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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://al-shabaka.org/roundtables/who-lost-the-arabs-regional-relations-with-palestine/">https://al-shabaka.org/roundtables/who-lost-the-arabs-regional-relations-with-palestine/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Who Lost the Arabs?: Regional Relations
with Palestine <br>
</h1>
<div class="meta-data">
<div class="reader-estimated-time">by <a
href="https://al-shabaka.org/en/author/ibrahim-fraihat/">Ibrahim
Fraihat</a>, <a
href="https://al-shabaka.org/en/author/nadine-naber/">Nadine
Naber</a>, <a
href="https://al-shabaka.org/en/author/LoubnaQ-2/">Loubna
Qutami</a>, <a
href="https://al-shabaka.org/en/author/sherene-seikaly/">Sherene
Seikaly</a> <time>on April 18, 2019</time></div>
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<h2><b>Overview: Nadine Naber </b></h2>
<p><span>For decades, progressive political
analysts have critiqued Arab states for
abandoning the Palestinian struggle for
liberation. According to this critique,
while Arab governments often claim
solidarity with Palestinians, their
actions involve complicity in Israeli
settler-colonialism – from political and
economic cooperation with Israel to
scapegoating Palestinians and repressing
solidarity with Palestinian liberation
within Arab states – as well as using
the Palestine issue to bolster their
legitimacy.</span></p>
<p><span>This roundtable interrogates this
critique, offering nuanced perspectives
on whether and to what extent Arab
states have abandoned or compromised the
Palestinian cause. Contributors situate
this question within the transnational
context of US imperialism and the
connected realities of Arab and
Palestinian fragmentation. Their
perspectives inspire new questions about
the relationship between state-run Arab
nationalism and the global right; the
US-Gulf-Israeli relationship; and the
Palestinian political establishment’s
normalization with Israel. </span></p>
<p><span>As recent changes in the region
have given rise to increased
normalization with Israel and more and
more cooptation of the Palestinian
leadership, challenging the US and
Israeli-backed fragmentation within and
between Arab states is more urgent than
ever before.</span><span> To this
end, contributors call upon readers to
consider new possibilities for
Palestinian-Arab solidarity. </span></p>
<p><b>Sherene Seikaly</b><span> urges us to</span><span> “return
to the idea of Palestine for
fortification in the next rounds of
battle.” While </span><b>Ibrahim Fraihat</b><span>
reminds us that Palestinians have allies
in the people of the Gulf states, </span><b>Loubna
Qutami</b><span> insists that “</span><span>the
schism is not between Palestinians and
Arabs but between the revolutionary
aspirations of the people and the
interests of those in political power.”
</span></p>
<h2><b>Sherene Seikaly</b></h2>
<p><span>To grasp the present reality of the
lone Palestinian confronting
geopolitical brutality, we can return to
the fortunes and fallacies of state-run
Arab nationalism. The latest
deformations of this fallacy must be
situated in the consolidation of the
global right. Targeting Palestinians,
dispossessing them, and foreclosing
their futures has become an initiation
ritual. Do it and you are welcomed into
the ranks of the triumphant
practitioners of xenophobia, racism,
sexism, and stupidity. </span></p>
<p><span>The Donald Trump-Narendra Modi-Jair
Bolsonaro bromance is crucial here. More
crucial still is Arab state
participation in these masculinist
celebrations of suffocating the
Palestinian. Egyptian President
Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi and Saudi Arabian
Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman prove
their credentials by bullying the
Palestinian, who today, more than ever,
stands as the figure of the weak and
bereft outsider. Any casual observer of
history knows that Arab states have
rarely, if ever cared about Palestine
and the Palestinians. Yet, since 1948, a
thin rhetorical veil of pan Arabism
discursively shielded the Palestinians
from full-fledged assault against the
very idea of Palestine. Today, the
global right and its Arab handlers have
shorn the Palestinians of this last
remaining shred. They seek at all costs
to kill the idea of Palestine. </span></p>
<p><span>The idea of Palestine was one of
the false promises of the modern Arab
state. The desperate and disparate Arab
performance in the war of 1948 mobilized
that fateful group of young Egyptian
officers. These men, along with their
counterparts in Damascus and Baghdad,
would become the vanguard of a
never-realized revolutionary future. A
future, they promised, of economic,
political, and social equality nourished
by anticolonialism, third worldism, and
socialism. From the shores of the
Mediterranean, the Nile, and the Tigris
to the Ghouta oasis, these military men,
these founding fathers, would destroy
the anticolonial promise they had
touted. </span></p>
<p><span>In its place, they built a
resilient authoritarianism that
imprisoned the very people that Arab
nationalism had committed to liberating.
If one stopped to search among the
battered shards of revolutionary
promise, one might have found the idea
of Palestine. The Arab world’s
authoritarian fraternity would excavate
the idea as a stand for everything they
failed to deliver. The founding military
fathers used Palestine as evidence that
they still believed in these imperatives
just as their subjects bristled at their
bald hypocrisies. The idea of Palestine
stood for freedom and anticolonialism.</span></p>
<span><span><a
href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http://ow.ly/5Zxl30osBN0&text=The%20idea%20of%20Palestine%20was%20one%20of%20the%20false%20promises%20of%20the%20modern%20Arab%20state&via=AlShabaka&related=AlShabaka"
target="_blank" rel="noopener
noreferrer">The idea of Palestine was
one of the false promises of the
modern Arab state </a></span><a
href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http://ow.ly/5Zxl30osBN0&text=The%20idea%20of%20Palestine%20was%20one%20of%20the%20false%20promises%20of%20the%20modern%20Arab%20state&via=AlShabaka&related=AlShabaka"
target="_blank" rel="noopener
noreferrer">Click To Tweet</a></span>
<p><span>Today the authoritarian fraternity
has killed the valiant and flawed
efforts of the Arab revolutionaries to
reclaim the future, and it differs from
the military fathers of yesteryear. This
fraternity finds pleasure in the
international cohort of leaders who seek
to butcher opposition and expect
international impunity. They are under
no obligation to give lip service to
freedom. Freedom is the antithesis of
their visions for the present and
future, and they will seek to bury it
ever deeper. </span></p>
<p><span>This is why the idea of Palestine
is nowhere now to be found in Arab state
rhetoric. We could mourn this
disappearance. It has dire consequences
for the further entrenchment of the
ongoing Nakba that is Palestinian
reality. To be certain, the future is
dark. But perhaps we can return, as have
so many radicals in the Arab world and
beyond, to the ongoing struggle for
freedom, to the idea of Palestine for
fortification in the next rounds of
battle. As we do so a devastating
question haunts us: Has Palestine lost
not just the Arab states but the Arab
people?</span></p>
<h2><b>Ibrahim Fraihat</b></h2>
<p><span>A number of events that suggest an
improvement in the relationship between
Israel and several Gulf states have
taken place, especially since the
arrival of Donald Trump to power. It
started with former Saudi General Anwar
Eshki’s 2015 </span><a
href="https://www.cfr.org/event/regional-challenges-and-opportunities-view-saudi-arabia-and-israel-0"><span>meetings</span></a><span>
with former Israeli officials such as
Dore Gold, and then Eshki openly
visiting Tel Aviv. Recently, Oman </span><a
href="https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2018/11/03/israels-prime-minister-visits-oman-an-arab-monarchy-and-is-welcomed"><span>received</span></a><span>
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu in an official visit, the UAE
received Israeli Minister of Sport and
Culture </span><a
href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/regev-visit-uae-sparks-questions-over-improving-relations-402480358"><span>Miri
Regev</span></a><span>, Bahrain
participated in a </span><a
href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cycling-giro-israel/palestinians-condemn-uae-bahrain-presence-in-cycle-race-in-israel-idUSKBN1I81NW"><span>cycling
race</span></a><span> in Jerusalem on
Nakba Day, and Qatar received an Israeli
gymnastics team and </span><a
href="https://www.albawaba.com/loop/israels-%E2%80%98hatikvah%E2%80%99-plays-doha-qataris-campaign-against-%E2%80%98normalization%E2%80%99-1270586"><span>played
the Israeli national anthem</span></a><span>
when an athlete on the team won an
event. Only Kuwait seems to have stood
firmly against any form of relationship
with Tel Aviv. </span></p>
<p><span>While more encounters are expected
in the near future, a sustainable and
long-term relationship between Israel
and the Gulf states remains far from a
reality. The Gulf states will likely
revert to their original positions once
they realize that all they achieve from
the relationship is international
legitimization of Israel and their own
delegitimization among their domestic
constituencies. This is good news for
the Palestinians, who can benefit from
relations with the Gulf states without
Israeli interference. </span></p>
<p><span>The first reason why the
Gulf-Israeli relationship is doomed is
the fact that it is not supported by
Gulf citizens and thus remains
restricted to government officials on
both sides. Not even in one Gulf country
does the public support such a
relationship. On the contrary, some
public figures who are known to be close
to their governments have openly
expressed </span><a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/at-a-sporting-event-in-an-arab-capital-an-unexpected-sound-the-israeli-national-anthem/2018/11/25/fb64049a-e2a2-11e8-ba30-a7ded04d8fac_story.html?utm_term=.147e6c1cc763"><span>outrage</span></a><span>
against such relations with Tel Aviv. </span></p>
<p><span>One might rightly argue that
Egyptians never normalized with Israel
though the Egyptian government’s
relationship with Israel continued. Yet
Egypt’s border with Israel renders the
conflict central to Egypt’s national
security. This is not the case for the
Gulf, whose governments generally
perceive their national security to be
affected by developments with Iran
rather than Palestine. </span></p>
<p><span>Furthermore, the emerging
American-Gulf-Israeli alliance is not
built on equal partnership – in terms of
rights, obligations, and gains – but
rather on manipulation and exploitation.
Israel’s and the Trump administration’s
gains are actuals while those of the
Gulf states are promised or perceived.
So far, the US has benefited from
significant arms sales to the Gulf and
withdrew from its obligations under the
</span><a
href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-33521655"><span>JCPOA</span></a><span>,
while Iran has remained committed to the
terms of the deal. Israel too is
achieving unprecedented gains regarding
Palestine, given the US embassy move to
Jerusalem and Trump’s aid cuts to UNRWA.
Israel is also making cracks in the
historical Arab boycott of Israel, which
has always been seen as a Palestinian
strategic reserve. </span></p>
<p><span>In contrast, the Gulf states’ gain
is only the perception that one day the
alliance will remove the Iranian threat.
This objective is fundamentally
questionable. First, the US and Israel
have no incentive to risk further
clashes with Iran after turning their
gains to actuals. More importantly, it
is not in their long-term interest to
completely remove the Iranian threat,
which they use to manipulate the
oil-rich Gulf states. The threat allows
the US, for example, to maintain itself
as the sole security vendor to the Gulf
region. The maintenance of the threat is
even more important for Israel, which
has historically milked the US for
advanced technology, as the latter is
committed to Israel’s military
superiority in the region. The “Iranian
threat” serves as a mechanism to ensure
the continuous supply of funds and
military technology from Washington.</span></p>
<span><span><a
href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http://ow.ly/5Zxl30osBN0&text=The%20chance%20remains%20for%20the%20Gulf%20states%20to%20return%20to%20more%20robust%20support%20for%20Palestinian%20rights&via=AlShabaka&related=AlShabaka"
target="_blank" rel="noopener
noreferrer">The chance remains for the
Gulf states to return to more robust
support for Palestinian rights </a></span><a
href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http://ow.ly/5Zxl30osBN0&text=The%20chance%20remains%20for%20the%20Gulf%20states%20to%20return%20to%20more%20robust%20support%20for%20Palestinian%20rights&via=AlShabaka&related=AlShabaka"
target="_blank" rel="noopener
noreferrer">Click To Tweet</a></span>
<p><span>Gulf states rushing to build a
relationship with Israel are under the
illusion that the road to Trump’s heart
and mind goes through Tel Aviv. This is
a myth that Israel hypes effectively,
especially to the Gulf states. Gulf
states should realize that they are
giving indispensable services to
Washington in many areas, including oil,
counter-terrorism, and military bases,
and thus they need no one to provide an
in to the White House. </span></p>
<p><span>Moreover, the relationship will not
succeed simply because it was tried
before but failed. In 1995, Qatar opened
a trade office for Israel but discovered
that the relationship was nothing but a
serious liability. In 2009, Qatar shut
down the office and ordered its officers
to leave. </span></p>
<p><span>Similarly, the Gulf-Israel
relationship is doomed because it goes
against the interests of the Gulf states
themselves. A normalized Israel in the
Middle East will allow it to compete
economically with cities like Dubai. For
Saudi Arabia, normalization will not
only delegitimize its leadership
position in the Muslim world but also
invite Iran’s media to emphasize
Riyadh’s dealings with Israel and give
Iran the ideological upper hand. </span></p>
<p><span>Finally, the alliance is not
institutionally based, and the only
power keeping it together is Trump being
in office. If the 2020 elections lead to
a Democratic leader in the White House,
the entire project of “confronting Iran”
will collapse and the parties will
revert to their original positions.
Washington and Tel Aviv will retain
their actual gains, while the Gulf
states will go back empty handed. They
will have lost the cards that they once
had to play: an influential role in the
region’s politics.</span></p>
<p><span>Yet despite this turn of events,
Palestinians should not abandon the Gulf
states, as this would play into the
hands of the Israeli government. The
chance remains for the Gulf states to
return to more robust support for
Palestinian rights – as well as a more
robust role in regional politics.
Moreover, Palestinians have allies in
the Gulf, that is, the people of the
Gulf states who have never subscribed to
normalization with Israel. It also
appears that certain individuals within
Gulf regimes are behind the
collaboration with Israel, rather than
entire state systems. It is thus in the
interest of the Palestinians to engage
the Gulf diplomatically and with its
civil society actors to ensure that they
do not lose a key player in their
struggle with Israel. </span></p>
<h2><b>Loubna Qutami </b></h2>
<p><span>The Arab region’s seismic
transformations since the 2011 uprisings
have stimulated critical questions
regarding the relation between the
unfinished Palestinian anti/de-colonial
struggle and aspirations for freedom,
justice, and an end to totalitarian rule
among Arab masses. As Arab regimes
re-establish a new – and perhaps more
egregious – iteration of normalized
political, diplomatic, military, and
economic alliances with the Israeli
state, they betray their peoples’ dreams
of systemic change in their own
countries as well. Thus, there are ready
parallels between Palestinian and Arab
peoples’ grievances with establishment
political regimes, which often act as
gatekeepers to the current order. </span></p>
<p><span>The story of puppet regimes is not
new to the Global South, and certainly
not new to the Arab region. For at least
40 years, several Arab countries have
operated in the interests of global
hegemonic powers rather than their own
peoples’ interests. For Jordan and
Egypt, these decisions were calcified in
peace agreements with Israel, which
ended prospects of direct confrontation
between them and the Israeli state. But
giving in to Zionist regional hegemony
took place in other ways as well,
including among countries that had no
formal diplomatic relations with Israel.
</span></p>
<p><span>Unfortunately, the Palestinian
political establishment – a leadership
that once included outspoken critics of
other Arab regimes – has now joined
these regimes, officially since the 1993
Oslo Accords but especially since 2007,
when Palestinian-Israeli security
cooperation deepened in unprecedented
ways. Though 2011 offered a monumental
chance to foreground Palestinian
liberation as part of a new phase in
Arab history, Palestinians were
unfortunately ill equipped to seize the
opportunity. This is in part due to the
internal fragmentation within
Palestinian political life, which
intensified in 2006 when Hamas won the
parliamentary elections. Since then, the
split between Fatah and Hamas has
hardened the segmentation of Palestinian
constituencies, weakened Palestinians in
the regional landscape, made the
recuperation of a coherent vision and
political program more difficult, and
placed factional interests and
geopolitical and global loyalties above
the project of national liberation. </span></p>
<p><span>The paradox today is that in the
exact moment that global efforts for
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)
of Israel are at their most powerful,
Palestinians remain engulfed in coerced
relations with the Israelis and
Americans and relatively powerless
geopolitically, while Arab regimes are
intensifying their normalization with
the Israeli state. The Arab dimension of
the Palestinian national struggle must
be understood in the context of this
divide between those in power and those
who challenge that power.</span></p>
<p><span>First, one must comprehend the
precarity of the Palestinian colonial
condition. The Palestinian people
inhabit an </span><a
href="https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kn3k8jk"><span>ontology
of Nakba</span></a><span>, whereby
Palestinian life, land, political
institutions, vision, and strategy
development are persistently decimated
by siege, exile, and annihilation across
multiple phases of the struggle and
physical sites of resistance. </span></p>
<p><span>For the Palestinian revolutionaries
of the 1950s and 1960s who anchored the
political parties and later the </span><i><span>fedayeen</span></i><span>
movement, the ability and necessity to
inaugurate their political operations
while in exile meant that they
formulated their national identity and
strategies interdependently with
regional and international actors. This
interdependent formulation of the
Palestinian national struggle, which the
PLO largely spearheaded in the aftermath
of the 1967 war, meant that Palestinians
enjoyed considerable support from
regional and global state and non-state
actors but were also vulnerable to the
whims of regional and global
reconfigurations of power. With each
moment of regional and global
transformation, Palestinians were forced
to start anew, unable to accumulate
materially and politically in the
context of multiple exoduses (for
example, from Jordan, Lebanon, Cyprus,
Tunisia, Kuwait, and most recently Iraq
and Syria). </span></p>
<p><span>Attempting to resolve this
precarity, the dominant strand of
thought and political power within the
PLO, largely anchored by Fatah
leadership, took questions of
Palestinian self-determination,
self-reliance, and identity literally,
such that it made pragmatic decisions in
its quest for a state without paying
attention to the trappings of statehood
and its subsequent institutional
arrangements. Each decision was
overdetermined by pragmatism rather than
frame, ideology, principle, and an
intentional strategy to maintain or even
garner direct confrontation between the
Arab regimes and Israel. After 1974,
this nationalist pragmatism became the
ultimate driver of strategy rather than
revolutionary tenets of disruption and
denormalization of a Zionist Israel’s
permanence and influence in the region
at large.</span></p>
<span><span><a
href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http://ow.ly/5Zxl30osBN0&text=The%20schism%20is%20not%20between%20Palestinians%20and%20Arabs%20but%20between%20the%20revolutionary%20aspirations%20of%20the%20people%20and%20the%20interests%20of%20those%20in%20political%20power&via=AlShabaka&related=AlShabaka"
target="_blank" rel="noopener
noreferrer">The schism is not between
Palestinians and Arabs but between the
revolutionary aspirations of the
people and the interests of those in
political power </a></span><a
href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http://ow.ly/5Zxl30osBN0&text=The%20schism%20is%20not%20between%20Palestinians%20and%20Arabs%20but%20between%20the%20revolutionary%20aspirations%20of%20the%20people%20and%20the%20interests%20of%20those%20in%20political%20power&via=AlShabaka&related=AlShabaka"
target="_blank" rel="noopener
noreferrer">Click To Tweet</a></span>
<p><span>Though the PLO had not yet
abandoned guerilla warfare and armed
resistance as methods of acquiring
power, it found itself increasingly
vulnerable in the region as a result of
deepening relations between the Arab
regimes and both Israel and the US.
During its time in Lebanon and following
its 1982 exodus to Tunisia, the PLO
began to rely on international diplomacy
as its main strategy for statehood. Arab
states had to cooperate with the PLO to
levy taxes among the Palestinians living
within their borders, and they
maintained some ambivalence to brokering
overt deals with Israel in the interest
of retaining credibility among their
populations. But such cooperation became
largely symbolic and transactional
rather than embedded in a joint-struggle
model confronting Zionist expansionism.</span></p>
<p><span>By the early 1990s, The PLO had
survived multiple phases of defeat,
exodus, and loss across various sites in
the region. On the heels of a
monumentally successful first Intifada,
Israelis were finally forced to
negotiate with the PLO. For the
Palestinians, the fall of the Soviet
Union, the impotence of the Arab
nations, the Gulf War, and the
subsequent exodus of some 250,000
Palestinians from Kuwait after the PLO
supported Saddam Hussein circumscribed
the leadership’s ability to maintain
their resistance struggle while in
exile. </span></p>
<p><span>The road to the Oslo Accords, which
marked official Palestinian capitulation
and normalization with Israel, thus
began long before 1993 and was deeply
informed by both the precarity of the
Palestinian ontology of Nakba and the
desperate turn to nationalized
pragmatism as a way out of the
leadership’s decline in power and
permanence in exile. Under these
conditions, Palestinian political
leaders made harmful decisions for their
people and took unprincipled – albeit
pragmatic – positions when it came to
support for the rights and dignity of
their Arab brethren. </span></p>
<p><span>We would therefore do well to
interrogate the long-too-accepted claim
that the Arabs abandoned Palestine and
the Palestinians. Rather, Palestinians
must assume responsibility for the
things over which they did have control
in the context of colonial occupation
and dispossession, though it must be
said it was not very much. Arab regimes,
alongside the Palestinian political
establishment, operated in tandem to
nationalize the Palestinian cause and
neutralize Arab countries in the
confrontation with Israel. In the end,
the schism is not between Palestinians
and Arabs but between the revolutionary
aspirations of the people and the
interests of those in political power. </span></p>
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