By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
The Coming Arab Backlash
Since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, the Middle East has been rocked
by mass protests. Egyptians have demonstrated solidarity with Palestinians at
great personal risk, and Iraqis, Moroccans, Tunisians, and Yemenis have taken
to the streets in vast numbers. Meanwhile, Jordanians have broken long-standing
redlines by marching on the Israeli embassy, and Saudi Arabia has refused to
resume normalization talks with Israel, in part because of its people’s deep
fury over Israel’s operations in the Gaza Strip.
For Washington, the
view is that none of this mobilization matters. Arab leaders, after all, are
among the world’s most experienced practitioners of realpolitik, and they have
a record of ignoring their people’s preferences. The protests, although large,
have been manageable. Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and other leaders
have long encouraged protests about the treatment of Palestinians which allow
their people to blow off steam and direct their anger toward a foreign enemy
instead of against domestic corruption and incompetence. In time, or so the
argument goes, the fighting in Gaza will end, the angry protesters will go
home, and their leaders will carry on pursuing self-interests, an activity at
which they excel.
U.S. foreign
policymakers also have a long history of disregarding public opinion in the
Middle East—the so-called Arab street. After all,
if autocratic Arab leaders are calling the shots, then it is not necessary to
put stock in what angry activists shout or in what ordinary citizens tell
pollsters or the media. Since there are no democracies in the Middle East, care
need not be given to what anyone outside the palaces thinks. And for all its
talk of democracy and human rights, Washington has always been more comfortable
dealing with pragmatic autocrats than with publics it regards as irrational,
extremist mobs. It rarely pauses to consider how this might contribute to its
dismal record of policy failures.
The United States’
willingness to dismiss popular concerns is strengthened by the memory of 2003
when Arab public opinion was wildly against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, but
most of the region’s leaders cooperated with the invasion and none took steps to
oppose it. Despite decades of frequent mass protests against Israeli actions in
Gaza and the West Bank, Jordan, and Egypt have maintained peace treaties with
Israel, and Egypt has even actively participated in the siege of Gaza. Indeed,
U.S. complacency has actually increased as anticipated eruptions of popular
anger—for example, over moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem or bombing
Yemen—failed to materialize. Washington’s conviction was briefly shaken by the
Arab uprisings of 2011, but it returned in full force as autocracies reasserted
control in the following years.
That seems to be what
the United States and most policy analysts expect this time around, too. When
the bombing is finally over, the crowds will return to their homes and find
other things to be mad about, and regional politics can go back to normal. But
these assumptions reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of how public opinion
matters in the Middle East, as well as a deep misreading of what has truly
changed since the 2011 uprisings.
No Idle Chatter
The term “Arab
street” is used by policymakers to reduce regional public opinion to the
rantings of an irrational, hostile, and emotional mob that might be appeased or
repressed but is without coherent policy preferences or ideas. The expression
has deep roots in British and French colonial rule and was adopted by the
United States as it entered the Cold War and came to believe that education and
capitalism are capable of transforming the Middle East into the image of the
West. These ideas underpinned Washington’s policy of cooperating with Arab
dictators who could control their people. That suited Arab leaders, who could
deflect Western pressure on issues such as Israel or democratization by
pointing to the threat of popular uprisings, and Islamic bogeymen waiting in
the wings to take their place.
Before 2011, the high
point of the Arab street concept occurred during the so-called Arab Cold War of
the 1950s, when populist pan-Arab leaders enjoyed great success in mobilizing
the masses against conservative Western allies in the name of Arab unity and
support for Palestinians. The sight of thousands of angry protestors responding
to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s radio addresses by rampaging through
the streets in countries including Jordan impressed
itself on Western policymakers. Washington, in particular, concluded that the
Arab street was dangerous, creating openings for the Soviets. These peoples,
then, were not to be reasoned with but, rather, to be controlled by force. Long
after the Cold War ended, this perception has endured, although it rests on a
basic misunderstanding of Arab politics and continues to drive U.S. Middle East
policy, as well as many policy analyses of the region. It has always been
easier to dismiss Arab support for the Palestinian territories as rooted in
atavistic anti-Semitism—or to wave away public fury at U.S. policies as
cynically drummed up by politicians—than to take seriously the reasons for
Arabs’ anger and to find ways to address their concerns.
This idea of the Arab
street changed somewhat in the 1990s and the subsequent decade. Satellite
television, especially Al Jazeera, crystallized in these decades and shaped a
pan-Arab public opinion. The rise of systematic, scientific public opinion
polling in the 1990s provided considerable nuance about national variances,
attitudes changing in response to events, and sophisticated assessments of
political conditions. The emergence of social media allowed a wide variety of
Arab voices to break the media’s control and shatter stereotypes through their
unmediated analysis and interactive engagement. After 9/11, Washington put
great effort into a war of ideas, designed to combat extremist and Islamist
ideas across the region, an approach that, however misguided, did require
significant investment in survey research and careful attention to Arab media
and emerging social media. But then the uprisings in 2011 shattered general
complacency about the stability of the region’s autocrats, showing that the
people’s voices needed to be heard and taken into account.
The Autocrats Shake But Survive
The memory of the 2011 uprisings still hangs over every calculation
of regime stability in today’s Middle East. The results of those revolutionary
events carried mixed lessons. The rapid spread of regime-threatening protests
from Tunisia across virtually the entire region showed that the supposed
stability of Arab autocracies was mostly a myth. For a brief moment, it stopped
making sense for Washington to ignore the subtleties of Arab public opinion or
to defer to the assurances of jaded Arab rulers. The uprisings were manifestly
not simply the eruption of a mindless Arab street. Rather, the young
revolutionaries who captured the spirit of the era articulated thoughtful,
incisive critiques of the autocrats they challenged, and even the Islamists in
their midst spoke the language of freedom and democracy. Western governments
initially raced to engage with these impressive young leaders and tried to
support their efforts to bring about democratic transitions and more open
political systems.
But such lessons were
quickly forgotten as Arab regimes regained control through military coups,
political engineering, and wide-ranging repression. Autocrats throughout the
region helped other autocrats restore their power, and the West simply stood
by. The United States, for example, did not act as Saudi Arabia, the United
Arab Emirates, and other Gulf states supported Bahrain’s vicious repression of
its protests in 2011 and poured financial and political support into the 2013
Egyptian military coup. The autocratic restoration that followed brought a
level of repression that went far beyond that which had existed before 2011,
with regimes across the region crushing and silencing civil society, fearing
any resurgence of opposition. Digital surveillance aided these repressive measures,
giving regimes unprecedentedly nuanced understandings of their citizens’ views
and the potential for opposition movements to appear.
The autocratic
restoration quickly resulted in the return of an older model of Western foreign
policy based on cooperating with autocratic elites and ignoring the views of
the Arab public. Nowhere could this be seen more clearly than in U.S. policy
toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From 1991 until recently, Washington
had shepherded a peace process in part because U.S. leaders believed that
delivering a just solution for Palestinians was essential to legitimize U.S.
primacy. President Donald Trump’s administration, however, simply ignored
Palestinian and Arab public opinion as it brokered the Abraham Accords, which
normalized relations between Israel Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates,
without resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The accords also included
Sudan, as well as Morocco, after Washington agreed to recognize its sovereignty
over Western Sahara.
U.S. President Joe
Biden, despite promising campaign rhetoric, instead wholeheartedly embraced
Trump’s approach to the Middle East, pushing for Arab-Israeli normalization and
ignoring democracy and human rights. After his inauguration in 2021, Biden abandoned
his promises to put human rights first and make Saudi Arabia a pariah for its
murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi
and its war on Yemen. Instead, he scrambled with unseemly desperation to finish
Trump’s policy of normalization with Israel without resolving the Palestinian
issue, and fending off Chinese gains in the region, by securing an agreement
with Saudi Arabia. It is not an accident that the Hamas assault on Israel on
October 7 coincided with the Biden administration’s full-court press for a
Saudi normalization deal amid unprecedented provocations by Israeli settlers in
the West Bank. There were many signs of Arab discontent with normalization and
countless warnings of an imminent explosion in Gaza, but Washington ignored
them as just another instance of misguided deference to an Arab street that it
believed its autocratic allies could control. It was wrong.
That is because
public opinion matters in the Middle East. Politics matter, even under
autocracies and, in the Middle East, political forces move seamlessly between
the domestic and the regional. Successful leaders must learn to master both
dimensions of the game. Part of ensuring their survival is knowing how to
respond to protests, and the response depends on the issue at hand. Western
diplomats listen to Arab rulers who would not sacrifice even minor interests
for the greater good if they could get away with it. Of course, Saudi Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman would do a deal with Israel if he thought it would
serve his government’s interests and he could absorb public anger without too
much risk. But that is a big if. Prince Mohammed and other Arab leaders care
about what might get them overthrown. For the most part, they care about one
thing more than anything else: staying in power. That means not only preventing
obviously regime-threatening mass protests but also being attentive to
potential sources of discontent and responding as necessary to head them off.
With almost every Arab country outside the Gulf suffering extreme economic
problems, and accordingly exercising maximum repression, regimes have to be
even more careful in responding to issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
Arab leaders are,
meanwhile, also focused on the regional political game and fiercely compete to
position themselves as the most effective defenders of their shared identities
and interests. That is why they often dress up even the most nakedly cynical and
self-interested moves as serving the interests of Palestinians or defending
Arab honor. The recent actions of the United Arab Emirates, such as when it
tried to justify the Abraham Accords by claiming to have prevented Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned annexation of the West Bank, are a
case in point. Arab leaders care about what gives them an advantage or
threatens them in the intensely competitive game of regional politics—whether
that is against other Arab contenders for influence or against other powers,
including Turkey and Iran. The regional dimension of competition has become
even more intense over the last decade, as the Arab uprisings highlighted how
political developments throughout the region may risk the survival of any domestic
regime. Most notably, Qatar competed hard with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates over political transitions and civil wars in Syria, Tunisia, and
elsewhere, seeking to shape public opinion but also responding to it.
The Building Backlash
Today, it is
glaringly obvious that it was wrong for the United States to assume that it
could ignore Arab public opinion about the treatment of Palestinians. Arabs
have not, in fact, lost interest in the issue. And Arab regimes have not, in
fact, established a death grip on public mobilization. Almost every regime now
finds its publics extraordinarily mobilized by what they consider to be
Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza and a new program of displacement and
occupation. The resulting level of mobilization and public outrage exceeds the
2003 fury over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and it is influencing the behavior of
the region’s regimes. Indeed, the degree and power of popular mobilization can
be seen not only in the media and the crowds in the streets but also in the
uncharacteristic criticism of Israel and the United States being voiced by
regimes that need to get this right to survive. Even Egypt, a close U.S.
partner, has threatened to freeze the Camp David
Accords if Israel invaded Rafah or expelled Gazans into the Sinai.
The Arab media, which
had been badly fragmented and politically polarized during the previous
decade’s intraregional political wars, has largely reunited in defense of Gaza.
Al Jazeera is back, reliving its glory days through round-the-clock coverage of
the horrors there, even as its journalists have been killed in action by
Israeli forces. Social media is back, too—not the corpse of Twitter or the
woefully censored Facebook and Instagram, so much as newer apps such as TikTok,
WhatsApp, and Telegram. The images and videos emerging from Gaza overwhelm the
spin offered by Israel and the United States and easily bypass soft-pedaled
coverage by Western news outlets. People see the devastation. Every day they
confront scenes of unbelievable tragedy. And they know victims directly. They
do not need the media to understand WhatsApp messages from terrified Gazans or
to view the horrifying videos widely circulating on Telegram.
Arab activists and
intellectuals have been developing powerful arguments about the nature of
Israel’s domination of the Palestinian territories and these are entering the
Western discourse in new ways. The case South Africa brought to the
International Court of Justice, alleging an Israeli genocide in Gaza,
introduced many of those arguments into circulation across the global South and
within international organizations. It did so by referencing not only the
statements of Israeli leaders but also conceptual frameworks about occupation
and settler colonialism developed by Arab and Palestinian intellectuals. The
war of ideas that the United States sought to wage in the Muslim world after
9/11, claiming to bring freedom and democracy to a backward region, has
reversed course, with the United States on the defensive because of its
hypocrisy in demanding condemnation of Russia’s war on Ukraine while supporting
Israel’s war on Gaza.
A Region Adrift
This is all happening
in an era characterized, even before the Israel-Hamas war, by the declining
primacy of the United States and the rising autonomy of regional powers.
Leading Arab states have increasingly sought to demonstrate their independence
from the United States, building strategic relations with China and Russia and
pursuing their agendas in regional affairs. The willingness of Arab regimes to
defy U.S. preferences was a hallmark of the previous decade, as Gulf states
ignored American policies toward democratic transition in Egypt, flooded
weapons into Syria despite Washington’s caution, and lobbied against the
nuclear agreement with Iran. This willingness to flout the United States’
wishes has become even more apparent following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The past two years have seen most Middle Eastern regimes refusing to vote with
Washington against Russia, and Saudi Arabia declining to follow the United
States’ lead on oil pricing.
Washington’s
unblinkered support for Israel in its devastation
of Gaza, however, has brought long-standing hostility to U.S. policy to a
head and triggered a crisis of legitimacy which threatens the entire edifice of
historic U.S. primacy in the region. It is difficult to exaggerate the extent
to which Arabs blame the United States for this war. They can see that only
U.S. weapons sales and United Nations vetoes allow Israel to continue its war.
They are aware that the United States defends Israel for actions that are the
same as those the United States condemned Russia and Syria for. The extent of
this popular anger can be seen in the disengagement of a large number of young
workers in nongovernmental organizations and activists from U.S.-backed
projects and networks built up over decades of public diplomacy, a development cited
by Annelle Sheline in her principled resignation from her post as a foreign
affairs officer at the State Department in March.
The White House is
still acting as if none of this matters. Arab regimes will survive, anger will
fade or be redirected to other issues, and, in a few months, Washington can get
back to the important business of Israeli-Saudi normalization. That is how things
have traditionally worked. But this time may well be different. The Gaza
fiasco, at a moment of shifting global power and changing calculations by
regional leaders, shows how little Washington has learned from its long record
of policy failures. The nature and degree of popular anger, the decline of U.S.
primacy and the collapse of its legitimacy, and Arab regimes’ prioritization of
their domestic survival, as well as regional competition, suggest that the new
regional order will be much more attentive to public opinion than the old. If
Washington continues to ignore public opinion, it will doom its planning for
after the war ends in Gaza.
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