Is the Palestinian Cause Central to the Arab World?

The date of the Al-Aqsa Flood, 7 October 2023, will be remembered for more than one reason, regardless of the intentions of its masterminds. One reading is that Al-Aqsa laid bare an Arab collective decision, consensual albeit tacit, to deprioritise the Palestinian cause, demoting it further in the queue with other tragedies in the Arab region (Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere). These issues receive scant attention from Arab monarchs and presidents, and the Arab League, and so are the not the subject of collective initiatives. Instead, the concerned Arab states are left to contain the security fallout of each one separately.

In the international arena, amidst what may go down in history as the Second Nakba (Catastrophe), there is no longer any official Arab collective momentum behind the Palestinian cause. Even Algeria, which for several decades has been the most prominent incubator for the cause and all resistance factions, has fallen silent. The states most active internationally in support of the legitimate goals of the Palestinian people since 7 October are non-Arab. South Africa and the states spearheading diplomatic initiatives to support Palestine and punish Israel internationally, such as Norway, Ireland, Belgium, and Spain, are neither Arab nor Muslim. Remarkably, it is the new British Foreign Secretary, David Lammy—who took office just last month—who seems the most driven to reach a ceasefire.

When exactly was the collective decision made to demote the Palestinian cause on the official Arab agenda?  It is difficult to say. The 1968 Battle of Karameh, fought by the Jordanian army alongside the nascent Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation army in the West Bank, marked the beginning of Arab officialdom’s rallying around the Palestinian armed resistance, exemplified by the seat given to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in the Arab League. The official Arab consensus on the Palestinian issue most likely began to break down following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, when Yasser Arafat, senior PLO leaders, and Palestinian cultural icons came out in support of the invasion amidst remarkable Palestinian popular sympathy inside and outside Kuwait, even though Kuwait was an important source of political and material support for Palestine. Palestinians then constituted some twenty per cent of Kuwait’s population. In contrast, the armies of Arab states, led by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, participated in the liberation of Kuwait alongside American forces. The PLO was only able to reopen its office in Kuwait some twenty-five years later, but it is questionable whether the injury this dealt to popular solidarity with the Palestinian cause in Kuwait, the Gulf region, and other Arab countries had fully healed before 7 October.

The two decades between the Battle of Karameh and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait were a period of violent political conflicts between Arab governments seeking to hijack the Palestinian cause or contain its impact on their domestic politics. This led to the outbreak of bloody armed confrontations between the Palestinian resistance and Arab armies and militias in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. The political conflict within the PLO intensified, and Palestinian leaders’ resistance turned into support for opposing Arab views amidst mutual accusations of betrayal between Arab governments (Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Egypt), especially after the Camp David Accords were signed in 1978. Palestinian elements were also used by Arab intelligence agencies to assassinate other Palestinian and Arab leaders. The Palestinian people, especially in the refugee camps of Jordan and Lebanon, paid a steep price for these internecine Palestinian and Palestinian-Arab conflicts.

Republican regimes in Arab states (with the exception of Tunisia and Sudan) were more vociferous in their support for the Palestinian cause than the monarchies, especially regimes that seized power through military coup such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Libya. After the October 1973 war, these four republics competed even more fiercely to control Palestinian decision-making and subordinate it to their own strategies for erasing the legacy of the Israeli occupation as well as to some leaders’ ambitions to monopolise political leadership of the Arab world (Gamal Abdel Nasser had sown these seeds in the 1950s). The positions taken by these regimes on the Palestinian issue were not sincere. While they differed in their approach to the cause, they shared some specific priorities: securing a monopoly on rule in their countries and misleading domestic and regional public opinion about their immediate and long-term goals in managing what was then called the Arab-Israeli conflict. They all opportunistically adopted ludicrous Arab unity projects, exploiting the Palestinian cause to this end, and they acted to avoid political embarrassment resulting from the relatively high political ceiling of the PLO.

Before the 1948 Nakba, these regimes had reaped the fruits of a half century of struggle by peoples in the region against foreign occupation, but they bequeathed to their peoples tragedies no less terrible than the colonialism of old: new occupations in Syria by Israel, and later Russia and Iran; the disintegration of the state in Libya; genocidal wars against the population in Syria, Iraq, and Sudan; and the impoverishment of the largest Arab state (Egypt), which has been reduced to begging for loans and aid. The largest Arab countries waged bloody wars that consumed their wealth and hundreds of thousands of their finest soldiers, as Egypt did in Yemen, and then came the 1967 war and Israel’s occupation of what was left of Palestine. Iraq waged a reckless war with Iran, followed by the invasion and occupation of Kuwait. These disastrous, momentous decisions were not made by state institutions, but by individuals unaccountable to anyone, who ran their countries (and still do) with the logic of bandits. It was not the invasion of Kuwait, then, that shifted the official Arab agenda on the Palestinian issue, but rather the outcome of a catastrophic accumulation that all went in one direction: the Arabisation of the Palestinian Nakba.

The need for a modern, democratic political system was one of the most important conclusions drawn by political elites in the Arab world in the wake of the dismal military defeat in 1967 at the hands of the army of an ‘entity’ that the majority of Arabs at the time refused to grant the status of a state. Later, Field Marshal Abdel Ghani al-Gamasy, who headed the Egyptian Army Operations Room in the October 1973 war, said that the military should have been kept out of politics, seeing this as one of the most significant lessons of the historical defeat. But this would only happen a half century later.

Student and popular protest movements against successive defeats in the region since 1968 did not view the demand for democracy and press freedom as separate from the liberation of occupied Arab and Palestinian land. On the contrary, they considered these indispensable tools for mobilising around a national, emancipatory goal. In the 1990s, there was an important qualitative development in the agenda of the peoples of the region. Globally, the largest bloc of authoritarian regimes in the world, the Soviet bloc, collapsed. In the Arab world, authoritarian regimes were under greater pressure to democratise. Before the decade was out, the first opening took place in Morocco, when Abderrahmane Youssoufi, the historic leader of the Moroccan opposition who had previously been sentenced to death, was invited by King Hassan II to form a coalition government and serve as prime minister. The authoritarian grip of Morocco’s monarchy would be gradually loosened and the democratic margin expanded, though the country would not become a constitutional monarchy. The death of Syria’s brutal dictator, Hafez al-Assad, in 2000 and the succession of his son Bashar triggered the so-called ‘Damascus Spring’, which adopted an ambitious democratic programme despite Israel’s continued occupation of the Golan Heights. On the Palestinian front, the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, after which Yasser Arafat and PLO leaders moved to Ramallah. The following year, an academic symposium was organised addressing the future of human rights in this new Palestinian entity, organised by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights in concert with leading Palestinian human rights organisations. It was the first seminar of its kind, as the Palestinian human rights discourse prior to that was limited to Israeli occupation crimes. Hope for a ‘Palestinian Spring’ was on the rise. The late Egyptian human rights advocate and academic Mohamed El-Sayed Said later wrote an iconic article, ‘Two Schools in Palestinian State Building’, which though published a quarter of a century ago, reads as if it were written after 7 October.

With the advent of the Arab Spring as this century entered its second decade, tension began to surface between the demands for Palestinian liberation and Arab liberation. The first point of divergence was Oslo’s transformation from a project for a Palestinian state into a bloody conflict between Fatah and Hamas, the latter seeing the accords as a betrayal of the goal of statehood in the entire Palestinian territory, from the river to the sea. Over the next thirty years, the two parties (along with Palestinian mediators, Arab mediators in Cairo, Doha and Algeria, and foreign mediators in Norway, Russia, and China) failed to find a mutually acceptable framework within which they could manage their differences without undermining the overall goals of the historic struggle of the Palestinian people and their ongoing sacrifices. During the same period, the two parties were able to reach separate interim compromises on their conflict with Israel, which naturally entailed some degree of acquiescence, although such acquiescence was deemed unacceptable in the conflict between the two Palestinian parties.

The second ‘Syrian Spring’ in 2012 was another point of divergence. Bashar al-Assad called on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Lebanese militias with Hezbollah—both field and media allies of the struggle of the Palestinian people—to assist him in suppressing the aspirations of the Syrian people. When IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani (whom Syrians call a butcher) was later assassinated, the late head of the political bureau of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, mourned him as the ‘martyr of Jerusalem’, giving enormous offense to the Syrian people. The resentment persisted even after Haniyeh’s assassination, especially since Palestinian refugee camps in Syria were not spared Assad’s repression during the Arab Spring. Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr the day before Haniyeh’s assassination also brought profound pain to the surface. Shukr was a leading member his party’s militia in Syria, which backed Assad’s war to annihilate and displace his people, turning them into refugees akin to Palestinians.

The points of tension are not solely related to Syria. Hezbollah is accused of pawning Lebanese political and military decision-making to Tehran, suppressing the Lebanese democratic movement, containing resistance to political and financial corruption, preventing the investigation into the bombing of the Beirut port in 2020, and assassinating Lebanese cultural and political figures. Yemen is another prominent member of the Iranian-led ‘Resistance Axis’ that includes Hezbollah, the Syrian regime, Hamas, and Iraqi Shiite armed groups that control Iraqi state decisions to meet Iran’s interests. The Yemeni member of the axis is Ansar Allah (the Houthis), who are carrying out attacks at the entrance to the Red Sea on ships destined for Israel or owned by companies from states that support Israel. The Houthis also attacked and looted the United Nations humanitarian support offices in Yemen and arrested foreign and Yemeni staff there. Not only did the Houthis block the Arab Spring in Yemen ten years ago, they have worked diligently to restore the medieval style of rule (the Imamate) that prevailed in Yemen before the 1962 revolution. Erasing Yemeni public memory tops their agenda; this erasure entails the renaming of squares, thoroughfares, schools, and other facilities that memorialise the leaders of the 1962 revolution and its prominent writers and poets, naming them after religious symbols that belong neither to the revolution nor to the Sunni Islam embraced by the majority of Yemenis. The political and cultural resistance faced by the Houthis in this field has prompted them to replace the names of the symbols of the 1962 revolution with those of Palestinian martyrs (Ismail Haniyeh, for instance) to achieve the same goal.

After Arab peoples won national independence in the middle of the last century, they put solidarity with the Palestinian people at the forefront of their agenda. But later they found that their emancipation was incomplete; they were still unable to exercise their right to self-determination. It was confiscated by non-foreign regimes, which squandered their countries’ wealth and energies on capricious political and military adventures, coups and counter-coups, and reckless economic gambles, unconstrained by the slightest accountability. A few decades later, these peoples found themselves in the same basket as the Palestinian people, despite important differences. Whether a unified state in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, or Sudan can be restored is questionable. Meanwhile, over the last twelve years, millions of Arab refugees have joined the Palestinians in exile, their return to their country being equally uncertain.

It is the right to self-determination that anchors the heroic struggle of the Palestinian people in international law. This right is also the basis of the struggle of other peoples in the Arab world, and here we are talking about the right of peoples, not of states. Empowering peoples to manage their own public affairs is the essence of the right to self-determination, whether for Palestinians, in their struggle against both Israel and the corrupt governing authority that collaborates with the occupation, or for Arab peoples, in their struggle against authoritarian, thieving rulers who foolishly squandered the gains of national independence and failed to build states.

This is a new horizon for the struggle-based relationship between the Palestinian people and the majority of peoples in the Arab world, and for the horizon of mutual solidarity in the era of the Arabisation of the Nakba.