In the weeks immediately following the start of Israel’s devastating military offensive against Gaza, the Middle East was the scene of massive demonstrations denouncing Israeli atrocities in the Strip and supporting the Palestinian people. Now, attention is drawn above all to the United States and Europe, as a result of the camps and protests organized on more and more university campuses due to the contagion effect, which, however, has not led to a comparable upheaval in the Arab world.
That initial peak of mobilizations in the region not only failed to transform into a broader movement, but has diminished slightly. From the outside, it could even convey a certain feeling of indifference. However, this trend largely responds to complex domestic and regional political balances, increased repression, unfavorable local contexts, and difficulties in generating momentum. It also hides attempts to maintain pressure with safer forms of expression.
For many regimes in the Arab world, and especially for those that maintain relations with Israel, the Palestinian question involves a delicate balance due to its broad social support. On the one hand, it can be useful to divert attention from domestic problems and try to gain followers, and, in this sense, the Israeli aggression against Gaza has been repeatedly criticized by the capitals of the region. But Palestine has also traditionally been an engine of protest and opposition that has sometimes turned against local authorities, which is why solidarity mobilizations are viewed with suspicion.
Furthermore, for the regimes of the two countries that established ties with Israel the longest ago – Egypt and Jordan – their ties with Tel Aviv are tied to a network of economic and security interests, woven by the United States, which causes a review strategy of its policy on this front represents an existential risk. Along these lines, both Arab states receive two of the largest annual packages of direct military and economic assistance from Washington, without whose support they would struggle to survive.
For the two most influential nations in the Gulf – the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia – the Israeli offensive in Gaza and the escalation with Iran surprised them by working to reduce tension with Tehran, normalize relations with Tel Aviv and put aside the Palestinian cause to focus on its economic development. Despite its domestic unpopularity, for both regional powers the normalization of relations with Israel is a strategic bet, which for Riyadh is also tied to major agreements on defense, energy and technology that it is also negotiating with Washington. And although the pace of the process has slowed, there is no sign of a revision.
The influence capacity of the rest of the countries in the region is significantly lower, and there are still many that do not even recognize Israel. In those where there are armed movements and groups more or less supported by Iran, such as Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen; There have been spikes in violence in recent months that represent a worrying additional source of instability.
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If the governments of the region were held accountable to their citizens, however, everything indicates that the policy with Israel would be very different. A survey conducted between December and January in the region by the Arab Center Washington revealed, in a single-choice question, that 36% of respondents defended that Arab governments should break relations or normalization processes with Israel. 14% said they should send aid to Gaza without waiting for Israeli approval. And 11% defended using the oil card to pressure. In May, Turkey suspended trade relations with Israel after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party lost municipal elections in part over its handling of the Gaza crisis.
On Friday, in one of the few instances in which direct steps have been taken to try to stop Israeli aggression in Gaza through legal channels, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN’s main judicial body, announced that Libya has requested to join in support of South Africa in its case against Israel for genocide. In this way, it became the first Arab country to take this step, following in the wake of Nicaragua and Colombia.
Rising repression
Within this tangled context, many try to make a way to express themselves. In recent months, hundreds of demonstrations have been held in the region in solidarity with Palestine, according to data from the conflict monitoring organization ACLED, and where there is a certain space, such as in Morocco, the protests have been continuous.
However, Moroccan foreign policy has not moved one iota on its path towards the normalization of relations with Israel, promoted in December 2020 by the then president of the United States, Donald Trump, within the framework of the so-called Abraham Accords. A year later, the Defense Ministers of both countries formalized in Rabat an unprecedented military cooperation agreement in the Arab world. And in 2022, when Morocco was in the middle of a low-intensity conflict against the Polisario Front, over Western Sahara, Israeli-made drones proved extremely effective in causing casualties in the Sahrawi ranks. That summer of 2022, Morocco hosted for the first time an Israeli Army chief, General Aviv Kohavi, on an official visit. Since then, nothing has changed in the policy of rapprochement between the two countries. Not even the death of 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
In addition to Morocco, protesters have also been seen in front of the Israeli embassy in Amman, at the Egyptian journalists’ union in Cairo, and on the streets of Bahrain. The flood of Yemenis protesting on Fridays in Sana’a, the country’s capital, have been equally recurrent. And there have been student mobilizations from Tunisia and Libya to Lebanon, Iraq and Kuwait. However, the lack of a strong civil society, due to the systematic repression of any opposition, and the heavy hand against this incipient current of protests have prevented them from gaining traction and have pushed many of these displays of support and anger to social networks.
Since October, Jordanian authorities have detained up to 1,800 people over pro-Palestinian protests, according to Amnesty International, which cites figures from a lawyer for the Jordanian National Forum for Freedom. Dozens of them are still detained awaiting trial. In Egypt, 120 arrests have been registered and half remain in preventive detention, according to a count by the Egyptian Commission of Rights and Freedoms shared with Morning Express. In Morocco, human rights lawyer Mohammed Serroukh tells this medium that the authorities have detained and sent to trial several bloggers and activists critical of the normalization of relations between Rabat and Tel Aviv, in a campaign that some consider “systematic and deliberate.” to dissuade their fight against normalization.”
In the Gulf, Bahrain authorities have also detained dozens of people, and in the rest of the countries in the area, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, there is not even room to try. “For [estos] States, any social mobilization that affects or changes in any way the security dynamics of the regime is problematic and, therefore, cannot be allowed. This is the only reason why there has not been large-scale social mobilization,” says Umer Karim, an expert on Saudi politics at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies.
In several countries in the region, the population is also facing local contexts marked by strong instability and high levels of violence, especially where there are groups that have opted for armed struggle to confront the military presence of the United States or directly to Israel. Others suffer serious economic crises, which represent an added obstacle.
An alternative and safe channel of protest that many in the region have chosen has been the boycott of brands perceived as favorable to Israel. On Monday, the franchisee of fast food chains such as KFC and Pizza Hut in the Middle East declared that its profit in the first quarter of 2024 plummeted by half compared to the previous year, and attributed this in part to “continued tensions geopolitics.” Shortly before, Starbucks and McDonald’s also presented worse than expected results. “The boycott of popular Western food chains, supposedly because of their pro-Israel stance, shows that there is still widespread anger among people and that, if allowed, it can become a significant political event,” says Karim.
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