[Salon] Popular escalation in the Gaza war - ArabDigest.org Guest Post

Popular escalation in the Gaza war Summary: despite the efforts by Arab regimes to suppress support for Palestine, the ongoing slaughter in Gaza and settler attacks in the West Bank have fired popular support across the Middle East and North Africa for the Palestinian cause. We thank Tarek Megerisi for today’s newsletter. Tarek is a policy fellow with the North Africa and Middle East programme at the ECFR, the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is a political analyst and researcher who specialises in North African affairs and politics, governance and development in the Arab world and is a regular contributor to the AD podcast. You can find his latest podcast North Africa: “broken countries in a broken region” here. Since October 8 last year, Western policymakers have been deeply concerned about the prospect of regional escalation, very particularly defined as Israel having to fight multiple Middle East state or non-state actors simultaneously. Much of the America’s Middle Eastern activity since then, from deploying multiple strike carrier groups to the Eastern Mediterranean to Secretary of State Blinken’s many regional tours and the massive overreaction to Huthi attacks on shipping lanes in the Red Sea have been about wielding a superpower’s deterrence to stop this scenario from unfolding. But there are different types of escalation, and different ways that Israel’s actions can provoke unrest and instability that not just the region but the world will suffer from. In recent weeks this concern has focused around the potential of an Iran-Israel war after the bombing of an Iranian embassy compound in Damascus. But Iran’s retaliatory attack seemed more an act of geopolitical theatre than the opening salvo of a new war. If, that is, we consider escalation to be only about military confrontation. After all, the already fragile MENA region has been rocked by various degrees of political-economic fallout since October last year. Higher import costs, and diminished trade have hit state coffers from Morocco to Yemen and heavily damaged the economies of regional lynchpins like Jordan and Egypt. Meanwhile, regional populations are increasingly agitated as Israel perpetrates shocking crimes from slaughter and starvation in Gaza to settler-launched pogroms in the West Bank and the targeted destruction of Lebanon’s farmland. All of this Israel has carried out with complete impunity. For a region that feels trapped under tyranny and condemned to poverty, the tragedy in Gaza is a harsh reminder that not only are Arab lives and humanity worthless to the wider world but also to their own leaders. So as Israel’s cruelty continues towards an ever more terrible crescendo, humiliated Arabs braved severe risks over Ramadan to show their opposition once more. Since Israel’s war on Gaza began, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in neighbouring Jordan [photo credit: HRW] In Egypt there were protests against Israel’s activities and the Egyptian government cronies profiteering off Gaza. The ever-anxious Sisi regime tried to cow protestors with threats, outlawed the protests and then on April 5 arrested key participants. It wasn’t the first time since October that the regime had cracked down on pro-Palestinian protestors but in one of the region’s most ruthlessly repressive states where every other form of resistance has been crushed the Palestine protests defiantly continue. Similarly in Jordan, daily marches to the Israeli embassy steadily developed despite stiff opposition from security services as Jordanians called for an end to normalisation and cooperative projects with Israel. Then, on April 6, almost in sync with Egypt, the Jordanian establishment, initiated a broad arrest campaign, accusing the protests of being organised by Hamas (see our 11 April newsletter.) Elsewhere, youthful disenfranchisement and dismay over Israel’s atrocities are increasingly reflected in disdain towards the state and its traditional vehicle of soft power, religion. In Morocco long-simmering discontent over normalisation with Israel expressed itself through people leaving Ramadan evening prayers in protest at imams no longer offering prayers for Palestinians. And in Saudi Arabia where all protest is banned and where religious leaders have also conspicuously avoided praying for Palestinians, the Imam of Medina’s grand mosque came under widespread social media attack when he instead prayed to protect Muslim countries from protest. In light of this continued fracturing under the weight of Israeli atrocities and American pressure, Tehran’s heavily-signalled retaliation (see our 16 April newsletter) takes on different qualities, a ‘psyop’ to insulate and deflect criticism of the Iranian leadership while exacerbating dynamics which are causing the ground to break under Israel’s feet. American desperation to defend Israel from Iran and prevent further escalations has (at least temporarily) quashed Israeli aspirations for a regional war but at the cost of damning Gaza to further devastation. Meanwhile Iran’s dramatic retaliation, closely followed by the region’s social media and much played out on TV screens, has served to deepen a narrative flogged by Iran that contrasts Iranian resistance with Arab acquiescence. It is a narrative that Jordan is already suffering from after it was broadly cast as the bad guy for shooting down Iranian drones which violated its airspace. As Netanyahu shifts his sights away from Tehran and back on Rafah, with the promise of a fresh hell for the millions of starved and traumatised Palestinians trapped there, all these dynamics will only get worse. Trade through the Red Sea will remain throttled, the lingering spectre of a broader war will deter investors and the unfettered slaughter to come will keep raising temperatures and stymy efforts at de-escalation. Jordan may have been the first victim of Iran’s retaliation. But, as the prayers of Medina’s Imam showed, every regional leader fears that their enforced impotence towards Israel’s slaughter could spark their already volatile and disenfranchised populations into massive street protests of the sort unseen since 2011. What’s more, given the harsh economic climate exacerbated by Israel’s activities, many non-GCC Arab states may not even have the funds needed to continue buying the peace.