After 7 October: Prospects in the Arab World

Over the two waves of the Arab Spring uprisings, which spanned nearly a decade, the Arab world was unable to find a common middle ground between the ruling elites and the aspirations of the people. The former failed to channel national independence from foreign colonisers into the advancement of the economic and human capabilities of their populaces, while the latter failed to produce alternative political elites with well-considered projects for a better future, not just romantic revolutionary slogans. Tunisia was a short-lived exception that failed for the same reasons holding other countries back. Morocco is another exception thanks to the savvy of its ruling elite. The oil-rich Gulf states are an exception of a third type, their distinct economic and political features distinguishing them from the rest of the region.

This inability to reach a consensus has led to civil wars, intense armed conflicts, and military coups, during which war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed, resulting in still-unfolding humanitarian and geostrategic tragedies. Three states where power is shared by multiple parties that enjoy the backing of rival regional and international powers have unravelled (Syria, Libya, and Yemen), and the same fate currently looms in Sudan. For all intents and purposes, Iran occupies the seat of power in both Iraq and Lebanon, and the largest Arab country Egypt  has become the second most indebted state in the world, living on whatever handouts it can solicit from the Gulf states, Europe, and international financial institutions, while being unable to stop the precipitous decline of its national currency and keep the lights on in homes in its own capital. Over the last ten years, the Arab region has become the sick man of the world, as rising regional powers (Iran, Israel, and Turkey) vie for influence and bite off chunks for themselves. This is an unsurprising development.

On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched the Al-Aqsa Flood. The operation may fail to achieve its Palestinian objectives, or it may end up achieving other, unanticipated Palestinian goals. Either way, it is likely to have qualitative impacts in the Arab world given that the region has been the site of successive geopolitical landslides over the past decade.

Regardless of how one assesses Al-Aqsa Flood itself, whether positively or negatively, Israel, claiming self-defence, responded by launching a genocidal war to uproot Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and amplified its rabid colonisation efforts in the West Bank. At the same, the war gave rise to the largest movement of popular solidarity with the rights of the Palestinian people in American universities and in several cities in Europe and the United States, forcing the US administration to submit a draft resolution in the Security Council for a ceasefire in Gaza (10 June 2024), although it had vetoed similar resolutions proposed in previous months. The governments of some European states have also formally recognised a Palestinian state.

In parallel, the Palestinian question has risen to the top of the agenda of the two most important courts in the world. Israel stands accused of attempted genocide in the International Court of Justice, while the International Criminal Court is currently deliberating the prosecutor’s request for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant, as well as three top Hamas leaders, on charges of war crimes.

This multilateral, multidimensional global solidarity, which has continued for months, was not matched by similar expressions of collective popular solidarity in the Arab world except in Morocco. Arab governments did not allow expressions of popular solidarity with the Palestinian people save in Jordan and Yemen, and then only symbolically and for various reasons. Hundreds of Egyptians who tried to express solidarity were arrested. Unfortunately, this huge gap between popular expressions of solidarity with Arab causes in the Arab world and globally is not new. Only the size of the gap varies. In 2002 and 2003, mass demonstrations swept cities in Europe and North America in a show of solidarity with the Palestinians and then in protest against the US invasion of Iraq. Some twenty million people turned out against the invasion of Iraq on 15 February 2003, in what was considered the largest demonstration in human history. Although solidarity protests in the Arab world at that time were comparatively limited, they were the only demonstrations in the world in which people were killed. In some Arab countries, hundreds of citizens were arrested and tortured.

Nevertheless, a political gap of another kind began to unfold on 7 October 2023. True, no one was killed this time in the small-scale Arab solidarity demonstrations, but some 40,000 Palestinians were killed in front of everyone, while another two million are threatened by famine. Every day, this fact deepens the sense of despondency and shame in the Arab region. There is pervasive helplessness in confronting the savagery of the Israeli war machine and American support of it, exacerbated by the helplessness of popular solidarity initiatives, and even human expressions of grief,  as they face ferocious political and security crackdown. There is deep shame at the modest expression of Arab popular solidarity when compared to the scope and effectiveness of popular solidarity in countries associated with colonialism and imperialism in Arab political culture, where broad swathes of Jews, including leading literary and academic figures, turned out to publicly repudiate Israeli war crimes. There is further shame and astonishment at the enervated response of Arab governments to the brutality of Israeli aggression, even compared to the position of these governments two decades ago or to the position of non-Arab governments now, such as that of South Africa or other European and Latin American countries.

The Arab League is effectively dead (though no death certificate has been issued), and this is true for all issues, not only the Palestinian cause. The current secretary-general is not even attempting to feign it’s still breathing, in contrast to former secretaries-general. In June, in the shadow of the ongoing war of extermination in Gaza, army commanders in five Arab states had no qualms about meeting in Bahrain with the chief of staff of the Israeli army to discuss regional security. As Lebanese Hussam Itani wrote, convincingly: ‘The Palestinian issue has fallen off the political agenda of Arab governments and been placed in the humanitarian column’.

The gap is growing wider still due to the fact that Hamas, for the last nine months, has continued to engage in armed combat with the most powerful army in the region—the same army that successfully cleared the battlefield of the most powerful Arab army (the Egyptian army) in just three hours in the 1967 war after it destroyed the Egyptian Air Force. There is, however, a vital Palestinian element contributing to even further widening this gap. The end goal of all this is political, not military—namely, the extraction of a tangible Palestinian state from the abstract realm of international law and its transformation into living institutions on the ground. This goal cannot be achieved by even the entire Palestinian people, in the West Bank and Gaza, taking up arms and becoming fighters. According to Palestinian academic Yazid Sayegh in his classic book, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993, armed struggle as a strategy ended in 1982 with the departure of PLO forces from the last Arab country neighbouring Israel that allowed for it. Of course, the right to resist occupation, as guaranteed by international law, persists, as embodied in sporadic resistance operations.

Achieving the goal of independence requires qualitative, impactful developments in the relations of international, Arab, and Palestinian powers, as well as within Israeli society and within the positions of these parties on the Palestinian issue. To achieve this goal, it is not enough for the first three parties to incessantly invoke ‘the Palestinian state’ or ‘the two-state solution’ at every possible occasion. These assuring phrases must be turned into a political mechanism that creates facts on the ground, especially since there is no significant party in Israel, in either the government or the opposition, that accepts it. Proponents of the two-state or bi-national one-state scenario have gone extinct in Israel since the wave of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians in the 1990s and then the gradual rise of the far right. It is not without significance that a month since it was issued, there has been no international will to implement the UN Security Council’s long-awaited ceasefire resolution, which Palestinian, Arab, and international parties had been tirelessly striving after for eight months.

On the other hand, there is no serious, institutional Palestinian movement towards the creation of political realities on the ground; there are only wishes. The head of Hamas abroad, Khaled Meshaal, said in June 2024: ‘The most likely scenario is the collapse and disintegration of this entity [Israel], and the loss of justification for its existence.’ He did not explain how this would happen, even as reconciliation talks between Fatah and Hamas are in their seventeenth year. The negotiations have moved from Cairo to Doha, Algiers, and finally Moscow, but without result.

The Palestinian Authority, which was built on the political and security model of Arab governments, has been decimated by financial and administrative corruption, and its security cooperation with the Israeli occupation. Nathan Brown, a scholar specialising in Palestinian affairs, observes that PA institutions have ‘withered, degenerated and lost their connection to the state-building project except at the rhetorical level’. No wonder, then, that its political and moral standing is in the gutter among the Palestinian people themselves. According to the latest poll (June 2024) in the West Bank and Gaza Strip conducted by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is the least popular potential candidate for the presidency of the promised Palestinian state. The candidate who consistently polls the best is Marwan Barghouti—serving a life sentence, it would take a miracle for Israel to release him—who also far outpolls Hamas leaders both inside and outside of Gaza. In this miserable context, the Palestinian people are understandably sharply divided over future options, which, according to the aforementioned poll, range from continued armed struggle, peaceful resistance, the two-state solution, a binational state, and the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority.

Regardless of Hamas’s objectives in the Al-Aqsa Flood, the operation, and the military and political reactions to it, have triggered a political earthquake whose tremors continue to be felt. Yet there is another yawning gap between aspirations unleashed by Al-Aqsa and the heroic steadfastness of the Palestinian people set against the bitter political realities on the ground. It is not yet clear what new political realities will one day emerge. Some analysts believe that the huge gap between the magnitude of Palestinian human suffering and the outpouring of international solidarity, on one hand, and Arab official and popular helplessness, on the other, may be a source of spontaneous uprisings in the Arab world. That could be a political earthquake of another type, one that may sweep away the ruins left by the long-time—too long—failure of the nation-state in the region and bring the Arab peoples to the threshold of a new historical era.