The Coming Arab Backlash : Middle Eastern Regimes—and America—Ignore Public Anger at Their Peril
▻https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/coming-arab-backlash
Je n’ai repris que la fin de cet article exceptionnellement important. A mes yeux, Marc Lynch est un des tous meilleurs analystes étasuniens sur le monde arabe. Ces analyses sur les révoltes arabes de 2011 ont démontré leur pertince.
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 own 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 toward U.S. policy to a head, and triggered a crisis of legitimacy that 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 really 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, suggests 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.