authoritarian transitions in Yemen, Libya and Sudan became mired in devastating civil wars sponsored by regional powers. At the same time, mass protests in Bahrain were crushed by forces sent by its Gulf neighbours. Syria's revolutionary movement succumbed to foreign interventions, leading to the country's destruction and isolation.

Moral bankruptcy

The Arab uprisings, among other things, proved that in previous decades, Palestine was not simply a distraction for Arab societies. Instead, it was a site of mass political education in its own right, one in which alternative political narratives and identities were forged in defiance of those advanced by rulers.

The struggle for Palestine had exposed the structural weaknesses and moral bankruptcy of Arab regimes that allowed for the success and expansion of the Zionist project in their midst while they continuously edged closer to it in terms of their strategic realignment.

Consequently, the impact of Israel's genocidal war in Palestine on the wider region cannot be separated from the broader political and socioeconomic developments of the last decade.

This era has been largely defined by aggressive attempts to reconsolidate an authoritarian regional order, mainly directed by the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Along with the deployment of their militaries and proxy forces, they have also shouldered a large share of the economic burden to stabilise floundering states and turn the page on the mass mobilisation driven by popular unrest that marked the prior period.

In doing so, these would-be regional powers coordinated closely with successive US administrations that pursued "stability" in the form of bolstering repressive dictatorships and leaving the region in reliable hands as the US sought to reassert itself elsewhere, principally in its ongoing rivalries with Russia and China.

The new ruling bargain in much of the Arab region is one of violent, coercive power, as seen through the mass imprisonment of political opponents, the silencing of dissent, the tightening of control over media and the securitisation of society.

No longer needing to pay lip service to the issue of Palestine, these regimes inched ever closer to a US-Israeli vision of regional security that would enlist a number of states in the struggle against Iran and its allies.

A key outcome of this process was the so-called Abraham Accords, which normalised relations between Israel and several Arab states.

As one regime after another lined up to embrace the settler colony, it became clear for all to see that the traditional Arab position that normalisation would not occur until Palestinian self-determination was achieved represented nothing more than empty words from a bygone era.

Shaky ground

On the heels of Donald Trump's normalisation deals with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, US President Joe Biden's administration believed it could deliver to Israel the biggest prize of all: normalisation with Saudi Arabia, which was poised to usher in a new "twin pillars" policy. It was a vision of the Middle East in which Israel and Saudi Arabia would be militarily and economically empowered to dominate the region jointly for the foreseeable future.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to the United Nations General Assembly last September boasted of a "corridor of peace and prosperity" connecting Asia and Europe from the UAE to Israel.

A similar effort to prop up Saudi Arabia and Iran as the region's dual powers during the 1970s collapsed with the fall of the shah during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. It would seem this latest version of the policy has been built on even shakier ground.

Nevertheless, by the beginning of last October, the question of Palestine had been completely purged from Arab politics.

Millions of Palestinians were essentially doomed to endure the miseries of life in the concentration camp of Gaza or the apartheid and piecemeal ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Jerusalem, while generations of refugees saw no end in sight to their forced exile.

The events of 7 October and the genocidal war that followed have forced Palestine back to the top of the regional agenda, much to the frustration of the US, Israel and their Arab partners.

Betrayal

The Arab states that have played their part well by providing Israel with crucial military and economic support now face a far greater challenge in their struggle for internal legitimacy than they did prior to this war.

Recent events have reopened questions that had long been buried regarding the prospects for popular mobilisation, which the region's autocrats have answered with yet more repression.

In late October, a rare and carefully stage-managed protest march in Cairo in support of Palestinians broke off from the regime-approved path and attempted to enter Tahrir Square, where security forces swiftly broke it up.

The Sisi regime has not allowed any protests to take place since.

In several Gulf states, the waving of Palestinian flags and wearing of keffiyehs have been strictly banned. Even prayers offered in support of Palestinians have been suppressed by Saudi police in Mecca.

Viral videos of young Moroccans enjoying the Israeli nightlife and praising their hosts sparked outrage, with many Moroccans holding the regime responsible for the callous display.

The fact of the matter is that the gap between Arab rulers and their populations has never been wider, a situation that is clearly unsustainable in the long term.

For all the discussions about the liberal order being upended by the unwavering western support for Israel's genocide, it should be noted that this moment has exposed the Arab regimes as well.

If the liberal order is shaken to its core globally, it will have massive reverberations in the region, particularly as socioeconomic conditions worsen, compounding the sense of frustration and betrayal.

'Generation-defining' moment

This moment has also brought to the surface questions surrounding the role that resistance movements are poised to play in the future of the region.

Arab regimes that have gone to great lengths to impose a deeply sectarianised vision of regional politics for years are now at a loss as to how to confront these groups' newfound popularity.

Lebanon's Hezbollah and Yemen's Ansar Allah are widely viewed as the only regional actors willing to challenge Israel's military aggression.

Indeed, the calculus that informed the decisions of the region's ruling elites has been challenged like never before, resulting in a more precarious and combustible situation in the years ahead.

Their only strategy, it seems, is to bide their time in the hopes that the pre-7 October order (or some version of it) can be restored in the aftermath of the current Israeli onslaught.

But even if Saudi Arabia follows through on its plans for normalisation, it would be allying itself with a vastly weakened Israeli state whose alleged military invincibility and diplomatic impunity have suffered unprecedented defeats. The US, meanwhile, will encounter far more resistance overseeing this alliance following its critical role in arming Israel and shielding it from accountability.

Moreover, given the historically unprecedented death and destruction that has unfolded in Gaza during the past 10 months, Palestine will not disappear from the region's collective consciousness, even if it has been erased from Saudi textbooks.

Questions surrounding rebuilding and resettlement, as well as matters of political governance and tending to the needs of the survivors, will demand the attention of populations across the region.

Most significantly, however, this is a generation-defining moment and will not be forgotten.

While past uprisings and their causes may have been buried beneath the weight of violent crackdowns, civil wars and authoritarian resurgence, the Arab youth of today are witnesses to this genocide and the role of their ruling elites within it.

That is sure to inform their core beliefs and political choices for years to come.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/palestine-arab-regimes-betrayal-may-haunt-them

Middle East Eye

War on Gaza: Why Arab states are failing the Palestinian people

Ussama Makdisi

After decades of a successful US-Israeli drive to marginalise the Palestinian cause, regional leaders have fallen in line - but Arab peoples have not

Before the question of Palestine became a central global ethical concern for our contemporary world, it was an ethical core of modern Arab identity. The belated European Zionist colonisation of Palestine was a flagrant injustice that unified Arabs from Morocco to Saudi Arabia and beyond.

It cut across regional, class, sectarian and religious divisions. For that same reason, the question of Palestine has also exposed a gulf in the Arab world between western-dependent rulers and their populations yearning for meaningful self-determination and solidarity.

This chasm has increased massively during the current Israeli onslaught against Gaza, which many consider to be a genocide.

Although the Anglo-French partition of the defeated Ottoman Empire in 1920 created several nominally independent Arab states, or what British imperial leaders described as an "Arab facade" to cover up the reality of British imperial rule, neither Britain nor its Arab rulers - referenced by historian Arnold Toynbee as the "Arab henchmen" of British colonialism - were able to avert growing hostility towards colonial Zionism in Palestine.

Anti-Zionist sentiment across the Arab and Islamic worlds crystallised after the 1929 Buraq uprising and the 1936 Arab revolt, both in Palestine.

Because of the manifest injustice of colonial Zionism in Palestine - which was predicated on privileging European Zionist aspirations to create a Jewish state, in fundamental disregard of the self-determination of the majority, who were native Palestinians - representatives of six Arab states made impassioned pleas against the proposed western partition of Palestine at the newly formed United Nations in 1947.

Along with a handful of other nations, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq objected vociferously to the obvious injustice of granting a mostly foreign-born minority of Jewish settlers, colonists and refugees more than half of Palestine to create a Jewish state at the expense of the native Arab population.

Fighting for Palestine

For all their dependency on British or US power and their own dynastic and geopolitical interests, the pro-western Hashemites in Jordan and Iraq and their rivals, Saudi Arabia, as well as Syria and Egypt, felt compelled to mobilise in May 1948 in an attempt to prevent the Zionist colonisation of Palestine. As poorly equipped and trained as most of their armies were, the Arab states sent actual military detachments to fight in and for Palestine.

Although Jordan's King Abdullah secretly colluded with the Zionists to divide Palestine, his army nevertheless fought the Zionists to prevent the fall of the Old City of Jerusalem. At a basic level, Arabs collectively understood the existential threat posed by the creation of a modern, expansionist, western settler-colonial, ethno-religious, nationalist state in their midst.

After the Nakba of 1948, the anti-colonial, secular Arab pedagogue Sati al-Husri reflected on how several Arab states could fail to defeat Israel. His answer was that it was precisely because there were several Arab states. His point was that Arab states reflected a western policy of divide-and-rule, and the absence of Arab political unity inevitably weakened the Arab ability not only to resist colonial Zionism, but also to aspire to meaningful self-determination and sovereignty.

Among those who fought in Palestine in 1948 and were profoundly shaped by the experience of defeat, emerging with an anti-colonial vision, was the Egyptian and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. He led the Egyptian revolution of 1952, and then directly challenged western imperialism and Arab official quiescence by building up Egypt's army, nationalising the Suez Canal in 1956, supporting national liberation movements in Algeria and Palestine, and helping to consolidate the Non-Aligned Movement.

Nasser spoke and acted defiantly. More than any other Arab leader, he represented the anti-colonial moment of the 1950s. He embodied what philosopher Frantz Fanon called "the pitfalls of national consciousness", which led to the consolidation of power by an authoritarian post-colonial leader, and the genuine Arab desire to be free that drove this national consciousness to begin with.

Nasser understood the threat that colonial Zionism posed to Arab self-determination, and he increasingly recognised the centrality of the question of Palestine to the wider Arab desire for meaningful independence and development.

The shocking Arab defeat of 1967 lost the Arabs more than what was left of historic Palestine, with the Israelis conquest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. The war effectively also lost them their most inspirational secular nationalist leader, Nasser, who would soon die in 1970. In addition, they lost their collective voice.

De-Arabising Arabs

Taking advantage of Nasser's downfall, the US worked hard to defang secular Arab anti-colonialism and build up Israel militarily (while turning a blind eye to its nuclear weapons programme). The US also worked relentlessly to isolate the question of Palestine - and hence the fate of Palestinians - from any concerted Arab state support.

The US had long known that its overt support for Israel was the great driver of anti-American political sentiment in the region, from which the US wanted oil and pro-western "stability", not democracy. It thus proffered Arabs the pretence of "even-handedness", while encouraging deeply anti-democratic, absolutist, pro-western monarchies in the Gulf to fight a Palestine-centric anti-colonial consciousness.

After 1967, a State Department research memorandum insisted that the Arab failure to become a secular democratic "modern man" was rooted in an allegedly internal archaic Islamic mentality, not external geopolitical reasons. The memorandum stated that what was required was, in essence, "the de-Arabisation" of the Arabs; that is, to make them accept the supposed rational values of the West, which included its support for Israel.

What was strongly implied by the memorandum was the Arabs had to be made to accept Israel's domination of the Palestinian people, reject the myth of secular Arab unity, and submit to the US architecture of hegemony over the petroleum-rich Middle East.

One pillar of this hegemony depended on despotic oil-rich states, such as the Shah's Iran and Saudi Arabia; the other pillar rested on Israel, which was allowed to begin its colonisation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, the Sinai and the Golan Heights.

The 1973 Arab-Israeli war saw the US overtly aiding Israel's militaryﾠfor the first time. It also marked the last time the world witnessed concerted Arab state action to resist Israel militarily and economically. As Egyptian and Syrian armies sought to retake their occupied lands, the Saudi-led Arab oil-producing states imposed an oil embargo on the philo-Zionist West.

After the war, however, one after another, the significant Arab states fell in line with Washington, accepting their subordinate role within a US architecture of hegemony over the Middle East.

The rewards of lavish western attention and praise were too tempting for Arab despots, while the costs of ongoing warfare with Israel were made to appear far too high for their societies to bear. In 1978, Egypt under President Anwar Sadat became the first Arab state to break openly with the Arab consensus around Palestine.

It signed a peace treaty with Israel that abandoned Palestinians to their fate under Israeli colonialism, and accepted the humiliating Israeli terms for demilitarising the Sinai. Camp David marked Egypt's formal subordination to an Israel-centric Middle East policy, which is why the liberal West hails Sadat as a visionary, and has supported the autocratic governments led by former military men Hosni Mubarak and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Henceforth, the US-equipped Egyptian army would be used almost exclusively to suppress Egypt's own democratic aspirations, and not to fight Israel.

US hegemony

Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 consecrated the new official Arab acquiescence to US hegemony over the region. For three months, Israel pummelled an Arab capital city. It oversaw the largest single massacre of Palestinian civilians in their modern history (before the current war on Gaza) in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, after the US negotiated the exile of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) to Tunis in return for the protection of Palestinian refugees.

In sum, Israel killed 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians that summer. But the Arab states in Washington's orbit, led by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, sat impotently on the sidelines. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 accelerated the disintegration of even the pretence of official Arab unity. Kuwait's punitive mass expulsion of its Palestinian residents after the war confirmed this disintegration.

The more the US military presence in the Gulf increased, the more the absolutist oil-rich Gulf states conformed to an increasingly explicit American vision of a new Middle East, with a belligerent and unapologetic Israel firmly at its centre.

With the advent of the US-led "peace process" of the post-Cold War 1990s, the PLO leadership in exile, and then Hashemite Jordan, also capitulated to US and Israeli demands for disadvantageous treaties. The new Palestinian Authority created by the Oslo Accords became an auxiliary of Israel's military control over the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

As Israel flooded the occupied territories with Jewish colonists, in brazen violation of international law, Arab states were reduced to ineffectual pleading from the sidelines.

Having abandoned any pretence of military resistance to Israeli colonialism, Arab governments in 2002 offered Israel a full peace in return for a two-state solution based on 1967 borders. Israel rejected this offer out of hand, and the mostly pro-western Arab states, in turn, acquiesced to a US policy that was predicated on ignoring the question of Palestine. Focused on their own dynastic interests, they relegated the question of Palestine to irrelevance.

Embracing defeat

The 2017 US recognition under then-US President Donald Trump's administration of Israel's illegal annexation of Jerusalem, and the subsequent moving of its embassy there, confirmed official US contempt for Arab popular sentiment. The ensuing Abraham Accords, signed in 2020, confirmed Arab governments' own contempt for their repressed populations in return for various US favours.

These accords - in which Morocco, the UAE and Bahrain "normalised" relations with a fanatical and totally unrepentant Israeli government that had clearly spelt out its intentions to never recognise meaningful Palestinian self-determination - typified the meaning of the US-led "peace process", which vacated any sense of needing Arab popular legitimacy for the acceptance of colonial Zionism.

The US policy of forcing Arabs to embrace defeat appeared to have succeeded at the surface level. But it was based on a delusion that Palestinians would accept their fate as a colonised people in perpetuity; that Arab peoples would simply forget about Palestine being central to their ethics and worldview; that colonial Zionism could be imposed in its most racist form on the native peoples of the Arab East; and that American and Israeli power was irresistible.

The US convinced authoritarian Arab leaders of these notions, and that the Islamic Republic of Iran, and not Israel, was their principal enemy - but it did not convince the peoples of the region.

US domination over the official Arab world - that is to say, a majority of Arab states that belong to the Arab League - ended formal Arab military resistance to Israel. But it also inevitably saw the mantle of Arab resistance to colonial Zionism taken up by non-state parties, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, and more recently the Houthis (officially known as Ansar Allah) in Yemen, after the PLO had run its course.

These organisations formed an "axis of resistance" backed by Iran, whose own geopolitical and ideological considerations have induced it to actively support military resistance to Israel. Islamist parties have successfully waged asymmetrical warfare against Israel, and their sustained defiance of Israeli brutality has garnered them enormous popular support - a popularity that eludes Arab governments.

They have been able to withstand a vastly greater amount of Israeli bombing than any Arab state has ever endured, and thus far, they have appeared vastly more capable than any conventional Arab army. Whereas the Arab armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria capitulated to Israel after six days in 1967, Hezbollah drove Israel out of Lebanon in 2000, the first time any Arab territory had been liberated through armed struggle.

Hezbollah then endured a month of relentless Israeli warfare in 2006, only to emerge victorious and puncture the idea that Israel could not be defeated. Hamas has thus far endured nearly 150 days of indiscriminate Israeli bombardment, and yet as of this writing, it continues to fight.

Global question

Today, despite Israel's genocidal assault being live-streamed around the world, leading Arab states have not carried out diplomatic or economic sanctions against Israel, let alone sent military forces to defend the Palestinian people, as their forebears did in 1948.

While Latin American countries such as Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Columbia have recalled their ambassadors, or have severed or downgraded diplomatic ties with the Zionist state, not a single Arab state that has "normalised" with Israel has done so.

These Arab states act as if they have no resources, no leverage and no ability to do anything except plead with the Americans, who themselves loudly and bellicosely embrace colonial Zionism and enable the war on Palestine.

More to the point, these states are now convinced that their interests lay firmly within the undemocratic status quo that includes Israel. Palestinians in this sense are no longer seen by these states as a kindred people suffering from profound injustice as much as an anachronistic problem that affects regional stability and hampers economic prosperity.

At the Munich Security Conference on 17 February, while the Palestinians were being mercilessly bombed by Israel in besieged Gaza, the Egyptian foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry, agreedﾠwith former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and castigated Hamas for being unrepresentative and for being outside the consensus calling for a "recognition of Israel".

Post-apartheid South Africa's recent petition to the International Court of Justice to stop Israel's genocide against the Palestinian people was replete with symbolism. But also telling was the reluctance of either Egypt or Saudi Arabia - the purported leaders of the Arab world - to strongly support South Africa's petition.

The Arab League issued a belated series of perfunctory tweets on 10 January stating that it was "natural" for the Arab League to support South Africa. Official Arab reticence constitutes its own indictment, but it also sends a clear message to the world: whereas Arab peoples from Morocco to Yemen have not accepted defeat and overwhelmingly support the liberation of Palestine, the official, despotic and sclerotic Arab leadership has indeed embraced defeat on the question of Palestine.

This is much to the satisfaction of Israel and the US, just as, ironically, Palestine has again become a global question.

[Published on March 1, 2024]

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/war-gaza-arab-states-failing-palestinian-people-why

Middle East Eye
Gaza war: Arab regimes ignore popular support for Palestine at their peril

Mohamad Elmasry

Pushing ahead with these Israel normalisation deals could prove risky, amid unprecedented Arab support for the Palestinian cause

Anew survey from the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies has found that Arabs are more pro-Palestinian than they have been at any point since 2011, the year the organisation began systematically polling Arab public opinion on Israel-Palestine and other issues.

In the most recent survey, conducted between 12 December and 5 January, the centre polled 8,000 Arabs in 16 countries that represent more than 95 percent of the population of the Arab region. Respondents were asked a variety of questions about the Palestinian cause, the 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas, Israel’s war on Gaza, and US policy.

The findings suggest that Israel’s war on Gaza, likely a genocide under international humanitarian law, has increased Arab support for Palestinians, and amplified anti-Israel and anti-US sentiments.

A massive 92 percent of respondents said the Palestinian cause was an issue of concern for all Arabs, not just Palestinians. This represents a significant increase from the 76 percent reported in the centre’s 2022 poll; indeed, it is the highest figure ever recorded.

The survey also shows strong evidence of Arab public support for Hamas, which governs Gaza but is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK and other countries.

Nearly 90 percent of Arab respondents said they considered the 7 October attack by Hamas to be a “legitimate resistance operation” or a “somewhat flawed but legitimate resistance operation”.

Importantly, a total of 89 percent of respondents said they rejected recognising Israel, the highest figure in the centre’s polling history. Only 13 percent of surveyed Arabs said they believed that peace with Israel remains possible.

Stalled momentum

Opinions about the US also appear to have grown more negative as a result of the Gaza war. More than 90 percent of respondents said the US response to recent events has been “bad” or “very bad”, with 76 percent saying their opinion of US policy had become more negative since 7 October.

It is worth considering the implications of these results for Israeli normalisation efforts. In 2020, four Arab countries - the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Sudan and Bahrain - agreed to normalise relations with Israel.

These deals were significant, in part because they bypassed Palestinians and seemed to do away with concerns about Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories. While Zionists praised the normalisation efforts, scholars and pro-Palestinian groups saw them as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause.

Since 2020 and before 7 October, there had been momentum for more widespread normalisation, with Saudi Arabia well on its way towards making a deal. But Israel’s war on Gaza, and the negative sentiments it has engendered about Israel in the Arab world, could make future normalisation agreements less likely - or at least more difficult to execute.

In the centre’s latest survey, 68 percent of Saudi Arabian respondents said they rejected recognising Israel - nearly double the 38 percent who said this in 2022.

Moroccan and Sudanese Arabs are also more likely now to reject recognising Israel than they were in 2022. In Morocco, rejection of recognition rose to 78 percent from 67 percent, while Sudanese rejection rose to 81 percent from 72 percent. These findings underscore the daunting task faced by Arab regimes attempting to normalise with Israel going forward.

As South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice has made clear, Israel has, since 7 October, issued numerous statements that appear to show genocidal intent, while Israeli forces have killed more than 24,000 Palestinians, including 10,000 children.

It will be difficult to convince Arab citizens, most of whom are overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Palestinian plight, of the political, ethical and religious appropriateness of normalising relations with a state that has bombed civilian areas indiscriminately, targeted hospitals, shelters and safe routes, and systematically prevented humanitarian aid from reaching innocent civilians.

United in anger

Going forward, the question for Arab regimes will revolve around the extent to which they are willing to ignore popular sentiments. Pushing ahead with Israel normalisation against the will of their citizens could prove risky.

Indeed, Arab publics appear united in anger. The last time anger was this palpable on the Arab streets was during the Arab Spring era, which led to calls for democracy and widespread popular protests. Will Arab governments be willing to roll the dice on normalisation agreements that could lead to unrest? Only time will tell.

More than anything, perhaps, the recent survey results demonstrate the massive disconnect between some Arab regimes and their citizenries.

With rare exceptions, most Arab governments have delivered only relatively mild rebukes of Israeli atrocities, and popular calls for action against Israel - including calls for an oil embargo - have not gained traction with Arab governments. Importantly, previously agreed-upon normalisation deals have continued unabated.

Egypt’s handling of the Rafah border crossing has perhaps best illustrated the disconnect between Arab governments and the Arab street. Egypt has not fully opened the Rafah crossing - a critical failing, since allowing essential aid into Gaza would mitigate the current humanitarian catastrophe.

For months, the Egyptian regime has obstructed the work of aid workers and stifled Rafah-related protests, even arresting foreign activists attempting to mobilise aid. Last week, an Egyptian woman who carried out a modest street protest, waving a Palestinian flag while chanting for justice, was arrested by Egyptian authorities.

Acts of tragic, oppressive violence can sometimes catalyse significant change. This was the case during the Arab Spring, when Arab regime violence led to unprecedented public anger, massive street protests and calls for democracy. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that the Gaza genocide could mark a substantive change in Arab politics.

No one knows for sure what the next round of survey results will show. But unless Arab regimes do something to meaningfully check Israeli and US aggression - and to better align their policies with the desires of their citizenries, while creating better economic opportunities - anger and frustration in the Arab street will likely continue to rise.

Arab governments would be wise to listen to the calls of their populations. It is always difficult to predict how public anger may manifest.

[Published on January 17, 2024]

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/war-gaza-arab-regimes-ignore-popular-support-palestine-peril