Was the entrenched hostility toward Israel and the repeated rejection of peace – a defining feature of many self-proclaimed revolutionary and progressive Arab regimes for decades – truly driven by unwavering conviction in Palestinian rights and the justice of their cause?
Or did it mask a far more pragmatic, even cynical, strategy – one deliberately wielded to secure these regimes’ grip on power and prop up their shaky legitimacy amid relentless internal and external pressures?
A sober reading of modern Arab history, particularly the post-Ottoman decades of nationalist struggles, shows that emerging political vacuums were seldom filled with democratic institutions reflecting popular aspirations. Instead, military and ideological elites seized power through successive coups.
Regimes styling themselves as revolutionary and progressive took root, borrowing heavily from Communist models and backed by Soviet support during the Cold War’s ideological battlegrounds.
These security-dominated systems faced an existential dilemma: having overthrown traditional monarchies and colonial-era structures, they lacked inherent legitimacy.
Here, the Arab-Israeli conflict proved an invaluable instrument.
Historical records, particularly pre- and post-1948 British and international proposals on Palestine, reveal the conflict need not have been intractable.
There were plans for a Palestinian state alongside Israel, with international guarantees and prospects for economic-intellectual cooperation. Had these materialized, the region might have embraced a different trajectory of development.
Yet Arab leaders – and the revolutionary regimes that followed – chose absolute rejection.
Decisions throughout history cost Palestinians viable settlements
Framed as principled intransigence, this stance became a reflexive pattern, one history would expose as self-defeating. It cost Palestinians viable settlements when the power balance was less disproportionate than today.
Post-1948, these regimes weaponized the Palestinian cause. Lacking organic legitimacy, they turned anti-Israel hostility into a survival mechanism.
The “Jewish threat” justified perpetual emergency rule, the crushing of dissent as “imperialist and Zionist treason,” and the channeling of popular discontent into an all-consuming “existential struggle.” Their rejection of peace, though paraded as ideological purity, was ultimately about conflict’s utility; it guaranteed their continued dominance.
The exploitation went beyond rhetoric. These regimes fostered – and often manufactured – Palestinian militant groups, less as authentic national movements than as proxies. These factions eliminated political rivals (Palestinian independents or Arab dissidents) and staged attacks abroad to destabilize monarchies deemed reactionary.
Such patronage aimed not at liberation, but at controlling Palestinian agency and leveraging it in regional power plays. Resistance factions effectively became mercenaries, advancing the interests of regimes indifferent to Palestinian – or even their own peoples’ – well-being.
The outcome? A Palestinian cause crippled by infighting, weakened at the negotiating table, and reduced to a transactional card in regional politics.
Meanwhile, the “fig leaf” brilliantly obscured these regimes’ failures: stunted development, brutal repression, and interregional rivalries where survival justified any sacrifice.
This was no tactical miscalculation but structural to these coup-birthed dictatorships. Perpetual conflict furnished their substitute legitimacy, justified their police states, and masked governance failures.
The legacy was a Palestinian cause grievously harmed – its unity fractured, its leverage diminished – and a region robbed of stability and cooperation, paying the price to this day.
Does this not demand urgent reckoning? An unflinching examination of how these regimes’ pathologies deformed the conflict and locked it into its catastrophic course?
The writer is a UAE political analyst and former Federal National Council candidate.