The Arab Peoples’ Calculus of Rage

On November 8, 2023, during a public session in Singapore, Bloomberg editor Stephanie Flanders asked the Saudi oil minister Khalid Al-Falih whether Saudi Arabia would consider using economic tools, specifically oil prices or oil leverage, to help secure a ceasefire in Gaza. According to multiple reports, before answering, Al-Falih laughed, paused, and then replied: “First of all, that is not my mandate today…” He then pivoted to broader diplomatic language about de-escalation, stability, and the need to contain the conflict rather than discussing any oil pressure mechanism.

The moment was revealing. It was less a dismissal of the question than an instinctive expression of how many Arab ruling elites regard the Palestinian question, and how detached they have become from the emotions of their own societies.

Official-popular Divergence

On the other side, not one of these countries was without detainees charged with supporting the Palestinian people, demonstrators, placard-bearers, or even those who simply voiced prayers for their victory and retribution against their enemy and his enablers. Those who could demonstrate did; those who could donate did; those who could cry out did, out of rage, anguish, and grief for the people of Gaza, whom they regarded as part of their own fabric.

As Israeli brutality intensified as the bombardment, destruction, and slaughter of tens of thousands of Gaza’s people grew ever more severe; so too did the sharpness of the divide between governments and their own peoples. The regimes went far in their support for Israel, establishing land, sea, and air corridors to supply it with everything it needed: weapons, ammunition, materials, goods, and commodities — all to counteract the Yemeni attempt to blockade ships bound for Israeli ports until the massacre would cease.

Even as Israel’s campaign of starvation against the people of Gaza intensified, cutting off food, water, medicine, and infant formula until dozens perished of hunger in full view of the world; trucks, ships, and aircraft were departing from the territory, ports, airports, and military bases of at least seven Arab countries to serve the Israeli army and sustain the comfort of the Israeli civilian, lest he suffer any shortage in even a single variety of fruit.

Anger seeped through in some quarters, prompting sharper reactions: some opened fire on Israeli officers or businessmen with ties to the Israeli military; others attempted to take hostages in order to pressure their own governments into adopting a more resolute stance against the genocide. These were among the many outpourings of popular rage, sometimes unplanned, sometimes uncontrolled.

This sharp divergence between official and popular positions is not a product of the moment, nor will it end here. The two are like trains traveling in opposite directions — the moment of collision determined only by the distance between them, the time elapsed, and the speed at which each moves.

Before the Al-Aqsa Flood operation was launched on the seventh of October, a number of Arab regimes had signed normalization agreements with Israel — known as the Abraham Accords — vaulting over Palestinian rights and over the suffering of the Palestinian people under occupation and systematic genocide, repeating what the regimes of Sadat in Egypt and Hussein in Jordan had done before them. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, was preparing to conclude a similar agreement, had the Flood not erupted.

History repeats itself

Seventy-eight years ago, the situation closely resembled what we witness today. The predecessors of these regimes engaged in similar conspiracies, exploitation, and narrow self-interest during the Palestine War of 1948. They competed with one another for popular leadership, for the partition of Palestinian land, and for expansionist projects to consolidate their own rule, and above all, they sought to suppress the authentic Arab popular fury over Palestine.

That fury had driven thousands to travel and join the Palestinian popular resistance against Zionist settlement: men from every ethnic, religious, and sectarian background, nationalists, Islamists, and communists; officers, workers, intellectuals, and farmers, along with other Arab and Muslim popular groups from every corner of the Arab and Islamic world, the near and the far alike.

This rift between regimes and peoples generated waves of simmering fury that these regimes utterly failed to reckon with, and they paid a heavy price for their complicity, their conspiracies, and in some cases their outright betrayal — entering into agreements with the very enemy they were ostensibly fighting, against other parties and regimes that were their partners in the “Arab Front.”

The peoples came to understand that the source of their defeat was betrayal, complicity, and corruption. This drove them to a boiling point that erupted in successive waves against these regimes, popular uprisings, political assassinations, and military coups that struck down kings, prime ministers, and military commanders alike.

The wave began early, with an uprising in Iraq that toppled a prime minister, then swept through successive waves of assassinations and coups in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, whose king was assassinated, before reaching Egypt, where the entire monarchical order was swept away.

Israel’s ambassador in Washington commented on the assassination of King Abdullah of Jordan in July 1951, saying,

 It was an unfortunate fact that nearly every Arab leader who had dealt with Israel in the Armistice negotiations had been assassinated—Nokrashy in Egypt, Zaim in Syria, Riad Solh in Lebanon, and now Abdullah. He said these assassinations did not all spring from the same source and the motives no doubt went beyond the mere fact that all of these leaders had had dealings with Israel, but this striking coincidence, if it was a coincidence, would undoubtedly be a strong deterrent to any other Arab leader dealing with Israel.

The Israeli ambassador’s observation was lost on many Arab leaders. They felt immune to their peoples’ rage, and so they perished: from Farouk, who lost his throne, to Sadat, who lost his life, to the rulers of today, who may well lose their kingdoms.

Rage accumulation

The Arab peoples today are suppressed under harsh dictatorial rule, with the assistance, backing, and protection of the United States and Israel. Yet only a fool would feel safe from their rage. However severe the repression, however stable and controlled the situation may appear, when their anger reaches its peak it will find a way to erupt in forms that those rulers cannot begin to anticipate.

In a meeting with members of the United States Congress, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman stated that he feared the fate of Anwar Sadat, should he proceed with a normalization agreement with Israel without the establishment of a Palestinian state, given the depth of Arab anger. This was a shrewd assessment of the limits of what his regime could concede to America’s hysterical drive to bring the region under Israeli control, a drive fueled by the immense Zionist influence over American decision-making.

This Saudi awareness of the gravity and centrality of national causes, foremost among them the Palestinian cause, in the movement of Arab peoples is absent from other Arab regimes that are scrambling down the path of normalization and its aftermath. Yet even this awareness is incomplete.

There are other factors that will exert a powerful influence on the equation of rage, chief among them what peoples have witnessed during the present war: Iran’s ability to repel American-Israeli aggression, which has dispelled many of the illusions of America’s limitless power that propaganda machines had long manufactured. To this must be added the humiliation these regimes have suffered through Iran’s responses to Arab participation in that aggression.

None of this will evaporate into thin air. The peoples will not forget it; they will accumulate it alongside every transgression of the regimes, in a private reckoning that the real estate brokers in the White House and their allies in the Arab palaces are wholly incapable of comprehending. A day of reckoning will come when no propaganda cooler and no manufactured media apparatus will be of any use, when the rage will no longer be confined to social media but will erupt as an explosion that shakes the streets, rocks the palaces of power, and brings down regimes, governments, and a great many Agents.