By Dr. M. Reza Behnam
For over a year, Palestinian resistance has not only unmasked Israel’s genocidal character, it has also bared the soul of the Arab regimes.
The question often asked but rarely explored or answered is why the Arab Middle East has remained quiet and on the sidelines as their fellow Arabs in Palestine and Lebanon are being slaughtered.
Although they wield enormous economic clout that could be used to end the genocide, they have chosen instead to be butlers to the United States and Israel.
When I observe Arab rulers who look to the United States to maintain power I am reminded of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act I, Scene 2), when Cassius counsels his fellow senators, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
For decades, Arab regimes have been subservient to the United States, not due to fate, but because of their choices, which have often been few.
The why of their decisions to serve foreign masters are many. Among them are the drawing of manufactured boundaries by the victorious imperial powers after World War I (1914 – 18); the imposition of foreign state systems, and the occupation and exploitation of Arab land.
Because most of the Arab states were newly contrived by the imperial powers, their political cultures tended to be the same.
Political power centers maintained by a ruler or ruling groups thrived, while political communities (umma) did not. The rulers, chosen by the colonizers to administer the nascent states, became the new oppressors of their own people.
The carved-up Middle East became a flea market for the victorious British and French. They became the colonial draftsmen of the Arab future, crushing Arab national aspirations and creating a legacy of turbulence and instability that haunts the region to this day.
Under the Mandate System – an internationally-sanctioned form of colonialism established in 1919 by the League of Nations to administer Ottoman territories – Syria and Lebanon were colonized by the French, while Iraq, Jordan and Palestine by the British.
These territorial divisions, drawn to serve imperial interests, took no account of regional ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity. While the mandate powers preached self-determination, they undermined its practice, believing that the Arabs were incapable of self-government.
The British goal of transforming the Arab world into a superior version of British India was reflected in a famous line from TE Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia,” in 1919, “My own ambition” he said, “is that the Arabs should be our first brown dominion, and not our last brown colony.”
Former Arab client states of the British, who would become American clients after World War II, with borders imposed on them, had no substantial unifying political culture on which to build viable institutions.
In addition, their hopes for change and unity were overshadowed by another foreign colonizer on their doorstep; one determined to steal Arab land to create “Greater Israel”—“River to River” from the river Euphrates in Iraq to the river Nile in Egypt and all the land in between.
The case of Palestine was unlike the other post-war mandates. Support for European Zionism became official British policy with the 1917 Balfour Declaration – Britain’s commitment to help establish a Jewish national home in Palestine in the heart of the Islamic world.
Soon after the British unloaded the Palestine quagmire in the newly created United Nations and the General Assembly voted to partition Palestine in 1947, both sides prepared for war.
The Arab states, many of which had just gained independence, entered the war against Israel weakened and fragmented. Their humiliating defeat in 1948 and massive loss of all of historic Palestine in the 1967 war dealt a serious blow to pan-Arab prospects and convinced Palestinian nationalists to act independently of their fellow Arabs.
Rhetorical support for the Palestinian struggle for liberation became the staple of Arab politics after Arab rulers met and signed the Khartoum Resolution in September 1967, following the war. Aware of the appeal of Arab nationalism and support for the Palestinian cause among their public, the Arab regimes continue to act as if they are concerned about them.
The history of colonialism has left Arab states weak, vulnerable and devoid of social contracts. Iraq is a befitting example of how a colony is born bereft of its own political identity and oppressed internally and externally.
British colonialists, in 1918, cobbled together three Ottoman provinces (Baghdad, Basra and Mosul) to create modern Iraq (in Arabic deeply rooted, fertile); and in 1921, installed the Hashemite leader of the Arab Revolt, Faisal bin Hussein, as king. Even though Iraq gained formal independence in 1932, it remained subject to British influence for a quarter century of discordant monarchical rule.
British technocrats, not Iraqis, were tasked with creating an identity for the new country, including recommending national borders, creating a unit of currency and designing a flag, national anthem and stamps.
Large oil fields were discovered in 1927. Iraqi oil was divided among foreign companies, leaving the Iraqi people with none of their oil wealth. That changed in 1958 when King Faisal was overthrown in a military coup and an era of republican government was ushered in by Prime Minister Abdul-Karim Qasim.
That Iraq has never been completely liberated from its imperial ties is evident in the role the US Central Intelligence Agency played in helping the Ba’ath Party overthrow the Qasim government in 1963.
After years of de facto rule, Saddam Hussein, supported by the United States, became president in 1979. In those years, the Reagan administration (1981-89) saw Iraq as a strategic asset in preserving US regional power.
Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the United States encouraged Saddam to invade Iran. During the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), the US provided economic and military support to the regime, including chemical weapons.
At the end of the war, Saddam, believing he had a friend in Washington, invaded fellow Arab Kuwait in August 1990. The first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, ended with the humiliating defeat of the Iraqi army by US-led coalition forces in 1991.
Subsequently, Iraq was required to submit to intrusive US searches for weapons of mass destruction and subjected to 12 years of devastating economic sanctions.
After the 9/11 attack, and based on false pretenses, the US invaded, occupied and ravaged Iraq in March 2003, until President Barack Obama declared an end to the war eight years later.
The image of Saddam on trial and hanged by a tribunal set up by the US was humiliating to Iraqis and Arabs across the region.
Little has changed for Iraq since 1921, as it continues to struggle to find its political identity.
It has yet to recover from the political, economic and social depredations of three brutal wars.
Although the current government of Prime Minister Mohammad al-Sudani has worked to end the presence of US troops, approximately 2,500 remain. After 106 years, Iraq remains an occupied land.
Other Arab nations are currently faring no better.
The modern Arab world continues to be mired in its colonial past. The fissures that already existed have been exacerbated by the horrific consequences of the establishment of Zionist Israel in Palestine in 1948, the Arab defeat in the 1967 war and the loss of Arab Palestinian land.
History reveals that being “Arab” alone has not given meaning to the political sphere or united the Arab world. It is Islam, however, which is deeply interwoven in Arab culture, that has in its language, history and values, the potential to unite the community.
Used as a political force, Islam has in it the agency to emancipate the oppressed and dismantle the global colonial order.
Moreover, Islam was born in activism, in opposition to injustice, corruption, and usury. Under the direction of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), Islam was meant to invigorate, not debilitate, the community.
Non-political Islam advanced by rulers in countries like Saudi Arabia, for example, has made their populations unwilling to challenge authority and “satisfied” with a passive form of corporate Islam.
The steadfastness of the Palestinian resistance has demonstrated the power of political Islam to confront the Zionist enemy.
It comes as no surprise that the Arab regimes appear to fear the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, more than Israel. Although the Arab public supports the Palestinian cause, Arab dictators have viewed Palestinians and the example of a free and independent Palestinian state as threats to their longevity.
Arab autocrats are also concerned with how a Palestinian state would alter the balance of power in the region.
They worry about the empowerment of countries and organizations—Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansar Allah in Yemen and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq—that have sacrificed for Palestinian freedom, while they have turned their backs on their fellow Arabs.
In addition, the center of the Islamic world could shift from Mecca and Medina, controlled by the House of Saud, to al-Quds (Jerusalem) in the new state of Palestine.
Undoubtedly, the implantation and maintenance by foreign powers of an aggressive colonizing Zionist entity in the heart of the Arab world has sowed the seeds of disunity and violence for generations.
For over a year, Palestinian resistance has not only unmasked Israel’s genocidal character, it has also bared the soul of the Arab regimes, exposing their impotence and indifference to the genocide of fellow Arabs.
While the US regime has poured billions into the Israeli war machine, some Arab rulers have continued to do business with Israel and ignored their fellow Arabs in occupied Palestine.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Lebanon, sanctioned by the United States, has proven that they have no regard for Arab lives.
Today it is Palestine and Lebanon, tomorrow it could be Egypt, Qatar or Saudi Arabia.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said as much in a boastful message on September 27, 2024, “There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach, and that is true of the entire Middle East.”
What has made Netanyahu so imperiously confident? Undoubtedly it has been Israel’s symbiotic relationship with the United States, its wealth, might and guns at his service, as well as the acquiescence of some Arab regimes.
Fear in the Middle East of the “long arm of Israel” has been broken by the powerful example of Palestinian resistance. It can, however, be further strengthened if the Arab world finally recognizes the power of unity.
– Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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