[News] From Palestine to Iran: What Arab and Muslim silence really reveals

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 Comments <https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/>
>From Palestine to Iran: What Arab and Muslim silence really reveals
Ramzy Baroud <https://english.palinfo.com/authors/ramzy-baroud>

Saturday 28-March-2026

I have always found it interesting, and at times revealing, when seasoned
activists and intellectuals in the West, including those who see themselves
as deeply committed to Palestine, raise the same familiar point: Arab
governments must stand up to Israel and the United States in solidarity
with their brethren in Palestine.

The argument often comes wrapped in a perplexed question: why are Arabs and
Muslims not doing anything for Palestine?

What makes this particularly puzzling is that the question is often posed
by respected analysts and historians—people who should recognize that the
issue is far less sentimental than structural.

At first glance, the question may not seem bizarre. Palestinians are tied
to their neighbors through history, geography, demography, religion,
language, collective memory, and a shared experience of Western domination
and Israeli colonial violence.

Additionally, Israeli leaders speak openly in expansionist terms, and they
act accordingly, whether in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, or elsewhere. The
people on the receiving end of this violence are often the same native
communities of the region: Arabs, Muslims, and Christians alike.

Indeed, Arab and Muslim institutions themselves constantly invoke Palestine
as a central cause. Arab summits still describe Palestine as a core issue,
and public opinion across the region remains overwhelmingly aligned on that
point.

For example, the 2024-25 Arab Opinion Index found that 80% of respondents
across 15 Arab countries agreed that “the Palestinian cause is a collective
Arab cause”, not solely Palestinian. The same survey found that 44% viewed
Israel as the greatest threat to Arab security and 21% named the United
States, far ahead of Iran at 6%.

So yes, the question of Arab and Muslim solidarity does not emerge from
nowhere. On the level of popular feeling, it is entirely rational. It
reflects a moral and political intuition that Palestine should be a point
of unity.

But here is what that argument misses. Sentimental expectations aside, many
Arab governments are not neutral actors waiting to be persuaded into
solidarity. They are already positioned, structurally and strategically,
within the US-led regional order. Some are client regimes in the classical
sense. Others are so dependent on American protection, validation, or
military partnership that calling them “partners” barely conceals the
hierarchy embedded in the relationship.

The problem, then, is not hesitation. It is alignment.

The Gaza genocide offered a devastating example of this reality. While
Palestinians were being starved and bombed, official Arab responses
remained fragmented, cautious, and largely subordinate to Washington’s
strategic priorities.

Some governments hardened their rhetoric later, but the early reactions
were deeply revealing. Bahrain, for example, publicly condemned Palestinian
resistance for October 7, rather than, at least, taking a position even
remotely proportionate to the scale of Israeli violence and genocide.
Egypt, meanwhile, allowed the narrative to circulate that it had warned
Israel beforehand of “something big,” a framing that shifted attention
toward Palestinian action rather than Israeli impunity.

Even more revealing was the economic dimension. As Ansarallah’s Red Sea
operations disrupted maritime access to Israel in declared solidarity with
Gaza, a land corridor developed to move cargo by truck from ports in the
Gulf all the way to Jordan and finally to Israel.

Whatever diplomatic language Arab governments employed in public, trade and
logistics were being quietly adapted in ways that helped Israel absorb the
pressure and maintain continuity.

This was not an anomaly. It was continuity.

For decades, major Arab regimes have been deeply implicated in sustaining
American military power in the region. US installations in Kuwait, Qatar,
Bahrain, the UAE and elsewhere have long served as the infrastructure
through which Washington projects force across the Middle East. These bases
are now the lifelines for the US-Israeli war on Iran.

This is why the constant demand that Arab regimes “develop” a stronger
position on Palestine is ultimately misleading. Their position has already
been developed. In many cases, it has taken the form of normalization,
security coordination, military hosting, logistical facilitation, and
political adaptation to US priorities. The action has already been taken.
It is simply not taken in favor of Palestine.

And yet, despite this reality, the question continues to resurface. Why
does it persist?

Part of the answer lies in the enduring belief that Arab and Muslim
solidarity with Palestine is both historically logical and politically
defensible.

Another lies in the fact that Israel’s ambitions do not stop at Palestine.
Israeli leaders and institutions repeatedly articulate visions that
implicate the entire region, whether through permanent military
superiority, fragmentation of neighboring states, or the normalization of
endless war.

These realities make the question emotionally and strategically
compelling—even if it is ultimately misplaced when directed at regimes
rather than peoples.

There is also a deeper reason: the historic failure of the West. Western
governments are structurally biased toward Israel, and many intellectuals,
activists, and ordinary people have concluded—reasonably enough—that if
justice will not come from Washington, London, Berlin, or Paris, then
surely it must come from the Arab and Muslim worlds. The instinct is
understandable. But it confuses publics with regimes.

That misplaced expectation makes the current war on Iran all the more
consequential.

The war on Iran may indeed become a wake-up call. As the joint US-Israeli
assault on Tehran is faltering, new realizations may be emerging in Arab
capitals that neither Washington nor Israel can ultimately guarantee regime
survival or regional stability.

At the level of ordinary people, the war has also generated a familiar
sense of pride in resistance, not unlike what many felt during the
steadfastness of Gaza and Lebanon. That may yet produce new conversations,
perhaps even a new collective political imagination.

Until then, we would do better to understand Arab regimes according to
their actual priorities, not our expectations. They are not “betraying”
Palestine in the emotional sense, because Palestinian freedom, the defeat
of Zionism, and the dismantling of imperial domination were never central
to their governing agenda in the first place.

To the contrary, their overriding priority is the preservation of the
regional status quo, whatever the human cost. And if maintaining that order
requires the slow destruction of Palestine, many of them have already
demonstrated that they are willing to pay that price.

*-Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
He is the author of five books. His latest is ‘These Chains Will Be Broken:
Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons’. Baroud is
a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global
Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC).*
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