Why do Arab regimes betray Gaza?

After more than eight months since the genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza, waged by the Israeli settler-colonialism with support and backing from the United States, the positions of the Arab autocratic regimes continue to betray Gaza and forget the Palestinian cause. This is despite the fact that the Israeli genocidal attack is being broadcast live worldwide. The abandonment by Arab regimes has reached the point of complicity with the crimes of genocide. Arab countries have not implemented any diplomatic or economic sanctions against the Israeli settler-colonialism, nor exerted any real pressure on the United States, the main supporter of the Zionist colonial project. Meanwhile, countries from Latin America such as Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, and Colombia have recalled their ambassadors or severed or reduced diplomatic relations with the Zionist state. Arab countries, however, have not even dared to threaten such actions, let alone send military forces to defend the Palestinian people, as the predecessors of Arab leaders did in 1948.

The ongoing monstrous genocide war carried out by the Zionist settler-colonialism in Gaza, under the world’s watch, has resulted in the martyrdom of more than forty thousand Palestinians, mostly children and women, and the injury of more than eighty thousand in the Gaza Strip. It has also led to the destruction of nearly 70 percent of residential buildings, public facilities, hospitals, mosques, schools, and infrastructure. Despite the enormity of the crimes, destruction, and mass killings, Arab regimes act as if they are helpless and lack the resources, influence, or ability to do anything except plead with Americans to minimize losses and quickly eliminate Palestinian resistance, particularly Hamas. America, openly embracing Zionist colonialism, participates in the genocide war through military, financial, and diplomatic support, aiming to liquidate the Palestinian cause, empower the settler-colonial entity, and normalize its presence in the region.

The Gaza war has exposed the disconnect of Arab autocratic regimes from the aspirations and ambitions of their people, confirming the loss of popular legitimacy by these regimes. Their existence and interests are not realized through democracy but through further oppression, coercion, abandoning any national aspirations, and reinforcing narrow nationalist and sectarian identities. Western autocratic regimes no longer view Palestinians as a suffering sisterly people with shared history, identity, and destiny. Instead, they see the Palestinian issue as an obstacle to their interests, considering the Palestinian people as a problem that threatens regional stability and impedes economic prosperity.

These Darwinian political ideas among Arab tyrants emerged dramatically after the coup against the Arab Spring uprisings. New perceptions emerged about threats to the stability of Arab regimes under American dominance. The Israeli Zionist colonization became the linchpin between Arab autocratic regimes and American imperialism.

The official Arab decline and betrayal of the Palestinian cause indicate a long path of failure, lack of vision, and moral bankruptcy, complete submission to American hegemony, and colonial arrangements. President Gamal Abdel Nasser was the last Arab leader who realized, after the creation of the Zionist colonization by the catastrophe of 1948, the magnitude of the threat posed by Zionist colonialism to Arab self-determination, and the centrality of the Palestinian issue in achieving Arab aspirations for unity, independence, and development.

The shocking Arab defeat in 1967 marked the major Arab collapses, as the loss extended beyond what remained of historic Palestine in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza to include the loss of the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and the Syrian Golan Heights. Soon, the Arab voice faded with the death of Nasser in 1970.

The United States, after Nasser’s demise, exploited the absence of Arab resistance to colonialism, aiming to solidify and build Israel, ensure its military superiority in the region, and work relentlessly to isolate the Palestinian issue from Arab countries by supporting pro-American autocratic regimes that oppose democracy and combat anti-colonial awareness centered around Palestine.

A research memorandum by the Foreign Ministry after the 1967 war insisted that Arab failure to transition to a secular democratic “modern man” rooted in internal reasons stemming from Islamic mentality, rather than external geopolitical interventions. The memorandum recommended “Arabization” eradication, making Arabs accept Western rational values, including supporting Israel. Simply put, Arabs were required to accept Israeli hegemony over the Palestinian people, reject the secular Arab unity myth, and submit to American hegemony in the oil-rich Middle East. One pillar of this hegemony relied on oil-rich autocratic states like Iran during the Shah’s era and Saudi Arabia, while the other depended on Israel, allowed to colonize the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights.

Instead of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, which saw the United States overtly supporting the Israeli military for the first time, leading to the emergence of an Arab narrative against American imperialism and Zionist colonization, the tragic end of Arab solidarity and joint coordination to militarily and economically confront Israel and resist American hegemony occurred. Subsequently, Arab autocratic regimes, one after another, fell into the structure of American hegemony over the Middle East.

In 1978, Egypt under President Anwar Sadat became the first Arab country to publicly break away from Arab consensus on Palestine, signing a peace treaty with Israel and leaving Palestinians to their fate under Israeli colonial rule. The Camp David Accords epitomized the new Middle East, with Egypt’s official regime surrendering to American hegemony and submitting to a regional political system centered around Israel. This legacy was upheld by military autocrats from Hosni Mubarak to Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, transforming the Egyptian army from a force equipped with American weapons to one that prioritizes policing to suppress democratic aspirations.

As Egypt exited the Arab world and fell under American-Israeli hegemony, the Arab system dramatically collapsed. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, revealing the total submission of official Arab autocratic regimes to American hegemony in the region. For three months, Israel bombarded an Arab capital and oversaw a massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, all under American sponsorship after negotiating the exile of the Palestine Liberation Organization to Tunisia. Despite killing more than 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians at the time, the Arab regimes under American hegemony remained inert.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, coinciding with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, signaled the end of remaining formal slogans about official Arab unity.

With the United States monopolizing unilateral pole power and the end of the Cold War, greater efforts were made to resolve the Palestinian issue through what was termed the “peace process.” The leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization in exile surrendered in 1993, followed by Jordan in 1994, with the newly established Palestinian Authority becoming an agent of occupation and a tool for Israeli military control over the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel flooded the West Bank with settlements and nearly 800,000 settlers, enforced apartheid, and the official Arab world’s task was reduced to pleading for the application of international law.

During the era of the war on terror initiated by the United States after the September 11 attacks in 2001, Arab autocratic regimes abandoned any claim to military resistance against Israeli colonization. They focused their efforts on proving their non-support for terrorism and engaging in the American war on terror, a term referring to Islam in the era of American unipolar dominance. The efforts of Arab regimes targeted imaginary internal enemies, leading to the Arab governments’ offer of full peace to Israel in 2002 in exchange for a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, which Israel categorically rejected. This further formalized Arab submission to American policy, ignoring the Palestinian issue and supporting Arab autocratic regimes.

The political and moral collapse of the Arab despotic regime reached its peak by abandoning the Palestinian cause after the United States recognized, during the tenure of President Donald Trump in 2017, Israel’s illegal annexation of Jerusalem and the subsequent relocation of its embassy there. This affirmed the official American contempt for Arab popular sentiments and confidence in the Arab despotic regime, which proved its loyalty to the doctrine of stability under American hegemony. The latter seeks to lead Israel in the region after integrating and normalizing its presence, resulting in the Abraham Accords in 2020, where Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain “normalized” their relations with a racist, extremist Israeli government that does not recognize the right to self-determination for the Palestinian people.

In this context, “Operation Flood of Al-Aqsa” was nothing but a necessary vital response to decades of attempts to liquidate the Palestinian cause and the increased momentum of liquidation projects after the coup against the Arab Spring revolutions and the reconstruction of Arab despotic regimes in the region. This occurred at a historical moment where the Arab despotic discourse on Israeli colonial violence in Gaza, turning it into a large prison and jail, coincided with Israeli Zionist, American imperialist, and Western approaches that ignored the historical and contextual background of the colonial settlement project of Israel, which relies on subjugation, extermination, erasure, and purification. They also overlooked the nature of Palestinian resistance against Zionist colonization as a liberation and nationalist movement, making Israel’s repetition of its crimes in Gaza not only possible but also a duty based on the right to self-defense.

The illusion that Palestinians and Palestinian resistance can be erased or forgotten became an accepted reality among Israeli settlers and their international allies. The belief grew that Palestinian resistance had become a forgotten and neglected issue, and that Israel could maintain its illegal existence indefinitely because it possessed the upper hand militarily. The normalization tracks of the colonial entity with Arab despotic states under American imperial sponsorship made occupation a permanent reality and a natural state. Imperial, Zionist, and despotic discourses converged with the myth that the Palestinian people are the perpetrators of terrorism and that Israeli settlers are always victims of terrorism.

In conclusion, the position of Arab despotic regimes in betraying Gaza falls within a long trajectory of official Arab political and moral decline, which occurred within a series of submission and surrender to American hegemony and its aspirations to integrate Zionist colonialism into the region while forgetting and liquidating the Palestinian cause.

After decades of relentless efforts, the United States believed it had succeeded in forcing the Arabs to accept submission and defeat. However, “Operation Flood of Al-Aqsa” exposed the fallacy of American wishful thinking and Zionist assumptions. The painstaking efforts over decades only caused superficial scratches to consciousness, as the illusion that the Palestinian people would accept their fate as a colonized people forever dissipated, along with the illusions of the Arab peoples forgetting Palestine. The political Darwinism of Arab despotism, American imperialism, and Zionist colonialism cannot comprehend the Palestinian and Arab self that constitutes Palestine as a symbol of its existence as a nation and the axis of its ethics and worldview. The sickly imperialistic perspective imagines the possibility of imposing Zionist colonialism by American force without any resistance, and perhaps the magnitude of the genocide practiced by Israel and America in Gaza reflects a state of fear and anxiety about the end of the colony, the decline of American hegemony, and the collapse of despotic regimes.

The betrayal of the Arab despotic regime of Gaza reflects a state of panic after “Operation Flood of Al-Aqsa,” where the gap widened between Arab despotic regimes and their peoples. The genocide war on Gaza exposed the submission, incapacity, and complicity of Arab despotic regimes, deepening the gap between the peoples and revealing a state of inability, submission, and collusion of Arab despotic regimes. International support for the Palestinian cause and opposition to Zionist colonization escalated.