Why Arab states are failing the Palestinian people
A Palestinian man sits amid the rubble of the family’s house, which was destroyed in a deadly Israeli strike, in Rafah, Gaza Strip, on 9 January 2024
Ussama Makdisi writes in Middle East Eye on 1 March 2024:
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.
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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.