Will the Arab Spring serve the cause of Palestine?

This question has been repeatedly asked, in various ways, over the last year and a half. Many discussions in the media have been formulated around this question, although the answer is far from a simple “yes” or “no”.

Why should the question be asked in the first place? Hasn’t the Arab link to the Palestinian struggle been consistently strong, regardless of the prevalent form of government in any single Arab country? Rhetorically, at least, the Arab bond to Palestine remained incessantly strong at every significant historical turn.

True, discrepancy between rhetoric and reality are as old as the Arab-Israeli conflict. But the relatively small divide between words and actions widened enormously following the Arab defeat in the 1967 war, which cemented US-Israeli ties like never before.

The war brought an end to the dilemma of independent Palestinian action. It shifted the focus to the West Bank and Gaza, and allowed the still dominant Fateh Party to fortify its position in light of Arab defeat and subsequent division.

The division was highlighted most starkly in the August 1967 Khartoum summit, in Sudan, where Arab leaders clashed over priorities and definitions. Should Israel’s territorial gains redefine the status quo? Should Arabs focus on returning to a pre-1948 or pre-1967 situation?

The PLO insisted that the 1967 defeat should not compromise the integrity of the struggle. It also stressed that Palestine — all of Palestine — was still the pressing issue. Then, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s messages seemed, for once, befuddled, although he continued to advocate conventional military confrontation with Israel. Syria, on the other hand, did not attend the summit. Nonetheless, the Arabs agreed that there would be no negotiations, no recognition and no peace with Israel, whose existence continued to be a source of loss and hostility throughout the region.

International response to the war was not promising either. The United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 242 on November 22, 1967, reflecting the US’ wish to capitalise on the new status quo (Israeli withdrawal “from occupied territories” in exchange for Arab normalisation with Israel). The new language of the immediate post-1967 period alarmed Palestinians, who realised that any future political settlement was likely to ignore the situation that had existed before the war, and would only attempt to remedy current grievances. As a result, Fateh determined the need for a swift resumption of armed struggle, this time in the West Bank itself, but not in Gaza.

Then, the boundaries of the conflict permanently changed. For some, Palestine and its conflict became more of a burden than a shared responsibility. Official Arab solidarity with Palestinians become a form of everyday politics — essential to claim relevance to greater Arab causes, but extraneous in terms of substance and application.

Present-day Palestinian leaderships — since there are several bodies that claim to represent Palestinians “everywhere” — also learned how to stage-manage official Arab manipulation of Palestine. They often did so out of desperation, as they urgently needed a physical base and sources of financial support. But some factions wanted to ensure primacy over Palestinian politics. They capitalised on Arab division to widen their own Palestinian divides, and Arab rulers used them to validate their supposedly significant role in ensuring Palestinian victory over Israel.

Over time, it became clear that official Arab solidarity with Palestine was mostly — although not entirely — a farce. The solidarity they speak of is either entirely nonexistent or grossly misrepresented. Palestinian communities in various Arab countries are treated with “suspicion” at best. Those who never tired of publicly calling for freedom for Jerusalem often failed to treat Palestinian refugees with respect. They refused entry to stateless Palestinians and denied Palestinians work and permanent residence.

Many Palestinians surely concluded that one must learn to differentiate between Arab peoples and Arab governments.

Since the latter mostly dominate the former without legitimate mandate, it was foolish to expect official Arab institutions to lead any substantive action to end the subjugation of Palestinians.

That is, until several Arab nations revolted. The more genuine and inclusive the revolt the more representative the outcome. A sudden surge in popular solidarity with Palestine in Tunisia replaced bashful but real attempts by the former Tunisian regime to normalise relations with Israel. In Morocco, the gap is wider than ever: massive mobilisation for Palestine while Israeli products mysteriously find themselves in the Arab country’s markets. Per Israeli calculations, Arab peoples are dismissible. They are a non-entity. But now Israel is forced to revisit that old calculation. Its fears that Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi, will shun or at least revisit the Camp David peace treaty — signed between Egypt and Israel in 1979, with the ultimate aim of sidelining Egypt from a conflict that remains essentially Arab — are well founded. But Morsi is not the one that is truly feared, nor is his Muslim Brotherhood. The trepidation stems from the fact that a truly democratic Egypt is unlikely to work in tandem with US-Israel to further pressure and isolate Palestinians — or sideline Egypt from its Arab context. Israel and its allies fear genuine Egyptian democracy.

With the notable shifts that may redefine Palestine’s position among Arab priorities, one cannot ignore the fact that several Arab countries continue to normalise with Israel, oblivious to any seasonable political changes in the region. They do so as if there were hidden hands that wish to balance the possible losses in Tunisia and Egypt, with gains elsewhere. Meanwhile, Israel’s maximalist approach remains unchanged: colonise all of Palestine and normalise with Arabs at the same time.

Some seem eager to give Israel exactly what would deprive Palestinians of a major line of defence: Arab solidarity

Palestinians in Gaza, as elsewhere, still speak of “Arab solidarity” with passion, but also with obvious bitterness. They still pray for their brethren to come to the rescue. The older generation speaks of the bravery and sacrifices of many Arabs who fought alongside Palestinians. But the generational expectations have also been altered.

Palestinians simply want real solidarity. They want to see Palestinian communities treated with respect, a complete end to Arab normalisation with Israel, and a truly united front in the face of Israel’s attempts at determining the outcome of the conflict.

This is hardly too much to ask, of Morsi or the rest of the Arab leaders.